Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

David Smith, CEO of Sinclair Broadcasting, patriot, truth-teller, fan of highway blowjobs from prostitutes

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/22/sinclair/index.html

Well, that's a discerning and cogent argument. All lies are equal, all political figures and parties at all times lie equally. Therefore, all lies and deceits are excuseable.

I'm going to guess, though I might be wrong, that you aren't forwarding a Chomskian view of modern American political dynamics. If that assumption is correct, then you'll have to do rather better at defending an administration now responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand American soldiers (and many many thousands of innocent Iraqi women, children, and men) who have told consistent untruths about the war.

Blatham,

Get hold of yourself. You are descending from hyper-inflated indignation over the degree to which ties to al Qaeda were "significant", to personal smears, and now to mean-spirited babble. This is truly below your standards.

What's with the Chomsky stuff anyway? That drivel is only for the terminally self-loathing, who must force all around them into molds as ugly as they perceive themselves to be.


Do you now disapprove of blow jobs?

"Significant"!? How much do you know about Doug Feith, george? At the very least, if you wish to totally ignore what the 9-11 commission has found regarding him (and his truthfullness), and it looks like perhaps you do wish to ignore it, you can at least recall Tommy Franks' comment...
" I have to deal with the fukking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."

"Mean-spirited"? Guilty. I think representative democracy is a very good thing, that it depends upon truthfulness and transparency, that it is not served well and is badly damaged by such consistent secretiveness, deceits and outright falsehoods as this administration has demonstrated over the last four years.

As regards Chomsky, I'll be happy to talk with you about the fellow after you've read even one complete essay (a full book being completely out of the question, as we both know) from him. In the years I've been debating politics here and on an earlier site, there have been perhaps four or five people who have argued against Chomsky's views who have actually read him. Out of some 50 or 100 derogative posts on the fellow, that's not a happy average.

Blowjobs? Having never been in the Navy, I can only imagine what it would be like to give one. As regards Sinclair, I'm more than happy to help pass on this bit of criminal history noted above.

You're getting worse. Now even denigrating Chomsky critics and responding with tired Navy jibes - ('rum, bum, and the lash' was actually a Royal Navy mantra, not ours)

I have read a few Chomsky essays (no books) and even watched a few speeches - with awe struck amazement - on the tube. His very odd monotone mumbling of the worst accusations of evil acts and intent betrays an inhuman detachment and an unremittingly hostile viewpoint. It is very clear that, while he may know a good deal about words and speech, he understands little of history. He is a twisted soul not worth serious consideration.

RIDGE AND RICE POLITICIZE SECURITY

Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge told reporters, "we don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."[1] But a new analysis by the Associated Press reveals that the travel schedule of Ridge and other top DHS officials are influenced by political considerations.

According to the report, in the past seven months nearly three-fifths of Ridge's travel has been to "the 17 states considered the most hotly contested in the presidential election."[2] In the same time period, 22 senior officials "did nearly half their public events in those 17 states."[3] Sue Mencer, who heads the Office of Domestic Preparedness for DHS, recently traveled to Ohio - a key battleground state - "to deliver a grant that had been awarded weeks earlier."[4]

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has also "traveled across the country making speeches in key battleground states, including Oregon, Washington, North Carolina and Ohio."[5] In the next few days "she also plans speeches in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida."[6] White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan denied the appearances were politically motivated.[7]

Sources:

1. "Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge," Department of Homeland Security, 8/03/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64340.
2. "Homeland Security officials heading to the political battleground states," Associated Press, 10/20/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64341.
3. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64341.
4. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64341.
5. "Rice Hitting the Road to Speak," Washington Post, 10/20/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64342.
6. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64342.
7. "Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan," The White House, 10/20/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=64343.

let's stop talking about replacing GW........let's do it! I'm going to vote tomorrow. Not that my vote will be registered properly here in good ole Texas.......

I guess if we want to get rid of GW, we'll have to prosecute the little weasel.

Now I'll have to vote three times.

You mean, additonally to your already four absentee ballots?

Bush's Blinkers

By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 22, 2004

Does President Bush even tip his hat to reality as he goes breezing by?

He often behaves as if he sees - or is in touch with - things that are inaccessible to those who are grounded in the reality most of us have come to know. For example, with more than 1,000 American troops and more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians dead, many people see the ongoing war in Iraq as a disaster, if not a catastrophe. Mr. Bush sees freedom on the march.

Many thoughtful analysts see a fiscal disaster developing here at home, with the president's tax cuts being the primary contributor to the radical transformation of a $236 billion budget surplus into a $415 billion deficit. The president sees, incredibly, a need for still more tax cuts.

