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F6, ain' that the truth yet zithead refuses to see that. I was watching MSNBC when Sharpton was speaking and they cut away before his speech was finished to denigrate his thoughts and the fact he deviated from his 'script'. Damn liberal media!! From that moment on I have been watching the coverage on CSPAN. Speaking of that, did you notice how they closed last night with Frank Sinatra singing?? These guys can't even come up with someone live. I expect to see 'The Duke' before this coronation is over.
What say you, zithead?? Oh yeah, it is the twins that turn you on....enjoy!!
zithead -- the major networks are affording the repub convention the same non-coverage they gave the dems -- the truth is that they should have given both conventions full coverage -- but you want full coverage of the repubs after the dems got just the one hour per night -- as you keep bitching and moaning about the non-existent 'liberal media'
Hmmm...seems I had a message posted to me by zithead that has been deleted. Don't know what he said but the truth must have hit close to home.
F6, the Bush administration will do their level best to hide, obfuscate and deny the true reality of what is occurring in Iraq until after the election...then you will see and hear a totally different story.
Contrary to the pre-coronation of last night and the great decision to go into Iraq...nice try. I wasn't sure, but I think McCain and Rudy were wearing zit's rose colored glasses.
A No-Win Situation
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 31, 2004
Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran." That was the attitude in Washington two years ago, when Ahmad Chalabi was assuring everyone that Iraqis would greet us with flowers. More recently, some of us had a different slogan: "Everyone worries about Najaf; people who are really paying attention worry about Ramadi."
Ever since the uprising in April, the Iraqi town of Falluja has in effect been a small, nasty Islamic republic. But what about the rest of the Sunni triangle?
Last month a Knight-Ridder report suggested that U.S. forces were effectively ceding many urban areas to insurgents. Last Sunday The Times confirmed that while the world's attention was focused on Najaf, western Iraq fell firmly under rebel control. Representatives of the U.S.-installed government have been intimidated, assassinated or executed.
Other towns, like Samarra, have also fallen to insurgents. Attacks on oil pipelines are proliferating. And we're still playing whack-a-mole with Moktada al-Sadr: his Mahdi Army has left Najaf, but remains in control of Sadr City, with its two million people. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "interviews in Baghdad suggest that Sadr is walking away from the standoff with a widening base and supporters who are more militant than before."
For a long time, anyone suggesting analogies with Vietnam was ridiculed. But Iraq optimists have, by my count, already declared victory three times. First there was "Mission Accomplished" - followed by an escalating insurgency. Then there was the capture of Saddam - followed by April's bloody uprising. Finally there was the furtive transfer of formal sovereignty to Ayad Allawi, with implausible claims that this showed progress - a fantasy exploded by the guns of August.
Now, serious security analysts have begun to admit that the goal of a democratic, pro-American Iraq has receded out of reach. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies - no peacenik - writes that "there is little prospect for peace and stability in Iraq before late 2005, if then."
Mr. Cordesman still thinks (or thought a few weeks ago) that the odds of success in Iraq are "at least even," but by success he means the creation of a government that "is almost certain to be more inclusive of Ba'ath, hard-line religious, and divisive ethnic/sectarian movements than the West would like." And just in case, he urges the U.S. to prepare "a contingency plan for failure."
Fred Kaplan of Slate is even more pessimistic. "This is a terribly grim thing to say," he wrote recently, "but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq" - no way to produce "a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster." Deeper disaster? Yes: people who worried about Ramadi are now worrying about Pakistan.
So what's the answer? Here's one thought: much of U.S. policy in Iraq - delaying elections, trying to come up with a formula that blocks simple majority rule, trying to install first Mr. Chalabi, then Mr. Allawi, as strongman - can be seen as a persistent effort to avoid giving Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani his natural dominant role. But recent events in Najaf have demonstrated both the cleric's awesome influence and the limits of American power. Isn't it time to realize that we could do a lot worse than Mr. Sistani, and give him pretty much whatever he wants?
Here's another thought. President Bush says that the troubles in Iraq are the result of unanticipated "catastrophic success." But that catastrophe was predicted by many experts. Mr. Cordesman says their warnings were ignored because we have "the weakest and most ineffective National Security Council in post-war American history," giving control to "a small group of neoconservative ideologues" who "shaped a war without any realistic understanding or plans for shaping a peace."
Yesterday Mr. Bush, who took a "winning the war on terror" bus tour just a few months ago, conceded that "I don't think you can win" the war on terror. But he hasn't changed the national security adviser, nor has he dismissed even one of the ideologues who got us into this no-win situation. Rather than concede that he made mistakes, he's sticking with people who will, if they get the chance, lead us into two, three, many quagmires. (A la zithead and his love for war on many fronts. My Bold)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/opinion/31krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
America's Failing Health
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 27, 2004
Working Americans have two great concerns: the growing difficulty of getting health insurance, and the continuing difficulty they have in finding jobs. These concerns may have a common cause: soaring insurance premiums.
In most advanced countries, the government provides everyone with health insurance. In America, however, the government offers insurance only if you're elderly (Medicare) or poor (Medicaid). Otherwise, you're expected to get private health insurance, usually through your job. But insurance premiums are exploding, and the system of employment-linked insurance is falling apart.
Some employers have dropped their health plans. Others have maintained benefits for current workers, but are finding ways to avoid paying benefits to new hires - for example, by using temporary workers. And some businesses, while continuing to provide health benefits, are refusing to hire more workers.
In other words, rising health care costs aren't just causing a rapid rise in the ranks of the uninsured (confirmed by yesterday's Census Bureau report); they're also, because of their link to employment, a major reason why this economic recovery has generated fewer jobs than any previous economic expansion.
Clearly, health care reform is an urgent social and economic issue. But who has the right answer?
The 2004 Economic Report of the President told us what George Bush's economists think, though we're unlikely to hear anything as blunt at next week's convention. According to the report, health costs are too high because people have too much insurance and purchase too much medical care. What we need, then, are policies, like tax-advantaged health savings accounts tied to plans with high deductibles, that induce people to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket. (Cynics would say that this is just a rationale for yet another tax shelter for the wealthy, but the economists who wrote the report are probably sincere.)
John Kerry's economic advisers have a very different analysis: they believe that health costs are too high because private insurance companies have excessive overhead, mainly because they are trying to avoid covering high-risk patients. What we need, according to this view, is for the government to assume more of the risk, for example by picking up catastrophic health costs, thereby reducing the incentive for socially wasteful spending, and making employment-based insurance easier to get.
