Approval Ratings: The Public v. McCain
OpenSecrets | Troops Deployed Abroad Give 6:1 to Obama - Capital Eye
August 15, 2008During World War II, soldiers crouching in foxholes penned letters assuring their sweethearts that they’d be home soon. Now, between firefights in the Iraqi desert, some infantrymen have been sending a different kind of mail stateside: two or three hundred dollars — or whatever they can spare — towards a presidential election that could very well determine just how soon they come home.
According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain’s haul.
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OpenSecrets | Troops Deployed Abroad Give 6:1 to Obama - Capital Eye
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Wichita’s Congressional Hope: Sen. Donald Bett’s
May 14, 2008Kansas State Sen. Donald Betts is running for U.S. Congress. At age 30, he’s already served in the Kansas legislature for six years. His story is inspiring and shows the power of perseverance.
Wichita’s Congressional Hope | Video | Think MTV
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Tags: bettsfor congress, senator donald betts, kansas politics
More Than 43,000 Unfit Troops Deployed
May 8, 2008Since 2003, tens of thousands of troops have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan even though they were ruled medically unfit for combat, Pentagon records show. “It is a consequence of the consistent churning of our troops,” says the president of a veterans group. “They are repeatedly exposed to high-intensity combat with insufficient time at home to rest and heal before redeploying.”
Top Headlines, Breaking News, U.S., World, Politics, Entertainment and Sports News - AOL News
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Democrat blames weak economy on Iraq war
April 12, 2008
WASHINGTON - The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq “is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it,” a Democratic congressman said Saturday.
Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky linked the costly, unpopular war with the growing economic troubles — some say recession — in this country.
Yarmuth said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address that the testimony this week of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Iraq war served as reminder of the billions of dollars being poured into Iraq as the U.S. economy struggles.
Democrat blames weak economy on Iraq war - Yahoo! News
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Haven’t the tornado victims suffered enough?
April 11, 2008
Bush to give Greensburg commencement address
WICHITA, Kansas, April 10, 2008 – President will give the commencement
President Bush will give his speech May 4th.
The event has been in the works for more than a month.
Planners are expecting about 800 people to watch the 18 students graduate.
The commencement was moved from May 10th to May 4th because President Bush’s daughter Jenna is getting married that day. Coincidentally, May 4th is the one year anniversary of the tornado that demolished the town.
400 picket Westboro Baptist church
March 31, 2008TOPEKA, Kan. - Instead of picketing by members of Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, around 400 people targeted the church in a Sunday protest of their own.
Organizers said the event drew marchers touting messages of compassion and tolerance for homosexuals. The church is known for its anti-gay message and picketing of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Homosexual, heterosexual and transgender pickets hugged, danced and cheered as passers-by honked their support for the protest at Gage Park in Topeka.
Organizer Chris Love of Leavenworth said he got the idea for the march after Westboro members picketed actor Heath Ledger’s memorial service.
Kansas.com | 03/31/2008 | 400 picket Westboro Baptist church
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Million Fag March - a photoset on Flickr
March 31, 2008
418 attended this peaceful protest of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS on March 30, 2008.
Million Fag March - a photoset on Flickr
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Kucinich to Investigate 9/11 Insider Trading
February 22, 2008Kucinich to Investigate 9/11 Insider Trading
Aaron Dykes
JonesReport.com
February 20, 2008
Congressman Dennis Kucinich revealed that he is initiating an investigation of the insider trading that took place leading up to 9/11, particularly in regards to put options placed on American Airlines and United Airlines stock.
Kucinich said that he had personal questions about the implications insider trading had.
“I’ve indicated a long-standing interest in gathering information and trying to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with respect to all the stock activity that took place preceding 9/11.” Kucinich said.
Kucinich said it was the bizarre record-level put options that caught his attention initially. The odd trades heavily indicate prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks and have raised a number of questions that Kucinich hopes to probe.
“First of all, I’m not afraid to ask questions about 9/11,” Kucinich told the Alex Jones Show.
