Imagine a TV Show where the host challenged you, the final contestant with the following situation: "For the top prize of $50,000, we have placed a liberal beyond the curtain and you need to tell us the following: 1. Do they support Abortion? 2. Do they attend church less than once per week? and finally: 3. Do they support gay marriage? If you said: Yes to all three you would probably be wrong. I say that because while th...
Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee, is a Republican from Pennsylvania where he has served as a conservative representative for over 20 years. Specter is generally considered to be fiscally conservative and has fought against government expenditure for such programs as healthcare for many years. Democrats are said to see him as less moderate than many in the Senate but someone who can be reasoned with on matters of substance. But Specter has "pro-choice" stamped on his...
The 2004 Election has been the most emotional in my lifetime, perhaps in history besides Lincoln-Douglas in 1860. (Of course, a bit of a war broke out over that one.) However, now that the election is over, the politicians and candidates have called for reconcilliation and healing of the rift between right and left. Before you shout me down telling me to "shut up" (thank you Mr. O'Reilly) consider a few things you are doing by the efforts on both sides to make our country totally contenti...
The United States of America has always been about the concepts of freedom and responsibility. It was founded on those principles 225 years ago when a group of mostly rich, mostly well-educated people got together and decided that representation in a government was more important than loyalty to the King of England and freedom to achieve was more important than supporting decisions of a government that didn't have your interests at heart. A poll taken among the new citizens of the united co...
Early this Spring, while the snow was still on the ground in New Hampshire a group of my friends was sitting around drinking coffee after church on Sunday morning discussing the primaries and what we saw as the 3 frontrunners for the Democratic nomination for President. The group thought Howard Dean was the strongest candidate because he had been most vocal against the Iraq War (which we all had supported) and was an outsider in Washington (like Bill Clinton). Most of us scoffed at the time...
Someone wrote in a thread recently that everything "seemed" to be dependent on money these days. Certainly if you look at the three spheres of our lifetime activities (Economic, Political, and Social) there seems to be a heavy reliance of concern surrounding the Economic sphere than the other 2. We will vote in a few weeks and more than a few will vote for the candidate who best expresses their economic concerns. Healthcare, jobs, prescription drugs, the deficit are just a "few" of the iss...
BUSH CAMPAIGN OFFICIAL RESIGNS President Bush's New England campaign chairman stepped down Friday after the Democrats accused him of taking part in the jamming of their telephone lines in New Hampshire on Election Day 2002. "The Democrats' allegations against me are without merit," the official, James Tobin, said in a statement. "But to avoid any harm to the campaign from their underhanded tactics, I elected earlier this week to step down from my voluntary position with the campaign." Last s...
"I think the price is above what's justified by the fundamentals of the marketplace," John Snow said. "It's out of line with the fundamentals, and there will be a movement back toward the fundamentals, which means a lower price." John Snow, Secretary of the Treasury, is George Bush's point man on the economy who seems to think (noting the quote above) that oil is overvalued relative to the supply and demand in the worldwide economic system. The oil market this morning reacted to this ...
The link to this article will take you to a PDF file. Link A month ago the projections for the deficit and spending came out of an independent research group that watches trends in the economy and then looks out for several months to see what the economy will do. The results were shocking because the main impetus for the economy has been consumer spending which came in flat last month and real estate and refinancing which is cooling off after a 3 year upswing. As a money manager i...
The first debate was very interesting to watch but there was something that I saw the first time that took several days of pondering to understand. Why was Bush so fidgetty, perhaps squirmy is the word in the first 22 minutes? What was going on that made him so out of touch with what he was supposed to be doing (i.e. grabbing the initiative) that allowed Kerry to beat him so soundly? Now we know from 9/11 that Mr. Bush is not one to get overly emotional about crisis situations. We saw h...
There is so much information coming out of Iraq that Americans are becoming bored with the daily stats on how many bombs blew up and how many casualties and deaths occured. We are constantly amazed by the neocons marching men like Allawi in front of the camera and Congress to speak words written by a Bush speechwriter reassuring us that things are getting better. We have the protestations of Donald Rumsfeld who says elections aren't perfect so getting 50 to 80% of the people involved in the...
My wife and I were talking with some friends this weekend and the discussion turned to the election. The other couple, who are good people and whom we care greatly about astonished us by saying that they believe that if John Kerry is elected that the Bible will be banned from public places. It took me a moment or two to "process" this as it was so extreme a statement I knew they couldn't have made it up themselves but had to be a "talking point" from some conservative radio or tv program th...
Another day brings still another set of reports from across the political spectrum, including FOX news this morning on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. More deaths (American servicemen numbering now into the thousands, the Iraqi death toll reported to be over 30,000) and reports of beheadings and hostages taken. A Canadian Report last night (CBC) said that less than 15% of Iraq is under control of either the Americans or the Iraqi interim government and that fighting was too widespread ...
Politics is very much the "art of the debateable." Every one is entitled to an opinion and the way we settle the conflict over viewpoints is an election (coming right up, one long election night!). But before you take the conservatives at their word over all the wonderful things we are saying we do in Iraq, I have a website you should visit. Link is a site run by soldiers, featuring stories from soldiers predominantly now returned from Iraq. The reason you should hear "their storie...
It has been my contention for sometime now that the news media (both old and new) has lost touch with reality in terms of how it portrays the news as "90% spin and 10% questionable reporting" giving Americans and the world a distorted picture that is neither "fair or balanced." The upcoming debate on foreign policy (September 30th) may well be a spotlight event for the distortion that so plagues what we have to base the most important decision many people make every 4 years. So, without...