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Discussing all things political in NW Arkansas and beyond.
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Dardedar
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Bush Suppressed Health Reports for Political Gain

"Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel
Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to
weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political
considerations," reports Gardiner Harris of The New York Times. "The
administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue
reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues."

LINK

DAR
Will we ever get to the bottom of the pile of examples of just how bad this goddamn president has been?
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How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas and Skies

LINK

Nick Turse writing for TomDispatch.com says: "The DOD's 'real property
portfolio,' according to 2006 figures, consists of a total of 3,731
sites. Over 20 percent of these sites are located on more than 711,000
acres outside of the US and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn
out to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005 Pentagon
report listed US military sites from Antigua and Hong Kong to Kenya and
Peru, some countries with significant numbers of US bases go entirely
unmentioned - Afghanistan and Iraq, for example."
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Pentagon: US Troops Shot 429 Iraqi Civilians at Checkpoints

Nancy A. Youssef reports US soldiers have killed or wounded 429 Iraqi
civilians at checkpoints or near patrols and convoys during the past
year, according to military statistics compiled in Iraq and obtained by
McClatchy Newspapers.

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"Another day, another sex scandal involving a god-fearing republican who just happened to be a key supporter of John McCain. That and the fact that this legislator had also co-sponsored bills on public sex is pretty much par for the course with these guys.

As expected, once news of the McCain connection broke a minor regional story hit all the national media. McCain’s campaign, already on life support, looks about ready to expire at this point.

State Rep. Bob Allen, a co-chair of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s Florida campaign, is expected to address Thursday charges that he offered to perform oral sex on an undercover male police officer for $20."

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Image

"In the final days of his imploding candidacy, John McCain has taken a page out of Richard Nixon's play book, finding increasingly bizarre explanations for his political failures. Strangest of all: He reportedly feels his handlers forced him to wear "gay sweaters."

According to one insider, the knit-picking was the crescendo of a tirade by the Arizona senator, in which he blistered aides about the minutiae of the campaign. While many septuagenarians live in a perpetual state of sweater weather, McCain reportedly declared his frustration with being told to don the perceived homosexual outerwear in order to look younger and more approachable.

"He wasn't happy being dictated to. The sweaters were part of that," the source says."

***
It wasn't... the walk in the Baghdad market, his support for a ridiculous war, his flip-flopping on evolution, abortion, Falwell, Bob Jones, campaign finance reform, lobbying reform and every other issue.

Not his temper, his ambition or his obstinence. Gay sweaters have done him in.

LINK

Image
Last edited by Dardedar on Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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"FOX and CBS have both recently refused to air ads for condoms that emphasize their use as a birth control method. When interviewed by the New York Times, a FOX rep said, that the decision was based on their policy that condom ads “must stress health-related issues rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” In other words, it is okay to educate consumers about STDs, but empowering them to make reproductive choices is beyond the purview of two of our nation’s most sex-saturated networks."

Feministing
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FDA Plan Raises Food Safety Concerns

Claudia Lauer for The Los Angeles Times reports on proposed plans to
close half of the Food and Drug Administration's testing laboratories,
despite protests that this will lessen the nation's ability to ensure
food safety.

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Bush’s Agencies Of Mass Politicization

This week’s report that officials in the Office of National Drug Control Policy made politically motivated appearances in the months leading up to the 2006 elections are only the latest example of the Bush administration’s misuse of federal employees.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2003 that Karl Rove or his top aide, Ken Mehlman, “visited nearly every agency to outline White House campaign priorities, review polling data and, on occasion, call attention to tight House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be affected by regulatory action.”

Partisan campaign or electoral activities on federal government property are illegal. This prohibition, however, has not stopped the Bush administration from politicizing virtually every agency under its control.

To veiw a quick review of the extent of the White House’s efforts to politicize the federal agencies, see here
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DAR
Bush, destroying the US government one department at a time. This is a good one to start with if you want to do that:

DOJ All But "Operating on Autopilot"

The Financial Times UK's Brooke Masters writes: "Resignations and the ongoing furor over allegedly politicized hiring and firing at the US justice department have left so many top positions vacant that the department is all but operating on autopilot."

LINK
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U.S. officials have finally admitted what has long been obvious: that George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” has been an expensive failure, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and claiming possibly hundreds of thousands of lives, but making the world no safer and quite likely more dangerous.

Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged as much on July 17 in releasing a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that represented the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community.

The report, entitled “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” described a resurgent al-Qaeda that has regrouped in remote sections of Pakistan while exploiting Muslim anger over the war in Iraq to increase its operational strength internationally and to take aim at American targets, again.

“We assess that al-Qaeda will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the [U.S.] homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups,” the NIE said. “Of note, we assess that al-Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaeda in Iraq [AQI], its most visible and capable affiliate and only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the [U.S.] homeland.

“In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qaeda to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for [U.S.] homeland attacks.”

In other words, Bush’s repeated warnings that the United States must fight Islamic extremists in Iraq so “we don’t have to fight them here” or so "they won't follow us home" turn out to be the opposite of the truth: because U.S. forces are occupying Iraq, al-Qaeda has more resources and more recruits determined to bring the war to the United States.

The underlying reality is that Bush remains the perfect foil for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists. The surging anti-Americanism, which derives from a widespread hatred of Bush, represents a recruitment boon for al-Qaeda, so much so that Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders understand that Bush and his stubbornness are indispensable assets to their cause.

Almost six years into the “war on terror,” Bush has overseen a strategy that has simultaneously alienated world public opinion – with torture scandals over Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons – while fueling Islamic extremism and giving new life to the 9/11 masterminds.

