George W. Bush: The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Have you seen the new Bush/Cheney '04 commercial? A pack of wolves leaping ferociously in a field?

The message: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Be afraid of The Boy Who Cries Wolf.

1546 Reasons to Vote Against Bush

One Thousand Reasons

This the numbered list to end all numbered lists. It is still being updated, so the number may be higher than 1546 when you check in.

What Hunter S. Thompson Says

Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the Rat gods. But not me. No. I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the bastard out of office on November 2nd.

'Fear and loathing, Campaign 2004'

A 9/11 Mother's Grief & Anger

Donna Marsh O'Connor: 'An open letter to George W. Bush'

On the Thirty-third Anniversary of My Daughter's Birth

I can't even imagine this woman's pain.

Sometimes, Mr. Bush, it's the smallest of details that makes everything click. The smallest of details. Right now, Mr. Bush, I am looking at your watch. It's an item of clothing accessory and, unlike your other costumes, it is one that is particularly revealing.

On Halloween my daughter would be thirty-three years old. Her child would be almost three. Seven weeks before her twenty-ninth birthday, Vanessa, four months pregnant, ran from the falling towers of the World Trade Center. She did not make it. Her body, and in it the small body of her unborn child, was pulled from the rubble of the fallen towers on September 24th, just ten feet from an alley between towers IV and V. It is important for me to tell you that she was on the phone to her uptown office five minutes after the first plane hit tower I, explaining how she and others in tower II were "safe."

Here is what you did regarding specifically the events of that morning: You vacationed before, during and after August 6th, the day you were handed the presidential daily briefing that said very clearly Vanessa Lang Langer and many other Americans were not safe. After the first plane hit tower I, the fact of the PDB did not click in your mind, did not cause you to act, to turn on a television, to contact the Pentagon. You sat so that you did not frighten a group of children. You did not worry about Vanessa's brothers, or the young children who would certainly be directly affected by that event. You did not, like her fourteen year-old brother, rush from your seat and head for a phone, desperately trying to reach out, to fix, to save. You sat.

You said, two weeks to the day before the general election of 2004, that you would protect Americans; that is, according to you, your primary responsibility as Commander-in Chief; no terrorists would get us, no terrorists would attack us (you said this with your arm extended), and I you said and I quote, on your watch. You said this with no sense of irony, no sense, no indication of how that text would sound to those you failed miserably to protect. You never notified officially the airlines, flight schools, persons who lived or worked in our tallest structures. You failed in your watch and on it.

They're Feeling a Draft, Talking About It On Their Cell Phones

Jimmy Breslin: 'Election rides on the cell phone vote'

Not one cell phone has been called during the presidential campaign. This is because there is no method for polling cell phones. Nobody has their numbers. Nor do they know who the users are, where they live and what they do. You have 170 million phones and you talk to none of them and then try to say you know what the public is thinking.

A month ago, pollster John Zogby said he had discontinued telephone polls because cell phones had made any and all results meaningless. Now if you pay attention to polls, you are insane.

Yesterday, the polls showed a Bush surge. It never happened because they were basing it on thin air. There also were figures showing Kerry winning states like Ohio in the Midwest. They came up with the percentages without calling one cell phone of the millions and millions of them in the area. I believe nothing.

**********

They talk on cell phones, and when they talk they say, "Where are you? Did you hear George Bush saying the jobs are improving? Where? And for how much? He is making this a $9-an-hour country. Did you hear his idea on Social Security? We can give it to a stock broker to steal. Did you hear him saying a word about the guys getting killed in Iraq? No. He wants to make like it never happens. So long. I'm going into the building, and I'm going to lose you."

I'm with Jimmy. Kerry in a landslide.

The Ex-Cubs Factor

A Wise Decision Brings Boston Home

Murray Chass says Francona out-managed Torre. Personally, I think he just had better pitching, but who am I to say.

The really interesting part of his article is this:

Lowe certainly worked to the Red Sox' advantage. So might have the ex-Cubs factor.

A Cornell professor named Ronald Seeber raised the ex-Cubs factor in an e-mail message to friends yesterday, and one of them forwarded it here.

The ex-Cubs factor was brought to light years ago to explain why some teams won and some lost in the World Series. If a team had at least five players who had previously played for the Cubs and had more former Cubs than its opponent, that team would lose the World Series.

