.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Milton J. Madison - An American Refugee Now Living in China, Where Liberty is Ascending

Federalism, Free Markets and the Liberty To Let One's Mind Wander. I Am Very Worried About the Fate of Liberty in the USA, Where Government is Taking people's Lives ____________________________________________________________________________________________ "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue." -Barry Goldwater-

Friday, November 26, 2004

Turning 50 years old....

Godzilla, 50 years and 29 movies......here.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Al Zarqawi's Funniest Decapitation Videos....

Sometimes it is best to not be serious...

The Al Jazeera Network's phone lines were jammed with angry calls when an episode of the highly rated television series, Al Zarqawi's Funniest Decapitation Videos, was interrupted to broadcast gruesome footage of a U.S. Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a Fallujah mosque.


"I love Funniest Videos!" said Iraqi businessman, Khamid Ali Sayid. "When they play that one of the fat infidel squealing like a crusader pig as his head is removed according to the Holy Koran's instructions, I laugh so hard I nearly plotz. Then they break in with Americans shooting sick old man in our Holy Shrine, and my heart is breaking. How can they be allowed to do this?"


Read it all here.

The "other" story of Thanksgiving.....

As told by BlameBush! Because Bush is to Blame for Everything. An excerpt from our PC world....
So when your naive, pasty-faced brats come home from school this week wearing their cute little construction paper pilgrim hats, gently take them aside and explain the truth about this evil holiday: Thanksgiving dinner is not a reenactment of a bountiful harvest feast shared with friends, but the symbolic consumption of a murdered Indian's flesh to celebrate the cannibalistic genocide of the indigenous peoples.

That will be an easy one to explain to my 10 year-old son. Some of the facts...
Faced with starvation, the colonists unanimously agreed to eat the Indians. For the next six months, they ate the Patuxets, the Narragansetts, and the Erectorsets almost to extinction. They justified the hideous crime by convincing themselves that the dark-skinned savages posed an imminent threat, and had arrows of mass destruction. This pleasant fiction lasted until the NicNacs and the Paddywacs banded together with the Mohawks and the Pompadours, exacting revenge on the pilgrims and inflicting severe casualties.

Enjoy your holiday! Read all of it here.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

My annoying dinner discussion tonight.....

At a wine dinner tonight, I had to again endure European commentary about the United States...of course indirectly and directly aimed at the administration of George Bush and his policies.

Annoying comment number one....

There hasn't be any successful 'imposition' of democracy anytime or anywhere in the world.

Alrighty. Lets take a look at Germany and Japan. How about Korea? Philippines....ok that is not a success but they do have elections. It is disfunctional. Sure, these took time to build but aren't they vibrant democracies? How about Afghanistan? Well, my French friend, railing against me last weekend said, 'Well we don't know if Afghanistan will be a success yet.' But of course if you don't know if Afghanistan is yet a success, then how sure can you be that Iraq is a failure? Both require judgments and Iraq is clearly the younger of the two situations.

My comment to the both of these people, tonight and last week, was 'I suppose that your view depends upon your viewpoint.'

Annoying comment number two....

Islam is not conducive to Democracy and has no tradition in respect to this....

Of course I pointed out that in Islam, there is an actual process for the election of a Caliph through what could be seen as a a indirect election of this leader. In fact, I recall that following the prophet Muhammad, they choose leader of the Islamist movement. I looked for references in the Koran to this but was not able to find any.

However, this was belittled as just the election by elders of the head is not any call towards universal suffrage. But I also have failed to find any reference to universal suffrage in the Bible.

The modern concept of elections flows from the reformation where people revolted against the autocratic rule of the Catholic Church. Modern democratic tradition a la the United States comes from the wars and difficulties fought in England several hundred years ago. I am no expert in this stuff, but the modern concept of universal suffrage is not something that flows from Christianity but from a need to create stability given the friction caused by such powerful institutions that existed at the time. And it appears as if even the Arab world could use such a pressure valve.

So no reference to this process in either holy book forever condemns both religions to an eternity of autocratic rule? We know that this has not been the case since over the past 200 years, most of the Christian world has moved towards democratic self determination. Turkey and Indonesia are large Muslim majority democratically run countries that have been able to find themselves through to universal suffrage. Afghanistan is the newest. Maybe all of these will be failures. Maybe not. Africa, has largely been a failure with a few successes, South Africa, Senegal and Ghana. Yes, may of them have had terrible times recently. But there always has to be hope.

