BartBlog

The Facts About Today’s Soldiers
• The average reading level of new soldiers is roughly a full grade level higher than their civilian peers’.
• Enlistees’ high school graduation rate was 97 percent in 2003, 2004, and 2005. The civilian graduation rate is seventeen percentage points lower.
• The wealthiest 40 percent of neighborhoods in America are the home of 45.6 percent of 2005 enlistees. For every two U.S. recruits from the poorest neighborhoods, three come from the richest.
• There is no statistical evidence to support the claim that minorities are being targeted or exploited for military service. The 100 zip codes with the highest proportions of African-Americans were actually under-represented among military enlistees in 2005.
• Every U.S. military recruit of the last 33 years has been a volunteer.
(See also, “Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003–2005”)

(more…)

http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=2257

Other than vague and easily dismantled assertions about Hillary’s “Big Government”
healthcare plan and a small penis suspicion that she might take their guns away,
they had nothing of substance, but the conclusion was firm:  Hillary was a non-starter
and the Democrats were toast if she became the candidate.

Hatred of Bush is often portrayed by mainstream and right-wing pundits,
the expansive overlap therein, as a nervous condition, a neuroses, despite
Bush’s overwhelming stench of illegitimacy and the staggering amount of
suffering he has unleashed, which make his formidable personal inadequacies
seem quaint by comparison.         

Hillary-haters, on the other hand, often have no beef with her policy positions. 
They simply don’t trust her and never will.

…and yet, despite a ‘personality gap,’ Hillary maintains a 20-point lead
over Obama, a lead which grew after the recent Democratic debates.

A Gilroy company’s recall of Chinese fresh ginger contaminated with a toxic pesticide is the latest scare involving imported ginger and other food products from China.

No illnesses were reported as of Monday, a day after California officials first issued a public warning to advise consumers against eating fresh Chinese ginger.

State and federal health officials are now working to determine how the ginger got into this country and how widely it has been sold. It’s not the first time that contaminated Chinese ginger has been a problem.

U.S. port inspectors in Seattle have turned away shipments of Chinese ginger that contained pesticides in recent months, according to news reports. And Japanese authorities acknowledged this month that they mistakenly allowed 25 tons of Chinese ginger laced with pesticide into their country.

This time, California officials said they found potentially harmful levels of the pesticide aldicarb sulfoxide in a batch of fresh ginger from China that was distributed earlier this month by the Christopher Ranch food company of Gilroy. It was shipped to retailers and wholesalers in California, Michigan, Oregon, Louisiana and Washington.

The contamination was discovered in samples gathered randomly from an Albertsons grocery store in Roseville, near Sacramento. The samples were collected by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, which routinely tests produce for pesticide residue.

If New York dollars were used to fund a Christain school, all hell would break loose – so why isn’t the Main Scream Media reporting this:

“Some New York parents are upset their tax dollars are being used to fund the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a secondary school that will purportedly teach students Arabic culture and language. (See earlier story) The school is scheduled to begin classes next month in Brooklyn.

Pamela Hall, a member of the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition, contends that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chief, Joel Klein, have been ignoring residents’ concerns about the school’s principal, Dhabah Almontaser, and her ties to organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“She has an advisory board that is all religious; she has no academics on her advisory board. She has three imams … and they’re associated with the more radical mosques as well — there’s nothing moderate about them,” says Hall. “And one of [those imams] represents seven mosques in Harlem. I mean that’s an awful lot of Muslim/Islam influence on an advisory board for an academic public school.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/07/3058/

* Hillary has the highest disapproval ratings
* The woman thing
* Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton
* She’s a political “weathervane”
* She thinks winning votes are found in the “center”
* She is clearly not the people’s choice
* Kucinich’s and Richardson’s views coincide more with public opinion

…yet she’s going to be president – she must be good.

Is anybody betting on her to lose?

I’m hearing lots of Nancy Grace Guarantees…
 
 Vegas-sportsbetting.com lists Her as the favorite.

Those Vegas boys bet like it’s real money.

 http://hempfest.org/drupal

I wish I’d known.
I’d rather be in Seattle in August than San Francisco in July.

 Link

The old establishment parades to the cable networks and editorial boards on behalf of their candidate, telling the world that the Democratic nomination is over and decided.

That’s a bad thing for OUR side?

