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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2693)	6/26/2003 5:53:46 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Message 19064962

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2693)	6/26/2003 6:02:48 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10965

Dem. Campaigns Look to Virtual Primaries By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer story.news.yahoo.com WASHINGTON - No matter who finishes first in the online presidential primary, the Democratic candidates are counting on thousands of potential volunteers, donors and campaign dollars from the Internet event. By the time voting ended at 1:15 a.m. EDT Thursday, more than 317,000 people voted in MoveOn.org's first presidential primary, 54,730 had pledged to volunteer for their preferred candidate and 77,192 authorized MoveOn to pass on their e-mail address to their favorite candidate. Final results of the vote and details about financial commitments will be released Friday. "This could be the biggest volunteer day of the entire cycle," said Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn.org. "The primary benefit for candidates is to broaden their base of support, put new supporters on their rolls." Several candidates have grumbled about the online event being skewed to favor Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who has aggressively used the Internet to mobilize support. But the campaigns saw benefits to participating. "We've never believed that we would win this," said Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator who bought an online banner ad at the Yahoo! Web site to encourage voting. "We always believed this was a made-for-Howard Dean primary. "We saw it as a chance to increase the number of people interested in the senator's campaign, a way to increase the number of donors in the campaign and a way to bolster our long-term online communications capabilities." A spokesman for candidate Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) said the Connecticut senator's campaign sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to participate, as several other campaigns did. "We would have done that for any online forum, we recognize that enough questions have been raised about MoveOn.org and its supposed primary, that it calls it into question," said Jano Cabrera. The threshold to win the primary and get MoveOn's endorsement is 50 percent, and Dean supporters acknowledge that it's not likely they will get that much support in a nine-candidate field. Those who voted were offered the option to donate to their preferred candidate. MoveOn raised $3.2 million for congressional candidates in 2000 and $4.1 million for candidates in 2002, Boyd said. <snip>

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2693)	6/26/2003 7:09:39 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

In Bush We Trust? ______________________________ by John Moyers Published on Wednesday, June 25, 2003 by TomPaine.com George W. Bush is a liar. There, I said it -- the "L" word. Someone in Washington had to. Thanks to AWOL WMD, people all across America have the "L" word on their lips, but here in D.C. it's still a hard one to mouth. Few Washington-based commentators and fewer politicians have done so. On Sunday, June 22, The New York Times had a chance to be the first big-league outfit to say it plainly. But the headline on Washington-based reporter David E. Rosenbaum's story, "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" was a tip that the story would pull up short. Rosenbaum considered a narrow question -- whether Mr. Bush has told any neat, tidy, obvious lies -- and concluded he has not (a couple of fibs and distortions, maybe, but no lies). Whether the president twisted intelligence on WMD "can probably be answered conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are known," Rosenbaum wrote. (So, our kids get to pay the debt for our imperial aspirations and our tax breaks, and someday they'll be the first to know how it all happened. Great.) Distance seems to make criticism easier. The Times' Princeton-based columnist Paul Krugman has written that the administration "systematically and brazenly distorts the facts" and is "choosing and exaggerating intelligence" and "misleading the public." Close, but still no "L" word. Boston-based William Rivers Pitt isn't daunted: The administration "lied us into a war," writes the high-school teacher who moonlights as a columnist for Truthout.org. "Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away." A full-page ad in The New York Times last week by MoveOn.org and Win Without War, groups with members across the nation, put it plainly and hoisted the president on his own pointed WMD -- words of mass distortion. Under the headline "MISLEADER" the ad stacked up five of Mr. Bush's pre-war whoppers and noted, "It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die for a lie." (Full disclosure: TomPaine.com liked the ad so much, we paid to run it in the June 30 issue of The Weekly Standard.) Harley Sorensen, writing on SFGate.com, gets the prize for directness: "Why mince words? These are the facts: 1) President George W. Bush is a liar. 2) Secretary of State Colin Powell is a liar. 3) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a liar. 4) National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a liar." No mincing there. So the word is out there in different forms -- lie, lies, lying, liar. When will Mr. Bush's putative opponents in government, the Democrats, decide it's time to tell it like it is? Democrats have accused the president of "a pattern of deception and deceit" (Sen. Bob Graham), said he's not been "entirely truthful" (Howard Dean), and led us to war based on "unfounded assertions" (Rep. Dennis Kucinich). Strong stuff, but no "L" word. Opposition worthy of the name would push the GOP-controlled House and Senate hearings beyond the question of what the intelligence community knew about WMD, where it seems stalled. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, could invoke committee rules that would allow his minority party to launch a full investigation. But he won't -- reportedly for fear of being seen as partisan. If this isn't the time for partisanship -- after all, we're talking about manipulations that led the nation into war -- when is? Rockefeller's timidity is allowing committee Republicans to cover what looks more every day like a lie of literally global magnitude. Perhaps Dems fear the day when WMD are found (and they will be found, by hook or by crook). But they needn't worry -- even if misleading the nation to war weren't an issue, Mr. Bush's record is full of lies. The president says he supports our troops -- but he proposed cutting veterans' benefits and sidestepped a law meant to protect the health of soldiers headed for combat. His "leave no child behind" pledge is a fraud -- he's vastly underfunded his own education plan, and he signed the recent tax bill even after his GOP minions sneakily removed provisions benefiting low-income families. Mr. Bush says he's a "compassionate conservative," but only a hard-hearted radical would push his Robin-Hood-in-reverse tax policies. He says he wants to expand national service programs, but he's presiding over a huge cut in AmeriCorps programs. Candidate Bush promised to be "a uniter, not a divider," but his foreign policies have profoundly divided the international community, isolated America and devalued her stock in the eyes of world. Mr. Bush's administration is built on lies, which means the granddaddy of them all is his promise to restore "honor and integrity" to the Oval Office. Presidential Brain Karl Rove must be worried. Rove knows that any president's popularity rests more on whether voters think he's a believable and admirable leader than on the substance of issues. George W. Bush has that going for him -- people might not like his policies (if they understand them at all), but they like his swagger and certitude, and they trust him to do what he says. But that trust could crumble if questions linger about whether the White House deceived us into war. Few of the president's allies could or would defend that -- even GOP-TV (a.k.a. Fox News) would have trouble explaining away that one. __________________________________ John Moyers is Editor-in-Chief of TomPaine.com. Copyright 2003 TomPaine.com commondreams.org