Is Islam abhorrent of democracy? Maybe, maybe not. Is it impossible? As Turkey and Indonesia illustrate, that there is hope. Is Christianity better suited to democratic rule? For 1800 years, it wasn't.

So, what is these people's point? Are Arab genetically incapable of any life but one where a strongman rules or are they culturally conditioned this way? If its the later, then yes, there is hope.




Friday, November 19, 2004

Wow...monster hamburger

1,420 calories of bliss, here. US$ 5.49 only. I wonder if I can buy this at the Hardee's here in Hong Kong.

Here's how they build it:

Two-thirds of a pound of beef ... 664 calories
Three slices of cheese ... 186 calories
Four pieces of bacon ... 150 calories
Mayonnaise ...160 calories
Butter ... 30 calories
Bun ... 230 calories

Add it all up and you get a massive 1,420 calories with 107 grams of fat.

Yummy, my arteries can hardly wait!

Thursday, November 11, 2004

A real discussion on prescription drug prices....

When I hear all the blithering in the press and with the politicians on high drug prices, it really gets my blood boiling.

All told, prescription-drug spending in the United States rose 9.1 per cent last year. Only three of those percentage points were due to price increases, however, which means that inflation was about the same in the drug sector as it was in the over-all economy.



The fanatical frenzy in the US on high prescription drug prices revealed to be moreso of a hoax then truth. Seniors are again getting all in tizzy about drug prices when the facts don't really bear this out. Read it all here in the New Yorker.

It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States. Of course, not every drug comes in a generic version. But so many important drugs have gone off-patent recently that the rate of increase in drug spending in the United States has fallen sharply for the past four years. And so many other drugs are going to go off-patent in the next few years-including the top-selling drug in this country, the anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor-that many Americans who now pay more for their drugs than their counterparts in other Western countries could soon be paying less.

As far as I am concerned the whole debate on drug prices is just another crass money grabbing attempt by seniors to get something for nothing.

Is the system broken? I say no. Can it be improved? Why should it be improved? Will the government be able to improve it? Chances are very slim that they could. They may make things a little cheaper over the shorter term but will 'dumb-down' the system so that innovation will decrease, fewer new drugs will be developed for when we are older and some basic discoveries may not be achieved.

Get a life America. Stop trying to steal other people's assets for your own benefits. And if it saves your life, what is too expensive about that?


Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Securlarist Bush....

Interesting piece on the rotting core of the American left and GWBush's advancement of secularism.

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine-disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO-described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).
The whole piece by Christopher Hitchen's can be read here. The rot at the core of the American liberal left flows from the inability to hold people accountable for their own actions. Poor people in the USA get a pass since they grew up in poverty. Murderous thugs in the Middle-East get a pass since they grew up in poverty or just didn't know better. Jeesh.

The terrible thing about this attitude is that it disenfranchises the moderates in these communities and disables these communities from improvement by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. The age old building a better life for our children get annihilated in the upside-down moral relativist liberal left world.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

This just can't be good.....

Bush, voting in Texas, said, "I've given it my all." Kerry, still campaigning in Wisconsin, promised to take the nation "to a better place."

When the cowboys or soldiers in all of the movies had their hats off for a fallen comrade, someone always said, 'he's in a better place now.' Implying he died and went to the great beyond. Kerry thinks that we will die?

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

The urban legend of black voter disenfranchisement in 2000 Florida election......

A San Francisco Chronicle article on the myth of black voter disenfranchisement arguing against the oft repeated charge can be read in its entirety here. The column is a regular piece called the 'View from the Right.'

The writer cites several arguments and asks that if disenfranchisement happened, then how did it happen? He makes some very strong points....
Keep in mind two basic facts: the same voting system had been in place for well over 20 years in Miami-Dade County, without incident. No one claimed conspiracy when Clinton was elected by the same voters from the county using the same system. Also, remember that it's the local elections chief in each county who determines the local voting system, including all the details, from the type of voting machine to the location of the polling stations.
In Florida, all but one of the 25 counties that experienced the greatest ballot "spoilage" during the 2000 election were controlled by, you guessed it, Democratic election chiefs, and the one remaining county was controlled by an independent.

