President George W Bush has Highest Approval Ratings in the History of U.S.

[Guest guest]

CNN's Wolf Blitzer just released a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll with some very good news for President Bush. President Bush now has an approval rating of 90%; 5% against, the highest approval rating EVER in the history of the presidential poll. This is higher than FRD, JFK, and others. The second highest approval rating was that of Bush's father who had an 89% approval rating after winning the Gulf War and Bush hasn't even started HIS war!. Other polls have him above 85 percent, these even include polls that have always under represented Republicans (WashPost/ NBC: 91%, NewsWeek: 86%)

 

Gallup: When asked if Americans support military action againts Afghanistan, 82 % say they support it, 12% say they do not. When asked if they support military action against Iraq, 73% support it, with 20% against it.

[paul108 0]

Probably the same cheaters who put him in office also made arrangements for the attack on 9/11. It's not hard to see how his oil and military friends are making money off this.

[valaya 0]

Originally posted by paul108:

Probably the same cheaters who put him in office also made arrangements for the attack on 9/11. It's not hard to see how his oil and military friends are making money off this.

So what part of PA you from, Paul?

 

 

[paul108 0]

Originally posted by valaya:

...you won't be seeing, hearing, or feeling anything soon since you'll be DEAD!...

 

So what part of PA you from, Paul?

 

 

Doesn't matter, we're moving soon. Did you want to get together for harinama samkirtan or did you were you planning on following through on your wish to murder me?

[valaya 0]

Originally posted by paul108:

Doesn't matter, we're moving soon. Did you want to get together for harinama samkirtan or did you were you planning on following through on your wish to murder me?

Tried to get a `license to kill`, but they told me we don't do that in Can'tada! BTW, along with everything else, you seem to be confusing murder with execution. Anyway, it's that other guy you really should be worried about...

 

 

[Guest guest]

<center></center>

[Guest guest]

<h2>Say what? A pro-war rally at Berkeley?</h2>

 

The times, they sure ARE a-changin'.

 

The University of California at Berkeley, a famous hotbed of anti-U.S. rhetoric and student protest during the Vietnam War, broke out in a "Rally for America" Monday as a coalition of student activists and fraternities gathered to back President Bush's "war against terrorism."

 

From the steps of Sproul Hall, the place where some scholars of the 1960s say American student protest and anti-war activism got its start, 150 students rallied for a show of unity behind the U.S. government after the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C..

 

Rally supporters waved American flags and hoisted signs with such slogans as, "Whip Terrorism," and "We Cannot Stand Idle," while student speakers called for military action against those they called terrorists, praised the United States, and denounced anti-war activists as unpatriotic.

 

"This is 2001, not 1968," said rally coordinator Randy Barnes, a Berkeley senior majoring in Mass Communications. "This is not Vietnam, but an act of aggression against the United States."

 

Before the rally, Barnes borrowed the language of the Vietnam War era by saying that he wanted to give voice to the "silent majority" of students that he said do not blame U.S. foreign policy for the attacks on September 11, and who want to see a punishing military response.

 

"We are average students," said Barnes. "We are here to go to class and get an education. We are not the ready-made, professional protesters of Berkeley."

 

While the rally's supporters cheered and pumped flags, a group of counter-demonstrators, some of them students, chanted, "1-2-3-4, We don't want your racist war," and held aloft banners with anti-war messages.

 

Barnes and his supporters took pains to say that the rally was pro-American and not pro-war, but the language from the podium was often bellicose and many in the anti-war group saw the rally as a bloodthirsty call to arms.

 

"I'm not against the U.S." said Patricia Mueller-Moule, a graduate student at Berkeley and an anti-war activist. "This is a pro-U.S. rally, but I assume there will be some people here who want war. They shout, Win the war.' I'm just against the war."

 

Robb McFadden, president of the university's Republican club, and a junior majoring in political science, blasted what he described as anti-American sentiment on campus.

