What They Said in 2000

Politicians say lots of things in their campaign speeches. You expect them to give a list of reasons why they would be better than their opponent. So, when George W. Bush became the Republican nominee for President in 2000, it was not surprising that he would declare in his acceptance speech all the ways that he would be a better President than Al Gore. No, the surprising part is how ironically things turned out.

Look at some of the things W said when he got the GOP nomination in 2000:

• We have seen a steady erosion of American power and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, "Not ready for duty, sir." This administration had its moment, they had their chance, they have not led. We will.

• Our generation has a chance to reclaim some essential values, to show we have grown up before we grow old. But when the moment for leadership came, this administration did not teach our children, it disillusioned them. They had their chance. They have not led. We will.

• A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.

• I believe in tolerance, not in spite of my faith, but because of it. I believe in a God who calls us not to judge our neighbors but to love them.

• That background may lack the polish of Washington. Then again, I don't have a lot of things that come with Washington. I don't have enemies to fight. I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect.

• After all of the shouting and all of the scandal, after all the bitterness and broken faith, we can begin again.

• So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.

And there was also this ironic observation by Dick Cheney when he accepted the Republican nomination for Vice-President in 2000:

• In Washington today, politics has become war by other means, an endless onslaught of accusation.

Considering these words after 7 years of their mis-administration, I have to give them their due. Heckuva job, Dick and W! Mission Accomplished!

http://jeffersonsparlor.blogspot.com

Where is Santa?

Track Santa Here: http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.htm

Clinton's Power

I usually agree with Lou Dobbs but on the matter who will be the next president of the USA his flopping in the wind is inconsistent. Hilary Clinton is without question the strongest candidate for president our nation has seen in decades. She has survived continuous attacks by the conservative establishment. She is also right for America at this time. Fact is fact which leads me to know that America in 2008 is not yet ready to put Barrack H. Obama in the White House. This is precisely why the right wing machine has literally called off criticism of him if not outright campaigning on his behalf. Republicans whom I currently oppose to govern are clearly conscious of this: the same America that elected George W. Bush twice will never put an African American named Barrack H. Obama during war times behind the Oval Office.

“Friday, December 14, 2007 – Lou DobbsTonight: A remarkable turn of events in the race for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations. Sen. Hillary Clinton has tumbled from a commanding lead in several early primary states being tied—and in some polls trailing—rival Sen. Barack Obama. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee has surged from polling around 3 percent in July to the high 20s now. What’s going on? We’ll have all the latest from around the country.”

Spy, Spy on your phone.

There is an evolving issue surrounding the corporation of telecommunications companies in spying in on American’s phone records. Frankly, let the people know what went on. Please Contact Congress with your opinion.

“Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that did not include retroactive immunity. Immunity would let telecommunication companies who broke the law helping the Bush Administration spy on Americans off the hook.

Now, Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader, is using procedural tricks to make this bill irrelevant by bringing the Intelligence Committee's version of the same bill to the Senate floor instead. What's the big difference? This version of the bill includes retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies.”

Does AP have an agenda?

Certain media outlets are certainly out stepping their role in informing the public of news in addition to presenting agendas in an attempt to guide and create news where there is none.

For example this is the opening sentence in a recent news story “By MELINDA DESLATTE of the Associated Press.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Two students were found shot to death in a home invasion at a Louisiana State University apartment, and officials decided to keep the campus open Friday while police searched for three suspects. “ DESLATTE instead of reporting the story, immediately renders a judgment call upon the decision of officials. Personally I would like to hear the news not second guesses by unqualified reporters during an involving situation.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071214/ap_on_re_us/lsu_students_slain

Black Voters Prefer Clinton

According to a new study, Hillary Clinton has a slight edge over Barack Obama in the eyes of black voters.

Farai Chideya talks with David Bositis, senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which released the study.

Scientists Develop Life-Extending Compounds

The scientists who discovered resveratrol, a substance in red wine that extends the lives of mice, say they've developed three drugs that work the same way, but much more powerfully. The most potent of the three controls blood sugar; it is also believed to fight other diseases of aging.
Sales of red wine took a big jump last year after researchers at Harvard published a study on resveratrol. The study showed that large doses of resveratrol helped obese mice live as long as regular mice. The substance also let the mice run longer on a treadmill. And it seemed to prevent a range of diseases associated with aging.

According to David Sinclair, the lead researcher, there was one snag for those looking to uncork a bottle of Pinot Noir to stay young.
"You would need to drink about 1,000 bottles of red wine to get the amount of resveratrol in your body to even have a chance of seeing those benefits," he said.

So Sinclair and a team of researchers have been searching for something like resveratrol, but more powerful.

They came up with three contenders and published a study of the compounds' effects in this week's issue of the journal Nature. All three were tested in rodents. Sinclair said they triggered the same set of chemical reactions in cells – the same chemical pathway – as resveratrol did.
"The best one in this paper is 1,000 times better at activating this anti-aging pathway than resveratrol is, which is great news," he said. "It means that we can potentially have a small pill that would treat many of the diseases of the Western world."

