August 11, 2004
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Kerry’s not Bush
The Onion has a great article summing up The Kerry Campaign. Although, I must take issue with one claim:
“During his term in office, George Bush has relentlessly continued to be president”
Actually, hasn’t George II taken an unprecedented number of days of vacation from being president?
Yes, corporate master. No, corporate master. As you wish, corporate master.You can be banned admission to Olympic events this year if you have any food or drink from someone who didn’t sponsor the games.
Actually, it isn’t quite that bad. You just can’t have the logos. If you remove the labels, you’ll be fine. No Pepsi bags or hats either. I’m not a bit Olympic fan, but it seems like the oligopolies keep creeping (or leaping) forward.
FloridatedThis post on Greg Palast’s web site alleges that Choice Point (the company that botched the felony list in Florida for the 2000 election) has citizen/voter files for a number of other nations – Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela.
For those who don’t know, President Chavez of Venezuela is very unpopular with our current administration. Our government has been involved with numerous attempts to get Chavez out of office including supporting a coup a year or two ago and pushing the upcoming recall vote.
If, during that recall vote, the lists of voter files which are also in the hands of our administration, fall into the hands of Chavez’s opposition, Palast alleges that Venezuela could end up being “Floridated”.
More deceitIf Kerry wants to win back the blue collar vote, they should stick to the facts rather than mislead. Fact Check digs further into Kerry camp claims that the Bush administration is responsible for manufacturing job losses. It is undeniable that we are loosing these jobs, but the Bush administration didn’t start it, and Kerry’s proposals won’t fix it. Read it here. Every time I feel I am being manipulated or misled, I take a step further from the guilty parties.
I do have something of a pet hypothesis that the dot.com crash of late 2000/early 2001 was due in part to Bush being elected: I think tech investors panicked at the idea of Bush getting into office, and that panic precipitated the crash. After all, investing, stocks, and speculation are highly effected by emotion and confidence. It would be interesting to know if there is anything to this idea.
Where do we go from here?On the one hand, we want the Iraqi people to have sovereignty and get our troops out of there as soon as possible. On the other hand, it isn’t very cool that we’re providing support for people setting up torture chambers. It doesn’t seem like we have given the Iraqi people all that great of a government.
For those who would have us pull all troops from Iraq now: What would this do to Iraq? It seems like the people we’d be leaving in power (who were not democratically elected) have the potential to be very abusive of their people.
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