Bush Endangers National Health!

New York One just reported that the FDA is negotiating with a Canadian company to get more than a million flu vaccines imported into the US. Isn't Canada the same inferior nation whose medicine was too inferior and unsafe to allow into our country? Why is Bush willing to endanger the health of our seniors with that shoddy Canuck snake oil?
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Anger, anyone?

The Conference Board reports that CEO compensation rose again in 2003. Why? Apparently there was good "profit performance" last year. Workers' wages declined last year, according to CNNfN.

Two points here that make my blood boil.

First, and the obvious one, CEO pay is outrageous -- it's ridiculously high, now over 300 times that of the front-line worker. So much has been said about this there's little more I can add.

Second, the salary links to performance just aren't credible. If these companies are so profitable, their stock prices would be doing better. As posted last night, the markets have lost value under the bush administration. They were down again today.

When are these people going to realize that the economy only goes as far as its workers can take it?
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Kerry Missing His Target?

The NYT mildly conservative David Brooks is as milquetoast as they come and I usually find his articles pointless and annoying -- second only to Maureen O'Dowd.

But today's piece on Kerry seems on-target. Brooks says Kerry's latest salvos are fear-mongering. His particular points -- on Social Security, on the draft, on Mary Cheney and stem cell research -- I actually disagree with issue by issue. But Kerry's approach to them seems scattered.

He won the debates because he was measured and pointed and attacked Bush's incompetence. Bush's record is a shambles, so why talk about what Bush might do in the future? Attack Bush again and again for what he's already doing and his refusal to face reality.

Kerry should have gotten DAYS of mileage out of that Iraqi scandal where Bush let insurgents spirit away massively heavy equipment and material needed to make nuclear weapons. That happened AFTER the invasion and over months if not longer. It's an absolute scandal, points up Bush's incompetence and highlights the area where Kerry is strong. Not fighting terror, which is an amorphous idea, but fixing the mess in Iraq.

Brooks writes, "But there is a deeper assumption, which has marred Democratic politics for years. Some Democrats have been unable to face the reality that people have been voting for Republicans because they agree with them. So these Democrats have invented the comforting theory that they've been losing because they are too virtuous for the country.

"According to this theory, Republicans - or usually some omniscient, omnipotent and malevolent strategists, like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove - have been tricking the American people into voting against their true interests. This year, many Democrats decided, we'll be vicious in return.
The truth, however, is that voters are not idiots. They are capable of independent thought. If you attack your opponent wildly, ruthlessly, they will come to their own conclusions."

Brooks is right. You don't beat the Republicans by fighting just as sleazily. You beat them with sober facts and calm, consistent leadership.
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Winning The Peace -- How Bush Screwed Up

Hey, the liberal media is finally waking up. Another lengthy, damning, fascinating article in the New York Times details the cocky, short-term thinking of the Bushies and how they failed to win the peace in Iraq.

I love the description of Gen. Tommy Franks in Baghdad just after it fell. Sure, the Sunni Triangle -- the most obvious place for insurgents from the Baathist regime to go -- was sparsely patrolled. And sure the capitol was still reeling from lawless rooting. But Franks held a meeting where they planned to start pulling out troops in 60 days. 90 days after that, they'd be down to 30,000 troops. This was April of 2003, more than a year and a half ago.

"As the Baghdad meeting drew to a close, the president in a teleconference congratulated the commanders on a job well done. Afterward, they posed for photos and puffed on victory cigars.

"Within a few months, though, the Bush administration's optimistic assumptions had been upended. Many of the foreign troops never came. The Iraqi institutions expected to help run the country collapsed. The adversary that was supposed to have been shocked and awed into submission was reorganizing beyond the reach of overstretched American troops."

The rest of the article details repeated warnings that more troops would be needed to win the peace and how Bush and Rummy ignored it all.
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American Muslims Rejected By Ashcroft

Major American Muslim groups pleaded with the Justice Department and got the cold shoulder. During Ramadan, Muslims are required by their religion to give money to the poor. These groups came to the Justice Dept. voluntarily and asked for a list of Islamic charities they could donate to without supporting terrorism or being suspected of supporting terrorism. Tough, said Justice. We'll tell you AFTER you've inadvertantly screwed up.

"If the government knows there are charities that are misleading the American Muslim community, it's their obligation to help protect these innocent Americans," said Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer for the New Jersey-based American Muslim Union, according to USA Today.