The list could include maladies such as type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease.

The new compounds are the property of Sirtris, a company that Sinclair helped start. Unlike with resveratrol, which occurs naturally and is sold as a dietary supplement, Sirtris will need FDA approval to market the compounds.

"We're moving away from this molecule in red wine toward real drug discovery, pharmaceutical and rational drug design that most of the drugs we take these days come from," Sinclair said.
And drugs have to be approved to treat a specific disease. So the new study took the most potent new compound and studied its effect on mice and rats with diabetes.

The researchers found that it controlled blood sugar as well as a widely used diabetes drug.

Sinclair believes the compound also will work against other diseases of aging, including cancer.
Less sure is Dr. Randall Holcombe, the chief of hematology and oncology at the University of California-Irvine. He did an experiment comparing pure resveratrol to a powder made from grapes. The goal was to reduce the risk of colon cancer.

"We actually found that the grape powder was more effective than pure resveratrol," Holcombe said, "and that suggested that resveratrol is more active in combination with other compounds such as grapes than it is all by itself."

Holcombe says that raises the possibility that Sinclair's super-resveratrol compounds, by themselves, won't do much to prevent cancer.
Despite the lingering questions, Steven Helfand of Brown University says the research based on resveratrol does seem awfully promising.
"The surprising thing really is how well this molecule has worked so far," Helfand said. He added that he has mixed feelings about the research moving away from dietary supplements and toward more traditional drug development.

On the plus side, he said, the need for FDA approval ensures that any new products will get rigorous testing.
"I think the public should be pleased in that sense. The correct experiments will be done and the correct scrutiny will be given to these compounds," Helfand said. "They will now be scrutinized much more so than they were before."

The downside, Helfand said, is that any product to emerge from this research probably won't be cheap.

David Sinclair said that so far, his company has had no trouble raising money, despite the risk that no drug may ever emerge from the tests.
"The payoff is huge," Sinclair said. "Even diabetes in itself is roughly a $10 billion worldwide market. Some say even higher. And that's just one disease."

Sinclair said the first major studies of resveratrol used on people won't be published until next year. Human studies of the newer, more powerful compounds are even further off."

Our Ahab-In-Chief

How like Captain Ahab is our Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush. Ignoring all counsel, all protests, and all misadventures, he drives on, obsessed with the quest of his White Whale.

What is his White Whale? He calls it “Terror”. It’s not a specific terrorist group. It is “Terror”. His pursuit of it is a “Global War”. For when “Terror” burned the World Trade Center it figuratively scarred his face and chewed on his leg. Now it must be hunted down and slain, regardless of the cost to our Ship of State and to the lives of those who depend upon it.

And there have been costs, dear costs:

• Thousands of our soldiers have lost their lives, and thousands more have grievous wounds.
• Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed, injured, and forced to flee their homes.
• Our military has been ground down, to the point that its readiness has been compromised.
• Our financial future has been gambled, to the point that our currency is worth less and less.
• The price of oil has skyrocketed, and remains at the mercy of mostly hostile foreign powers.

For all of this, his “Terror” has not been eliminated. So our Ahab-in-Chief insists we stay the course. He demands continued funding, its use to be subject to his whim. He demands respect for his captaincy, to the sacrifice of all restraint and reason, even though he has shown poor judgment time and again. It’s not “defeatist” to say this will lead to ruin. It is prophecy based on bitter experience.

Alex Budarin

Permanently in Iraq‏

Have you seen the headlines? President Bush is quietly negotiating an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep our troops there indefinitely--an agreement that could include permanent bases and a massive military presence for years!1 Bush is trying to tie the hands of the next administration to keep us in Iraq for the foreseeable future.2
This is a pivotal moment—the agreement is still in the planning stages and if we don't act now, we could be stuck in Iraq for decades.

It's critical to push Democrats into opposing this. Right now, President Bush's troop reduction plan has fooled some people into thinking we're headed toward an exit in Iraq—but this move makes it clear he's literally committing the U.S. to a war with no end. It's an extreme policy and Congress can stop it—but whether they do depends on how loud we are.

Can you sign the petition demanding that Congress act to stop the president from committing to a massive military presence in Iraq for decades? We'll deliver your comments to your representatives by the end of the week—there's no time to waste. Clicking here will add your name:

http://pol.moveon.org/endless/o.pl?id=11723-3446513-7uL.S0&t=3

Are National Democrats blowing off Florida?

