Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (86786)	11/8/2006 3:15:53 AM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 361804

Yes sir they will.

To: geode00 who wrote (86786)	11/8/2006 3:38:27 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361804

The End of a Revolution ____________________________________________________________________ Sex, lies and power games are just the latest symptoms of a Republican Party that has strayed from its ideals. By KAREN TUMULTY Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages. "If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out." That quiet admission may have been the most damning one yet in the unfolding scandal surrounding Florida Congressman Mark Foley: holding on to power has become not just the means but also the end for the onetime reformers who in 1994 unseated a calcified and corrupted Democratic majority. Washington scandals, it seems, have been following a Moore's law of their own, coming at a faster clip every time there is a shift in control. It took 40 years for the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the Republicans to get there. If you think politicians clinging to power isn't big news, then you may have forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich's original revolutionaries. They swept into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill. And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few scandals in his day, didn't always follow his own rules. But his doctrine turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George W. Bush as President. But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis. Page 1 of 7 >> more at: time.com

To: geode00 who wrote (86786)	11/29/2006 8:42:20 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361804

Vote Disparity Still a Mystery In Fla. Election For Congress _______________________________________________________________ By Peter Whoriskey Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 29, 2006 SARASOTA, Fla., -- Almost since the time the votes were tallied here on election night, the race for Florida's 13th Congressional District has been surrounded by a contentious mystery: Why were there no votes for Congress recorded from more than 18,000 people who chose candidates in other races? The answer is central not only to the outcome of the election, which for now has been won by Republican Vern Buchanan by a mere 369 votes and is in litigation, but also to the ongoing debates over whether the electronic voting systems in use nationwide can yield reliable tallies and recounts. Coincidentally, the latest dust-up has occurred in the contest for the seat being vacated by Katherine Harris, who presided over Florida's election apparatus during the much-disputed 2000 contest between President Bush and former vice president Al Gore. So far, there are three theories, and lots of political and legal posturing. Maybe, as scores of voters have claimed, there were glitches with the touch-screen systems and they dropped votes. Or maybe voters overlooked the congressional race simply because of a confusing ballot design. Or maybe, as some say, an astoundingly high number of Sarasota County residents decided to forgo voting in the high-profile race. On Tuesday, as state election officials here ran a mock election to test the machines for defects, there were no clear answers. By evening, as clerical workers input votes, no major problems were reported with the machines, but the review will continue through the week. "Our analysis of the results shows that something went very wrong," said Kendall Coffey, an attorney for Buchanan's challenger, Christine Jennings. He played down the significance of the tests, saying they did not faithfully replicate the voting because the state clerical workers were presumably more adept at the machinery than voters in general would be. Hayden Dempsey, an attorney for Buchanan, said: "There is nothing wrong with the machines, as these tests show." The essence of the dispute arises from the fact that once all the votes were counted in the Nov. 7 election, a troubling anomaly appeared in the tally. More than 18,000 people who had voted in other contests did not have selections recorded in the congressional race. washingtonpost.com

To: geode00 who wrote (86786)	12/2/2006 1:31:37 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361804

What’s in a Name, Barry? _____________________________________________________________ By MAUREEN DOWD Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times December 2, 2006 If you call Barack Obama’s office to check the spelling of his middle name, the reply comes back: “Like the dictator.” In the first rush of our blind date with the young senator from Illinois, we are still discovering things that are going to take some getting used to. Like his middle name: Hussein. There were already a few top Democrats scoffing at the idea that a man whose surname sounded like a Middle East terrorist could get elected president. Now it turns out that his middle name sounds like a Middle East dictator. So with one moniker, he evokes both maniacal villains of the Bush administration. And to top it off, as Jennifer Senior noted in New York magazine, Barack rhymes with Iraq. Republican wizards have whipped up nasty soufflés with far less tasty ingredients than that. The middle name — the first name of his Muslim grandfather, a Kenyan farmer, and the middle name of his father, a Kenyan goatherd — had been cited in a few places, like Ms. Senior’s piece. But there hadn’t been much focus on the unfortunate coincidence of the senator from the city known as the Hog Butcher to the World having the same name as the Butcher of Baghdad until a Republican operative dropped the H-bomb on “Hardball” this week. Ed Rogers, a Bush 41 official, said he was underwhelmed with “Barack Hussein Obama,” dismissing him as “a blank canvas where people project their desires.” This set off indignation among liberal bloggers and in the Obama camp, where the middle name has not been hidden, but has not been mentioned much, either, even on the senator’s August odyssey to his paternal home in Africa. The hush-hush on Hussein is a bit odd given that Mr. Inclusive is presenting himself as the American dream in human form, a multiethnic quilt whose journey is his qualification for higher office. Obama aides thought Mr. Rogers was trying to stir up racial and religious biases. “It wasn’t a slip of the tongue, I know that,” said Robert Gibbs, the senator’s director of communications. “The 2006 election proved that people are far smarter than the spin and fearmongering. You can’t solve Iraq with a campaign about people’s middle names.” He said that when Mr. Obama was running for the Senate, there were conservative Web sites that crowned the Democrat’s picture with a turban and tried to make an issue of Obama and Osama sounding alike — just as G.O.P. strategists shamefully linked Max Cleland with Osama in 2002, and claimed in 2004 and 2006 that a win for the Democrats counted as a win for the terrorists. Mr. Gibbs said some had suggested to Mr. Obama early in his pursuit of a Senate seat that, given 9/11, he might want to go by his childhood nickname, Barry. (Then it could have been Barry! vs. Hillary!) In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” the senator describes a lunch with a media consultant in late September 2001. Looking down at a newspaper picture of Osama, the politico shook his head and said: “Really bad luck. You can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now ...” The senator wrote: “His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signaling the waiter to bring us the check. I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me.” The Republicans are expert at tying Democrats to villains. Mr. Rogers’s bad-boy mentor, Lee Atwater, yoked Willie Horton to Michael Dukakis. Mr. Atwater and his successors also liked to present their side as being more American. Traveling on the campaign trail with Bush Senior in ’88, Loretta Lynn made fun of Mr. Dukakis’s ethnicity, noting, “Why, I can’t even pronounce his name.” And in 2004, a Bush 43 campaign adviser trashed John Kerry for looking French. Names can be fraught in politics. Hillary Rodham felt she had to switch to Mrs. Clinton after her husband lost the Arkansas statehouse in 1980. Mr. Rogers denies he was playing hardball when he lobbed “Hussein” on “Hardball.” “No, I wasn’t trying to say he is Saddam-like,” he laughed. “The context was, this guy’s a lightweight. Never have I seen so much swoon for so little biography. If he can make something out of this, it proves he’s very thin-skinned and he ain’t ready. Hillary will beat him like a rented mule.” That would be Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton to you, Ed.