A smart economist can come up with theoretical justifications for either argument. The evidence suggests, however, that the Kerry position is much closer to the truth.
The fact is that the mainly private U.S. health care system spends far more than the mainly public health care systems of other advanced countries, but gets worse results. In 2001, we spent $4,887 on health care per capita, compared with $2,792 in Canada and $2,561 in France. Yet the U.S. does worse than either country by any measure of health care success you care to name - life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever. (At its best, U.S. health care is the best in the world. But the ranks of Americans who can't afford the best, and may have no insurance at all, are large and growing.)
And the U.S. system does have very high overhead: private insurers and H.M.O.'s spend much more on administrative expenses, as opposed to actual medical treatment, than public agencies at home or abroad.
Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes. Put it this way: in Canada, respectable business executives are ardent defenders of "socialized medicine." Two years ago the Conference Board of Canada - a who's who of the nation's corporate elite - issued a report urging fellow Canadians to bear in mind not just the "symbolic value" of universal health care, but its "economic contribution to the competitiveness of Canadian businesses."
My health-economist friends say that it's unrealistic to call for a single-payer system here: the interest groups are too powerful, and the antigovernment propaganda of the right has become too well established in public opinion. All that we can hope for right now is a modest step in the right direction, like the one Mr. Kerry is proposing. I bow to their political wisdom. But let's not ignore the growing evidence that our dysfunctional medical system is bad not just for our health, but for our economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
Dang sure won't be big brain Bush...
ROFLMAO! The debates are what's going to kill mister "I'm going to do all these great things but I have no idea how" Kerry...
yeeeeeeeeeeeeouch!!!
For Shame
A leaked video reveals what Bob Dole really thinks about Bush's tactics.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, Aug. 27, 2004, at 4:26 PM PT
Click the image to see the clip
56K / 100K
Download Windows Media Player
For pretty much the duration of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy, the Kerry campaign has been trying to demonstrate that the smear campaign being conducted against the Democratic presidential nominee is all the more loathsome because it is part of a pattern of behavior by George W. Bush: the use of front groups to damage his campaign opponents by putting false statements into the political bloodstream. Particularly salient, Democrats believe, is the 2000 campaign conducted against John McCain during the South Carolina primary.
Democrats now have an unlikely ally in their quest to prove that Bush has a history of these kinds of dirty tricks: Bob Dole. No one has done more to lend establishment respectability to the falsehoods being peddled against Kerry than Dole. The former Senate majority leader and 1996 presidential nominee of the Republican Party made several demonstrably false statements about John Kerry's war record this past Sunday on CNN's Late Edition before saying that "not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There's got to be some truth to the charges."
But Dole also made another statement that day, one that hasn't been aired until now. Of McCain's charge to President Bush during a 2000 debate—"You should be ashamed"—Dole told Wolf Blitzer, "He was right." Dole made the remark off-air, while CNN broadcast the Kerry ad called "Old Tricks," the one featuring McCain's 2000 debate remarks. The campaign stopped airing it recently at McCain's request.
Although the remark was made off-air, it wasn't made off-camera. A CNN employee who asked not to be named made a digital file of the raw camera feed from the Late Edition studio. The footage does not include the graphics or other video, such as the McCain ad, that was shown during the live broadcast. "Once the control room punches the ad, it automatically kills the mics in the studio," the CNN employee told me. "He knows he can speak to Wolf and no one will hear him." Slate has posted the video, so you can see Dole's remark for yourself. (Click the image to view the clip.)
Question for Bob Dole: If President Bush should be ashamed of his behavior four years ago, why aren't you ashamed now?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2105781/
And we know that some of the people on this board (who are for Bush) think the Iraqi government was responsible for 9/11, amongst other laughable accusations. They are some of the stupidest people I have ever come across...
Funny, I would say the same if Kerry gets elected. And we know that some of the people on this board (who are for Kerry) think the US government was responsible for 9/11, amongst other laughable accusations. They are some of the stupidest people I have ever come across...
Yeah, the Republicans were sooo concerned about terrorism and homeland security they spent 8 years and millions of dollars uncontrolably immersed investigating every aspect of both the Clinton's. A rephsrase of your statement would be...."let's see, getting a blow job VS keeping America safe". Remember, after the 93 wtc attack, the republicans had ample opportunity to make our security a priority over lying about a bj. But, of course, it is all about the party, isn't it??
Reality is not your best friend, zithead.
gee, if clinton wasn't so uncontrolably immersed in his undisciplined "if it feels good do it" presidential philosophy, he may have had time to pay attention to the mounting terror threat that escalated into 9-11
a rephrase of your statement would be......."let's see, getting a blow job VS 3,000 dead americans on 9-11"
remember, after the 93 wtc attack, clinton's cia director, james woolsey, in two years, never met one-on-one with clinton, and only twice for semi-private meetings
stick to your day job
i use the sound bites to add flavor and humor
F6, lol, I'll bet I beat you to that looong ago. I'm gonna guess it is a 'big brain' thing. This has been a busy board and I'm working on catching up. Good to see bulldzr is back with his usual articulate posts and easy, sluggo and teapee have been keeping bird brain, et al in line. I've read at least 300 posts, mostly bs having nothing to do with now and only saw one from F6 on the poverty numbers with, of course, no respone from those so deeply in love with our country, er, I should say party first, the bronze goes to Americans. Three straight years of more and more Americans poor and lacking health insurance. Gotta be Clinton's fault, right?? 36 million Americans now live below the poverty line, half of them children. 45 million Americans without health insurance. The defict is exploding, wages stagnant, jobs being exported big time, a war on terror in Afghanistan that has a puppet in charge of Kabul being supported by this administration while the rest of the country is lawless and outta control. An ill advised war in Iraq that anyone without a swollen brain can plainly see has no end game with another puppet regime installed. And what have I read the last 300 posts?? Rooster crowing about patriotism and waving the flag while bowing down to Ruuuuuuuush, zithead's hatred fixated upon Kerry's war record over and over and over while ducking F6's question over and over and over...and the most swollen brain of all, big ed professing his love to the 'independent' Savage as the gospel of life. Gotta hand it to y'all.....you love your party. Enjoy your coronation these next few days as y'all trot out all the moderates you can find. It's a damn shame y'all hate so many good Americans so much you cannot find it in your heart to support policies that give 18 million children a fighting chance, maybe some health insurance, but then again, this is your future pool for you chickenhawks war machine, isn't it?! Just think how many war fronts are possible if Bush wins another term. Bet that thought brings a smile to zithead's face.
zithead -- btw, sure hope you're not going to all that effort with your little sound clips for my benefit -- sound off is how I run my computer except only when I temporarily turn up the sound to listen to things I want to hear -- after turning my sound up to listen to a few of your (really stupid, as it turned out without exception) little sound clips, I stopped bothering . . .
