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Politics : IMPEACH GRAY DAVIS! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (728)	8/11/2003 6:21:21 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 1641

As the WP explains, only an idiot would claim that Bush lied about Iraq. The Dems are the liars: WP Editorial - Mr. Gore's Blurred View Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page B06 "If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people." -- Al Gore, Dec. 16, 1998 THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL race seems to be carrying the Democratic Party in a dangerous direction on the issues of the Iraq war and national security -- dangerous for the nation and risky for the party too. Some of the candidates are more off course than others. If they listen to former vice president Al Gore, who took it upon himself last week to suggest a theme of attack for the nine candidates, they will all go off the cliff. Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a "virulent threat in a class by itself," validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies "designed to benefit friends and supporters." The war was waged "at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil." And it occurred because "false impressions" precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war. This notion -- that we were all somehow bamboozled into war -- is part of Mr. Gore's larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq. You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents "a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism." But then how to explain that 98 senators -- including all four Democratic senators now running for president -- voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an "ideologically narrow agenda" serving only "powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle." But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: "The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . " Thus, Mr. Gore maintains, we were all under the "false impression" that Saddam Hussein was "on the verge of building nuclear bombs," that he was "about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs," that he was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And because of these "false impressions," the nation didn't conduct a proper debate about the war. But there was extensive debate going back many years; last fall and winter the nation debated little else. Mr. Bush took his case to the United Nations. Congress argued about and approved a resolution authorizing war. And the approval did not come, as Mr. Gore and other Democrats now maintain, because people were deceived into believing that Saddam Hussein was an "imminent" threat who had attacked the World Trade Center or was about to do so. Here, for example, is what Democratic Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) had to say on the Senate floor last September: "It is interesting, if you look at the countries that the Bush administration designated as part of the axis of evil -- North Korea, Iran, and Iraq -- of the three, the military capabilities of North Korea and Iran far surpass the capability of Iraq. . . . We know this. We know what their capability is." The nature of Saddam Hussein's threat -- serious but probably not imminent, defiant of the United Nations -- is what made the debate so difficult. In the end, most members of Congress accepted the logic that President Clinton put forward in 1998: that, if Saddam Hussein was not stopped, he would "rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal." It certainly would be fair now to argue that the logic was wrong. There was a cogent case to be made against the war, and even those who supported it might now say that the absence of any uncovered weapons of mass destruction, or the continuing violence against Americans, gives them, in hindsight, a different view. There's plenty to criticize in the administration's postwar effort too. What isn't persuasive, or even very smart politically, is to pretend to have been fooled by what Mr. Gore breathlessly calls the Bush "systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology." Nearly at the end of his speech last week, almost as an afterthought, Mr. Gore allowed that "the removal of Saddam from power is a positive accomplishment in its own right for which the president deserves credit." He's not the only Democrat who thinks he can have it both ways, pandering to anti-Bush passion while protecting his national-security flank. Sen. John Kerry has been trying something similar with, for example, this applause line, which he must know can only stoke isolationist sentiment: "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in Brooklyn." It would be possible to support firefighters in Brooklyn without questioning U.S. commitment to Iraq. Sen. Joe Lieberman has found plenty to criticize in the Bush administration foreign policy without abandoning his longstanding support of American strength and democracy promotion. It's an honorable position, and one that doesn't depend on portraying everyone else as poor saps duped by wizardly Bush propaganda. washingtonpost.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (728)	8/11/2003 1:52:34 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Respond to of 1641

