Kerry v Bush: The Facts, the Campaigns and the Spin...

So by your way of thinking, if the bad guys turn out to be in your own party, then the proper thing to do is look the other way?

and more and more people don't believe you anymore or else they consider it irrelevent.

Nimh, I will ignore your obvious sarcasm and invite you to help my young friend out and come up with something complimentary about Kerry he could use for his class.

And Nimh I have already explained why these don't show up on Kerry's resume and why he isn't using them as 'evidence' for why he's a good guy and suited to be president.

They were written early on by his campaign creative staff but the issues themselves have so many negatives attached, he can't use them effectively in his campaign. We did find most of this stuff and my young friend quickly and prudently realized how savagely any opponent would rip them apart. You see we Google everything, not just the stuff that sounds good if you ignore all the rest.

No Dookie it is more than that. I doubt Bush will go down in history as one of the greatest but he could if the next four years is much better than the first. He has made mistakes as I have mentioned and he has supported policies that I do not. But taken as a whole, he has proven to be quite honest, trustworthy to stick with his convictions, and I support more policies that he supports than those I disapprove. He has proven to me that he doesn't say things just because they're what voters want to hear. These are qualities I value in a president. Kerry doesn't have them, nor has Kerry shown me any clear conviction he holds about anything other than the self-promotion of John Kerry. And I think that's pretty sad.

This just in... Secretary of State Blackwell has backed off his earlier position to require voter registrations to be printed on 80# paper. This means registration forms printed from the internet, in newspapers, etc. will be considered valid and will be processed. This reversal is the result of direct pressure from citizens and the media after this decision was brought to light

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell yesterday issued a revised directive to county election officials telling them to accept voter-registration forms regardless of the weight of the paper on which they are printed.

The "clarification" was a reversal from Blackwell's Sept. 7 directive telling election officials in Ohio's 88 counties that they should not accept registration forms unless they were printed on "80-pound text paper," a heavy, cardlike stock. [..]

The Dispatch reported Tuesday that after Blackwell's initial directive, some county boards stopped accepting voterregistration applications printed on flimsier paper. Others were taping lightweight forms to heavier paper. And many, including Franklin County, had ignored Blackwell and continued accepting all otherwise-valid applications.

With Ohio's voter-registration deadline Monday, the confusion came during the final phase of a massive effort to sign up new voters and drew criticism from across the nation. [..]

It's unclear how many application forms have been rejected, but in Ohio, a key state in a tight presidential race, election officials say even a few thousand could affect the outcome.

In Franklin County alone, there are more than 90,000 new voters this year - 10 percent of the county's electorate. [..]

Dan Trevas, a spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, noted that Blackwell's own office has distributed registration forms that fail to meet his own requirements.

Some picked up this past spring by the Worthington Area Democratic Club are printed on 60-pound paper, according to John Stopa, a lawyer and club member.

And an election board official who asked not to be identified said forms his office obtained from Blackwell were printed on 70-pound paper.

LoParo said the secretary of state's forms are always on the prescribed paper.

"It's 80-pound text weight," he said. "We've been doing this for 10 years."

Larry434:

You're not paying attention. The terrorists are THRIVING in Iraq. How is that hell for them? It IS hell, though, for the poor innocent Iraqi citizens who McGentrix so dearly loves, and who are once again victims to a failed Bush foreign policy.

Just like Bush 41.

Despite Bush Flip-Flops, Kerry Gets Label

In 2000, Bush said he would include carbon dioxide on a list of air pollutants requiring federal oversight, a stand he abandoned within weeks of taking office. A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's spokesman said the president believed a homeland security department that Democrats proposed was "just not necessary." A year after that, Bush had switched course and was lashing some Democrats for not moving quickly enough to approve the agency.

While Bush professes himself a strong free-trader, most other free-trade proponents said he bent on principle in March 2002 when he ordered tariffs on imported steel -- a move that resonated politically in electorally important industrial states such as Pennsylvania. Facing an escalating global trade dispute, he lifted the tariffs at the end of last year.

In some cases, Democrats say, Bush's position stays the same even as his reasons flip. The most famous examples involve taxes and Iraq. He supported tax cuts in 2000 because he said they were affordable in a time of large government surpluses, and once in power he supported them amid rising deficits because he said the economy needed stimulation. The president's principal rationale for the Iraq invasion was to end Baghdad's suspected mass-weapons program and links to international terrorism. In the absence of compelling evidence of these, the main post-invasion rationale has been to rescue Iraq from a tyrant and support democracy in the greater Middle East.

Iraq, however, has been the source of the most damaging charges of equivocation and wind-shifting against Kerry. The Massachusetts senator voted for the Iraq war in October 2002, but a year later voted against Bush's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter vote came when former Vermont governor Howard Dean's antiwar candidacy was ascendant. The vote may have been wise politics at the time, but came with a high price -- lending an aura of plausibility to the subsequent charges by Bush that Kerry is motivated by opportunism.

Kerry's statements have compounded the damage. In September 2003, he said at a Democratic debate, "We should not send more American troops" to Iraq. "That would be the worst thing." In April, he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that "if it requires more troops . . . that's what you have to do." In August, he told ABC's "This Week" that if elected, "I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops." This week, he said that, as president, he would not have launched an invasion if he had known that there was not clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al Qaeda, though last month he said, knowing these things, he still would have voted to give Bush congressional authority to wage the Iraq war.

Polls make clear the extent to which Bush's flip-flop charge has stuck. A poll released last week by Kohut's Pew Center showed that 53 percent of voters believe Kerry "changes his mind too much." [..] Stevens, who has been studying Kerry since advising then-Massachusetts Gov. William H. Weld (R) in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the senator in 1996, said Kerry's very manner exacerbates the flip-flop impression: "He says these things with great condescension, [suggesting]: 'If only you were as smart as I and understand this that these issues are too complicated to have a consistent position.' . . .