Good post easy...notice no replies or comments from our big braintrust. At least Buchanan calls a spade a spade, but hey, for y'all it is party first, America a distant silver....or is it bronze??
ed_fascist, another big brain post, especially this part:
Of course, the liberals also fail to note what is happening in Pakistan, where the US and Pakistanis are successfully teaming up to eradicate militants in that country.
Let's see, Musharraf's life has been targeted a couple times, Mr. wanted dead or alive is still doing his thing, Afghanistan is 90% controlled by the war lords....oh yeah, I love your definition of success, kinda like manufacturing a hamburger, huh??? And, of course, after 3 years the upcoming election has nothing to do with this renewed urgency to 'eradicate militants'.
.
another shining example of your mindless, hate-filled obsession of all things Kerry, most of it 35 years ago, while ignoring anything Bush (oh yeah, his ability to speak is 'simple')$50 oil, 32,000 jobs created last month (Hoover is his hero), the mess in Iraq, you-know-who wanted dead or alive, the world's goodwill trashed since 9/11, the great economy (oh yeah, it's the Dems fault) his ability to unite with compassion....talk about bias, sheesh...
and by the way, where's the media's coverage of steve gardner's story, who was the machine gunner on kerry's boat, and was with kerry 100% of the time?
another shining example of the media's bias, and their willingness to carry kerry's ball for him
Hmmm, LOL, there you go again, showing how little you know. We mopped up Kuwait, bird brain, not Iraq, and 41 had the good sense (something you fight on as many fronts as possible, rightwingnuts chickenhawks wouldn't understand) not to get mired in Baghdad.
Hmm... I assume you're referring to January of 1991 when we mopped up Iraq in a few weeks... who was president then?
lol....bird brain, er, big brain at his best. So the liberals have weakened the military, thus it is their fault and Bush's policies and decisions have absolutely nothing to do with this utter failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Give me a freakin' break.
Stick to your take-my-ball-home one-liners as you are showing your lack of intelligence.
ROTFLMAO@U
ed_fascist....I gather you have volunteered your 'big brain' to Diebold.
ROFLMAO @ the Democrats who think they have a chance
F6, don't hold your breath...
Saving the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 17, 2004
Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.
When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.
How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.
Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.
Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.
This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret. When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely African-American - while including almost no Hispanics.
Yesterday, my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters - including participants in get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.
Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting machines give President Bush an upset, uncheckable victory.
Congress should have acted long ago to place the coming election above suspicion by requiring a paper trail for votes. But legislation was bottled up in committee, and it may be too late to change the hardware. Yet it is crucial that this election be credible. What can be done?
There is still time for officials to provide enhanced security, assuring the public that nobody can tamper with voting machines before or during the election; to hire independent security consultants to perform random tests before and during Election Day; and to provide paper ballots to every voter who requests one.
Voters, too, can do their bit. Recently the Florida Republican Party sent out a brochure urging supporters to use absentee ballots to make sure their votes are counted. The party claims that was a mistake - but it was, in fact, good advice. Voters should use paper ballots where they are available, and if this means voting absentee, so be it. (Election officials will be furious about the increased workload, but they have brought this on themselves.)
Finally, some voting activists have urged a last-minute push for independent exit polling, parallel to but independent of polling by media groups (whose combined operation suffered a meltdown during the upset Republican electoral triumph in 2002). This sounds like a very good idea.
Intensive exit polling would do triple duty. It would serve as a deterrent to anyone contemplating election fraud. If all went well, it would help validate the results and silence skeptics. And it would give an early warning if there was election tampering - perhaps early enough to seek redress.
It's horrifying to think that the credibility of our democracy - a democracy bought through the courage and sacrifice of many brave men and women - is now in danger. It's so horrifying that many prefer not to think about it. But closing our eyes won't make the threat go away. On the contrary, denial will only increase the chances of a disastrously suspect election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
kfc, you big brains do stick together
No, bird brain, it is you that is confused. From your pain train, Whoa...Whoa....to constantly rolling around on the floor Cheneying yourself, it is apparent you bring little to nothing most everywhere you go and with most everyone you meet. Give thanks that Gore invented the internet (and the message board) as your limited social skills are no longer necessary. Loser!
BTW, taking your ball and going home proves you DO give a Cheney.
Another fine mess in the making in Florida
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Florida, the Fun State, is off to a fast start on election shenanigans this year. Undeterred by the state's electoral disgrace in 2000, elections officials there have all but publicly announced, "We're going to cheat again."
In July, voting rights groups asked for the audits of the 2002 gubernatorial election, supposedly collected by new electronic voting machines. Ooops. Records gone.
Two computer crashes last year, officials said, erased the records of both the primary and general elections. Here's my favorite part: A spokesman for the Miami elections office said the reason that no announcement was made at the time was because officials believed "it was merely a record-keeping issue."
Said Seth Kaplan, "There's always a fine line between speaking out about things that are truly necessary to speak about and not unnecessarily alarming the public." How true that is.
Furthering the festive atmosphere is the unfortunate fuss over the felons' list. You may recall that in 2000, thousands of Floridians were deprived of the right to vote because they have the same names as someone, somewhere who was once convicted of a felony.
If, for example, a "Bill Smith" in Kansas City had done time for burglary 20 years earlier, any "Bill Smith" in Sarasota, Seminole or Solana also found himself knocked off the voter rolls. It was a horrendous injustice and a scandal at the time. Who would have guessed that Gov. Jeb Bush would choose to simply repeat it? This guy has chutzpah out the wazoo.
In 2000, a firm with GOP connections was hired by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris (also chairwoman of the state George-Bush-for-Prez campaign) to scan felon records nationwide and then purge Florida voters with similar -- or almost similar -- names. Bush officially carried Florida by 537 votes that year. Florida newspapers later found that 8,000 of the blacklisted voters had been convicted of misdemeanors, not felonies.
