Free Republic

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you the question about—this is going to cause some trouble with people—but as an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the War, insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today? CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is...

Special Olympics is outraged and have publicly issued the following statement: STATEMENT IN REGARDS TO DEROGATORY PORTRAYAL OF SPECIAL OLYMPICS ATHLETES IN POLITICAL FLYER From the office of Timothy P. Shriver Chairman and CEO, Special Olympics We at Special Olympics are astounded and appalled by a political flyer being distributed in Tennessee, showing the head of President Bush superimposed on the body of a Special Olympics athlete, saying, "Even if you win, you're still retarded." We see this communication as an egregious, gratuitous insult to our almost 2 million athletes in over 150 countries around the world and a stunning...

Here's a summary of today's polls. 'What's wrong with this picture?' Bush/Cheney : Kerry/Edwards RCP Average 10/3 - 10/10: 47.8% 46.0% Bush +1.8 Zogby (1216 LV) 10/8 - 10/10: 44% 47% Kerry +3 ABC/Wash Post (1438 LV) 10/7 - 10/9 51% 46% Bush +5 Time (886 LV w/leaners) 10/6 - 10/7 46% 45% Bush +1 GW/Battleground (1250 LV) 10/3 - 10/7 49% 46% Bush +3 Marist (642 LV) 10/4 - 10/5 49% 46% Bush +3 Without Zogby's "poll" Bush is +3

Zogby has been doing a fair amount of polling over the Internet. This mornings poll asks the usual questions for presidential polling and then throws in this gem: "Who would you more likely vote for president - the Tin Man who is all brains and no heart or the Scarecrow who is heart and no brain?" Which candidate is which.

The presidential race is going to Kerra Fowler's head. She's tattooed an anti-Bush message on her shaved head. The Indiana mother of four even offered her bare skull as political ad space on the eBay Internet auction site.

It is unfortunate when people confuse relentlessly negative critical comments as intellectual sophistication. There is this strange fascination with a certain segment of Freepers. They seem to think if they are playing devils advocate ALL the time and making constantly critical comments about their own side, it makes them seem thoughtful and intelligent. Maybe we should have a term for this? Call it "McCainism" A metal defect that requires the victim to constantly critize their own side while NEVER pointing out where the other side blew it. Mccainism does not make you look smart. See REAL intelligence would be to...

vanity

9/21/2004 Freeper post-Followup:Met my first Bush hater … Which was my mother-in-law as reported in my vanity post from Friday of last week. My original entry was meant to honestly seek input but also to purge my sudden confusion that I may function during her weekend long visit without ending up angry and full of hate. SHE hates Bush, or so she asserted that Friday when I brought her home from the airport. It had started as a normal conversation what with the upcoming presidential elections and the many Americans now paying full attention. Suddenly MIL launched into an invective...

Where's the dignity? The Republican National Convention is over, and George W. Bush's "leadership" was showcased -- leadership resulting in 962 U.S. service members killed and 6,690 wounded in an unnecessary and counterproductive war that is creating jihadists faster than we can capture or kill them at a cost of $1 billion a week. One billion dollars a week could be spent on supporting homeland security or domestic programs. Under Bush, the number of Americans living in poverty increased in 2003 for the third straight year and those without health coverage rose an additional million people to 15.4 percent of...

LONDON (AFP) - Jim Rose is famous among connoisseurs of the bizarre as ring-master of the world's more extreme freak shows. Lately, however, he's been wondering if he hasn't been upstaged by George W. Bush. Disgusted by the way his native United States is going, the Las Vegas-based performance artist and professional poker player has gone into artistic exile in Europe -- bringing his latest frontal assault on good taste with him. "The Jim Rose Dubya World Circus of Freaks," which opens Tuesday in Bristol, includes among its many eye-popping acts Big Mak, a contortionist who tips the scales at...