The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The president responded by turning most of the nation's firepower on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. When Mr. Bush was asked by the journalist Bob Woodward if he had consulted with former President Bush about the decision to invade Iraq, the president replied: "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

Last week the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University said in a report:

"During the past year Iraq has become a major distraction from the global war on terrorism. Iraq has now become a convenient arena for jihad, which has helped Al Qaeda to recover from the setback it suffered as a result of the war in Afghanistan. With the growing phenomenon of suicide bombing, the U.S. presence in Iraq now demands more and more assets that might have otherwise been deployed against various dimensions of the global terrorist threat."

There are consequences, often powerful consequences, to turning one's back on reality. The president may believe that freedom's on the march, and that freedom is God's gift to every man and woman in the world, and perhaps even that he is the vessel through which that gift is transmitted. But when he is crafting policy decisions that put people by the hundreds of thousands into harm's way, he needs to rely on more than the perceived good wishes of the Almighty. He needs to submit those policy decisions to a good hard reality check.

Here's one good reason why:

Dr. Gene Bolles spent two years as the chief of neurosurgery at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, which is where most of the soldiers wounded in Iraq are taken. Among his patients was Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In an interview posted this week on the Web site AlterNet.org, Dr. Bolles was asked: "What kind of cases did you treat in Landstuhl? And these were mostly kids, right?"

He said: "Well, I call them that since I'm 62 years old. And they were 18, 19, maybe 21. They all seemed young. Certainly younger than my children. As a neurosurgeon I mostly dealt with injuries to the brain, the spinal cord, or the spine itself. The injuries were all fairly horrific, anywhere from the loss of extremities, multiple extremities, to severe burns. It just goes on and on and on. ... As a doctor myself who has seen trauma throughout his career, I've never seen it to this degree. The numbers, the degree of injuries. It really kind of caught me off guard."

If you're the president and you're contemplating a war in which thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of these kinds of injuries will take place, you have an obligation to seek out the best sources of information and the wisest advice from the widest possible array of counselors. And you have an absolute obligation to exercise sound judgment based upon facts, and not simply faith.

In a disturbing article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the writer Ron Suskind told of a meeting he'd had with a senior adviser to the president. The White House at the time was unhappy about an article Mr. Suskind had written.

According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' " The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."
Got that? We may think there are real-world consequences to the policies of the president, real pain and real grief for real people. But to the White House, that kind of thinking is passé. The White House doesn't even recognize that kind of reality.

And...another one...

Who are these people that register to vote when a door-to-door salesguy comes a knockin'?

Why haven't they already registered, and if they haven't why would we want them to vote?

blatham

I would assume that these dirty tricks are illegal. I don't know who has jurisdiction however, I am sure some agency has. Nevertheless I have yet to see any legal action taken. I can only guess that those engaged in the illegal activities do so with the full knowledge and approval of our corrupt administration.

au

Here's another case from Nevada giving some information on the sorts of responses government agencies are presently engaged in...

http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe

There are some 20,000 lawyers now in the employ (or volunteering) for both parties. It's going to be very very ugly, particularly as cases like this one keep coming to light.

More, rather a lot more, from KOS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/13/15534/960

IMO nothing at all will be done about it prior to the election and people will only be aware that they have been disenfranchised when they attempt to vote.
The republicans and Bush claim to have God on their side. I suspect the God they worship is Satan.

au

I think there is little time before the election to sort out the facts of these instances, and then to go through the legal steps that would follow, even if each case wouldn't be held up and argued with lots of lawyers and dollars.

It's a huge problem for American democracy. Confidence in the whole electoral procedure will suffer god knows how much damage from this election.

But we should have expected this. We know now (those of us who read something other than townhall) that much of what went on in Florida was planned (eg the 'outraged citizens' that descended spontaneously 'to protect democracy' on the vote recount had been galvanized by rightwing radio and phone and email, then bused to the site by Republican activists, etc).

More dangerously though is the valuation in this administration of a set of neoconservative notions which derive from Strauss and Machiavelli (this isn't even covert, as one can find with some reading) and which justify outright lies and fear-mongering as tools of proper governance.

Voter registration fraud is not just a one party thing... the democrats are doing it as well

Its sickening, but it is happening within both parties.

I would never register to vote with someone who knocked on my door. Period!

If people are too lazy to get out and fill out a voter registration card then I as well would prefer they not vote.

Have there been any specific cases of this? So far I've only seen posts siting republican offenses.

General claims such as armyvet makes above don't get at truth, they avoid it.