"Florida Democrats are being boycotted by their party's presidential candidates, leaving many voters in the nation’s largest swing state feeling alienated. "

"Orlando -- On the final Friday of a parched and quarrelsome October, Florida Democrats were bumping around a hallway in Disney's faux-elegant Yacht and Beach Club Resort on the opening night of their state convention, perusing campaign items for sale (three Hillary buttons for $5!), sussing out the evening's schedule ("The progressives are supposed to be having a party, but where are they?") and, mostly, grousing about the conspicuous absence of presidential candidates.

"This whole thing here is a joke," said John Taylor, a hulking schoolteacher from Jacksonville wearing the tallest, most bodacious Chef Boyardee-style, star-spangled red-white-and-blue hat you ever saw. "How stupid the Democrats are -- we're shooting ourselves in the foot!" Taylor angrily recalled some of the Republicans' tactics for suppressing the Democratic vote in 2000 and 2004. "They stole two elections, and now we've been working six years to make sure that don't happen again. And the Democrats screw us!"

"Forget that," his friend said. "You're beating a dead horse. I blame the candidates. You've got, what, ten or eleven of them? And not one of them shows up here?"

It's rumored that Mike Gravel will be in town tomorrow, I note (and he did appear, at the convention and an antiwar rally). "If he's here, that's where my vote is going," said the friend.
Not Taylor's. "I'm going to have to resign from the Duval [County] Democratic Party" -- he serves on its executive committee -- "just so that I can vote for somebody else. I'm going to vote Libertarian, probably. Or I might cross over and vote for Huckabee. My wife will kill me. She's the treasurer of the Duval Democratic Party! She retired from her job to work full time, for no money, for the Democrats. And I'm the man in the hat! But why not? What difference does it make? The Democrats don't care about us in Florida."

"I think it sucks," says Bob Matherne, a bearded middle-aged fellow in a Kucinich shirt. Matherne's been registering LGBT voters in Sarasota for months now, but daily headlines featuring the war between national and Florida Democrats have made it tough. "People don't understand the situation -- and neither do I, really. They're asking for clarification: 'What's going on? The Republicans aren't being penalized for the early primary. Why are we being penalized? Why would Democrats do this, already knowing about Florida's problems with voting?'"

Florida Democrats can surely be excused for feeling a wee bit put-upon -- and confused. Across town just the weekend before, 5,000 Florida Republicans had been dined, wined and wooed by their presidential candidates at a lavish event culminating in a debate aired on Fox. Meanwhile, Florida Democrats -- who'd planned to trump the Republican weekend with their own presidential extravaganza -- found themselves in the bizarre position of being boycotted by their candidates.

This strange saga began innocuously enough. Fearing likely attempts by big states like Michigan and Florida to disrupt the parties' primary calendars with early dates in 2008, Republicans and Democrats ruled at their 2004 conventions that states trying to butt in before Iowa and New Hampshire would lose half their delegates. The Republicans left it there. The Democrats decided to try and fix things. The Democratic National Committee's rules committee was tasked with bringing order to the chaotic primaries. Twelve states applied for two additional early primary slots, which were awarded earlier this year to South Carolina and Nevada. Democrats in other states could not vote before February 5.

That created a sticky situation for Florida Democrats when, to nobody's surprise, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law in May scheduling the state's primary for January 29. (In most states, primary dates are set by the parties.) The primary date was wrapped up in a bill mandating a paper trail for the 2008 election -- a popular measure the minority Democrats could not afford to oppose. Besides, the loss of delegates was largely a toothless penalty, since according to precedent the Democrats' eventual presidential nominee controls the seating of delegates -- and surely wouldn't alienate folks from the nation's largest swing state by turning them away.

But the DNC did not leave it there. In August the rules committee voted to strip all the state's delegates unless Florida came up with an alternative to the January 29 voting. "I understand Florida's dilemma," DNC rules committee member Donna Brazile told me later. "But this is not about states' rights; this is about a process we're trying to keep some control over." Two weeks after the DNC vote, Democratic chairs in the "First Four" primary states jacked up the ante with their notorious "four-state pledge" demanding the candidates focus exclusively on them. The signees -- including John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- agreed to do no campaigning in Florida or any other state that might try to jump the gun. And under party rules, "campaigning" means just about everything: e-mail messages; calls to voters; TV, radio or newspaper ads; rallies; hiring campaign workers; holding press conferences. The only thing Democrats are allowed to do in Florida -- where folks have been complaining for years, with some justification, about being used as an ATM for the party -- is fundraise.

As Florida Democrats bayed in protest, DNC chair Howard Dean salted their wounds by opining that their votes "essentially won't count." Almost overnight, the unsavory reputation Florida Republicans had earned during the riotous Gore v. Bush 2000 recount battle was relegated to ancient history, and the Republicans' sagging hopes of carrying Florida -- where Democrats scored big in the 2006 midterms -- were suddenly sky-high. "The Democrats like to talk about Republicans disenfranchising black voters in Florida," state GOP chair Jim Greer shouted happily at a Black Republicans soiree. "How many delegates will the Democrats be sending from Florida to their national convention? Zero!""