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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (308868)	11/3/2006 7:13:40 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573627

JIHAD IS FUN! VOTE DEMOCRAT! By Ann Coulter Wed Nov 1, 8:04 PM ET John Kerry is the "botched joke" of American politics. For those of you keeping score at home, John Kerry has now called members of the U.S. military (a) stupid, (b) crazy, (c) murderers, (d) rapists, (e) terrorizers of Iraqi women and children. I wonder what he'll call them tomorrow. Whatever Karl Rove is paying John Kerry to say stupid things, it's worth every penny. Now, back to the midterm elections ... Analysts place the average midterm loss for the party in the White House at around 15 to 44 seats, depending on which elections are counted -- only elected presidents, midterm elections since the Civil War, midterm elections since World War II, comparable-sized congresses, first and second midterm elections and so on. The average first midterm election loss for every elected president since 1914 is 27 House seats and three Senate seats. The average sixth-year midterm election, like this year, is much worse for the president's party, which typically loses 34 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate. This makes the average loss in two midterm elections for the party in the White House: 30 House seats and four or five Senate seats in each midterm election. In his first midterm election, George W. Bush picked up six House seats and two Senate seats -- making him, according to The New York Times, "the first Republican president to gain House seats in an off-year election" and only the third president of either party to pick up House seats in a midterm election since the Civil War. This means that for Democrats simply to match the historical average gain for the party out of the White House during the first and second midterm, they would have to pick up 67 seats in the House and 11 seats in the Senate. They're about 30 Mark Foleys short of having that happen. It at least seems clear that Democrat gains this year are going to fall far short of the historical average. No poll has the Democrats winning even half of their rightful midterm gains. Despite the precedent of big wins in midterm elections for the party out of power -- especially in a sixth-year midterm election -- something is depressing the Democrats' popularity with Americans this year. I suspect it's the perception that many of them are Democrats. But instead of recognizing that the Democratic Party is a dying party, falling far short of its due historical gains, any gain by the Democrats will be hailed as a crowning mandate for the party that wants to lose the Iraq war, shut down Guantanamo and stop spying on Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil. Even a dying party has death throes. If Democrats win a slight majority in the House or Senate, Americans will get shrill, insane leadership of the nation in time of war. Democrats can't not be crazy. They will instantly set to work enacting a national gay marriage law, impeachment hearings, slavery reparations and a series of new federal felonies for abortion clinic protesters. The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands. The probable new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is in a catfight with Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) for not being insane enough. Pelosi has indicated she will deny Harman the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, instead giving it to Rep. Alcee Hastings (news, bio, voting record), whom Pelosi voted to impeach from his federal judgeship in 1988 for conspiring to extract a $150,000 bribe from convicted criminals in return for lowering their sentences. An O.J. jury had acquitted Hastings on the bribery charge in a criminal proceeding, though his alleged co-conspirator, attorney William Borders, was convicted. But the evidence of Hastings' bribery plot was so overwhelming that a Democratic House voted to impeach Hastings 413-3 on 17 separate counts -- including falsifying evidence to win his acquittal in the criminal case, and a majority Democratic Senate voted to convict Hastings on the very first count by 69-26, enough to remove him from office. Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) Jr. -- another finalist for the coveted "craziest Democrat in congress" title -- led the charge for Hastings' impeachment, saying the judge had "betrayed his office." In addition to having a history of soliciting bribes from criminals before his court, Hastings wants to shut down Guantanamo, and he adamantly opposes the U.S. government listening to phone calls from al-Qaida phones to anyone in America (especially federal judges negotiating bribery deals by telephone). As millions of lunatic Muslims plot to murder Americans, some Americans -- we call them "Soccer Moms" -- will cast a vote to save Michael J. Fox this year. In the process, they will put all Americans at risk by voting for a frivolous, dying party.

To: steve harris who wrote (308868)	11/3/2006 9:23:37 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573627

Tell us again about how honest and fiscally responsible the GOP is. Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office By JAMES GLANZ Published: November 3, 2006 Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces. Mr. Bowen’s office has inspected and audited taxpayer-financed projects like this prison in Nasiriya, Iraq. And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip. The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. Mr. Bowen’s office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence. But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course without a hard end date. The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen’s Republican credentials — he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White House — and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree. “It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.” “The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion,” she said. A Republican spokesman for the committee, Josh Holly, said lawmakers should not have been surprised by the provision closing the inspector general’s office because it “was discussed very early in the conference process.” But like several other members of the House and Senate who were contacted on the bill, Ms. Collins said that she feared the loss of oversight that could occur if the inspector general’s office went out of business, adding that she was already working on legislation with several Democratic and Republican senators to reverse the termination. One of those, John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen was “making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq.” “Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains to be done,” Mr. Warner added, “I intend to join Senator Collins in consulting with our colleagues to extend his charter.” While Senators Collins and Warner said they had nothing more than hunches on where the impetus for setting a termination date had originated, Congressional Democrats were less reserved. “It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform. “I just can’t see how one can look at this change without believing it’s political,” he said. The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008. Mr. Holly, who is the House Armed Services spokesman as well as a member of Mr. Hunter’s staff, said that politics played no role and that there had been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies whose work in Iraq Mr. Bowen’s office has severely critiqued. Three of the companies that have been a particular focus of Mr. Bowen’s investigations, Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, said that they had made no effort to lobby against his office. 1 2 nytimes.com

To: steve harris who wrote (308868)	11/3/2006 9:24:15 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573627

Ney, facing expulsion, resigns from House washtimes.com

To: steve harris who wrote (308868)	11/4/2006 7:20:15 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573627

Well, all you Republicans, even the Neocons are abandoning this Administration. It's like I've said all along. The ineptitude of Bush and his cronies is simply astounding. Neoconservatives decry execution of Iraq war POSTED: 1:04 a.m. EST, November 4, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) -- A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster. Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. "I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'" he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue. Asked about the article, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq, and we are going forward with it." Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration's conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised President Bush. Adelman said he was "crushed" by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Adelman also said that neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world," has been discredited with the public. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell." Meanwhile, the Military Times Media Group, a Gannett Co. subsidiary that publishes Army Times and other military-oriented periodicals, said Friday it was calling for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. (Full story) The critiques in Vanity Fair come as growing numbers of Republicans have criticized Bush's policies on Iraq. The war, unpopular with many Americans, has become a top-tier issue in next week's congressional elections. Perle said "you have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly. A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security . "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he said. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." The Military Times Media Group editorial, to be published Monday in four periodicals, says active-duty military leaders were beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success. "Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large," the editorial says. "His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt." The editorial concludes: "Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go."