So, lets get this right.....somehow the Republicans were able to infiltrate and cause some type of damage to the voting of blacks in these 25 counties. How did they do this? Did they bribe the local election officials? Did they intimidate voters somehow? Did they somehow inject some type of false information into the process? Were they able to mind control voters using some kind of military laser beam to affect voter decisions?

Or was it the same shoddy system that always caused problems that breaks down every time and broke down in 2000, again?
Of the two official investigations conducted immediately following the 2000 election to investigate conspiracy theories of black disenfranchisement, one was done by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, led by Mary Frances Berry, an African American.
It found that "potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers,
antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations and other barriers to exercise their right to vote." So, what else is new? That's going on all over America. However, the commission went on to say, "Moreover, even if it was not foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred." (emphasis added)

So, were these isolated cases in only black communities or is this something that happens in other communities too? Is this a problem that is limited to Florida or does it also happen in other states? And how did the Republicans intentionally create this catastrophe? How were they involved at all?
In addition, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department conducted its own investigation into the Florida voting "irregularities." Its conclusion? The office reported that it "found no credible evidence in our investigation that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election."

So, what do we have here? Its the Democrats again playing the race card. Fire up the base with claims that you are being cheated in an attempt to get blacks out to vote. But who is cheating who here?

Maybe the Democrats are cheating black voters themselves. Why weren't they diligent in ensuring that the voting process was fair; election workers were properly trained, there were enough polling locations and that the equipment worked? Whose responsibility is this in Democratic voting districts?

Maybe one day Black folk will wake up and figure out that if they want to vote and be heard, then they have to be diligent and make sure that things are set up properly. Obviously, the Democrats have not done too good a job of making sure that these people's voices are heard. Come on over and give us Republicans a chance one day, we will welcome you with open arms!

Well the illegal votes may not turnout enmass....

Walter Cronkite reading himself after his comment on Rove being behind the binLaden tape....
If they are challenged at the polls, as they line up to go into the polls, they may fear having to answer all those questions. Particularly if they do have anything wrong about them and shouldn't vote.
Read it from Powerline here. It kind of makes sense that illegal voters shouldn't be allowed to vote. But of course some people may be worried about being hassled since they are immigrants and don't fully understand the system. that is ashame. so maybe the registration of false voters and the attempt of fraud is really a net negative to what the fraudsters intended.

Study finds press pro-Kerry....duh

I have read that the challenger generally gets better press than the incumbent...read about it here. But this is the 2nd most lop-sidded ever. Of course its important to mention that it is the right leaning Washington Times that is reporting on this self described non-partisan study.
Sen. John Kerry has gotten the white-glove treatment from the press, garnering more praise from journalists than any other presidential candidate in the last quarter-century, according to a new analysis of almost 500 news stories released today by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It's not just that John Kerry has gotten better press than President Bush before this election, he's gotten better press than anyone else since 1980. That's significant," said Bob Lichter, director of the D.C.-based nonpartisan research group.

Why isn't this just obvious? It must be very difficult to praise JFKerry since he has done so many remarkable things in his recent Senate career.
In October alone, Mr. Kerry had a "record-breaking 77 percent positive press evaluations," compared with 34 percent positive for Mr. Bush, the study states.

The self-flagellating press has proved their worth to public; advocates of Democrats and not truly serious as news organizations. The interesting thing, is that when I discuss this with my liberal/democratic friends, the first that comes out of their mouth is something about Fox news. This is just so funny to me. So its one against how many?

My sister also thinks that the press is right-wing and has claimed that NPR is a right-wing news organization. This just tells me that the press is right of her since she is so far left that they had to extend the line a little bit.

But this really is very telling what the press thinks about Republicans....

But Mr. Bush didn't get the absolute worst press on record. With only 9 percent positive stories in 1984, President Reagan got the most negative treatment by news outlets on record, the study says.


How out of touch were they then when the electorate turned around and re-elected the man with a huge landslide victory. Now that the man is dead, they love him....and always loved him!


Monday, November 01, 2004

You have to love this Robert Novak column headline....

