Poll: Bush Job Rating Dips, Support for War Down

It's still annoying as hell that Bush does worse and worse, yet still is tied with Kerry for votes. Having said that, the toll on Bush is finally starting to improve Kerry's numbers. A 46% approval rating for Bush, that's abominable. Yet folks are still divided on whether they'd vote for him. That means Kerry has his work cut out for him, cuz so far, folks still don't love him (though, at least, they're "not loving him" less, if that makes any sense).

Reuters:

The CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll found Bush's approval rating had dipped to 46 percent, down from 52 percent a month earlier. Bush led presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry 48 percent to 47 percent, a reversal of a poll taken last week when Kerry had a one-point edge, in a statistically insignificant shift....

Only 44 percent said they believed the war was worthwhile, in another new low. In a poll taken a month ago, 50 percent said it was worth going to war in Iraq. A year ago, 73 percent said the war was worthwhile.

Fifty-four percent of those polled said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and only 41 percent of adults said they believed Bush was doing a good job handling the war.

Bush's handling of terrorism remained his strongest suit, according to the poll.

Fifty-four percent said they approved of his performance in that area. The respondents also said they had more confidence in Bush to handle the situation in Iraq than they did in Kerry, by 48 to 45 percent.

Still, Kerry's rating on that issue rose from 39 percent in a poll conducted in March while Bush's fell from 54 percent...

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African Frogs Threaten San Francisco Area

African clawed frogs invade San Francisco? Maybe that Bible thumper chick has a point... Read the rest of this post...

Read the classified Army report on Iraqi abuses

National Public Radio has published the Armys' entire Iraqi abuse report (you know, the one Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers didn't have the time to read). The report is classified and can't be read by foreigners. So if you're a foreigner (or an American with dark hair and a tan), close your eyes, and no peaking. Read the rest of this post...

Angry God caused Columbine, Enron, and OK City bombing

Uh huh... This is the same woman who had no problems excluding Muslims from last week's National Day of Prayer celebrations that Bush was all over.

...A co-founder of the world's largest Christian ministry says believers need to pray fervently for the moral direction of America. Vonette Bright spent more than 50 years working alongside her husband, the late Dr. Bill Bright, to oversee Campus Crusade for Christ. She was instrumental in the establishment of the National Prayer Committee in 1979, which led to the creation of the National Day of Prayer in 1988. Mrs. Bright says the nation needs to turn to God in repentance and obedience. "We are at a place of real crisis in our country right now, and I think a lot of it has to do with a belief in God," she shares. "It appears that many Americans today have forgotten that the Bible is the textbook that God has given mankind -- and it's this book that tells us how to relate to God, to each other, to husband and wife, to parents and children." Christians in the United States, she says, need to pray without ceasing for their nation. She believes that the more the country has moved away from an emphasis on God -- and ignored Him in the public square -- the more the nation is witnessing incidents like the Columbine shooting, the Enron scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing incident, and terrorist attacks. "I think God is showing some degree of displeasure with this country because we were established as a Christian nation," she explains. "We were biblically based -- and people do not know that." She emphasizes there are many who are determined not to allow that part of the country's history to be known. - AgapePress

Aha, so again the ACLU, the homos and the feminists are to blame for terrorism. Read the rest of this post...

Isn't that precious

A few weeks after the Bush administration named Medco to be one of the first Medicare drug card providers, a company executive helped throw a $100,000 fund-raiser for the president that was headlined by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. - AP

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EMT refuses to take woman to abortion clinic

Fire the bastards, all of them.

For several years now the religious right has used the charge of "religious discrimination" to cover pretty much every single thing they want to do to discriminate against others. Stop me from firing an employee simply because he's gay? Religious discrimination! Require EMTs in Michigan to pick up sick gay people whether they like or not? Religious discrimination! Require a pharmacist to fill your legal prescription regardless of what he thinks of you or your medical condition? Religious discrimination!