This year, same song, second verse. Jeb Bush tried to purge 47,000 supposed ex-felons. A Miami Herald investigation of the new list found that it wrongly listed 2,100 people whose right to vote had already been restored through a clemency process.
The Tampa Tribune produced an even more startling discovery: While half of those on this year's list are black, the list contains the names of few Hispanics. Hispanics in Florida tend to be Republican-leaning Cuban-Americans. Gosh, Jeb Bush was just astonished about the no-Hispanics thing -- except that the state had been repeatedly warned about it.
Florida finally withdrew the list on July 11. Then, on July 14, the 1st District U.S. Court of Appeals in Tallahassee ruled that the state must help felons fill out the form that they need to win back the right to vote after serving their time. Instead, Bush eliminated the form.
One tries not to be alarmist, one tries not to be paranoid, but this doth smelleth. Is there any Republican who would be happy if the role of the parties were reversed here and only Hispanic felons had been on Jebbie Bush's little list, but no blacks? Come on.
The Republican Party in Florida is urging its voters to use absentee ballots so they will have a paper trail in case of a recount. Hey, if it's good enough for Republicans …
Suppress the Vote?
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 16, 2004
The big story out of Florida over the weekend was the tragic devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. But there's another story from Florida that deserves our attention.
State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.
The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March.
Officials refused to discuss details of the investigation, other than to say that absentee ballots are involved. They said they had no idea when the investigation might end, and acknowledged that it may continue right through the presidential election.
"We did a preliminary inquiry into those allegations and then we concluded that there was enough evidence to follow through with a full criminal investigation," said Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Department of Law Enforcement.
The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.
I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.
"I can't talk about that," he said.
I asked if all the people interrogated were black.
"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said.
He also said, "Most of them were elderly."
When I asked why, he said, "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview."
Back in the bad old days, some decades ago, when Southern whites used every imaginable form of chicanery to prevent blacks from voting, blacks often fought back by creating voters leagues, which were organizations that helped to register, educate and encourage black voters. It became a tradition that continues in many places, including Florida, today.
Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote.
The president of the Orlando League of Voters is Ezzie Thomas, who is 73 years old. With his demonstrated ability to deliver the black vote in Orlando, Mr. Thomas is a tempting target for supporters of George W. Bush in a state in which the black vote may well spell the difference between victory and defeat.
The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Joseph Egan, an Orlando lawyer who represents Mr. Thomas, said: "The Voters League has workers who go into the community to do voter registration, drive people to the polls and help with absentee ballots. They are elderly women mostly. They get paid like $100 for four or five months' work, just to offset things like the cost of their gas. They see this political activity as an important contribution to their community. Some of the people in the community had never cast a ballot until the league came to their door and encouraged them to vote."
Now, said Mr. Egan, the fear generated by state police officers going into people's homes as part of an ongoing criminal investigation related to voting is threatening to undo much of the good work of the league. He said, "One woman asked me, 'Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?' "
According to Mr. Egan, "People who have voted by absentee ballot for years are refusing to allow campaign workers to come to their homes. And volunteers who have participated for years in assisting people, particularly the elderly or handicapped, are scared and don't want to risk a criminal investigation."
Florida is a state that's very much in play in the presidential election, with some polls showing John Kerry in the lead. A heavy-handed state police investigation that throws a blanket of fear over thousands of black voters can only help President Bush.
The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/opinion/16herbert.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
big brain, good to see you learned absolutely nothing from all the posts on the main board commenting on YOU, though by now I am sure you are quite comfortable being such a loser.
I'd say keep up the good work but you are a 'natural'.
and you cowards would never think of running on Bush's record or call for an investigation of ANYTHING while he has been in office but, of course, go back 35 years to make a case???... (cough, hack!)hear! hear!............
by all means, let's call for an investigation into these (cough! hack!) lies, to see who's really telling the truth about kerry's military service
but of course, you cowards will never do that, you'll merely call it a right wing conspiracy, and hope it goes no further
Rooster, I won't speak for you, but I care plenty what my government thinks...and more importantly, how they act and that is why I will not vote for Bush.
And as y'all seem to not care what our government thinks,
The love us as a people.....just hate our government.
What a beautiful response, zit, full of compassion for the Iraqi people. So it is "regrettable that this family feels selfishly more important than the 25 to 50 people that on average were killed by saddam on a daily basis". Do you really think this is the only family that feels this way? Do you really believe 'since the americans have freed iraq' 10,000 plus haven't been killed by us??? Where are all the flowers that were to be showered upon our troops??? Unemployment is running at 40%, potable water is a real problem, disease rampant, electricity is operating less than half the time with temps over 120 degrees. Hope the a/c in your glass house is working 'cause you really do not have a clue' how real people think in real circumstances. As for your advice, judging by the importance of Oprah and Blockbuster in your home you were long ago tuned out so I can see your need telling families thousands of miles away how they should think and feel.
The Nuclear Shadow
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 14, 2004
If a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon explodes beside the New York Stock Exchange or the U.S. Capitol, or in Times Square, as many nuclear experts believe is likely in the next decade, then the next 9/11 commission will write a devastating critique of how we allowed that to happen.
As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts - though, in fairness, not all - that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people.
Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face up to the danger.
"Both Bush administration rhetoric and Kerry rhetoric emphasize keeping W.M.D. out of the hands of terrorists as a No. 1 national security priority," noted Michèlle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And when you look at what could have been done in the last few years, versus what has been done, there's a real gap."
So what should we be doing? First, it's paramount that we secure uranium and plutonium around the world. That's the idea behind the U.S.-Russian joint program to secure 600 metric tons of Russian nuclear materials. But after 12 years, only 135 tons have been given comprehensive upgrades. Some 340 tons haven't even been touched.
The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment sees the effort against nuclear terrorism as having three components. One is the Pentagon's version of counterproliferation, which includes the war in Iraq and the missile defense system; this component is costing $108 billion a year, mostly because of Iraq. Then there's homeland security, costing about $37 billion a year. Finally, there's nonproliferation itself, like the Nunn-Lugar effort - and this struggles along on just $2 billion a year.
A second step we must take is stopping other countries from joining the nuclear club, although, frankly, it may now be too late. North Korea, Iran and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Brazil all seem determined to go ahead with nuclear programs.
Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, notes that if Iran develops nukes, jittery Saudi Arabia will seek to follow, and then Egypt, which prides itself as the leader of the Arab world. Likewise, anxiety about North Korea is already starting to topple one domino - Japan is moving in the direction of a nuclear capability.
The best hope for stopping Iran and North Korea (and it's a bleak one) is to negotiate a grand bargain in which they give up nuclear aspirations for trade benefits. Mr. Bush's current policy - fist-shaking - feels good but accomplishes nothing.
President Clinton's approach to North Korea wasn't a great success, but at least North Korea didn't add to its nuclear arsenal during his watch. In just the last two years, North Korea appears to have gone to eight nuclear weapons from about two.
A third step is to prevent the smuggling of nuclear weapons into the U.S. Mr. Bush has made a nice start on that with his proliferation security initiative.
A useful addition, pushed by Senator Charles Schumer, would be to develop powerful new radiation detectors and put them on the cranes that lift shipping containers onto American soil. But while Congress approved $35 million to begin the development of these detectors, the administration has spent little or none of it.
Finally, Mr. Bush needs to display moral clarity about nuclear weapons, making them a focus of international opprobrium. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush is pursuing a new generation of nuclear bunker-buster bombs. That approach helps make nukes thinkable, and even a coveted status symbol, and makes us more vulnerable.
At other periods when the U.S. has been under threat, we mustered extraordinary resources to protect ourselves. If Mr. Bush focused on nuclear proliferation with the intensity he focuses on Iraq, then we might secure our world for just a bit longer.
Right now, we're only whistling in the dark.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/opinion/14kristof.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
How a Bomb Shattered a Reporter's Detachment
Having escaped death at a Baghdad restaurant, she seeks out the families of those killed. They had been sitting at the table that originally was hers.
Note: My bold on how not to win the peace
By Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — The table was supposed to have been ours.
It was New Year's Eve, and we wanted to get a sense of the Iraqi mood by joining the party at Nabil's Restaurant, a popular hangout. As the day wore on, our group — foreign journalists and Iraqi staff — had grown larger. A picture taken before we headed out shows us, dressed up and smiling, offering a plastic-cup champagne toast.
When the first two in our group arrived at Nabil's, the waiter showed them to the table in the back corner, the table we had reserved. But the booth was cramped, certainly too small for our expanded entourage. The waiter agreed to move us to a larger table, closer to the front of the restaurant.
Almost immediately, two Iraqi couples took our place in the corner booth. The foursome, out to celebrate the advent of a new year without Saddam Hussein, had become fast friends of late. Omar Ajeely and Mahmoud Mear-Jabar were starting a cellular phone business together. Their wives, Dina and Hiam, were pregnant. Both were mixed Shiite-Sunni marriages.
They arrived at the restaurant in the dark blue BMW Omar had just bought and joined the restaurant din of Arabic music and lively conversation.
It was about 9 p.m.
At our new table, The Times bureau's computer expert, Mohammed Arrawi, and his fiancee were met by Saad Khalaf, a photographer and one of our part-time drivers. They waited for us.
Outside, Times reporter Chris Kraul and driver Ammar Mohammed pulled up in their old Mercedes and began to parallel park behind Omar's BMW. I followed a few seconds behind them in a small SUV driven by Nasif Duleimy, with fellow correspondent Ann Simmons in the back seat. Chris and Ammar saw a white Oldsmobile barreling the wrong way down the street toward them. They saw it veer to their right, cross their path, then crash into the back wall of Nabil's.
The explosion was so loud I couldn't hear it. It was a muffled pop and a flash of light. It lifted our car into the air with a jolt, slammed us down, then sent searing-hot glass shards, metal and gravel slicing into our faces, necks and hands with the force of a fast, hard punch.
Blood gushing from our heads, Nasif and I were able to shoulder-butt our way out of the crumpled front of the car, and someone pulled Ann from the back.
We staggered into a panicked chaos of flames, smoke and screams. People were running helter-skelter, frantic. It was difficult to breathe, and sight and sound became a blurry swirl. A colleague, Said Rifai, helped Chris, conscious but the most seriously wounded, from his car. Ammar managed to pull himself out.
Inside the restaurant, it was hell. Saad, a solid man weighing about 200 pounds, was hurled across the room like a rag doll. Mohammed and his fiancee, Atiaf, were thrown to the ground under a collapsed roof of beams and brick.
Mohammed managed to use his injured head to ram open the front door of the restaurant, gather Atiaf in his arms and carry her to safety.
And in the back of the restaurant, in the corner, two couples lay crushed to death, at the table that was supposed to have been ours.
The bombing at Nabil's, which lighted the black sky and echoed throughout an edgy city, seems a minor event in the catalog of horrors since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Dozens of other bomb attacks have been recorded since, most far more deadly than the New Year's Eve blast with its total of eight victims.
Few targets, however, have been as plainly civilian as the restaurant. And it doesn't take a large death toll to destroy families, exhaust spirits and torment a society.
Six months after the bombing, Mohammed, our computer tech, and I sought out the families of those killed. We wanted to talk to them about their loved ones, learn who they were. It was extremely painful; every meeting ended in tears.
Journalists ordinarily maintain a distance from their subjects, a shield. It's a defense mechanism, the skill or instinct that allows reporters to continue writing, thinking and asking the next question even as the person being interviewed recounts horrific acts or unimaginable circumstances.
In this case, distance was impossible. We had endured treatment and surgery, but we had survived the bombing that claimed the sons and daughters of the people we were interviewing. We were witness, in a way, to their children's deaths. We survived. Their children did not.
"Did you see them?" were among the very first words that came from each mother. And at the same time, Mohammed and I realized that the devastated people we were interviewing — the elderly father staring into space, the anguished mother asking why, the weeping sister — could have been our own parents and siblings, had things turned out just a bit differently.
We never tell the families that we were supposed to have been sitting at the back corner table in Nabil's Restaurant on New Year's Eve.
Both couples married for love, the families say — not by arrangement — and were full of hope about the future. Both Dina and Hiam were bringing children into the world, and their husbands Omar and Mahmoud were eager to exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities of the emerging Iraq.
The couples had met two years ago on a picnic excursion to Iraq's verdant north, the kind of organized vacation packages common before the fall of Saddam Hussein. In snapshots their families eagerly show me, the four are smiling on that trip, and the men seem to be sharing a joke of some kind. The women cover their hair with scarves but do not wear other, stricter clothing.