Is Kerry relevant to 2004 election?
I contacted several Democrats who have criticized Kerry privately to me in the past. They shrugged off Kerry's obsession with the explosives. They confirmed that the senator is regarded inside the party as largely irrelevant to the election of 2004. This is an election about George W. Bush. Democratic leaders talk a lot about how their "ground game" -- getting out their voters -- will elect Kerry Tuesday, and seem uninterested in what he has to say.

Interesting....its like the old Democratic machines and smoke filled back rooms of yesteryear. I suppose that you could get anybody to run for President in those conditions.....and that is what the Dems have put forward....an anybody that is a nobody that hasn't said or done anything remarkable or even remotely interesting in over the past 30 years. I call JFKerry a wind-chime...when there is a slight breeze, it can be pleasant to listen to but doesn't hold up too well during rough weather.

Beldar Blog outlines some of the serious failings and inconsistencies of the media......

Why dig into the divorce court papers of former Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan and not demand a full disclosing of JFKerry's military records? How about pernicious media bias? Read it here...
Digging into Jack and Jeri Ryan's marital sex life ought to embarrass the mainstream media. But failing to dig into John Kerry's military records ought to embarrass them more. If John Kerry is elected, he will take office with unplumbed secrets that directly relate to his fitness to be President, and that the mainstream media have willfully and consistently ignored.

But no one can seriously argue that Sen. Kerry's military record-including the mysterious circumstances of his discharge-are insufficiently related to his fitness to be Commander in Chief. Sen. Kerry himself acknowledged the public's legitimate interest in his military record by posting carefully selected documents on his website. But he's brazenly stonewalled efforts by the SwiftVets and others from outside the mainstream media to pressure him into releasing all of his records. And the mainstream media have not only let him get away with that, they've allowed it to go largely uncommented upon.

The Democratic party media are like those little plastic dogs that you see on the dashboards of cars...heads bouncing around. Just something that is there and amuses little children but is meaningless to anything else. But they are actually serious! Ack, when is it going to stop?

The weekly Standard piece on punitive liberalism....

An epitath for RReagan. Although the article ends with the thought that RReagan defeated this bizarre behavior, it is returning with a vengence carried by such people as Michael Moore.

June 28, 2004
The Weekly Standard
Punitive Liberalism
What Reagan vanquished.
by James Piereson

WE HAVE HEARD a great deal in recent days about how Ronald Reagan brought a spirit of optimism to Washington after his election in 1980 and thereby renewed the nation's belief in itself after a period of self-doubt, pessimism, and "malaise." President Reagan said America's best days were still ahead, and he thus renewed our belief in progress and a better future for generations yet unborn. In this sense, he did for the nation in the 1980s what had been done in the 1930s by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

This narrative about Ronald Reagan is completely accurate, so far as it goes. The problem is that it does not go far enough. Why had Americans become so pessimistic about their country during the 1970s? Why had they been overcome by a sense of "malaise," as Jimmy Carter described it? There was, of course, the long ordeal of Vietnam, followed by Watergate, and then a sluggish economy--reasons enough for Americans to feel some sense of doubt and disappointment. But why was Ronald Reagan able to reverse these doubts when Jimmy Carter could not?

The answer to these questions is that while Americans in general were not down on their country, Jimmy Carter, along with the leaders of the Democratic party and its main constituent groups, certainly was. President Carter could not overcome the "malaise" of the 1970s because he and his fellow Democrats had played a large role in fostering it.

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Here the Punitive Liberals parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people. The earlier reformers believed deeply that the American experiment in self-government was inherently good, and that the task of policy was to improve it. But in the troubled years following Kennedy's death, the reform tradition took on a furrowed brow and a punitive visage.

In many ways, Jimmy Carter, and his leading appointees, were the perfect exemplars of Punitive Liberalism. Given their sour outlook, it is no wonder that their leadership generated a sense of "malaise" among the American people.
During the 1970s an impressive network of interest groups was developed to promote and take advantage of this sense of historical guilt. These included the various feminist and civil rights groups who pressed for affirmative action, quotas, and other policies to compensate women and minorities for past mistreatment; the welfare rights organizations who claimed that welfare and various poverty programs were entitlements or, even better, reparations that were owed to the poor as compensation for similar mistreatment; the environmental groups who pressed for ever more stringent regulations on business; and the various human rights and disarmament groups who pressed the government to punish or disassociate the United States from allies who were said to violate human rights. These groups took up influential roles in the Democratic party and in the Congress, and ensconced themselves in university departments from which outposts they promoted and elaborated upon the finer points of Punitive Liberalism.

