Police, fire departments see shortages across USA

I know, I know. This article makes you feel a lot safer, doesn't it. Ya voted for the bastard because ya felt "safe" with him.

Do ya feel safer yet??

USATODAY.com - Police, fire departments see shortages across USA: "Staffing problems are being felt coast to coast. New York City, with 23,000 police officers, has lost 1,000 a year for the past three years. Minneapolis cut 38 positions from its police force last year. The Oregon State Police laid off 129 troopers from its 600-member force. 'It's almost completely budget-driven,' says Gene Voegtlin of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
There also are staffing problems at 911 emergency centers. National figures are not available for 911 call-takers and dispatchers, sometimes called the first of the first responders.
But Steve Souder, director of the Montgomery County, Md., 911 Emergency Communications Center, says staff shortages are at a crisis point nationwide. In his county, 25% of 911 jobs turn over each year as employees burn out from the stress and hectic schedule and take better-paying jobs with private companies."

Dude has some big ones...

He should say this about the good ol' USofA....

This administration has some cajones talking about voter fraud, don't they? Wonder if the GAO will find out anything about the fraud in this country in November? Now before you starting thinking that I think the election could be overturned, I don't. But I do think there was some sneakiness going on. Too many connections.

Lemme ask you, if the CEO of Diebold would have promised to deliver Ohio to Kerry, do you think there'd be a congressional investigation now? Me, too.

CNN.com - Bush: World watching Ukraine 'very carefully' - Nov 26, 2004: "'There's just a lot of allegations of vote fraud that place their elections, the validity of their elections, in doubt,' Bush said. "

washingtonpost.com: Bush Plans Tax Code Overhaul

So, hitting the working class where it hurst most, I suppose. Did Bush stump on this grand plan this year? Did he say, "if you elect me again, I'll eliminate your state tax deduction and I will eliminate the tax deduction for small businesses."

Nope. Kerry, on the other hand, DID say that he would INCREASE the tax deduction for small business owners.

washingtonpost.com: Bush Plans Tax Code Overhaul: "The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral. To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said. "

Terror Financing Fines Fall After 9/11

Feel safter yet?

ABC News: Terror Financing Fines Fall After 9/11: "Nov. 7, 2004 - Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of federal records shows.
The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records."

Don't worry...God's in charge

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.3799::

108th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. R. 3799

To limit the jurisdiction of Federal courts in certain cases and promote federalism.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
February 11, 2004

Mr. ADERHOLT (for himself and Mr. PENCE) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

Sec. 1260. Matters not reviewable

`Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.'.

2/11/2004:Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
4/26/2004:Referred to the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. 9/13/2004:Subcommittee Hearings Held.

Weapons: U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles

Feeling safer yet?

The New York Times > Washington > Weapons: U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles: "American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said. "

Salon.com News | The TV ad that put Bush over the top

I feel vindicated. In the fourth paragraph of this entry I said exactly this.

Emotionalism vs. logic. The democrats need to get this message. They need to or it's over for them.

Salon.com News The TV ad that put Bush over the top: "At nearly the same time that 'Ashley's Story' was released, Democrats began airing their own ad featuring a 9/11 next of kin. New Jersey 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser, speaking into the camera, talked about Bush's opposition to the 9/11 commission. That ad appealed to voters' logic about the terrorist attacks, while 'Ashley's Story' appealed to their emotions. 'Kerry tried to reason with voters, while the Bush campaign understood this was a campaign about emotion,' says Brown University's West. " (emphasis is mine)

God Help America

What we need in THIS country is someone to say this.