The late, great columnist Murray Kempton said editorial writers were like partisan fighters who come down out of the hills after the battle and shoot the wounded. There is some truth to that, but I have a kinder, gentler simile in mind. J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, used to ask children to sit with him in his box during performances of his famous play. After the curtain came down one night Barrie turned to the little boy he had invited and asked: "So what part did you like best?" The little boy said, "The part I liked best...

Halifax man accused of making death threats against President George W. Bush Fri Sep 10, 6:17 PM ET HALIFAX (CP) - A man in Halifax has been charged with making death threats against U.S. President George W. Bush (news - web sites) over the Internet. Timothy George Andrew, 28, has been remanded for a psychiatric assessment and is due back in court next week, the ATV news network reported Friday. Threats allegedly found on an Internet message board included: "Death to the president of the U.S.A. and destruction to that nation's Babylon" as well as "The president of the U.S.A....

New York voters. Your vote means nothing, since Kerry is so far ahead. I plan to WRITE IN Rudy. Not that he will win, of course, but I'm hoping that he gets enough write in votes to give him a boost for 2008. Think about it. Makes sense.

GEORGE W Bush snorted cocaine at Camp David, a new book claims. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14609301&method=full&siteid=50143&headline=bush--took-cocaine-at-camp-david--name_page.html His wife Laura also allegedly tried cannabis in her youth. Author Kitty Kelley says in her biography The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, that the US President first used coke at university in the mid-1960s.

Regime-shaking billionaire George Soros might sway the US electorate this fall - or not. Either way, the big-spending Bush blaster highlights the backdoor power of wealthy donors. One of the first jobs he found when he arrived in London from Budapest in 1947, practically penniless and speaking little English, was as a traveling salesman. The young George Soros would try to sell little knickknacks to tobacconists - unsuccessfully, as he now recalls. Often, he couldn't even find parking. His girlfriend left him because he seemed to have no future. He missed his parents. It rained incessantly. Then America beckoned. It...

Speaking of the Opera, I guess if you want Music Director Donald Runnicles to stick around, you'd better vote for John Kerry in November. The Scottish maestro, in Salzburg to conduct Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt," told an interviewer from the Austrian paper Der Standard that the outcome of the presidential election could determine whether he stays in the United States: "I would really have to think about whether I could stay there [the United States] if Bush wins a second time," he said. "The American people can make a mistake once, but if they re-elect him, then they actually want...

The big story out of Florida over the weekend was the tragic devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. But there's another story from Florida that deserves our attention. State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November. The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the...

Books keep pouring off the presses on the subject of why George W. Bush should not be re-elected. I got four in my mailbox recently. Bush might be the biggest boon to book publishing since Harry Potter. The most serious of the four books is The Bubble of American Supremacy, by George Soros. The most superficial is Bush Must Go, by TV personality Bill Press. The most left-wing is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. It is also the most tedious. My God, but progressive writers do need a sense of...

YUCCA MOUNTAIN UPDATE Scientists and the U.S. Court of Appeals reject plan, but Bush Administration says: We're confident in our science and we're moving forward." (Washington Post, 7/10/04) George Bush Is Making Yucca Mountain the Nation's Nuclear Dumping Ground FACT: 77,000 tons of radioactive waste will be dumped at Yucca Mountain over the next 24 years. That's one shipment every four hours, 365 days a year, for the next 24 years. FACT: A study by the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects estimates as many as 129 accidents as a result of the shipping of nuclear waste. Transportation routes put millions...

The Iraq War did not Force Gadaffi's HandThe Financial Times, March 9, 2004Martin S. Indyk, Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy Martin S. Indyk Embarrassed by the failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush is trying to find another WMD-related justification for his pre-emptive war on Iraq. Bush administration spokesmen have been quick to portray Libya's December decision to abandon WMD programmes as the direct result of the US invasion of Iraq or, as Mr. Bush himself put it in his State of the Union address: "Nine months of intense negotiations succeeded with...