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2693)	6/27/2003 8:55:59 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Bush Receives “F” For Environmental Issues on LCV 2003 Presidential Report Card FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JUNE 24, 2003 11:16 PM CONTACT: League of Conservation Voters Josh Galper, Dan Vicuña (202) 454-4678 WASHINGTON - June 24 - League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan announced today that LCV gave President George W. Bush an “F” on the organization’s 2003 Report Card on the administration’s performance on environmental issues. The Report Card, which focused on Bush’s performance from the beginning of his term through the midway point, calculated the failing grade by taking into account a number of factors, including appointments, administrative and executive actions, and legislative initiatives. LCV is the leading, nonpartisan political voice of the national environmental movement, and it periodically issues a report card on the performance of the president, both Democratic and Republican alike. “President Bush is well on his way to compiling the worst environmental record of any president in the history of our nation,” said Callahan. “Bush’s dismal Report Card is dominated by a disturbing trend: time after time, Bush favors corporate interests over the public’s interest in a clean, safe and healthy environment. Under the Bush administration, corporate polluters have been allowed to write the laws.” The Report Card found that, since taking office, Bush has assaulted environmental protections on all fronts, including air, water, land and wildlife. In particular, the Bush administration has attacked, weakened or undermined laws providing clean air, clean water, and toxic waste cleanups. Primary beneficiaries of these actions have been timber, mining, oil and gas, and real estate development companies. The Bush administration has waged this campaign through funding cuts, arcane procedural methods, and deceptive rhetoric to advance its anti-environment, pro-corporate agenda, according to the Report Card. For example, the Bush administration has cut enforcement for key environmental programs through steadily slashing budgets. Consequently, environmental laws that should otherwise be enforced by the Bush administration lie dormant on the books for lack of funding. In the case of toxic waste, for example, the Bush administration has opposed requiring polluters to clean up their own messes at toxic waste sites – unlike Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In fact, Bush has begun to use taxpayer money to pay for the mess of corporate polluters and to cut back overall on cleaning up existing sites. The Bush administration has also targeted a series of complex regulations that barely register on the American public’s radar screen to drastically reduce clean air and water protections, and increase industry exploitation of public lands, the Report Card reveals. The administration has proposed regulatory changes, for example, to weaken a significant provision of the Clean Air Act called “new source review,” which currently requires older, more polluting industrial plants to upgrade pollution controls when they renovate or expand in such a way that increases emissions of pollutants. Meanwhile, fraudulently named legislation has become the norm. In 2002, Bush proposed the “Clear Skies” initiative, which would weaken public health protections of the current Clean Air Act, while replacing them with insufficient standards and actually increasing toxic emissions like mercury and sulfur. Another initiative, the so-called “Healthy Forests” proposal, would open up 20 million acres of national forests to logging and waive environmental laws. ### commondreams.org