Mahmoud was his parents' only son, born to them late in life after a string of daughters. As Shiite Muslims, they were none too happy when Mahmoud, an engineer, announced that he had fallen in love with and would marry Hiam, an architect from a Sunni tribe in Tikrit — Hussein's home base. But everyone became enamored of Hiam when they met her, so loving and kind, and with a sense of humor that clearly delighted Mahmoud.
In the Arab world, the preeminent role of the son cannot be overstated. The father and mother will forever be referred to by the eldest son's name — Abu ("Father of") Mahmoud and Umm ("Mother of") Mahmoud, in the case of Mahmoud's parents — and the eldest son will assume management of the family and all family business at the appropriate time.
And so the loss for Mahmoud's family is all-encompassing. A large picture of a plump, mustachioed Mahmoud, who was 28 when he died, hangs on the wall in the Mear-Jabar living room, a comfortable home in Baghdad's middle-class Jamiaa neighborhood. Born when his father was in his 50s, Mahmoud had become his parents' sole support and the authority figure for all of his female relatives.
His four elder sisters, ranging in age from 33 to 38, stream into the room on our first visit. All are dressed from head to toe in black, in mourning. They help their father, Ahmed, 80, onto the sofa beside their mother, Faeza. The parents are retired high school teachers.
It will be quite a while before Ahmed, with a head of thick white hair, speaks, his gaze distant.
"My father's tears do not stop," says Nihad, the youngest daughter.
The two unmarried sisters, Maha, the eldest, and Zainab, are now in charge of running the cellular phone business that Mahmoud had started — not an easy job for women in this culture. A male relative must come at night to pick up the sisters and help them close the store. Ahmed spends his days sitting vacantly in the shop, just so that those outside see a male figure.
Ahmed had bought a large plot in the cemetery at the Shiite holy city of Najaf and buried his own father there. He fully expected that he would be the next to be interred. Instead, on a cold day in January, Ahmed buried his only son.
Our first meeting with Omar's family is at his father's flower shop on a traffic roundabout in downtown Baghdad. Raad Ajeely does not want us to talk to his wife and daughter. It will make them too sad, he says. The memories are still too painful and raw.
Omar was the eldest son. A gifted sketch artist who doted on his only sister and took care to remember birthdays, the 28-year-old studied graphic design with Dina and had an idea to expand the family florist shop into an interior decorating firm.
From below his desk, next to a stand of plastic zinnias, Raad pulls out photographs. Omar and Dina, beaming at their wedding, she in elaborate white with golden flowers in her hair, he with his dark mustache neatly trimmed. They pose at their home, in their garden, on vacation and, later, with their young son, Khattab.
And then the picture of Omar's dark blue BMW. Bought 10 days before he was killed and now, in the photo, crumpled like a piece of foil. I tell Raad that it looks a lot like the car I climbed out of. He soon relents on our visiting his wife and daughter.
"We hide all of the pictures," Raad says. "We don't want Khattab to see them."
The child is nearly 3. He is fair-skinned and blond, just like his father was at that age. Omar and Dina's parents, the two sets of grandparents, share in caring for the orphaned boy.
Later, at Raad's home, the boy clings to his two grandmothers, both shrouded in black, and hides his face. He cannot be coaxed into a game of peekaboo.
Khattab has not been told that his parents were killed ("What do you tell a 3-year-old?") but his grandparents think he must know. He does not speak their names. Sometimes, in a state of sleepiness in his grandparents' bed, he will try to nurse from his grandmother, as he used to do with Dina when he was upset.
The two families are neighbors in the well-to-do Aladel district where Sunnis and Shiites share the block in apparent harmony. Omar, a Sunni, and Dina, a Shiite, were smitten in elementary school, engaged during college. And in January, they were buried side by side, under a single tombstone, in Baghdad's Al Karkh Cemetery.
"They lived their whole lives together," says Dina's mother, Firyal Qilabi. "And they died together."
A chance encounter provided Raad with the most concrete details of his son's death.
A unit from the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, 2nd Brigade, stopped by the florist shop a couple of weeks after the bombing to buy flowers. When Raad told the soldiers that his son had been killed at the restaurant, they told him that they had been the first military team on the scene.
The soldiers described finding Omar's body on top of a table, crushed by a metal bar. Dina was on the floor. Hiam, partially buried in rubble, initially survived the blast and rambled deliriously. She died before they could pull her free. After telling Raad the story, each soldier filed solemnly through the florist shop and shook his hand.
Though troubled, chaotic and dangerous, Baghdad last December was a safer place than it would become in the spring and summer. Westerners were not yet being kidnapped and could eat at restaurants or shop in public. Iraqis, with some trepidation, were still enjoying something of a nightlife.
Still, Omar and Mahmoud weren't cavalier about safety. They were careful about going out, especially after dark. Mahmoud had never been to Nabil's; Omar had eaten there a few times but wasn't a regular. For New Year's, a holiday Iraqis celebrate even though it is not part of the Islamic calendar, a party of sorts was planned at Nabil's, and Omar thought that it would be fun. There would be music and a prix fixe menu.
"I told him it was too dangerous to go out," Mahmoud's father recalls.
"He told me not to worry, that they were going to a small restaurant, one that was safe and not too public."
We made a similar calculation. A single-story building the color of butterscotch, Nabil's was on Arasat Street, a main thoroughfare crowded with businesses. It was set back a good distance from the street, behind a low-slung wall, a position I figured protected it from a car bomb. The bomber, as it turned out, would approach from a side road, hitting the more exposed back of the restaurant.
Nabil's was one of many eateries and clubs marking that New Year's Eve with festivities, though more low-key than in years past because of the uncertainties of occupied Iraq. That's what I wanted to write about. Owned by a successful Christian Iraqi, it attracted Westerners (though most of the clientele was Iraqi), and it sold alcohol (as did several other establishments). Some of this may have helped make it a target.
About 35 people were injured at Nabil's and survived. The bomber did not. Iraqi police found a piece of his calf on the roof of a nearby building two days later.
As with most bad things that happen in Iraq, it's hard to separate the rumors from the facts. Facts are a pretty elastic commodity in a society that for generations has survived by cushioning and distorting ugly truths.
