According to the people at Gun Owners of America, the Iraqi interim constitution is flawed because it omits the right to keep and bear arms.
Look, I’m more pro-Second Amendment than many of my liberal colleagues, but a bad idea is a bad idea. And freedom to have guns in Iraq is a bad idea.
Yes, the report is in WorldNetDaily, but I believe it anyway.
You can go to the Bush-Cheney site here and create your own custom color Bush-Cheney poster.
They even let you insert your own "custom text" into the poster. Well, not really. I wasn’t able to insert MY "custom text" (heh heh heh).
Play around with it and you’ll see what I mean.
For a while, Kerry was tagged as being in the pocket of "special interests". Then it all died down. Good thing, too, because . . .
The Center for Responsive Politics reports that "nearly half of Kerry’s biggest financial supporters contributed more money to Bush than to Kerry himself through Jan. 30 of this year . . . In all, nine of Kerry’s top 20 donors favor Bush with their contributions." Read all about it here.
This article in Foreign Affairs begins:
President George W. Bush has singled out terrorist nuclear attacks on the United States as the defining threat the nation will face in the foreseeable future. In addressing this specter, he has asserted that Americans’ "highest priority is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction." So far, however, his words have not been matched by deeds. The Bush administration has yet to develop a coherent strategy for combating the threat of nuclear terror.
The article sets forth "a new doctrine of ‘Three No’s’: no loose nukes, no new nascent nukes, and no new nuclear states", all of which the Bush administration’s efforts are (according to its author) far from what they could be. Despite the opening paragraphs, it’s not a slam-Bush piece, and I don’t present it as such. Just something to mull over, and perhaps lose sleep over.
This is still premature and third-hand, but according to Josh Marshall, the President today blamed the economic downturn during the run-up to the war on . . . you guessed it . . . the media. In other words, if that damned media hadn’t reported on Enron, Worldcom, and the uncertainties about going to war, then everything would be fine!
The Bush line — which we have heard often — is that we learned on 9/11 how dangerous the world is. And that was why there was a marked shift in Bush’s foreign policy after 9/11.
It holds water, except for one problem: David Letterman.
In October 2000, presidential candidate George Bush appeared on Lettermen, where they had (in parts) a surprisingly serious discussion. Here’s one account:
So Letterman then asked Bush about the terrorist murder of 17 U.S. sailors in Yemen. Seriously.
"If I find out who it was, they’d pay a serious price," Bush said of the bombing. "I mean a serious price."
"Now, what does that mean?" Letterman asked, a follow-up Bush doesn’t often get when he’s asked about such bravado.
"That means they’re not going to like what happened to them," Bush said, and the crowd went wild.
"Now are you talking about retaliation or due process of law?" Letterman asked.
"Heh-heh," Bush said. "I’m talking about gettin’ the facts and lettin’ them know we don’t appreciate it and there’s a serious consequence … And I’ll decide what that consequence is."
Macho man, huh? But, in all fairness, a fitting response.
Eventually we learned . . . before Bush was even sworn in . . . that the Cole bombing was the dirty work of Osama bin Laden. But, alas, there was no "serious consequence" until after 9/11.
I raise this so that readers will keep in mind — that when Bush says that "9/11 changed things" (and he will say it), he’s blowing smoke. If Bush on the Letterman show is to be believed, he was prepared to act as soon as the facts were in. And the facts were in by the time he was "elected". And tough-talking Bush didn’t act.
CNN is reporting this:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might be preparing to move from Pakistan to Afghanistan, according to sources with access to the latest U.S. intelligence.
U.S. intelligence found signs of a network of al Qaeda couriers and safe houses on the Afghan side of the border, sources said. Such a network could be a sign bin Laden might be planning to flee Pakistan.
We (apparently) know where he is, we (apparently) know where he is going to . . . no disrespect to our fighting forces, or even President Bush, but I can’t believe we can’t get this guy.
Yes, it’s waaaay too early. Yes, much can change. But the latest polls show that Bush has the uphill battle, as opposed to Kerry — 57 percent want a change from Bush. The money paragraph from MSNBC:
Kerry’s advantage on many key issues was large. The Democrat currently has double-digit advantages over the president as the person best able to handle the economy (Kerry leads Bush by 12 percentage points), Social Security (16 points), education (12 points), the budget deficit (15 points) and health care (20 points). On only one major issue is Bush preferred to Kerry: the war on terrorism, where the president has a 21-point advantage.