Mirror.co.uk - Brian Reade

THEY say that in life you get what you deserve. Well, today America has deservedly got a lawless cowboy to lead them further into carnage and isolation and the unreserved contempt of most of the rest of the world.
...
A self-serving, dim-witted, draft-dodging, gung-ho little rich boy, whose idea of courage is to yell: "I feel good," as he unleashes an awesome fury which slaughters 100,000 innocents for no other reason than greed and vanity.
...
Instead America chose a man without morals or vision. An economic incompetent who inherited a $2billion surplus from Clinton, gave it in tax cuts to the rich and turned the US into the world's largest debtor nation.
...
A RADICAL Christian fanatic who decided the world was made up of the forces of good and evil, who invented a war on terror, and thus as author of it, believed he had the right to set the rules of engagement.
...
As for the ones who put him in, across the Bible Belt and the South, us outsiders can only feel pity.

Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets.

The self-righteous, gun-totin', military lovin', sister marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land "free and strong".

You probably won't be surprised to learn of would-be Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn who, on Tuesday, promised to ban abortion and execute any doctors who carried them out.

He also told voters that lesbianism is so rampant in the state's schools that girls were being sent to toilets on their own. Not that any principal could be found to back him up.

These are the people who hijack the word patriot and liken compassion to child-molesting. And they are unknowingly bin Laden's chief recruiting officers.

Instead, we get shit like THIS from the democratic party:

Democrats Map Out a Different Strategy

WASHINGTON — Reeling from their party's loss in the presidential election, some key Democratic financiers and strategists say they have learned a clear lesson: Next time around, no Northeasterners need apply.

The blue-state party needs a face from a red state if it is going to expand beyond its base on the two coasts and preserve its hold on the Upper Midwest, where its long-standing appeal to voters has become tenuous, these insiders say.
...
"We have to be very careful about the kind of candidate that we nominate and where that candidate comes from," said Scott Falmlen, executive director of the Democratic Party in North Carolina, where Easley won in a landslide Tuesday despite Kerry's lopsided loss there to President Bush. "This party has got to get in a position where it does not write off an entire section of the country."
...

The republicans didn't abandon their base when they were loosing seats in the congress -- they strengthened it. If this is all the democratic party thinks of me, then I'm builing my bomb shelter, buying my assault weaponry, and stocking up on water and Spam because I will NOT compromise my values to kiss the ass of the red-neck son-of-a-bitch that would just as well see gays executed. Now, I am not stupid enough to think that homosexuals are the democratic base. We are a small fraction. But if my party starts to look to the opposition for a model, where does that leave me? Will the democrats stand up when homosexuality is outlawed? Will the democrats stand up when the arts are no longer funded and galleries shut down because the Christians don't approve? The Christians in Texas have already started working on changing textbooks to read that marriage is defined as between a man and a woman. How long until the Christians want to insert in the textbooks that this is a Christian Nation founded on Christian princples? Will the democrats in office stand up and say something, or will they moderately disagree because they want to appeal to Johnny NASCAR Redneck?

CNN.com - Iraq declares state of emergency - Nov 7, 2004

Martial Law in Iraq. What makes anyone think that, given the right conditions, the Bush admin wouldn't do this here, too?

CNN.com - Iraq declares state of emergency - Nov 7, 2004

Christains are taking over.....

I was going to say "Conservative Chirstians are taking over," but for the time being I'm gonna lump 'em all together. I know there are "liberal" Chirstians in this country but they've done a piss-poor job of making thier voices heard.

Wisconsin district to teach Creationism. Of course, because they are incapable of being honest about thier agenda, they are calling it "intelligent design."

Texas is teaching the definition of marriage as one man, one woman.

Feel safer?

Warren's vote tally walled off by Homeland Security officials

Do you feel "safer"? Good use of our homeland security protections isnt' it? Keeping a fucking vote count unobservable. Welcome to your future.

Warren's vote tally walled off

Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.
...
Warren County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said he had recommended increased security based on information received from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in recent weeks.
...
And despite being told that there would be an area with telephones set up for the media, those who tried to get into the building on Justice Drive were stopped by a county employee who stood guard outside. After journalists challenged the restriction, reporters were allowed into the building's lobby - two floors below the elections office.
...
In the event this story gets removed from the website's database you can find it here

Diebold Stock

Hmmm...from Monday, November 1, 2004, through Friday, November 5, 2004.