 

"There is an unwritten rule in Berkeley: Blame America," McFadden told the rally.

 

The rally closed with a minute of silence observed by both factions of the demonstration, which was followed by a recording of the military signature tune "Taps."

 

[Tarun 6]

Hollywood Hails Bono - "Thorn in Bushel's Shoe"

 

U2 singer BONO was handed a Valentines by some of showbiz's hottest stars at fund-raiser to mark his "extraordinary philanthropy".

 

The first annual LOVE ROCKS concert was held at Hollywood's KODAK THEATRE in Bono's honor, and brought out the likes of TOM CRUISE, KEVIN SPACEY, REM, NO DOUBT, SEAN PENN, comedian DREW CAREY, singer LAURYN HILL and WALT DISNEY chairman MICHAEL EISNER. The event was designed to raise money for cardiovascular research.

 

Bono, real name PAUL HEWSON, was given the 'Heart of Entertainment' award for, "his extraordinary philanthropy and dedication to improving the lives of millions of people throughout the world."

 

Cruise told the crowd that Bono "makes us all proud to be human". Former President BILL CLINTON and ROLLING STONE MICK JAGGER sent congratulatory videos.

 

In accepting his award, Bono proudly described himself as "a thorn in the shoe" of President GEORGE W. BUSH's administration because of his efforts to apprise American lawmakers of suffering in the world's poorest countries.

* * * * * * * * * *

In contrast, Bushel was told to GO HOME! by South Koreans.

We can deduce at least this much:

Seoul's dog-eaters have more sense than Texan cow-eaters.

Any poll showing Bushy's popularity simply proves one thing:

Kaliyuga degrades in each country at distinct rates.

China's laughing at him right now. What a farce! Come on.

Get with it. Enough with the clowns.

Bring in a straight man.

Someone the world can take seriously.

[Tarun 6]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/opinion/23KELL.html

 

The Soul of George W. Bush

By BILL KELLER

March 23, 2002

 

About a year ago, The Economist published an article under the smirky headline "George Bush, homme sérieux." The British newsweekly argued that despite the new president's apparent intellectual weightlessness, the administration had in fact come to town with some serious thinkers in its entourage and some interesting ideas on its program. There might be more to the C-student president than we expected.

 

In the flush of patriotic solidarity after Sept. 11, no one questions whether Mr. Bush is a serious man, meaning resolute and full of purpose. But what, besides defending us from villains, is he about? This is not a bad moment to subject Mr. Bush's White House to an intellectual wanding. He has logged 400 days of on-the-job training. He has begun to trust his own instincts more. And he has, by virtue of the terrorist threat, acquired the political standing to get away with saying what he really thinks. So is there an emergent Bush philosophy that suggests what we might expect for the remainder of his presidency?

 

I think there is, and it is very different from what many on the right and left expected, although it is easy to miss for three reasons.

 

The first, of course, is the war on terror, which consumes Mr. Bush, defining him in some ways but obscuring him in others by overshadowing everything else on his agenda.

 

The second is that, to put it generously, Mr. Bush is not himself an intellectual. The sometimes skillful work of his speechwriters, which he sometimes delivers with conviction, cannot disguise the fact that he is not a deep thinker, a student of ideas, or even a very curious man. For all the spoon-fed portraits of the president exuding new gravitas since the war began, President Bush is still an easy man to take lightly.

 

Another confounding factor is the administration's extraordinary discipline in the cause of political longevity. This is a president who has no intention of dying the one-term political death of his father, even if that means selling out principles from time to time. Free-traders, who thought they had Mr. Bush's allegiance, are horrified by his imposition of tariffs on imported steel, for example, a naked move to shore up Republican support in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And a few conservatives swallowed their gum when they heard of the president's performance at the annual Gridiron dinner. Teasing Senator Tom Daschle about his presidential ambitions, Mr. Bush joked (or not): "What are you going to run on, Tom? Patients' bill of rights? I'm for it. Enron? I'm against it. Campaign reform? I'll sign it. Child care? Tom, I'm gonna expand child care to those who don't even have children."