Well that explains why Bush (and his supporters) don’t want to talk about anything but the war on terrorism.
Update: And how did I miss this, from Gallup?!? — holy crap!!:
. . . Bush is barely ahead in the states he won four years ago by more than five percentage points (which Gallup calls "red" states). He leads Kerry by just 50% to 47%. In the "blue" states, which former Vice President Al Gore won by margins of more than five percentage points, Kerry leads Bush by a substantial margin, 55% to 42%. In "purple" states — where the margin of victory for either candidate in 2000 was five percentage points or less — Kerry also leads by a substantial margin, 55% to 39%.
Heh.
According to today’s Newsday:
WASHINGTON — The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer’s name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.
Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman’s press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.
What juicy clues! What questions this raises!
Who was in the "White House Iraq Group" (Josh Marshall found out: Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
Who was the "former president" and why are his birthday party attendees relevant?
What’s the common thread between those events and the press secretary’s statement in Nigeria??
I’ll go out on a limb — it was Mary Matalin. She was part of the Iraqi Group, it’s quite likely she attended Bush 41’s birthday party, she has many media contacts (including, undoubtedly, Novak), and she left the White House shortly after the Plame thing happened.
I recently reported about the new Bush ads here.
Now the AP is reporting:
Relatives of victims killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks have criticised George W Bush for using images from the tragedy in his campaign advertisements.
Some of the families have complained that the images exploit those killed in the attacks and are in poor taste.
"It makes me sick", one woman, who lost her brother in the attacks, told AP.
Didn’t see that coming?
What will it take for people — of both sides — to stop with the Hitler comparisons???
Now comes Rep. Tom Cole (R) saying that a "vote against the re-election of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two".
Oh, and Osama, too.
The press report only quotes Cole verbatim on the Osama quote, but that’s beside the point. This kind of hyperbole, whether in MoveOn.Org ads or from Corinne Brown, is ridiculous.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is, in my view, Hitler.
A former professor of Bush writes:
At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was "socialism."
So is this true? Does Bush think poor people are lazy? I think we should open up Bush’s school records to find out. Get his essays, homework, etc., and make them public. (Personally, I doubt the veracity of this story — because I doubt that Bush attended classes and/or participated in them very much).
The Washington Post is reporting that Tuesday (March 2), Bush had "an unusual 80-minute session in the Oval Office with five network correspondents who agreed that his comments would not be directly quoted or attributed to him."
Unusual indeed. First of all, Bush was willing to devote a full 20 minutes more to chewing the fat with these reporters than to the committee investigating 9/11. Where are Bush’s priorities?
Secondly, why meet with reporters and ask them to promise not to attribute quotes directly to him? I guess it is an attempt to build camaraderie with the press, something he enjoyed during the 2000 campaign.
But for my money – the President — any President — cannot and should be able to talk to the press on "deep background". He’s the President — the American people have an interest in what he says and does — and the press has a responsibility to report it. The press should simply have rejected the offer and walked out.
Maybe Bush will only participate in debates as long as everyone excepts his disclaimer that we shouldn’t hold him to anything he says.
Looks like David Kay is getting more and more peeved with the administration.
David Kay, the man who led the CIA’s postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration’s reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.
As Calpundit sez, perhaps Kay will be doing commercials for Kerry soon.
Without comment, this:
Disney Removes Statue Inspired By Janet Jackson
ORLANDO, Fla. — The Walt Disney Co. has quietly shelved a life-size statue of Mickey Mouse inspired by singer Janet Jackson, who was roundly criticized for a risque Super Bowl halftime performance.
The 6-foot, 700-pound statue was one of 75 unveiled at Walt Disney World in Orlando last fall to celebrate the 75th birthday of Mickey Mouse (Photos from 75th celebration). The statues were inspired by celebrities such as tennis star Andre Agassi, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and comedian Ellen DeGeneres.
The Jackson statue used a tight black outfit Jackson wore in 1990 after the release of her album, Rhythm Nation 1814. It was replaced by a spare statue designed by Luis Fernandez, an in-house Disney artist.