Amid the rumors, the U.S. military conducted its own investigation and, on St. Patrick's Day, arrested a man officers described as the mastermind of the restaurant bombing.
Ammar Allami, who neighbors said worked as a truck driver, was accused of having helped the bomber mount 500 pounds of explosives and rig a detonator, which apparently exploded prematurely, killing the bomber along with his victims. Allami was picked up in the same Karada neighborhood where Nabil's is located and where two hotels were later targeted.
Allami spent about three months in several U.S.-run prisons, including the notorious Abu Ghraib facility, but was let go in late June. Through his family he denied any role in the bombing.
The families of the victims at Nabil's, however, learned none of this. Months after the bombing, they were still consumed with rumors and speculation. And with questions about why their children died.
One rumor that continues to swirl is that Nabil Helami, the owner, had been threatened a short time before New Year's Eve and warned against opening that night. He opened anyway, inviting disaster.
Nabil denies this. True, he acknowledges, he was not at the restaurant, but only because his baby-sitter called in sick at the last minute and he stayed home with his wife and daughter. He sent his brother to run things in his stead — something he would not have done, he says, if he had thought the establishment was under threat.
Nabil, who prides himself on managing to keep his restaurant open during the Hussein era and through most of the war, has finally been defeated. He is not rebuilding.
At first, Raad, Omar's father, wanted to blame Nabil. Now he speaks of God's will. And, he and the other relatives say, if there is anyone to blame, it's the Americans. This would not have happened before the Americans came, they say, time and again.
"People went to parties, celebrated, and nothing happened," says Omar's mother, Atiya. "The situation changed because of the Americans."
By "Americans," I know they don't mean me, but they do mean me. My presence in Iraq is part of the American occupation, as far as they are concerned. I know they are thinking that my being at Nabil's contributed to their children's deaths.
"Under Saddam, as long as you didn't go against the regime, you weren't hurt," says Dina's mother, Firyal. "Now, without doing anything, you get hurt."
Dina's father, an officer in Hussein's army, spoke out against him and was thrown in jail. Even that experience, faded with time, now seems tolerable compared with today's grief.
Raad, who chain-smokes despite a recent operation for throat cancer, cannot fathom how he survived a battle in the Iran-Iraq war in which 15,000 men died — and yet his eldest son dies at a restaurant.
By now, I had come to know a little bit about these people who were killed in my place. But I have no answers for their families.
So the conversations continue as we meet, talk and finally dine with the families of the dead. They are remarkably hospitable to us — people who are living apparitions of a nightmare. Even with a family clearly still in mourning, we share a formidable lunch at Raad's house. We sit down to a table brimming with plates of chicken and almonds, hummus, rice, lamb and okra.
Omar's sister, Rusha, 24, miscarried after the bombing but is pregnant again. She joins us but doesn't eat.
"I don't think they did anything wrong," she says of her much-adored brother and sister-in-law. "Everyone was celebrating. Omar loved to take his wife out. They were proud of their clothes and of looking good. And then they disappeared. Were they guilty of something? Were they to blame?"
Of all the discussions, it may be Rusha's words that most haunt me. Guilt. Blame. They didn't do anything wrong. Did I do anything wrong? Was it wrong for me to be there that night? Why did I survive? Just as I have no answers for these people, I have no answers for myself.
The conversation is lively, if bleak, and goes on for a long time as we linger over the dining table. We turn to the emerging politics, worsening ethnic tensions, even the lack of electricity.
Finally, it is too much for a grieving mother. Let's change the subject, Atiya says with the kind of tight smile that is molded by sorrow, with the corners of the mouth upturned but eyes full of pain.
"Let's talk about something pleasant," she says.
We look down at our plates for a few moments. We are silent.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nabil14aug14,1,6814916.story?coll=la-headlines-w....
ed, it must be quite a burden to be perfect in so many ways, intelligent beyond the vast majorities ability to even comprehend let alone conceive, with a depth of understanding rivaling the great thinkers of human history. Your ability to convey and share your vast knowledge and experience coupled with your commanding personality is truly appreciated by those of lesser intellect and brain power and is only exceeded by the magnetism your presence exudes. Your truly a legend in your own mind, eh?
Interesting discourse this evening on the main board how to win friends and influence people. Looks like someone is going to take their ball and go home. Nothing worse than a hypster unless they're liberal hypsters.
While we go deeper and deeper into debt, largely to the Chinese....surprising no comments to this article.
Ashcroft's Quiet Prisoner
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 13, 2004
Miami — David Joseph is a little guy, about 5-foot-5, maybe 115 pounds. He's 20 years old, looks younger, and has the sluggish demeanor and sad expression of one who is deeply depressed. He has nightmares and headaches. He spends his days dressed in the blue fatigues of detainees at the federal Krome Detention Center, washing dishes at mealtimes, staring listlessly at television images broadcast in a language he doesn't understand, and praying.
"I thought I would come here for a few days and be released," he told me in a soft voice, his words translated by an interpreter. "But I watch the other people come and go, and I am stuck here."
Mr. Joseph is a refugee from Haiti who is seeking asylum in the United States. He is not a terrorist, and no one has even suggested that he is a threat to anyone. And yet he's been in federal custody for nearly two years.
An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals have ruled that he should be freed on bond, pending a final ruling on his asylum request. But the attorney general of the United States, John Ashcroft, won't let him go.
Playing his ever-present, all-encompassing terrorism card, Mr. Ashcroft personally intervened in Mr. Joseph's case, summarily blocking his release. According to the attorney general, releasing this young Haitian would tend to encourage mass migration from Haiti, and might exacerbate the potential danger to national security of nefarious aliens from Pakistan and elsewhere who might be inclined to use Haiti as a staging area for migration to the U.S.
Mr. Ashcroft has been out in the Washington sun too long. Terrorism is not an issue here. Mr. Joseph is a nervous, nail-biting young man who has an uncle in Brooklyn who's a U.S. citizen and would be only too happy to take in his nephew. Keeping Mr. Joseph imprisoned for years is inhumane.
What's really at work here is the Bush administration's unwillingness to budge even an inch from its unfair and frequently cruel treatment of Haitians seeking refuge in the United States.
Mr. Joseph and a younger brother, Daniel, were among more than 200 Haitians aboard a boat that landed at Key Biscayne, Fla., in October 2002. The boys' immediate family had been viciously attacked in the political turmoil that wracked their homeland, and David Joseph still does not know whether the mother and father he left behind are alive. (Daniel, a teenager, is reportedly in foster care in New York.)