The punitive aspects of this doctrine were made especially plain in debates over the liberals' favored policies. If one asked whether it was really fair to impose employment quotas for women and minorities, one often heard the answer, "White men imposed quotas on us, and now we're going to do the same to them!" Was busing of school children really an effective means of improving educational opportunities for blacks? A parallel answer was often given: "Whites bused blacks to enforce segregation, and now they deserve to get a taste of their own medicine!" Do we really strengthen our own security by undercutting allied governments in the name of human rights, particularly when they are replaced by openly hostile regimes (as in Iran and Nicaragua)? "This"--the answer was--"is the price we have to pay for coddling dictators." And so it went. Whenever the arguments were pressed, one discovered a punitive motive behind most of their policies.

Naturally, it was somewhat difficult to advance the tenets of Punitive Liberalism in the public arena, and especially tricky to do so in electoral contests. The broader public, after all, is unlikely to take kindly to the idea that it needs to be punished for the sins of past generations. For this reason, Vice President Mondale, an experienced politician, felt that Jimmy Carter had made a serious mistake in calling the American people to task for their "malaise," since it is counter-productive for an elected politician to attack the voters. The Punitive Liberals thus chose instead to advance their causes in the regulatory bodies and in the federal courts--the latter being the perfect arena for leveling blame and exacting punishment. And they did so with considerable success.
Their success, however, was the undoing of the nation. The Punitive Liberals, because they sought to cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy, proved incapable of adopting practical measures to strengthen the economy or to advance American power in the world. Such goals, in any case, would have been contradictory to their deeper longings, which were to dispel American pride, and to shrink American ambitions at home and abroad. The Cold War, in particular, seemed to them a pointless struggle between two flawed empires, "two scorpions in a bottle." While they did not wish to see the Communists win, neither were they prepared to swallow the triumphalism that would accompany a victory by the West. A strong economy, meanwhile, would disproportionately reward the rich and the self-contented middle classes--the very groups that the Punitive Liberals wished to chastise.

And thus it was perhaps inevitable that the policies of the Punitive Liberals would give us the worst of all worlds--weakness and embarrassment abroad, inflation and unemployment at home, and a public that was beginning to lose hope in its future. By 1980, the nation had seen the results of its experiment with Punitive Liberalism, and was beginning to look for an alternative vision.
Fortunately for all of us, Ronald Reagan stepped into the void and supplied that vision. He understood, more than any other candidate of the time, that the pervasive negativism of the Democratic party was largely responsible for our national difficulties. And thus his pragmatic proposals for tax cuts, deregulation, and defense spending were accompanied with inspiring rhetoric about national pride and a hopeful future.

He stated the matter with abundant clarity in his acceptance speech before the Republican Convention in July 1980:
The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of the Democratic Party leadership--in the White House and in Congress--for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us. They tell us that they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.

"My fellow citizens," he continued, "I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves."

Ronald Reagan during the campaign and then in office challenged the leaders who had encouraged the spirit of malaise and doubt. He exposed, confronted, and eventually defeated the bizarre and self-flagellating doctrine of Punitive Liberalism. For this, as for so many other things, he earned the eternal gratitude of the American people.

James Piereson is executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation.

My rant to my Dad....

I will post a copy of the piece on punitive liberalism that my rant refers to.

From my Dad:
I am not so enamored of Kerry or the Democrats that I think they are "the stuff dreams are made on." (Shakespeare) Do you feel they are somehow sympathetic to or aligned with the terrorists? That they are part of the enemy? I would really like your feelings on this. I'm more a democratic republican than a Democrat and Mom is an independent. We try to listen rather than engage in argument. To us you are far more important than an party or candidate.

My rant in reponse:
Are they aligned or sympathetic to the terrorists....in a sense, Democrats are. I have attached a piece on punitive liberalism. I think that the doctorine is more along the lines that we deserved the terrorists attacks. That is why that clown Michael Moore is such a success with the 'in' Democratic crowd. And that is essentially what Osama bin Laden was saying on his tape the other day.