Since 2001, John Ashcroft has raided or shut down numerous US Islamic charities. But his perfect track record remains intact: none of the raids have led to terrorism-related convictions.

"Mohamed Younes, president of the American Muslim Union, was disappointed by the Justice Department's response. "We are trying to do the right thing and we asked for a little help," he said to USA Today. "At least we tried.""
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Sinclair Starts To Buckle Under Pressure

With your emails and boycotts focusing laser attention on them, Sinclar has started to buckle under the pressure.

According to USA Today, they now say they don't plan -- heck, they NEVER planned -- to air that 42 minute diatribe against Kerry known as "Stolen Honor." That, of course, is a lie. Now they plan to use excerpts of it in a "news feature" about the issue. It's still set to air on Friday.

Its stock fell another 32 cents to $6.26 Tuesday, down 12% since their political rally for Bush was first reported. The company is mired in debt, so any desire to go private would be difficult. They're being sued for skirting duo-poly laws by having minority holding firms own second TV stations in a a number of cities.

And in a lovely bit of wording, a Lehman Bros. analyst says airing the documentary has "no upside and only multi-dimensional downside" for the company.

Keep up the pressure to make sure anything they do air is, as Fox would say, fair and balanced.
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Reservists Who Refused Orders: The Truth Starts To Come Out

The true story about those reservists who refused a direct order is starting to come out. Obeying orders is essential to a working military -- it ain't a democracy out there and every mission is potentially a suicide mission -- but the situation these soldiers apparently faced is a farce straight out of Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" or one of your bleaker episodes of "M*A*S*H."

It comes from the NYT and is based on www.hackworth.com -- a web site run by a retired Army colonel that works to channel criticism about commanders.

In short, the 13th Corps Support Command -- led by Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers -- apparently has terrible morale and has been singled out by grunts for repeated criticism.

The soldiers involved in this mission had made complaints up the chain of command for months about the dangerously poor quality of their trucks and equipment. Then they were sent on a mission to deliver jet fuel that lasted four to five days. The trucks -- due for repairs -- broke down and ultimately the fuel was rejected because it was contaminated with diesel fuel.

The troops returned late Oct. 12 and were roused at 4 a.m. the next morning and were ordered to deliver the same useless fuel to another location much farther north than the last stop.

Imagine: being ordered to risk your lives on an utterly pointless mission of delivering tainted jet fuel that would be no use to anyone and ordered to do it with equipment and trucks that were dangerously in disrepair. They went up the chain of command and even got a civilian to confirm the fuel was tainted and useless but they were ordered out anyway.

Would you go on a life-threatening mission as a pointless exercise in military inefficiency and stupidity?
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Cheney to Voters: BOO!!!

Dick Cheney -- can we just call him Dick now? -- is at it again. The man who never suggested a link between Hussein and 9-11 -- except of course when he WAS suggesting a link between Hussein and 9-11 -- is playing the fear card again. After being excoriated for suggesting a few weeks ago that a vote for Kerry would mean more terrorist attacks in the U.S., Cheney has upped the ante.

``The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans,'' Cheney said, according to the NYT.

And does Cheney believe Kerry would be as aggressive and strong as Bush?

``I don't believe it,'' the vice president said. ``I don't think there's any evidence to support the proposition that he would, in fact, do it.''

What a shock. Of course, under Bush, insurgents in Iraq have walked away with massively heavy equipment and material needed to build nuclear weapons. It took days to dismantle and then spirit across the border. Some of the yellow cake has already popped up in Europe.

Under Bush, it would take 14 years to secure all the loose nuclear weapons and material spread out through the unstable, increasingly autocratic former Soviet Union. Kerry has a plan to secure it in four.

So if Cheney's right about this threat, Kerry's your man.

And isn't it crazy that Kerry is criticized for stretching the truth when he warns about a draft (Hello! There's already a backdoor draft with thousands of troops dragooned into serving in Iraq when they didn't volunteer and would rather be home.)?

But when Cheney says if you vote for Kerry it means nuclear bombs going off in American cities, it's just tough talk?
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Bush Vs. Science: Science Loses

Here's a good, meaty New York Times article about how Bush has turned science into a partisan issue. It's a little wishy-washy at first (some of the scientists who criticize Bush are -- gasp! -- Democrats). But then it gets into the facts and shows how many, many scientists who have served both Republican and Democratic adminsitrations over the decades think Bush ignores science and is trying to subvert scientific information for political purposes.