The barometer has since been expanded to other postseason series. Applying the factor to this series, the Yankees were in trouble. They had five ex-Cubs, the Red Sox only two.

On the Yankees' roster were the ex-Cubs Tom Gordon, Jon Lieber, Miguel Cairo, Kenny Lofton and Felix Heredia. On the Red Sox' roster were Bill Mueller and Mark Bellhorn, whose three-run homer was the decisive blow in Boston's 4-2 victory that tied the series.

I wonder how many ex-Cubs the Cardinals & Expos have? That will determine who I root for in their Game 7 tonight.

Why Not Us?

Still exulting over the Red Sox win over the MFY this morning. Yee-hah!

I especially enjoyed those obnoxious commercials with George Steinbrenner's arm in a cast because he has to write all those checks. I was screaming at the TV, "You're gonna be writing a lot of checks in this off-season, a**hole!!!" Gee, I guess the Yankees could have used Clemens, Pettite, or even David Wells. Kevin Brown lasted, what, two innings? hahahaha

The New York Times agrees with me.

More Changes Certain After Yankees' Defeat

The Yankees almost certainly will spend wildly to win; Steinbrenner has shown no tendency to do otherwise. The obvious target is the Houston free agent Carlos Beltran, whose agent, Scott Boras, is widely expected to ask for more than $100 million. Such a demand would lead Beltran straight to Yankee Stadium, where another Boras client, Bernie Williams, would have to cede center field.

happy, happy, happy

hahahaha

Sox win! Sox win! Sox win!

Time to sleep the sleep of the just.

Rethuglicans

Colorado Republican caught stealing campaign signs after he trips over a chain & hits concrete, knocking himself unconscious.

Truly poetic, n'est pas?

A Doctor Weighs in on "Frivilous" Lawsuits

Political malpractice

By Dr. W. Dudley Johnson, M.D.

His subtitle: All the talk about “frivolous lawsuits” is itself quite frivolous in the face of the real medical crises in the United States.

Read the article. He's right.

They're Feeling a Draft

MTV has published the results of their Choose or Lose poll, the PRElection, and as expected, Kerry won in a landslide with votes from (mostly) young voters.

Overall Votes
John Kerry 59,660 (61.1 percent)
George W. Bush 38,025 (38.9 percent)

A-Rod - Bush League Play from a Bush-Leaguer

You gotta believe. The Sawx are gonna win tonight in the Bronx, completing the greatest series comeback in baseball history.

The high & lowlight of last night's game for me was watching A-Rod get caught swatting the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's glove in the 8th inning. A-Rod is a big Bush man (see previous post) & this was definitely a bush-league play. He's a paper MVP, after all, never really won anything, and this is the kind of play that lets you see why. Kevin Millar called it "unprofessional," and other commentators have weighed in their disapproval. Ugly moment almost sullies a classic series

The other interesting thing about the game to me was hearing Schilling's post-game comments saying that he had become a Christian 7 years ago & dedicating this win to God. I didn't know Curt played on the God Squad though it doesn't surprise me.

And like so many other members of the God Squad, he believes that Bush is the messiah. On an appearance on ESPN radio today, he corrected the host who called A-Rod's play "bush-league" to say it was a Kerry-league play.

I forget sometimes that every one of these ballplayers is a millionaire. They're all part of Bush's base. The haves.

Stick to baseball, Curt.

Go Sox!

He's a 19th Century Bush

Not a 20th Century Fox, our Bush.

Via uggabugga:

He's against anti-trust laws, progressive taxation, the direct election of senators, the estate tax, the regulation of energy, the regulation of the public airwaves, regulating the securities market, social security, bipartisan foreign policy, the separation of church & state, the right to policy, and abortion rights.

Defend America. Defeat Bush.

Only a Bubble Boy Could Believe He Could Wage a War WIthout Casualities

'One Guy in a Bubble'

An excerpt:

"I have no outside advice" in the war on terrorism, President Bush told Bob Woodward in December of 2001. In an interview that Woodward revealed to Nicholas Lemann in last week's issue of the New Yorker, Bush insisted that, "Anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this Administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial phase of the war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble."