 

Leave aside style and political expediency, and what is left at the core? On the theory that it takes one to know one, I spent a few days talking to right-of-center thinkers from various camps. Whether or not you share their ideology, their sense of the president is often shrewd and well informed, and it is remarkably consistent across the right wingspan.

 

To begin with, Mr. Bush is emphatically not from the libertarian school of conservative thinking. A year ago, at libertarian strongholds like the Cato Institute - which favors minimalist government, a non-interventionist foreign policy and free markets - hopes flickered that Mr. Bush might be the first true leave-us-alone president. They loved the big tax cut, on the principle that cutting off the oxygen of taxes is the most reliable way to cripple government. But the libertarians have grown deeply disenchanted. It turns out that Mr. Bush is an activist, deficit-spending, interventionist president.

 

Early on, the president's determination to expand the federal role in education hinted at this. Now the war at home and abroad has demanded big budgets, which Mr. Bush has allowed to become a pretext for copious pork-barrel spending in the guise of "stimulus." The president's instinctive readiness to curtail civil liberties was another wartime cause of libertarian alarm. Abroad, the man who as a candidate advocated "humility" in our dealings with the world has developed a passion for upending foreign governments and rebuilding damaged nations.

 

Nor can Mr. Bush be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right, although he gave them John Ashcroft and occasionally throws them a steak. The president is not a bigot, or a pessimist. He created an office to promote faith-based social services, but has let it languish.

 

He is not quite a classic big-business conservative, either, although he and corporate America vibrate to the same tuning fork and he has stocked his administration with former C.E.O.'s. He is reflexively pro-development, and he regards environmentalists as whinging elitists.

 

But Mr. Bush brings something to the job that makes country-club conservatives quiver with unease. He is a moralist. I think this was true before Sept. 11, but the attacks have galvanized his inner missionary. More precisely, Sept. 11 confirmed for him that God had chosen him for a purpose, and showed him what that purpose is.

 

On the domestic front, his moral streak is summed up in his persistent rhetoric about "a new culture of responsibility." Remember that Mr. Bush is a convert - from alcohol and wild living to God and domesticity - and he has a convert's faith that anyone else can do likewise. Although his faith is Christian, this is a moral outlook that sits comfortably with Jewish and secular conservatives.

 

Look at his tough-standards education program, and especially at his new proposals to escalate the assault on welfare, and you see a Republican who is troubled by the legions of poor and prospectless but believes that what the government should offer them is self-reliance, a prosperous economy in which they can find a place, and a sermon about premarital sex. He proposes to add $300 million to the budget to, somehow, push unwed mothers into marriage, but nothing for day care so that single mothers can get to their mandatory jobs. If you've been wondering what "compassionate conservative" means, there you have it. It is not the liberal safety net or the noblesse oblige of the first President Bush, but the compassion of the strict parent who says, "This is for your own good." Or the drill sergeant who says, "Suck it up!"

 

"The message is a moral message: Let's cut the victimology, this is the land of opportunity," said Myron Magnet, editor of the neoconservative magazine City Journal and an early Bush policy tutor. "Of course everyone can succeed. The bars to success are now much more internal than external."

 

Mr. Bush's moralism is more ambitious, sometimes verging on messianic, when it comes to the world beyond our borders. It is encapsulated in two bits of presidential oratory that were widely written off as careless rhetorical flourishes - the glib "axis of evil" and the Islam-offending description of America's "crusade," which the White House later retracted. Read Mr. Bush's lips, and he seems deeply convinced that America's great project is to combat evil and implant what he calls "universal values" throughout the world. Foreign policy is not just about defending oilfields.