“From my own personal standpoint, I’ve had long-standing questions about why this volume, why those airlines, why that time, who made the buys, why did they buy them, who told them to make the buys, who was involved? There are questions there that need to be answered as part of an effort to get to the truth,” Kucinich said.
continued http://www.infowars.com/?p=362
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Tags: 9/1, kucinich, insider trading
Most vet suicides among Guard, Reserve troops
February 13, 2008
Most vet suicides among Guard, Reserve troops - Mental health- msnbc.com
WASHINGTON - More than half of all veterans who took their own lives after returning from Iraq or Afghanistan were members of the National Guard or Reserves, according to new government data that prompted activists on Tuesday to call for a closer examination of the problem.
A Department of Veterans Affairs analysis of ongoing research of deaths among veterans of both wars — obtained by The Associated Press — found that Guard or Reserve members accounted for 53 percent of the veteran suicides from 2001, when the war in Afghanistan began, through the end of 2005.
Overhaul set for guest-worker plan
February 6, 2008WASHINGTON — The Bush administration today plans to announce the most significant overhaul in two decades of the nation’s agricultural guest worker program, in a bid to dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.
The revised regulations, many months in the works, would make it easier for growers to bring foreign workers to the United States and could alleviate the critical farmworker shortage largely caused by the U.S. crackdown on illegal border crossings.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immig6feb06,1,2077970.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
Will Congress Vote “Yes” to More Bush Spying?
February 6, 2008This week Americans face a profound choice — and it has nothing to do with the presidential election.
The Senate is about to vote on legislation, favored by President Bush, to strip American courts of their authority to supervise massive government surveillance. The Senate intelligence bill sidelines the U.S. intelligence court, established by a 1978 law, and grants Bush new spying powers. Under the proposal, the Administration merely needs to “certify” it will not abuse them.
Of course, Bush already has abused his spying powers. He conceded in 2005 that the Administration conducted massive surveillance without the warrants required by law. A judge resigned in protest; Bush’s former attorney general, his deputy attorney general and the FBI director also threatened to resign; and one federal court found the warrantless spying illegal.
Loose Change 2nd Edition
February 6, 2008This is also about an hour and a half long.. Worth the watch..
One Bush Left Behind
February 6, 2008by Greg Palast
Here’s your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?
-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.
-$20 won’t cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say, ‘crack vials,’ they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, “I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them.”
Of course, there’s an effective alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which won’t cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there’s an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
Okay.. couldn’t pass this one up
February 6, 2008
Bush’s Mammoth Defense Budget is Another Bridge to Nowhere
February 6, 2008As the poor and middle-class continue to bear the brunt of these hard economic times, struggling to pay for housing, food, heating and health care, the Pentagon today announced its request of $515.4 billion for its 2009 budget. (The Bush budget later revealed a correction — the request is actually $518.3 billion — the Pentagon “forgot” $2.9 billion of “permanent appropriations.”)
According to the New York Times, this seven percent increase would make annual military spending, when adjusted for inflation, its highest level since World War II. Further, the budget request doesn’t even include war funding, nuclear weapons programs, taking care of returning veterans, or covering the interest on defense spending’s share of the debt. The Bush Administration has already increased “baseline military spending” by 30 percent since taking office, and the $70 billion Iraq supplemental alone was more than China’s entire defense budget.
White House: Bush Authorized Waterboarding
February 6, 2008The day after CIA Director Michael Hayden first confirmed that U.S. intelligence officials waterboarded three suspected terrorists between 2002 and 2003, The White House has confirmed that President Bush authorized Hayden to allow the technique.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto explained, “This program and the techniques used in it were determined lawful through a process,” with the legality “dependent on the circumstances.” Senate Democrats have demanded a government investigation.
Hayden said that these interrogations yielded a quarter of US intelligence on al-Queda from 2002-2006. Fratto said for future waterboardings, the CIA director would discuss legality with the Attorney General, present the president with their plan.