Indeed. By every available indication, George W. Bush's is the most inside-the-bubble presidency in modern American history. It's not just that his campaign operatives exclude all but the true believers from his rallies, or that Bush, by the evidence of his debate performances, has grown utterly unaccustomed to criticism.

With each passing day, we learn that once Bush has decided on a course of action, he will not be swayed by mere intelligence estimates, military appraisals or facts on the ground. We already knew that when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress during the run-up to the war that occupying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he sealed his ticket to an early retirement. We've recently learned that Paul Bremer had told the president we needed more troops to secure postwar Iraq and the safety of our troops already there, and that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had pleaded for more armored vehicles to better shield our soldiers.

But these and other such assessments and pleas ran counter to the idea of the war that Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had lodged in their heads. This would be our lightning war, and after Saddam Hussein was deposed, resistance would cease and U.S. forces could pack up and go home. A report in Tuesday's New York Times documents a Defense Department plan to shrink the number of U.S. forces in Iraq by 50,000 within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad. There were estimates aplenty from the State Department, the CIA and the Army suggesting that we'd need more forces for the occupation than for the war, but they were all blithely ignored.

Let's pop that bubble on November 2nd. Let America rejoin the Reality-Based Community of planet earth.

Kerry in a landslide.

Welcome to Bush-Mart

Fred Cederholm: 'Getting beyond the spin, the hype, the Bushing'

A good summary of Bush's tenure, from a reporter who admits he voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000. I guess this time his brain is in gear.

Here's the beginning; click the link to read the rest:

I've been thinking about packaging-about spinning, hyping, and "Bushing" in the context of what the public is being told/sold during the 2004 Presidential Election. You see, "spinning" takes a negative-twists, turns, blends, and gyrates it -- morphing it into a positive. "Hyping" takes a minor positive-whips, froths, magnifies, and fluffs it -- morphing it into some big deal; unless the target-topic involves your opponent, then hyping takes his minor negative and morphs that into an epic catastrophe. "Bushing"? well, read on.

Cherry-picking favorable facts/figures, redefining words/terms, and ignoring all harmful data/information did not begin with the Bush administration; they just elevated it to an art form. The past four years and the current campaign have gone far beyond Slick's "that depends on what the meaning of the word 'is,' is." The "W team" now deserves their own gerund--"Bushing"--to describe what they're doing to win re-election. This bothers me, since four years ago, I voted for Bush-Cheney because I bought their package--hook, line, and sinker; but the boxes proved empty--at least their contents were lacking, misrepresented, unreal, and/or non-useable.

Shortly after the 9-11 attack the administration identified the 19 culprits. Since then, at least six of them have been found alive and kicking in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan--the victims of identity theft. If not them, who were on those planes?

We got the Patriot Act(s) and the Homeland Security Act to protect us. Read the full text of them (our Congressmen and Senators didn't) and you will learn that never in history has there been such a blatant assault on the heart /soul of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Have these made our freedoms more secure, or did they take them from us by default?

It's All About the Numbers, Baby

Democrats register more new voters, analysis finds

The Democrats appear to be gaining the upper hand in the battle to sign up new voters in the all-important swing states, an Associated Press analysis suggests.

The AP analysis of the most up-to-date figures from across the country found that in every state where complete data are available, the Democrats have registered more new voters than Republicans. They have the edge in Arizona, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire.

Hah!

Living in La-La Land

Robertson: I warned Bush on Iraq casualties
President's response: 'We're not going to have any'

OK, so we here on the left know Bush is a nut job. Now even his supporters are saying he's nuts. Pat Robertson (yes, THAT Pat Robertson, the one who blamed 9/11 on the ACLU, gays & lesbians, feminists, secular humanists, and People For the American Way, among others) says he warned George W. Bush against the war in Iraq:

Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion. He described Bush in the meeting as "the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life."

"You remember Mark Twain said, 'He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.' I mean he was just sitting there like, 'I'm on top of the world,' " Robertson said on the CNN show, "Paula Zahn Now."

"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

GOTV people. We got to get this crazy guy a one-way ticket to Palookaville where he belongs.

It's In The Numbers

"Top 35 Trends that say Kerry will Take the White House in November"

As my readers know, I love a numbered list! This one's from dailykos.com.

Here are my top 4 from the list:

4)Kerry Has Large Lead in Swing States: ....