One of Michael Moore's books is called something like 'Stupid White Men.' It seems to be an ok thing to say. How do you think that a book called 'Stupid Black Men' would be received? So the moral relativity of good predudice is acceptable to this crowd. I remmember when I was young driving to Pittsburgh and we two sat down with Grandpa Scollon in the living room after the long ride. He said, 'Glenn, what about them niggers.' to you. You had a fit. Well, I feel like that today. Like people are saying 'what about them niggers' that is what makes me so angry. And.....

C-SPAN cameras captured spouse Elizabeth Edwards making the startling comments to a supporter during a Kerry Campaign Town Hall Meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Supporter: Kerry's going to take PA.
Liz Edwards: I know that.
Supporter: I'm just worried there's going to be riots afterwards.
Liz Edwards: Uh.....well...not if we win.

Oh I see, its justifyable to riot if the Republicans win, and the expectation is that if Republican's lose, then we will crawl back under our rock? See if black folk or the surrogate Democrats riot its justifyable. How utterly stupid is this? Well, what if we Republicans riot?

And if Bush was a 'good' President in your eyes, and he did all the right things over the last 4 years, would you vote for him? I think that alot of people just find Bush being Bush unacceptable. Maybe its his religion or his ability to let the water roll off his back, but people hate him for his success. In your words when we were discussing Clinton a few years back, you said that electing Clinton was ' a means to an end.' So what is the end game now? My opinion of Clinton that he was a vile opportunist, a populist panderer and just plain old lucky. But he was not a punitive liberal of the type described in the article but he did appologize for 8 years to the world for us being Americans. I think that he is as much responsible or maybe even moreso for the terrorist problems that we have today as anyone. But half the US reflecively blames Bush as if he had something to do with our 'behavior' for the 20 years preceding him leading to terrorist hatred. So people blame Bush. Do something, anything........

So, we may just choose Barrabas.

Lawyers will make elections impossible in a few years....

This is absolutely amazing. Discussing eliminating voters that die between the time that they cast their absentee ballots or early voting and the actual election day.

GHOST VOTERS: An untold number of absentee and early ballots cast before Election Day by people who later die will be counted. States differ on whether they count such votes and what they do to weed them out.

GETTING WORSE: New in-person early voting used by millions in at least 30 states makes it harder to retrieve ballots after a voter's death.

Jeez.

If you die or are planning too prior to the election and you have have already cast your ballot, please contact your local elections office. Failure to do so will result in severe penalties.

A question of character.......

Questioning JFKerry's character from none other than the extremist and partisan Boston Globe, here. The money quote:

On Jan. 9, 1991, as the crisis over Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was building to a climax, Kerry received a letter from a constituent, Walter Carter of Newton.
"Dear Senator Kerry," it began. "I urge you to support President Bush's request that Congress approve the `use of all necessary means' to get Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. To deny the president's request would encourage further aggression."

On Jan. 22, Kerry replied.
"Dear Mr. Carter," he wrote. "Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to the Bush administration's additional deployment of US military forces . . . and to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On Jan. 11, I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president immediate authority to go to war."

Nine days later, he replied again.
"Dear Mr. Carter," Kerry's second letter said. "Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush. . . . From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and
. . . our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."

As his glaringly inconsistent responses to Carter -- both form letters, of course -- make clear, Kerry's habit of coming down firmly on two side of controversial issues didn't begin with his presidential campaign. It has been a hallmark of his political career.


Read it all. Surprising coming from the attack dogs at the Boston Globe that usually do the oddball Democratic hit pieces that the parent, New York Times think are below them.

And an interesting conclusion. It will be difficult for the media to avoid reporting on Kerry's lack of backbone if he becomes President. The media is already setting up for this.....

But Bush, unlike Kerry, has the courage of his convictions. He can take a strong stand and not run away from it when the political winds shift. On the big issues, the crucial issues, he is a decisive man who means what he says -- and isn't afraid to say it even when his listeners disagree.

For a nation going to the polls in wartime, no issue matters more than character. Kerry has much to recommend him, and Bush's flaws are many. But Bush has the character and backbone of a leader. And Kerry doesn't.