 

In the tug of war between the go-get-'em, nuke-brandishing civilians of the Pentagon and the coalition-minded pragmatists of the State Department, conservatives are now convinced Mr. Bush's sympathies are gung-ho. The Weekly Standard, which has overcome personal strains with Mr. Bush to become something like the president's conservative superego, has taken to calling this "The Bush Doctrine."

 

"On tactics, he may be listening to Colin Powell," said Norman Podhoretz, the influential conservative editor and author. "But he's very clear as to his strategic objectives - not just to clean up Al Qaeda cells but to effect regime changes in six or seven countries and to create conditions which would lead to internal reform and modernization in the Islamic world."

 

Whether the president will, in the end, take us to a multitude of wars in the cause of liberating the world from evil, or whether the mission will lose some of its energy when the cost (literal and political) grows, I can't tell. But I think Mr. Podhoretz correctly reads the president's heart.

 

If you were hoping for the right-of-center moderate Mr. Bush campaigned as, or if you shared the patronizing view of the president as a good-natured boob tugged along by avuncular ideologues, this may strike you as chilling. But have no doubt, it is très sérieux.

[Jagat 1]

Chilling, yes. Well, I am glad that he's bringing you joy, BB.

[mahak 0]

Those who have read my politicos know I gave him a break, and I hoped he would be what he portrayed himself as, but, alas, he is the worst ever, demagogue, thief, war monger (and dont give me that 911 defence garbage, it is still killin for oil, just like papa). Hell, he hasnt saved one unborn baby or made it easier to own guns, he just keeps to his own and leaves us all out. GOP=greedy old politicians.

 

Gore wasnt better, but at least he had a platform.

[Tarun 6]

"Toppa the world, Ma!" Cagney = Cody's last words in "White Heat"

[Tarun 6]

Poll Suggests Concern About Economy Chipping Away at Bush's Support

By Will Lester

Associated Press | Boston Globe

Monday, 15 July, 2002

 

WASHINGTON (AP) Concern about the economy may be chipping away at the public's perception that the country is going in the right direction and at political support for President Bush.

 

The Ipsos-Reid tracking poll of political and economic attitudes suggests a growing number of people think the country is on the wrong track. Over the past month, not quite half, 49 percent, said they think the country is headed in the right direction and 44 percent said the wrong direction.

 

During interviews last weekend, more actually said wrong direction, by a 49-45 margin, the first time that has happened this year in the poll done for the Cook Political Report. In polls during the winter, people chose right direction by almost a 2-to-1 margin.

 

Meanwhile, the number who say they would definitely vote to re-elect Bush has dipped to 45 percent, compared with 54 percent who said so during the winter. Almost three in 10 29 percent said they would consider voting for someone else, and about a quarter 23 percent said they definitely would.

 

''What we've found in this poll is that the business bad news has begun to give people concern about the direction the country is taking, and the lever people have to force a change in direction is politics,'' said Thomas Riehle, president of Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs. ''It's a negative development for the Republicans.''

 

The poll indicated the president still has a robust job approval rating, 70 percent, though that is down from the high 70s during the winter in this poll.

 

The number in the poll who said they expect the economy to get stronger in the next six months was 30 percent, down from 41 percent in the winter.

 

The tracking poll of 2,001 adults taken over the past month has an error margin of plus or minus 2 percentage points, slightly higher for registered voters.

 

The stock market has been having more of an effect on the financial outlook of the average American over the past few years than at any other time in the past two decades, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

 

In the early to mid 1990s, month-to-month changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average had little connection to shifts in consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan. But as the stock market boom peaked at the end of the decade, about a fifth of the change in consumer confidence could be attributed to movement in the stock market, according to the Pew analysis.

 

This increased connection comes as more American households are invested in the stock market in some form from individual stocks to retirement plans like 401(k) accounts. Almost half now have holdings on Wall Street. That growth has come at the same time that Wall Street news coverage has grown, according to the Pew survey.