Why draw the line there? Some people still hate blacks and Jews and Irishmen - and some even hate the religious right - expressly because they believe religion tells them such people are evil. Are they to be next? Oh no, religious right advocates say, that's totally different. They would never target blacks or Jews or Irishmen (Muslims, however, are an entirely different matter). But the question needs to be asked, why not target them, and more importantly, how do you draw the line once you head down this path? If David Duke thinks blacks are inherently evil because he thinks his religion tells him so, aren't we impinging on Duke's religious beliefs (however wrong-headed) by telling him not to discriminate against blacks?

In my interpretation of my beliefs, the religious right leaders pushing such bigotry are going straight to hell, and what if I think it's religious discrimination to force me to pay taxes in order to provide religious fundamentalists with government services? Maybe we should sue the government to stop paving the road leading to Jerry Falwell's house... Read the rest of this post...

AP sues over Scalia tape erasure

My favorite part is at the very end where the marshal says that by erasing the tape he was rightfully providing for Scalia's "security." Ah yes, the old bomb in the cassette tape trick...

The Associated Press and the Hattiesburg American filed a lawsuit Monday against the U.S. Marshals Service over an incident in April in which a federal marshal erased reporters' recordings of a speech Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave to high school students....

During the April 7 speech in Hattiesburg, a deputy federal marshal, identified as Rube, demanded that AP reporter Denise Grones and Hattiesburg American reporter Antoinette Konz erase recordings of the justice's remarks. The reporters had not been told before the speech that they could not use tape recorders.

When the AP reporter resisted, the marshal took the digital recorder out of her hands. The reporter then showed Rube how to erase the recording.

Rube then reached across Grones and demanded that Konz hand over her tape. Konz surrendered the tape and, after the speech, was able to get it back only after she erased the recording in front of the marshal....

Nehemiah Flowers, the U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Mississippi, said later that the deputy's erasure of the recordings was appropriate, given that one of the service's responsibilities is to provide a traveling Supreme Court justice with security. - AP

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Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper

The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.

'This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war,' the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.

Army Times is one of four such publications owned by the Gannett Co., and has a circulation of about 250,000. The same editorial was carried in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps Times newspapers. - Army Times

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Man Fatally Bitten by Sexually Aroused Horse

Off topic, but interesting. Read the rest of this post...

9/11 hijacker confessed before WTC attack, feds refused to believe him

According to this incendiary story from yesterday's Sunday Times of London, the FBI had one of the 9/11 hijackers in custody A YEAR BEFORE THE ATTACK but refused to believe his story about flying planes into buildings. Why isn't this story being covered at all in the American press?

Sunday Times (London)
May 9, 2004, Sunday
Briton trained as 9/11 hijacker
by Christina Lamb

[excerpt (The Times doesn't post it's articles for free)]

A FORMER waiter in a Manchester curry house was recruited by Al-Qaeda and trained as a hijacker in preparation for the September 11 attacks.

The British Muslim was enlisted at a mosque in Oldham and attended terrorist training school in Pakistan. But he had second thoughts about his suicide mission as he flew to America and surrendered to the police after gambling away thousands of pounds given to him by Al-Qaeda.

The FBI's counter-terrorism taskforce questioned the 29-year-old man for three weeks at Newark, New Jersey, in the spring of 2000. There, agents refused to believe his claim that terrorists were planning to fly passenger jets into buildings, even though he passed lie detector tests....

The failure to investigate the Briton's claims was one of a startling series of missed opportunities that have emerged in inquiries by a US commission examining the September 11 attacks. His case has now been reopened amid wrangling between the FBI and British authorities.

The man, whose name is being withheld by The Sunday Times because his life is under threat from militants, was brought back to Britain in 2000 by two FBI agents and handed to British security officials at Heathrow airport.

He was then questioned by Special Branch and released. The FBI believes that the British authorities failed to follow up the case or to pass on any relevant intelligence. An urgent request to find the man after September 11 was ignored, although Special Branch officers have said they went back to him and took "appropriate action". The FBI has now asked for him to become a witness in its investigation....

He travelled to Lahore, where he was taught how to carry out a hijacking and was familiarised with the inside of a Boeing cockpit. "I knew they wanted me to do some kind of operation in which I would die, but my life was such a mess that in my mind I was already dead," he said.

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