FAIR: New York Times Killed "Bush Bulge" Story | BaltimoreChronicle.com

The "media" is NOT looking out for you and it is NOT telling you the truth. Do you care?

FAIR: New York Times Killed "Bush Bulge" Story | BaltimoreChronicle.com: "'The New York Times assigned three editors to this story and had it scheduled to run five days before the election, which would have raised questions about the president's integrity,' said Lindorff. 'But it was killed by top editors at the Times; clearly they were chickening out of taking this on before the election.'

Lindorff says two other major newspapers, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, also decided not to pursue the story, which featured a leading NASA satellite photo imaging scientist's analysis of pictures of the president's back from the first debate. "

Those faulty exit polls were sabotage

It's a mere four days after the election and there are a flood of reports coming out about the electronic voting machines not working right. Where "hanging chad" was the catch phrase of the 2000 elections, "computer glitch" will quick become the catch phrase for the 2004 elections.

I'd think that the republicans would want a thorough investigation into the matter. Would they really prefer a president elected through a "glitch."??

Those faulty exit polls were sabotage=The Hill.com=: "Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Fox�s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible."

The dollar is euro-trash....

Ok, so I'm stealing a line from Unfiltered on Air America. Yesterday they were chatting about the damaget that Bush has done to the dollar and suggested we could start calling it Euro-trash. I agree.

Read this article from Bloomberg. Some parts of it:

Against the euro, the dollar weakened to $1.2934 at 12:10 a.m. in New York from $1.2872 late yesterday, according to EBS, an electronic currency-trading system. The dollar fell as low as $1.2953, breaching the Feb. 18 record low of $1.2930. The U.S. currency fell to 105.64 yen from 106.03 yesterday.

The dollar, down 4.7 percent in the past month against the euro, initially jumped after the Labor Department said employers added 337,000 workers in October, after a gain of 139,000 a month earlier, fueling bets the Federal Reserve will raise its benchmark interest rate twice more this year.

``If a payrolls like this can't cause the dollar to rally it's the clearest signal that there is something seriously wrong with the dollar,'' said David Bloom, a currency strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc in London. ``If you can't smell the coffee on this, I don't know what's wrong with you.''
...
The dollar is weakening as the U.S. current account deficit widens, economists pare forecasts for U.S. economic growth and foreign demand for U.S. assets wanes. The currency has shed 21 percent since President George W. Bush, who won a second term on Nov. 2, took office in 2001.

Now, some people think that Bush invaded Iraq because the UN was going to let Hussein sell his oil in Euros rather than in dollars. Now, remember Bush's final defense for the war in Iraq? You know, after WMDs and mushroom clouds and regime change and freedom and all that? Bush said that Huessin was gaming the "oil for food" program. Pretty fucking weak reason if you ask me, but read this from the article I linked at the beginning of the paragraph:

Iraq had also threatened to stop oil exports, the bulk of which flow through the U.N. humanitarian programme, if its request for payment in euros was denied.

Is this how he was gaming the system?

The sound of a moral, God-loving Christian?

The rants and raves of a Bush supporter. One can only conclude that his religious faith and morals are important to him.

When I was a young 'un, I was told to never assume what God might have in store. Did that Christian message change?

If you'd like to contact him: adam-at-adamyoshida.com

Fear and Queers

Never underestimate the republican's ability to turn out their base, convincing them to vote against their own self interest by using fear and queers. First, let's look at the queers.

Eleven states in this years' election had anti-gay, "ban same-sex marriage" proposals. Now, we all know that gay marriage is not legal in any state, except Massachusetts (uh, by the way, every incumbent that supported gay marriage in that state was re-elected). And DOMA effectively makes it impossible for gays to have any recognition at the federal level. Yet, on the ballot they were. Ignoring this was a disaster for the democrats.

