Probably nothing more than the address of this URL http://americanresearchgroup.com/... This fascinating interactive site is pre-programmed with the results of the 2004 election by state, showing the elctoral votes for each state and indicating which party won the state. At the click of your mouse, you can "move" a state from one party to the other, and the new electoral vote total for each party will be displayed. This allows you to run any number of "what-if" scenarios.
The deficits being rung up by the United States year after year have become structural in nature. Even if the absurd sums of money being spent on uselessly trying to justify the colossal blunder of Iraq were eliminated quickly (and they won't be), the impending retirements of the baby boomer generation and their entry into Medicare assure that at current rates of taxation deficits will not disappear. The arguments by the Kudlow school of economics (admittedly, an oxymoron) that we will "grow" are way out of the deficits are absurd; they depend on economic assumptions that are beyond rosy and give no credence to the scope of the recession that we now face.
I will briefly propose a way out that can accomplish deficit reduction at the same time as fiscal stimulus. It is favorable to lower-income taxpayers and would be largely neutral to upper-income taxpayers if the assumptions of the Kudlow clowns were correct. Because I am too lazy to actually do the calculations, the numbers I propose will essentially illustrate the idea rather than necessarily being workable. There are, however, real numbers which can accomplish what I propose.
With short-term interest rates at 3% and Bailout Ben Bernanke threatening to take them lower in an effort to stave off the effects of the subprime mortgage mess created by a coalition of unscrupulous mortgage writers, indfferent greedy Wall Street mortgage packagers, and moronic investors who bought these packages without doing due diligence on the risks they were taking, the US economy is in trouble. Without question, the result of Bernanke's bailout will benefit Wall Street, but its main effect on Main street will be to increase the prices of virtually everything that we buy, and at a far greater rate than the absurd rates of inflation now being quoted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Shortly after his inauguration, President Ford issued a blanket pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon. As a matter of law, it does not seem to be clear whether a former president can be tried domestically for laws he may have violated while in office, unless he had been first impeached.
With respect to the vice president it seems likely that, once out of office, he may be charged with criminal conduct for acts committed during his term of office. See http://www.straightdope.com/... for a discussion of these issues.
Consequently, I think that we, as progressives, should ask the field of potential candidates for the Democratic nomination whether, if elected, they would pledge not to issue any pardons whatsoever in any legal proceedings that might be brought against the chimp or uncle fester.
To recap, for those who have not been following this story, there was a recent World Bridge Championship held in Shanghai, China. A team representing Norway won the Bermuda Bowl, emblematic of the World Open Championship. A team representing the United States won the Venice Cup, emblematic of the World Women's Championship. Women may compete in the Open division if they so choose, or may elect to contest the Women's championship.
At the closing ceremony in Shanghai, as the victorious American women were having their medals awarded, one of them held up a hand-written sign saying "We didn't vote for Bush" Evidently, expression of this sentiment met with considerable approval from the other teams in Shanghai, but it created a "Dixie-Chicks" like furor in the United States, initially among bridge players. However, word soon spread to the mainstream media, inspiring a long article about the incident in the "The Arts" section of the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/... followed by an editorial in the same newspaper supporting the ladies' right to express themselves as they did. Keith Olberman ran the story two nights in succession.
Over the past two weeks, the world championships of bridge were held in Shanghai, China. There were several categories of competition, one of which is exclusively for Women. The winner of this Women's competition is awarded the Venice Cup. This year, a team from the United States won the Venice Cup, defeating a team from Germany for the title.
The event is fairly formal, with opening and closing ceremonies. At the closing ceremonies, one of the Venice Cup winners held up a sign saying "We did not vote for Bush" while the medal presentation was going on.
http://www.swangames.com/... The pictures are the 9th, 10th and 11th from the bottom.
This is fairly reminiscent of the athletes who gave black power salutes while being awarded their medals at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Certainly the Olympic Games are watched by a far greater number of people than a bridge championship. Nonetheless, I want to express my admiration to these six women for telling the world that there are plenty of decent Americans left.
We have to support every Democrat running for local, state, or national office in every state. I firmly believe in Dean's 50 state strategy. However, we can also recognize that there are a dozen or more red states where the Democratic presidential candidate has no chance at all. I would like to use this fact to establish leverage for the progressive agenda that I think a majority who post on this board favor.
Assuming that the Democrats nominate a "moderate" as seems inevitable,
I suggest that those whose presidential vote will not matter forbear from casting it.