A big battleground? Global warming, where scientific studies and group after group insisted that the evidence for human impact on global warming was overwhelming but Bush lied anyway and said the jury was still out.

"Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be presented in public reports or news releases."

Then there's the overt politicizing of what should be non-partisan scientific advisory panels.

"Despite three years of charges that it is remaking scientific and medical advisory panels to favor the goals of industry or social conservatives, the White House has continued to ask some panel nominees not only about their political views, but explicitly whether they support Mr. Bush."

If Albert Einstein were still around, he'd probably be locked up in Guantanamo Bay.
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France to the rescue

Damn! And we are supposed to hate all things French and now they're going to help supply extra flu vaccine doses for the US to make up for the screw up in the UK. Let's see how long it takes before Bush makes yet another slam on France.
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Speaking Of Cartoons...

Here's a link to the latest Tom Tomorrow comic for "This Modern World." It's a very funny dissection of Bush's distortions of Kerry and how the media plays along. Exaggerated, but not that much.
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The Bart Simpson Presidency continues

Hooray for another pathetic speech full of excuses. It's the "I didn't do it guy" hitting the streets and telling voters what they already knew but he's too stupid to figure that out. I think Americans know that there was a "major manufacturing defect" with the flu vaccine Mr. Bart Simpson but what the hell was your plan? This guy just has never done anything wrong and it's always someone else. I'll bet his dog ate his homework when he was a kid as well.
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One state, two state, red state, blue state...

Looks like the blue states are just full of smart people. That's their problem! They are just too smart for themselves. They should be happy down in the middle of the pack with Texas (33rd), or really let loose and go with Nevada at 49th! Today's top ten list from Morgan Quitno Press - States Ranked: Smartest to Dumbest:

1. Massachusetts
2. Connecticut
3. Vermont
4. New Jersey
5. Wisconsin
6. New York
7. Minnesota
8. Iowa
9. Pennsylvania
10. Montana

Hey Montana, what's your problem - don't you know red states aren't supposed to be up there with those educated New Englanders - quit fraternizing with the enemy! Read More......

80th advertiser to dump Sinclair

I love the smell of boycott in the morning. Smells like... victory. Read More......

NYT: Bush preparing contingency plan to draft medical personnel

But he's NOT planning a draft, really, I mean it. I mean he's planning FOR a draft, but there won't ever BE a draft they're still telling us, we're just preparing for one in case we need it, even though we won't ever need it and even if we did we wouldn't do it.

The Selective Service has been updating its contingency plans for a draft of doctors, nurses and other health care workers in case of a national emergency that overwhelms the military's medical corps.

In a confidential report this summer, a contractor hired by the agency described how such a draft might work, how to secure compliance and how to mold public opinion and communicate with health care professionals, whose lives could be disrupted.

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The wealth gap

We all know this president likes to point to minority homeownership as one of the best reasons for african-americans to vote for him. But Derrick Z. Jackson has some interesting facts behind the homeownership numbers to give us a better picture -- a profoundly disturbing picture -- of the wealth gap in the United States.

So much for the rising tide lifting all boats, I guess.
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Blair caving in, again

Although the battle is still raging, everything is pointing towards the UK sending troops to the US region in Iraq to suck up to Bush. For all of those Guardian letter writers who felt so superior just a few days ago, it's time you quit pointing the finger across the pond and clean up your own mess at home. Blair is a complete disgrace and an enabler for Bush. What a boot licker.
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Canada worries about drug shortages

I was wondering when this issue was going to be raised in Canada. It doesn't seem like a viable long term solution to continue raiding Canada for cheaper drugs without having a negative impact on their own drug supply. What is so wrong with price controls in the US on drugs? The price gouging by Big Pharmaceuticals needs to be addressed sooner or later so why not get cracking on it now?
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NY Times/CBS poll a dead heat as well

What is striking about this is the 44% approval rating for Bush. There is no way anyone can spin that in a positive manner. That's a deep pit for an incumbent president.
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It's spelled "Putin" but pronounced "Puta"

I'd love to know what the Bushies paid Russian czar president Vladimir Putin to say this on Monday:

"International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," he said. "If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power."

Damn those terrorists are good. Imagine that all the way back in 1972 they attacked the Munich Olympics knowing that some 32 years later George Bush was going to be up for re-election. Bastards. The Achille Lauro? Bush-bashing. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993? Ditto. It's all about Bush. I suppose that's why the Chechens killed the Russian schoolkids as well.

I really can't wait for Kerry to win and then tell Putin to go Cheney himself. Read More......