10) Democrats Won the Registration Wars: Voter Registrations have heavily favored the Democratic party this cycle.

28) The 50% Rule: If an incumbent is experiencing approval ratings below 50%, he or she usually loses. The latest CBS News/NY Times poll gave Bush only a 44% approval rating. The average of the last 5 polls shows Bush's job approval even further below 50%:...

35) The left is fired up!: This is the key ingredient to ensure maximum turnout by the left on election day. This is one thing we can all thank Bush for. The left is so outraged and disgusted with the policies, lies and crimes of this administration, that we wouldn't stay home on election day if it was raining darts (which is something I'm sure the GOP is working on.)

Only a Fool Goes to War Without a Post War Plan

Post-war planning non-existent

Here are the first four paragraphs; you must read the entire article.

WASHINGTON - In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

A village in Texas is missing its idiot. Let's send him back to Crawford on November 2nd.

You Say Loofah, I Say Falafel, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Fark.com has some great covers for Bill O'Reilly's book.

Gallup's Record of Screwing up Presidential Polls

On October 27, 2000 the Gallup Poll showed George W. Bush with a 13% lead over Al Gore. A 13 percent lead!

And days later Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 and lost the presidency by one vote in the Supreme Court 6 weeks later.

Don't believe the polls. They're all for shit, & they don't have any validity.

I watched Sean "Puffy" Combs "Choose or Lose" half-hour special on MTV this morning. It was great. Do you think Gallup is calling the hip hop voters? I don't think so.

I voted for John Kerry today, via absentee ballot. On election day I'll be in Jacksonville, Florida with my brother, monitoring the polls for fairness with the Election Protection Coalition.

John Kerry in a landslide.

Another Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community

Read Matthew Yglesias and join the Reality-Based Community voting for John Kerry.

The phrase is from yesterday's New York Times article by Ron Suskind, Without A Doubt, about Bush's policies being informed by faith, not substance.

Here's the fantasy-land section of the article (it's on page 7 of the online version):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

Let's get the messianic nut-jobs out of the White House.

Hypocrisy Part II

Did you know that Lynne Cheney denied her daughter was openly gay 4 years ago?

LINK

On Sunday, when ABC's Cokie Roberts started to ask the GOP vice presidential nominee's wife about having a daughter who has "declared she's openly gay," an irate Lynne Cheney shot back: "Mary has never declared such a thing." Cheney then blasted the media for its interest in the story, and chided Roberts: "I'm surprised, Cokie, that even you would want to bring it up on this program."

"I have two wonderful daughters. I love them very much. They are bright; they are hard-working; they are decent. And I simply am not going to talk about their personal lives," Cheney told Roberts.

Don't Believe the Polls

We're bringing in the crowds.

LINK October 14th, Des Moines

Indeed, on Thursday night in Des Moines, Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, were greeted by a huge and roaring crowd which endured traffic jams and a four-hour wait in 35-degree temperature to see them at an outdoor, nighttime rally on the State Fairgrounds.

**********

Still, Mr. Bush's own post-debate rally at the US Cellular Center here on Friday drew a notably smaller and less enthusiastic crowd than Mr. Kerry drew the night before in Des Moines. Swatches of seats and patches of the arena floor were empty, even though the event took place inside a heated building, during the day, and downtown.

LINK October 15th, Milwaukee

In a speech before a lively, partisan audience at Milwaukee Area Technical College, the Democratic presidential candidate pressed his case that the Bush administration has ignored the rising costs of healthcare, child care and college education that he said are squeezing middle class families.

***********

The Bush campaign, speaking to several thousand supporters in a half-empty sports stadium in Cedar Rapids for which aides had no ready explanation, countered by arguing that Kerry's policies would hurt the economy, citing his past support for tax increases. Bush tried to play off many of the comments that Kerry had made during their three debates.

Maybe that's why Bush stayed home from the campaign trail today -- half-empty venues? Or perhaps it was to get that all-important photo-op of him going to church, something he almost never does. I wonder if he had ever met that minister in the photo before today?

Plus, Gore was behind Bush in the polls before 2000, and we know who WON the popular vote.

Kerry in a landslide.

Apropros of Nothing

Do you think Bill O'Reilly handled his falafel before he interviewed George W. Bush?

Inquiring minds want to know.