[Tarun 6]

Duryodhan in the White House, Let 'em out, Let 'em out!!

[Tarun 6]

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?ippopb&1

Petition to impeach Bushman. Same old problem: whom to replace him with?

[sha 0]

http://www.realchangenews.org/pastissues/Apr_18_02/opinion/opinion.html

 

Dear rRresident Bush (emphasis added),

 

When you were running for office, you stated that

Jesus Christ was your favorite philosopher. You have

made a point of proclaiming your Christian faith. You

have put time and energy in an attempt to link the

church's mission with state social security. You have,

particularly since September 11, continually preached

GOD BLESS AMERICA on almost every public occasion.

 

As a Pastor and fellow United Methodist, I need to ask

you: Do you know what the values and vision of Jesus

are?

 

I ask the question because I am baffled and confused

by your behavior. You claim Christ but act like

Caesar. There is blood all over your hands, with the

promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the

nations like the biblical Whore of Babylon, openly

fornicating with the military men of might, their

corporate sponsors, their nuclear madness, and their

insatiable hunger for global armament. Is this how you

learned Christ?

 

You claim the benevolence of your Administration

toward the rest of the world. But the treaties you

make, and the treaties you un-make, continue to be

laced with a tightened rope around the neck of the

poor. Is this how you learned to "forgive our

debtors"? Is it really Christ-like to insist on cuts

in life-supporting infrastructure while increasing

military budgets and allowing the plunder of nations

to accrue to a very small financial elite? Have you

not been taught that Jesus was crucified by these same

Principalities and Powers?

 

You practice a patriotic righteousness that visualizes

never-ending war against enemies of great evil. You

bombed Afghanistan, with both guns and butter, to show

the difference. But do you really think the few crumbs

of bread airlifted to Afghanistan shield the reality:

that you have no intention to assist in building a

sustainable society there? Is this how Christ taught

you to avenge the wrongs done unto you?

 

I am troubled by your spirit, George. You claim you

are of the Sustainer of Life, but you practice the

terror of Death. You are spreading the war.

Afghanistan is only the beginning. Military presence

crops up world-wide. You bait us with Iraq and shield

what you are doing in Columbia. You lay the groundwork

for disrupting Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. You

allow the dogs of capitalism to sink their teeth into

the battered body of a raped Central America. And the

buck stops on your desk, George: Is this what Jesus

would do?

 

The Spirit of Death rises, and nations tremble. We the

people of the United States tremble. We discover how

truly powerless we have become. Our military budget

grows to obscene levels, bankrupting the social

infrastructure from which our security and freedom

rise. We see basic medical care costs increase, even

as more and more Americans find themselves without

health care. We see environmental treaties subverted,

ignored, and disappeared, even as Mother Earth signals

increasing distress. Labor rights are made secondary

to the rights of corporations, resulting in wage

reductions and growing financial insecurity.

Homelessness exposes itself through tented cities.

Education becomes the victim of budget knife cuts. A

few benefit but the groan of the masses is growing.

Whose side are you on, George?

 

Perhaps you think that God has chosen you for this

hour. Perhaps God has. So again I ask you, Is this how

you learned Christ? If God has chosen you for this

hour then, in Christ's name, serve the values and

vision of Jesus: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked,

release the prisoners, cancel the debt, forgive your

enemies, practice Jubilee. Then, through you, this

nation and all nations will be blessed.

 

But beware: the road of the sword will bring division

and much blood. Those who take it up will be devoured

by it. Many people, in the name of God, have taken up

the sword. And many have come to ruin. Thinking

themselves capable of naming evil, they have become

the very evil they name.

 

Seek Christ first,

Rev. Rich Lang, Pastor

 

Rev. Rich Lang ministers to Trinity United Methodist

Church, which has hosted the homeless Tent City twice

in its Ballard parking lot and is currently hosting

Tent City through May 12. For more on Tent City, click

here.

 

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