For example, this paragraph from the New York times: From state capitals to Capitol Hill, the Republicans made gains on Tuesday. Eleven state ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage passed easily, even in laid-back, live-and-let-live Oregon, and apparently inspired turnout that helped Mr. Bush. William J. Bennett, the former education secretary who has crusaded for moral values, noted in National Review Online that it was Ohio, which may well have lost more jobs under Mr. Bush than any other state, that gave him his electoral vote victory.

If you look at the national exit polls from CNN about the 2004 elections, you see two things: a combined 83% of Bush supporters say "terrorism" and "morals" are the most important issues. As for Kerry supporters, here's the break-out of their biggest concerns: economy 80%, Iraq 73%, education 73% and health care 77%. Now, the issues important to Kerry supporters can be discussed using logic and facts. The issues important to Bush supporters are strictly based on emotion. It is impossible to counter and emotional stand with a logical, fact based argument. Why do you think these people want Evolution out and Creationism in?

So that all brings me to the fear part of the Bush supporter. They were so afraid that Adam and Steve might actually be recognized as a couple in their state someday (because they weren't on November 1, 2004, that's for sure) that they voted against their own best interests. How many jobs have been lost in Ohio? How many people have actually benefited from Bushes tax cuts for billionaires? The fear of queers.

The fear of terrorism: terror is a feeling. The "war on terror" is a war on a feeling. Terrorism is a tactic. I've heard some say that fight a war on terrorism would be like us starting a war on sneak-attack-ism after Pearl Harbor. Pretty silly. But they hear Cheney saying that if the elect the wrong person, we'll be "hit and hit hard" and they see the multi-colored Homeland security banner (which, incidentally is one color strip away from being a GAY PRIDE FLAG for goodness sake) and Tom Ridge telling them to break out the duct tape and that terrorists will steal their crop dusters and poison their crops and the bought it.

Kerry supporters, when looking at the facts of Iraq, put it at the top of their list. Now, you tell me -- who's more "Moral"?? A President that would lie to Congress and the American People about the justification for war, or a Senator with a plan to get us out? I suppose if you are a Bush supporter, it's better to send our kids to fight and die.

From that CNN exit poll. 91% of Bush supporters think that a person's "religious faith" is the most important quality in a candidate. 91% of Kerry supporters think that intelligence should be the measure of a candidates. Religion is very emotional. Intellect is very logical. We are coming from two different worlds.

In order for the democrats to flip Congress in 2006 and retake the Whitehouse in 2008, we have to figure out how to do two things: 1) Find a way to appeal to the emotion of the moderate republican and 2) use our intellect to explain to them clearly that democratic values ARE their values.

An interesting side note. Tonight on NBC News, there was a story about a small town in Maine, Centerville, that is in effect "going bankrupt" because this small town has no jobs and and aging population. The tax base is disappearing and "there is more work to be done" that people to do it. Their property taxes will go down if they become "a ward of the state" and un-incorporate.

Centerville is in Washington County. The State of Maine might have been a "blue" state, but Washington County voted for Bush, 57% to 40%. They had an anti-gay amendment a few years ago, so it couldn't have been that. It must have been the fear of "terror" that motivated them, because they certainly didn't vote for the candidate with a fiscal policy that benefits any of them.

What do PA, DC and NY have in common?

So, what do DC, Pennsylvania and New York State have in common? Struck by terrorists in 2001, you say? NO, I say. ALL three voted for Kerry! So much for feeling 'safer,' I guess. In fact, people in New York are actually thinking that "middle America" hates them.

"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "

CNN.com - High court clears way for Ohio poll challengers - Nov 2, 2004

So, the Court won't get involved when people are being challenged on their right to vote, but they will get involved to stop a state from counting all of it's votes??

CNN.com - High court clears way for Ohio poll challengers - Nov 2, 2004

VOTE!!!

VOTE

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2004