The rest here:

http://consortiumnews.com/2007/071907.html
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"The travel and tourist industry is one of the United State’s biggest money-makers, generating $103 billion in tax revenue every year. Without this tax revenue, every American household would pay nearly $1,000 more in taxes every a year. But while the travel business is flourishing internationally, tourism to America has been on a steep decline, dropping 36 percent between 1992 and 2005, with a loss of $43 billion in 2005 alone. The nation’s international tourism balance of trade declined more than 70 percent over the past 10 years - from $26.3 billion in 1996 to $7.4 billion in 2005." --LINK

***
Overseas travel to the United States has plummeted 17 percent in the past five years, travel industry officials say. And while a recent surge in travelers from Mexico and Canada has helped the industry rebound, it masks a precipitous and painful drop in travel originating in other countries.

The U.S. share of international travel has dropped from 9 percent to 6 percent, the group says.

Decline hurting economy, industry group says

Of the 25 countries that were the largest source of visitors to the United States in 2000, 17 sent fewer visitors in 2005, industry officials say. Japan -- the United States' third largest source of visitors after Canada and Mexico -- sent 5.1 million travelers to the country in 2000, but only 3.9 million in 2005. Germany sent 1.8 million in 2000, and only 1.4 million in 2005.

The decline is hurting the U.S. economy, the group said. Travelers from Canada and Mexico typically don't spend as much as people flying in from overseas, the group said.

Had U.S. travel remained on course, it would have resulted in $94 billion in economic gains, some 200,000 newly created jobs, and $16 billion in tax revenue, said Freeman.

CNN
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...the latest Democracy Corps poll that suggests Bush has helped drive a generation of young people into the Democratic Party’s open arms:
This is about what you’d expect, but Democracy Corps has released yet another survey demonstrating that the Republican Party is losing young people in droves. Among 18-29 year olds, 50% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party compared to only 35% for the Republican Party. There are plenty of reasons for this, but basically they hate George Bush, they hate the Iraq war, and they hate religious conservatives.

The good news, of course, is that people are brand loyal. Once they make up their minds in their twenties which party they like better, they generally stick with it for the rest of their lives. So the Republican Party’s deal with the devil to embrace the Christian Right might have helped them out for a while, but in the long term it’s a disaster.
In 1984, Reagan won 59% of the youth vote. Four years later, H.W. Bush won 52% of voters in this age group. It’s been downhill for the GOP ever since, and now only 25% of 17- to 29-year-old voters identify themselves as Republican.

LINK
LaWood

Post by LaWood »

"now only 25% of 17- to 29-year-old voters identify themselves as Republican. "

Yippers. Was once kewl to be an R. Ronnie was hot in nostalgic sort of way, Bush, ver.1 died on the vine and the Conquering Cowboy sold testosterone by the ad-ful. Now dead bodies, anti-science and a long, ugly war means it's not kewl to align with a stuttering-stammering Nascar fan.

The Long Right Turn is over. It takes the "great unread" about 20 years to realized they've been humped by the raging elephant.
-
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Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing

Steven Rosenfeld, of Alternet, reports: "Two-thirds of Ohio counties
have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related
election records, according to letters from county election officials to the
Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner. The lost records violate
Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months
after Election Day, and a US District Court order issued last
September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil
rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in
Columbus."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/073107C.shtml
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"(T)he media so far has missed one of the most interesting and innovative proposals that will be voted on: the Green Jobs Act of 2007.

This ground-breaking legislation will make $120 million a year available across the country to begin training workers (and would-be workers) for jobs in the clean energy sector. When the bill becomes law, 35,000 people a year will benefit from cutting edge, vocational education in fields that could literally save the Earth.

Lofty as that sounds, the Green Jobs Act is responding smartly to an important, practical need. To beat global warming and meet the energy challenges of the future, the United States will need hundreds of thousands of “green-collar workers.” Such workers will be needed to install millions of solar panels; weatherize homes and other buildings; create a sufficient quantity of bio-fuels; build and maintain wind-farms and much, much more. Without these workers, the country will not have the working muscle and hands-on smarts to change our trajectory and fashion a different future.

There is an added bonus found in creating a strong, green-collar workforce: these energy-saving, air-quality-improving, carbon-cutting jobs can do more than just save the planet or help avoid oil wars in the future. For tens of thousands of Americans who are falling behind in the global job market, these work opportunities can also create “green pathways out of poverty.”

The rest at Huffington Post.
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Early 2007 Saw Record-Breaking Extreme Weather: UN
By Laura MacInnis
Reuters

Tuesday 07 August 2007

Geneva - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.

There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.

"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva.

The rest
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States Feel Left Out of Disaster Planning

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080907H.shtml

Spencer S. Hsu reports for The Washington Post, "A decision by the Bush
administration to rewrite in secret the nation's emergency response
blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that
Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its
bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago."
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"A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

“It’s a slap in the face. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re sorry he died, but he’s gay so we can’t help you,’” she said Friday.

The church’s pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute saw pictures of men “engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing.”

“We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle,” Simons told The Associated Press. “Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it — yes, we would have declined then. It’s not that we didn’t love the family.”

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Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look

The Associated Press reported Friday evening that President Bush's
recently installed war adviser suggested the US should consider a return to
a military draft to offset extraordinary demands on the volunteer
force due to frequent tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Michael Moore's "SICKO" is playing at the Malco Razorback 6 for JUST 1 WEEK - ending Thursday, Aug 16.

Showtimes = 1:10, 4:10, 7:00, and 9:45
Length = 1 hour and 53 minutes
Child or Senior = $5.75 Adult = $7.75
**Matinee, ALL admissions = $5.75
STUDENT DISCOUNT $6.75 evening admission every day!
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