So what? The longer the chimp-in-chief hangs onto him, the worse it becomes for the rethugs. We should recognize that the chimp is our biggest asset. By all means keep the pressure on Gonzales, hear evidence as to the perjury committed,and then hope that the chimp-in-chief stubbornly says "he's my man"
Today, the Army censured retired Lt. General Kensinger for a "perfect storm of mistakes, misjudgment, and failure of leadership" after the death from friendly-fire of Pat Tillman in April 2004. http://news.yahoo.com/... Is it a coincidence that this censure 39 months after the incident occurs precisely when the fire is heating up about the precise circumstances surrounding Tillman's death? And how ironic that the phraseology used to describe General Kensinger applies so perfectly to the lunatic who started the whole affair, except that the general is not accused of outright lies while the chimp-in chief certainly is guilty of that as well.
Apparently, there are a number of people who post on this board who are as accepting of dissent as, well, the lunatic in the White House. If you dare to air negative views about those they favor, you are rewarded by being called a troll, apparently the worst thing that can happen to you here. Well, since I am unlikely to agree with the political opinions of the majority, I accept your verdict: I admit it, I am a troll. In this diary, I shall attempt to explain to you how I came to be a troll, and why I am proud of it.
Hillary Clinton is in many way a clone of George W. Bush. Bush is a corporation masquerading as a human being(?), and so is Hillary. The fact that Hillary is reasonably bright whereas Bush is of subnormal intelligence defines the greatest difference between them. Yes, it is likely that Hillary would pay marginally more attention to what is good for people than to what is good for corporations, but the outcomes for average Americans would be similar: More jobs lost to cheaper overseas labor; a steady increase in the volume of imports, a declining US dollar, and an ever-widening gulf between "affluent" America and the ordinary American. Yet the media and its punditry have annointed Hillary as the inevitable candidate. So what is a secular humanist to do?
Microsoft is one of the major sponsors of Foxnews online. Before you can see a film clip entitled 'Idiot Liberals' by the bringers of unfair and unbalanced reporting, you have to listen to a spiel from Microsoft. By the way, the reason that the Liberals are idiots according to Faux is that they want to get out of Iraq now.
The channel that we rely on for unfair and unbalanced news reporting saw fit to report in the second spot on it's online site a reprint of an editorial column published in the Las Vegas Review Journal that criticized Nevada Democrats for pulling out of a "debate" that was to have been co-sponsored by Fox News. Evidently this "rebuke" to Democrats was deemed more important than the demonstrations being staged against Bush in South America. http://www.foxnews.com/...
The victory last Tuesday was an exceptional expression of the American peoples distaste for the farce in Iraq and the Republican attempts to cover it up. Make no mistake about it though; had the Iraq war gone well, deposing Saddam Hussein and allowing American troops to leave with minimal casualties, the average American could not have cared less that the war was initiated on a series of lies and was immoral and illogical. In my opinion, 70% of Americans have never heard of Habeas Corpus and less than half of those who have heard of it know what it means.
Today the idiot-in-chief ushered in a new era of bipartisanship, at least according to him The great uniter, who last week was accusing democrats of being allies of terrorists, is now inviting Speaker-elect Pelosi and Majority Leader-elect Reid to lunch. To their credit, I suppose, they didn't tell him to go fuck himself in Cheneyesque fashion, although I kind of wish they did. They had better remain quite aware that bipartisanship to the chimp-in-charge is nothing more than an attempt to further subvert what remains of our civil liberties and Constituitional protectons under cover of "working together" to make America safe.
CNN is currently showing John Tester with a lead of about 9700 votes over Conrad Burns with about 60% of the vote counted. This normally would not be enough to celebrate but it turns out that no votes have yet been returned from Gallatin County, which contains Bozeman and the University of Montana at Bozeman.http://www.cnn.com/...
The only large block of votes to come in in the Virginia Senate race is from Richmond, where one third of the vote is still out. http://www.cnn.com/...
In the (unlikely) event that the Democrats control both houses of Congress after the election, there will be a huge agenda from which the Democratic Party will have to select items that are most relevent. There will be calls on the far left for the impeachment of Bush, which should be firmly rejected.
Instead, IMO, the Democrats should recognize that little of real substance can be accomplished except for bills that may be passed that are so powerful politically that a Bush veto can be overridden. Democrats should use their opportunity to pass bills that represent their Party's platform for the 2008 election and let those GOP Senators and Representatives who will have to run in 2008 decide whether they want to run on the basis of having opposed them.
