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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (761530)	4/23/2007 12:59:27 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "of course he was yelling at his kid" That's WHAT I SAID... so I'm not sure what you are arguing about.... Now, as to this: "My point is that he was doing much more than that, he was venting all his pent up life long frustrations...", all I can say is that I don't know the guy, so I can't have much of an opinion about that, but it sure sounds like a lot of melodrama and speculation to me.... (Unless, of course, you personally know the guy....)

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (761530)	4/23/2007 1:04:01 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

France's coming choice to affect many things Trans-Atlantic: Europe Features Outside View: How France is now EU key By Martin Walker Apr 23, 2007, 14:25 GMT news.monstersandcritics.com CANNES, France (UPI) -- The first round of France`s presidential election has set the stage for an epic duel between left and right, and between two sharply different visions of the modern post-industrial state, whose outcome is likely to determine the future of Europe. The conservative Nicolas Sarkozy of the ruling UMP (Union for a Presidential Majority) party won 31.11 percent of the unprecedented high voter turnout, and the Socialist Party`s Segolene Royal won 25.84 percent. Both go through to the second and final round of voting in two weeks time. The other 10 candidates, including the centrist Francois Bayrou with 18.55 percent and the far-right Jean-Marie le Pen with 10.51 percent of the vote, were all eliminated. So the question now is whether Royal, the first woman with a serious chance of becoming France`s president, can win enough of those votes to build an anti-Sarkozy coalition and win the 50.1 percent of the votes now required for victory. One key component of her anti-Sarkozy strategy will be to make the next vote a referendum on President George W. Bush and Sarkozy`s pro-American stance. 'I will not go down on my knees before President George Bush,' Royal declared last week in the closing stages of her campaign. Her followers have dubbed Sarkozy, who is of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry and something of an outsider in French politics, 'a neo-conservative who happens to carry a French passport.' She hopes to rally all those who voted for France`s slew of far-left parties, and many of those who voted for the centrist Bayrou, behind her campaign to preserve France`s generous welfare and social system and against what she calls 'the cruelties and profiteering of the so-called free market system of the Anglo-Saxons.' Sarkozy, by contrast, openly admires the low unemployment, low taxes and faster growth of Tony Blair`s Britain and the U.S. economy. He made London one of his first campaign stops to appeal to the estimated 300,000 young French people who work and prosper in the City of London that it was time to come home and help him build a similar economy of free enterprise and lower taxes. His key economic promise, which could have a dramatic effect on France`s sluggish economy, is to tempt people to work as much as they choose beyond the current limit of 35 hours a week, by dropping all taxes and social insurance charges on the extra hours they work. This is one of the three main reasons why the outcome of France`s election is being watched so closely by France`s partners in the 27-nation European Union. Any recovery of France`s low-performing and high unemployment economy will help boost the EU as a whole, and reinforce Britain`s solid growth and the recovery now under way in Germany. If all these 'Big Three' economies, who between them command more than half of the EU`s total economic output, start growing in unison then the prospects are bright not only for the EU as a whole but also for the EU`s long-stalled 'Lisbon Agenda' of reform. The Lisbon Agenda agreement was reached back in 2000, with the goal of making the EU into the world`s most dynamic and high-technology 'knowledge economy' by the year 2010, through a mix of productivity and labor market reforms. Labor union opposition, low growth and public and left-wing opposition to any reform of Europe`s generous welfare systems have blocked progress. A Sarkozy presidency could help restore Europe`s long-blocked dynamism. With her dependence on labor union support, the Socialist candidate Royal would find this far harder to achieve, despite some her pre-campaign rhetoric when she voiced (but quickly dropped) some admiration for the British economic recovery of the past 20 years. The second reason for the EU-wide fascination with France`s political drama is that the outcome is likely to determine whether the EU can move ahead with the Anglo-German push for a full free trade agreement with the United States, to drop all non-tariff barriers to trade and investment though common rules and standards on accounting and the financial sector, on competition and mergers and health and safety standards. At its most ambitious, as seen by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and by Britain`s next prime minister and Blair`s almost inevitable successor Gordon Brown, the plan would build a single transatlantic economy whose 800 million people would produce half the world`s economic output and meet the challenge of growth in China and India. Segolene Royal, who reflects the broadly anti-American stance of the European left, would give this ambitious plan no support. The third reason for the EU`s passionate interest in France`s election is that its outcome could finally allow progress on the plans for EU reform, after French and Dutch voters each in a separate referendum rejected the draft of a proposed new EU constitution two years ago. Sarkozy has proposed a far more modest new EU treaty, which could be passed in the National Assembly without the need of a referendum, that would give the EU a single foreign minister and scrap the 6-monthly rotation of the EU presidency. His plan, which would get British support, would give some administrative stability and tidy up the internal rules on majority voting to allow a system that was devised 50 years ago for a Europe of six member states to work more smoothly now that it has enlarged to 27. The problem now is Sarkozy himself. His abrasive personality and naked ambition, his unusual admiration for the U.S. and the Anglo-Saxon economic systems and his reputation as a maverick, all combine to make it difficult for him to win the centrist votes that he will need to win the runoff election next month. He now has 30 percent of the vote. He can probably scoop up most of the 11 percent of the vote that went to Le Pen. That still leaves him needing another 10 percent of the vote to win, and so Francois Bayrou`s centrist voters now hold the fate of France and of Europe in their hands. Copyright 2007 by United Press International © Copyright 2006,2007 by monstersandcritics.com.