...the recall is another...mass distraction. Pardon the edit. ADD anyone? The recall will certainly be a distraction, though I think that Kobe Bryant will be the main beneficiary. It seems that everyone is burned out on news. August 11, 2003 Suffering News Burnout? The Rest of America Is, Too By JIM RUTENBERG nytimes.com Has the nation's television audience burned out on serious news? American soldiers are dying in Iraq almost daily, questions are continuing to swirl around the Bush administration's case for the March invasion and United States Marines are poised off the coast of Liberia. At home, decisions by the Supreme Court prompted national debates on affirmative action and gay rights, a basketball star stands accused of sexual assault and the California governorship suddenly hangs in the balance. And yet, television news viewers are tuning out. The total evening news audience on the broadcast networks has been lower this summer than it was during the summer of 2001, when the pressing stories of the day were shark attacks and Chandra A. Levy. "CBS Evening News" has been particularly hard hit; in late June, CBS, which is owned by Viacom Inc., had one of its least-watched weeks for its nightly news report in at least a decade, and perhaps in its history, according to Nielsen Media Research. The audience of ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, is down nearly 600,000 from last year. Among the broadcasters, only NBC, which is a unit of the General Electric Company, has bucked the tune-out trend this summer. The collective cable news audience, meanwhile, is slightly smaller so far this summer than it was this time last year, despite gains for the Fox News Channel, which is owned by the News Corporation. "People have been through two years of very heavy-duty, stressful news, from Sept. 11 through the war with Iraq," said Jim Murphy, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather." "I think there's probably just a little bit of a break-taking going on across the spectrum." Steve Sternberg, senior vice president for audience research at Magna Global USA in New York, an advertising buying agency, takes a similar view. "Considering how much news there was with the Iraq war," he said, "people are probably just taking a breath and saying, `O.K., that's enough news for a while.' " Summer TV viewing, of course, is always lighter than other times of year, as people find other things to do. And, because TV audience analysis remains an inexact science, with no hard data on what motivates people in their TV-watching decisions, no one can say for certain why news ratings are lower this summer than in recent years. But the overall diminished state of the television news ratings has come as a surprise to some executives and advertising executives — especially since it comes after impressive audience figures, at least for cable news, during the main military action in Iraq back in the spring According to Nielsen Media Research, about 24.1 million people watched the three evening newscasts each night, on average, in June and July, compared with 25.2 million during the two-month period last year and 24.3 million during June and July 2001. As for cable, CNN's daily audience during June and July was, on average, 413,000 people, down from 502,000 last summer, according to Nielsen Media Research, and much smaller than its audience of 2.5 million during the thick of the war. The daily average audience for MSNBC, which is owned by the Microsoft Corporation and G.E., fell from 254,000 last summer to 197,000 this one — which is down from 1.3 million during the war. And while the average daily audience at Fox News grew to 753,000, compared with 612,000 during last summer's two-month period, the audience was nowhere the average of 3.2 million people who watched Fox News each evening during the thick of the Iraq fighting. Some news executives said that many viewers may see this summer as nothing more than the end of the big Iraq story that they so eagerly watched in the spring. Others said this summer's more serious-seeming news events were, in fact, less compelling than those of last summer: the disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her Utah home; the abduction and killing of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion in California; the rescue of nine miners from a Pennsylvania coal shaft; the fatal shooting of two people at the Los Angeles International Airport and the killing of the gunman by an El Al security guard. Among the top news stories this summer, "none of these have the broad appeal and emotional tug that a Samantha Runnion, Elizabeth Smart, the miner rescue or the airport shootings had at that time," said Jack Wakshlag, head of research for the Turner Broadcasting System, which manages CNN for their parent company, AOL Time Warner Inc. CNN's highest-rated day during June and July last year, for example, was July 27, when an average audience of about 1 million people tuned in to learn about the rescue of the coal miners, according to Mr. Wakshlag's Nielsen Media Research data. This summer, CNN's most-watched day during the comparable two-month period was July 22, when an average audience of about 650,000 tuned in for news about the United States military's killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein. Mr. Wakshlag said the audience for the miners was probably higher because the nation had been following their plight over the course of several days. The successful attack on the Hussein brothers, "obviously was not a large-scale, unfolding, dramatic event," he said. "It was pretty much straightforward coverage of the fact that they were caught, which is by and large something you learn quickly and you don't have to stay and watch a whole bunch of stuff all day and get glued to the set." Though he took heart that CNN's ratings were up from the summer of 2001, Mr. Wakshlag acknowledged, "I'm not sure that national import and national interest always correspond." There are two anomalies in the ratings that dispel the theory that perhaps the American public is turning a blind eye to the world: the audience increases for "NBC Nightly News" and the Fox News Channel, the respective leaders of their fields. According to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which is a newsletter that tracks the network evening newscasts, NBC has given the heaviest coverage of Iraq of the three newscasts in recent weeks. Fox News Channel has not exactly shied away from Iraq, either. Executives at Fox News Channel and NBC said they concluded that it was better to devote more time where more context can be given to Iraq news rather than less. If boiled down to mere headlines, they said, that news can seem relentlessly negative and may turn off viewers. "Other networks have come on the air every day and they give you a countdown or count-up of the bad things that have happened — whether it's military deaths or civilian deaths," said Bill Shine, the executive producer of Fox News Channel. "That is important, and it's news America should know. But, there is some progress going on in that country." CNN and MSNBC dispute that Fox News is devoting more time to Iraq than they are. And competitors of NBC News denied they were being overly negative, saying that if NBC News is covering Iraq any more than they are, it is only by a marginal degree. "I think that reality can get to viewers at times," said Mr. Murphy at CBS. "But I don't think our coverage is negative or relentlessly negative. We tell people what we have. Some days it's negative, some days it's not." It remains unclear whether the big celebrity-driven news narratives of the moment — the Kobe Bryant sexual-assault case and Arnold Schwarzenegger's announced gubernatorial run in California — will change the current ratings equation. On cable news, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC saw spikes in their average daily audiences on Wednesday — the day Mr. Bryant had his first court appearance and Mr. Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy. But the gains were not huge. Reliable data on the evening newscasts for last Wednesday were unavailable. Either way, Mr. Murphy said, he did not expect the ratings funk to continue for very long. "People come to watch the news when they need the news," he said, adding, "and they will need it again."

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (728)	8/11/2003 8:24:08 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 1641

You're right. George Bush forced Davis to spend California into bankruptcy. ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!! Dolt. Considering Davis's screwups and what has happened and will happen to the state, what did you expect? It does have recall in the Constitution and everyone here knows it. The idea was in the air. OF COURSE DAVIS WAS GOING TO GET A RECALL ELECTION! WHAT DID YOU EXPECT??? And, of course, when it happened, this being the most populous state, that was going to get lots of ink nationwide. D**n, you're dumb.