The United States may be a beacon of liberty, but when someone like David Joseph sails toward that beacon he can find himself perversely embraced in the barbed wire of a place like Krome.
"He was fleeing persecution,'' said Selena Mendy Singleton, a vice president of TransAfrica Forum, a research and policy group that is among several organizations supporting Mr. Joseph's request for asylum. "He is not a threat to the community. He is not a terrorist. And he meets the criteria to be released on bond. David needs to be let out."
Mr. Ashcroft was pointedly questioned about the Joseph case by Senator Arlen Specter during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June.
"On April 17 of last year," said Mr. Specter, "an issue came before you where there was a young Haitian refugee where there had not been any showing of a problem with respect to terrorism. And you overruled both the immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals. And then the inspector general of the Department of Justice criticized the department for the failure to distinguish between immigration detainees who are connected to terrorism and those who don't have any reason for detention.''
Senator Specter urged Mr. Ashcroft to consider a policy in which the Justice Department would address cases like Mr. Joseph's on a less sweeping, "more individual" basis, which would enable officials to determine whether there was any real basis for concern about terrorism.
Mr. Ashcroft was unmoved. He told Senator Specter: "Sometimes individual treatment is important. Sometimes it's important to make a statement about groups of people that come."
So David Joseph, a threat to no one, sits and waits and prays at Krome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/opinion/13herb.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
My bold just for you, zit
Keepin' it simple!!
Bush's Own Goal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 13, 2004
A new Bush campaign ad pushes the theme of an "ownership society," and concludes with President Bush declaring, "I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America."
Call me naïve, but I thought all Americans have a vital stake in the nation's future, regardless of how much property they own. (Should we go back to the days when states, arguing that only men of sufficient substance could be trusted, imposed property qualifications for voting?) Even if Mr. Bush is talking only about the economic future, don't workers have as much stake as property owners in the economy's success?
But there's a political imperative behind the "ownership society" theme: the need to provide pseudopopulist cover to policies that are, in reality, highly elitist.
The Bush tax cuts have, of course, heavily favored the very, very well off. But they have also, more specifically, favored unearned income over earned income - or, if you prefer, investment returns over wages. Last year Daniel Altman pointed out in The New York Times that Mr. Bush's proposals, if fully adopted, "could eliminate almost all taxes on investment income and wealth for almost all Americans." Mr. Bush hasn't yet gotten all he wants, but he has taken a large step toward a system in which only labor income is taxed.
The political problem with a policy favoring investment returns over wages is that a vast majority of Americans derive their income primarily from wages, and that the bulk of investment income goes to a small elite. How, then, can such a policy be sold? By promising that everyone can join the elite.
Right now, the ownership of stocks and bonds is highly concentrated. Conservatives like to point out that a majority of American families now own stock, but that's a misleading statistic because most of those "investors" have only a small stake in the market. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than half of corporate profits ultimately accrue to the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, while only about 8 percent go to the bottom 60 percent. If the "ownership society" means anything, it means spreading investment income more widely - a laudable goal, if achievable.
But does Mr. Bush have a way to get us there?
There's a section on his campaign blog about the ownership society, but it's short on specifics. Much of the space is devoted to new types of tax-sheltered savings accounts. People who have looked into plans for such accounts know, however, that they would provide more tax shelters for the wealthy, but would be irrelevant to most families, who already have access to 401(k)'s. Their ability to invest more is limited not by taxes but by the fact that they aren't earning enough to save more.
The one seemingly substantive proposal is a blast from the past: a renewed call for the partial privatization of Social Security, which would divert payroll taxes into personal accounts. Mr. Bush campaigned on that issue in 2000, but he never acted on it. And there was a reason the idea went nowhere: it didn't make sense.
Social Security is, basically, a system in which each generation pays for the previous generation's retirement. If the payroll taxes of younger workers are diverted into private accounts, there will be a gaping financial hole: who will pay benefits to older Americans, who have spent their working lives paying into the current system? Unless you have a way to fill that multitrillion-dollar hole, privatization is an empty slogan, not a real proposal.
In 2001, Mr. Bush's handpicked commission on Social Security was unable to agree on a plan to create private accounts because there was no way to make the arithmetic work. Undaunted, this year the Bush campaign once again insists that privatization will lead to a "permanently strengthened Social Security system, without changing benefits for those now in or near retirement, and without raising payroll taxes on workers." In other words, 2 - 1 = 4.
Four years ago, Mr. Bush got a free pass from the press on his Social Security "plan," either because reporters didn't understand the arithmetic, or because they assumed that after the election he would come up with a plan that actually added up. Will the same thing happen again? Let's hope not.
As Mr. Bush has said: "Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - can't get fooled again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/opinion/13krug.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2....
wimpy reply, big brain, and yet again none to F6. For once, you're right, I will let it go....wouldn't want to sink to your level of intelligence
bird brain....another great one-liner. No wonder you love this president so much, you're mentally compatible.
Speaking of that, I thought of you yesterday. Had to wait for a train to pass and boom, you're big brain popped into my mind. As I watched the box cars go by, I got to thinkin' the actual brain mass in your big brain must roll around like a bb in a box car.
Keep those deep thoughts comin'.
Zit:
just saw the larry king interview with gwb and laura
though certainly simple in speech, gwb sure is dignified, decent, and classy....laura too
Copied from Hawaiiguy post:
So, who are these people who still support George Bush for four more years of dis-service to this country? Do they believe that stupidity pays some dividend in the end? Are they so frightened of the Democrats that they prefer a virtual moron as president--a man who has his finger on the nuclear trigger and who has already demonstrated that war is not his “last option”? Do they concede that Bush really is stupid but otherwise just a harmless dupe or puppet who will be held in check by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Republican forces in Congress--and so, is still better than any Democrat, who as we all know will raise our taxes, take away our guns, release all the felons from prison, give abortion on demand, promote pornography, … ?
This seems like a subject our simple, but decent president could embrace. I guess Cheney says otherwise.
That's why there has been a rush to fill the leadership vacuum left by Washington.
LOL.....LOL
Ah, that was great for a 6:15am laugh. Coming from a charter member of the infamous 'big brain' club, priceless!!!
just saw the larry king interview with gwb and laura
though certainly simple in speech
What you really meant to say is:
though certainly simple