Politics

Ouch. That’s gotta sting — the newspaper for Bush’s adopted hometown of Crawford, TX has expressed its discontent with Bush’s presidency and endorsed John Kerry for President.

The weekly Lone Star Iconoclast criticized Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq and for turning budget surpluses into record deficits. The editorial also criticized Bush’s proposals on Social Security and Medicare.

“The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda,” the newspaper said in its editorial. “Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry.”

It urged “Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.”

(via Terrence, via The Agonist)

Update: Here’s the editorial itself.

Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:

• Empty the Social Security trust fund by \$507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
• Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.
• Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.
• Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.
• Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
• Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
• Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.

These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.

(thanks to The Daily Kos)

Found on This Modern World, an e-mail that’s apparently making the rounds:

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but \$10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that his in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the tax-payer funded roads.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.

The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

Don’cha just hate those liberals?

The Washington Monthly is asking about the fantasyland that George Bush seems to be living in, when waging a war in which the strategy seems to be based not on any real situations, but on election-year political situations.

[Our upcoming] election, and the political considerations that go along with it, have been driving our military strategy for the past two years. Before the war, we passed up a chance to take out terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi — for political reasons. We invaded with too few troops — for political reasons. We lowballed the cost of the war — for political reasons. We ignored the UN and then turned around and pleaded for their help — for political reasons. Then we installed Iyad Allawi as president behind the UN’s back — for political reasons.

And just recently we’ve learned that the Marines were yo-yoed in and out of Fallujah — for political reasons. The president has bizarrely dismissed his own intelligence agencies’ analysis of Iraq as “guessing” — for political reasons. He’s ignored the advice of his own generals about troop requirements for the upcoming [Iraqi] elections — for political reasons. And assaults on Baathist enclaves have been postponed until December — for fairly obvious political reasons.

And things just keep going downhill.

(via Atrios)

From Tom Goldstein on the SCOTUSBlog:

Many of you will have heard of and read the lengthy October 2004 Vanity Fair article by David Margolick et al. on the 2000 election litigation, with a focus on never-before-reported details about what happened inside the Supreme Court. The piece has received a great deal of attention inside the Court because, as the article details, “[a] surprising number of [law] clerks [from that term] talked to Vanity Fair.” Tony Mauro did a short piece on the article (subscription required), but given the new details the article contains, it has received surprisingly little press attention otherwise. Vanity Fair does not have a web-site, but we’re grateful to have received permission to post the piece itself, as it appears in the magazine. So here you are, in two pieces: Part 1 and Part 2.

I’ll be perusing this as soon as I can.

(via Political Wire, via Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor pointed out a series of graphs from Buzzflash highlighting some of the numbers behind how our country is doing. Not that surprising if you’ve been paying attention, but certainly interesting to see.

The question, of course, is whether a Kerry presidency would have numbers close to what Clinton’s produced, and there’s really no way of knowing that at this stage in the game. I’d hate to see where these graphs end up after four more years of Bush, however.

“Seedy Films” by Soft Cell from the album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981, 5:04).

And I thought I got fired for a bad reason — my story doesn’t even begin to compare to this woman who lost her job because she is a John Kerry supporter.

“We were going back to work from break, and my manager told me that Phil [the owner] said to remove the sticker off my car or I was fired,” she said. “I told him that Phil couldn’t tell me who to vote for. He said, ‘Go tell him.'”

She went to Gaddis’ office, knocked on the door and entered on his orders.

“Phil and another man who works there were there,” she said. “I asked him if he said to remove the sticker and he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ I told him he couldn’t tell me who to vote for. When I told him that, he told me, ‘I own this place.’ I told him he still couldn’t tell me who to vote for.”

Gobbell said Gaddis told her to “get out of here.”

“I asked him if I was fired and he told me he was thinking about it,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, am I fired?’ He hollered and said, ‘Get out of here and shut the door.'”

She said her manager was standing in another room and she asked him if that meant for her to go back to work or go home. The manager told her to go back to work, but he came back a few minutes later and said, ” ‘I reckon you’re fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry,’ ” Gobbell said.

“I took off my gloves and threw them in the garbage and left,” Gobbell said.

I’m so glad we live in a country where personal beliefs and freedom of expression are constitutionally protected.

(via Lane)

[Update (because this is what happens when I’m a week behind):]{.underline}

Turns out this story had a happy ending after only a couple days — according to Slate, Gobbel has been offered a job with the Kerry campaign.

The story was picked up by Daily Kos, a political Web log, and spread quickly around the Web. By this morning, Geddes, who has declined to comment publicly on the matter, had apparently had enough of the bad publicity. Through an intermediary, he offered Gobbell an apology and said she could have her old job back. But Gobbell said she wouldn’t return without some written guarantee that Geddes wouldn’t turn around and fire her once he was out of the spotlight. Then, late this afternoon, Kerry himself phoned Gobbell. “He was telling me how proud he was that I stood up,” Gobbell told me. “He’d read the part where Phil said I could either work for him or work for John Kerry. He said, ‘you let him know you’re working for me as of today.’ I was just so shocked.”

Gobbell accepted Kerry’s job offer, “so I reckon I’ll be working for John Kerry.” Kerry left it that someone from his campaign would call Gobbell to work out the details.

[…]

[Update, Sept. 17: I checked in with Gobbell this afternoon. “I go to work in the local [Kerry] office Monday,” she said. Kerry is matching her salary at Enviromate and is giving her health benefits. Gobbell is very happy about the latter because Enviromate (you won’t be surprised to learn) did not. Gobbell was vague about what her duties will be, but she said, “a little bit of traveling may be involved.”]

[Update, Sept. 20: Stancil reports in today’s Decatur Daily that Gobbell is set to travel to Florida on this, her first day working for Kerry, to tell her story to CNN, among others. Already, she told Stancil, she has appeared on 15 to 20 talk radio shows. Apparently telling the story of her firing by Enviromate is more or less going to be Gobbell’s job. This looks to me like a wise investment on Kerry’s part.]

(via Terrence)

Simon Woodside has created this handy-dandy timeline of President Bush’s military service, using official documents released by the White House and the military.

“Introduction” by Atkins, Martin and the Chicago Industrial League from the album An Industrial Christmas Carol (1995, 14:00).