bush

Here’s Fred today:

"It really doesn't matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost," Thompson said on his radio show today.  "I say this because of one sad and simple fact. The president does not have the will and determination to do what's necessary to win it. His heart's not in it, and never has been. The Taliban knows it. Al Qaeda knows it. Our allies know it. And the American people know it.

"Our enemies are now emboldened and our friends are discouraged. We cannot prevail if the American people are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary for an extended effort. The case has not been made to them to justify this effort. The case can only be made by the president. This president is unable or unwilling to make that case," Thompson said.

I believe this news is a perfect example of my “sliding scale” of political parties I discussed in my previous post. A lot will try and claim that Scozzafava made this decision out of malice against people like Palin, but I believe it isn’t that simple.

Scozzafava was more to the right on fiscal issues, while being more to the left on social issues. For example, Scozzafava supported the Bush tax cuts, yet supported gay marriage and reproductive rights. By having two other candidates from opposite sides of the political spectrum, she was able to chose which candidate best represented her views. In this case that pushed her to the left with Bill Owens.

Now this doesn’t make the race a certainty for Owens – its still anyone's game. What it does do is give him a little boost, but this close to Election Day makes it really hard to capitalize off of it.

And even if you don’t agree with my political theory here, one thing is for certain – this is like cocaine to political junkies. We generally don’t see this kind of action in normal elections, but these special elections always open us up to bigger side shows.

The right is up in arms (no pun intended) over President Obama’s plan to scrap the Bush missile defense system. He hasn’t totally given up on it, instead working towards making a more mobile and cost effective system. The right just doesn’t like that.

The main idea of this missile defense system has been for protection of Europe from Iranian missiles, with a little added protection for the U.S. maybe.

So why is it the right is all for spending billions to defend Europe, yet they don’t want to spend a dime to defend U.S. citizens from a much more threatening killer – disease and illness? When you think about it along these terms, you quickly realize seriously misplaced priorities of the right.

I’m sorry but Obama’s address to school children next week is nothing out of the ordinary. Some are trying to dismiss their concerns as “he might be too political”. Perhaps these people should have focused on their own education and a little bit of history in our nation:

On November 14, 1988, Reagan addressed and took questions from students from four area middle schools in the Old Executive Office Building. According to press secretary Marvin Fitzwater, the speech was broadcast live and rebroadcast by C-Span, and Instructional Television Network fed the program “t o schools nationwide on three different days.” Much of Reagan’s speech that day covered the American “vision of self-government” and the need “to keep faith with the unfinished vision of the greatness and wonder of America” but in the middle of the speech, the president went off on a tangent about the importance of low taxes:

Yes the very white Ronald Reagan was allowed to preach tax cuts to our children and not one of these idiots complained. And he wasn’t the only one. Bush 41 also had an address to the students. Yes there is a double standard. Now why is that? Either its because of the President’s party affiliation or his skin color. Why don’t you explain to your children why.

I had noticed that Rasmussen seemed to change their way they track presidential approvals once Obama took office.

Rasmussen had always had a variable approval rating system. They ask if you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove of the President’s performance. On the surface that doesn’t seem to bad, but during Bush’s term they always combined both approval numbers and disapproval numbers and used that. I remember during Katrina people making a deal over Bush having a 46% approval from Rasmussen, but a vast majority of that number came from the “somewhat approve” category – something people trend more to state.

Now during Obama’s presidency they have changed it. Instead they take the different between strongly approve and strongly disapprove and that is their new “presidential index”. Let’s take today’s numbers:

Obama is given a –12 approval index. That sounds really bad, but if this was done under Bush’s term then Rasmussen would be saying Bush has a 48% approval rating. The later sounds much better.

Sure Obama’s numbers are in trouble right now, but that’s to be expected. People seem out to compare this to the same point in Bush’s presidency. Well at this point in Bush’s first term he was on vacation, something he did quiet a bit. It’s much safer for a President to not do anything, than one being active and trying to fix all the problems he was left with.

This whole birther movement is just plain craziness. I equate them with the “truthers” who constantly try to say 9/11 was some big Dr. Evil style plot put together by Bush and Co. There is one big difference though. The truthers never received the support of big names in either political party. The birthers seems to have more and more Republicans signing on, and now that includes the former vice-President’s daughter.

Conservatives are out with their talking points on Sonia Sotomayor and they are priceless. I guess they couldn’t find anything to go after her on, so they decided they would question her intellect.

So they want to compare Sotomayor to Harriet Miers. How many courts did Miers serve on when Bush nominated her? Oh yeah – none. Sotomayor has been serving for years, was nominated by Clinton and papa Bush and been confirmed by the Senate twice.

This is like comparing a doctor to a first aid person. Or how about comparing the fry cook at McDonalds to Emerald Lagossi? That is how ridiculous this neo-con attack it.

From the HuffPo:

In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

Here’s the video of this idiot saying idiotic things in a dangerous place during a dangerous war:

Remember the thing when Bush said “we are going to conduct a crusade”? Most people brushed it off as some silly bushism. Well guess what? It wasn’t…