Rubbish. Looking at polls today, it is very possible that Hillary Clinton loses Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada and could even come in third in more than one of them. In this case, either one of her opponents sweeps Super Tuesday after she comes in second and third in the four preliminaries, or we are headed to a brokered convention, which is far more possible than the pundits think.

Brent, you say it’s possible that She’ll lose – everyone agrees.
But her odds are better - money will follow the better odds.

 Link

The old establishment is composed of the Democratic pollsters and consultants
who told Democrats to support the Iraq war and, only days ago, to let Republicans
gut the American Constitution.
I don’t agree.
The pollsters showed the top tier what would happen to their careers
if the GOP could succeed in labeling them as “Al Qaeda enablers.”

All things considered (not that I’d have the brains to do that) the fastest
way to stop the monsters is to let them destroy themselves in the next 15 months.

Sure, they could “do the right thing” and challenge Bush now, but then
the whore press would paint Bush as the victim and suddenly 2008 isn’t
looking so good for us. 

That’s the same reason Bush isn’t getting impeached – because that
effort might convert his Nazi ass into a sympathic and popular hero
 - who wants that?

If you have a better idea, as John said, “We’d all love to see the plan,”
but saying, “I wish the facts were different” helps nobody.

The Economist, August 9, 2007

For George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America’s reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history, a man who sought to turn his victories of 2000 and 2004 into a Republican hegemony, may well end up driving the Western world’s most impressive political machine off a cliff.

That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot’s disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) and where the South and West have grown far more quickly than the liberal north-east, it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation.

Now they would settle for a lot less. Having recaptured Congress last year, the Democrats are on course to retake the presidency in 2008. Only one Republican, Rudy Giuliani, looks competitive in the polls, and his campaign is less slick than those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Voters now favour generic Democratic candidates over Republican ones by wide margins. Democrats are more trusted even on traditional conservative issues, such as national security, and they have opened up a wide gap among the young, among independents and among Latinos.

For this, he is not guilty

Read More Here

 Link

Howard Dean in the 2004 campaign; Al Gore as the effective leader of the Loyal Opposition; and now Barack Obama challenging the tired and decadent national
security establishment — these are the first true voices of 21st century politics.

If you believe supporting the Iraq war for five years was right; that America is
safer under Bush; and that special-interest lobbyists are the heart of America
who do not buy laws with money, Hillary Clinton, the leader of the old establishment,
is your girl (as she said).
Horsehockey!
Brent is talking about The Way Things Oughta Be.
Logic dictates we talk about The Way Things Are – it’s called reality.

Dean tried and he lost. Gore tried and he lost.
They didn’t know how to win – even with the Big Dog’s blueprints.
Obama might be great someday, but this isn’t his year.

And as long as sticking to reality isn’t required,
why don’t we dig up and run FDR?

Bart:

It feels like I’m living in a James Bond film. 

The freest country in the world is being held hostage by a bunch of very bad people
who want to control everything and no one is stopping them.

Who the hell is going to be our hero and where the hell are they? 
We’re running out of time.  Help!!!
  Mary in Seattle
Mary, either the GOP will stand up or the new Democratic president will. Their best chance to hold onto a sliver of power is to dump Bush now. 

He’s  P-O-I-S-O-N  and whoever sticks with him will be gone.

Bart, you said:
>  “Just stab the bitch so we can GO HOME!”

I thought it was one hilarious comparison.

Thanks, Bart.
 Gino R 

 WhorePost

You might have thought that now isn’t the most opportune time for the elected
leaders of both the United States and Iraq to pack up and head to the beach, ranch
or villa for a nice long vacation. Silly you.

You probably reasoned that with 162,000 U.S. troops sweltering in the war zone, with
the Iraqi government fracturing along sectarian lines and with what is billed as a
make-or-break report from Gen. Petraeus, due next month, maybe tradition ought to be ignored and the summer heat withstood just this once. You doubtless pointed out that no matter how uncomfortable triple-digit temperatures might be for the grandees of Washington and Baghdad, soldiers burdened with body armor and combat boots — and the constant threat of getting shot or blown up — have it a bit worse.

You were right, of course — it’s unbelievable that the Iraqi parliament is taking a
month-long vacation, that Congress has left for its traditional August recess and
that Bush is beating off in Kennebunkport and then in Texas. None of this really
matters because the war in Iraq is on autopilot.