Continued from forumosa.com/3/viewtopic.php?p=162894#162894
Please continue discussions re the US Presidential Election here.
OK, flike, there you go… 
As a disspassionate observer - don’t know yet who I would vote for out of the two - it seems that things may start to get a bit tricky for Kerry.
All this Bush-bashing over Iraq and the recent Clarke fiasco have done little to dent Bush’s “war president” image and his ratings on terror, security, etc.
Where he does badly are jobs.
But the recession is past and job creation will most likely get better from this point on, not worse.
Kerry’s hope has to be that although the overall numbers on jobs may improve, those in key states (Ohio?) do not.
But its an increasingly thinning strand to hang his hopes on.
Once this goes, he has to hope that Florida democrats are still motivated enough to go and vote for him out of anger for Bush v Gore.
At this early stage, looks reasonably good for George.
[quote=“imyourbiggestfan”]As a disspassionate observer - don’t know yet who I would vote for out of the two - it seems that things may start to get a bit tricky for Kerry.
All this Bush-bashing over Iraq and the recent Clarke fiasco have done little to dent Bush’s “war president” image and his ratings on terror, security, etc.
Where he does badly are jobs.
But the recession is past and job creation will most likely get better from this point on, not worse.
Kerry’s hope has to be that although the overall numbers on jobs may improve, those in key states (Ohio?) do not.
But its an increasingly thinning strand to hang his hopes on.[/quote]
Yes, I think jobs will pick up as well. I look for the Dems to scream “net job loss under Bush”, or maybe “Here it is in Aug/Sept and Bush has just created his first job!” or some similar version. I do expect the first net job created in the US economy under Bush’s presidency will create a bigger media event for the Dems than for Bush. The sooner zero is achieved, the better for Bush.
Another interesting thing I’m reading is that some economists think employer health care costs may actually be hanging up hiring in the US. Dems can probably get some mileage out of that as well, if it’s true (even if it’s not, maybe).
[quote=“imyourbiggestfan”]Once this goes, he has to hope that Florida democrats are still motivated enough to go and vote for him out of anger for Bush v Gore.
At this early stage, looks reasonably good for George.[/quote]
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Even more importantly for Bush, by some estimates some 4 million evangelicals, or Christian Coalition types, sat out the 2000 election. Rove’s goal is to get them out this time, and all for Bush, and you can see his work in that direction all over the place.
I do expect Bush to win in November, however. I hope not, but it’s rare that Americans jump horse in mid-river (flood).
kerry was stuck in a tough position. because of bush’s perceived strength in foreign policy, kerry had to rely on hammering the “3 million jobs lost” theme over and over again. well, that 3 million is down to 1.8 million. as the economy picks up, his sniping starts to ring more hollow.
there’s not much he can do on the iraq thing. as an establishment type, he knows he can’t call for a us pullout from iraq. recently he started criticizing bush’s planned handover date. when a reporter asked if that meant he would extend it, he tried to change the topic. even if he wants to pull us troops out, he can’t say it or the “soft on foreign policy” label will just hit home harder.
so he’s losing ground on the economy argument and he really can’t do much with the iraq argument.
[quote=“Josh Marshall”]A number of readers have written in to ask whether the “Joshua Marshall” who is the registered owner or registrant or whatever of [color=red]bushflipflops.com[/color] is this Josh Marshall.
Well, yes. It is.
About a month ago I registered the domain.
In large part, my immediate motivation was to make sure someone else didn’t get it who, shall we say, didn’t have a true and sincere interest in exposing the president’s long list of broken promises, changed positions, and highly disparate interpretations of the same facts.
My plan was either to set the site up myself or hand it off to some other organization or individual who was interested in setting up a site dedicated to the president’s distinguished record of flipfloppery.
I’m already so pressed for time that I’m really not going to have time to do anything with it myself. So if you’re that organization or individual, drop me a line. I’ll pass it on for the $35 registration fee or, just as likely, for nothing at all.
Opening day in America, Bush visits Busch Stadium in St. Louis (America’s heartland, and a state he won in 2000) for the Cardinals’ home opener, and the topic apparently becomes “thin skin.”
[quote=“StL Today”]Bush picks fire-red Cards jacket for flamethrowing assignment
By Deb Peterson
04/06/2004
FLACK JACKETS: President George W. Bush had his choice of jackets to wear when throwing out the first pitch at Monday’s Cards opener, said Mark Lamping, Cardinals president. Lamping said the team had a variety of jackets ready, five of them generic jackets with the president’s name on them, and a sixth red Cards jacket sans the Bush insignia. Bush, showing himself to be the savvy prez we all know he can be, chose the right red jacket.
[…]
BACK AT BUSCH: A somewhat hostile crowd complained mightily about the problems the presidential motorcade caused with regular fans trying to get into the park. A Cards employee tipped moi that the team was so concerned about Bush being booed that they piped in fake applause when he strode out to the mound.…
stltoday.com/stltoday/news/C … assignment[/quote]
Just another day in the presidency of Imperial George. 
Uh oh… the economy is looking super… jobs are coming back and expected to pick up even more…
But the Democrats can at least point to the total number of jobs lost during the Bush Presidency…
Or can they?
[quote]Friday brought good news on the economic front, with the Labor Department reporting that 308,000 jobs were added last month. But total payroll employment still appears sickly if one looks back over the last three years. There have been two million jobs lost since March 2001. Or have there?
It depends, as usual, on which statistics you use. And there is reason to doubt the numbers from the payroll survey, which the Labor Department has used since 1939, because they give a misleading picture of the 2004 economy.
[quote=“tigerman”]Uh oh… the economy is looking super… jobs are coming back and expected to pick up even more…
But the Democrats can at least point to the total number of jobs lost during the Bush Presidency…
Or can they?
[quote]Friday brought good news on the economic front, with the Labor Department reporting that 308,000 jobs were added last month. But total payroll employment still appears sickly if one looks back over the last three years. There have been two million jobs lost since March 2001. Or have there?
It depends, as usual, on which statistics you use. And there is reason to doubt the numbers from the payroll survey, which the Labor Department has used since 1939, because they give a misleading picture of the 2004 economy.
nytimes.com/2004/04/07/opinion/07KANE.html
[/quote][/quote]
Yesssss! Please oh please let Bush run on his fiscal record!
[quote=“The Washington Post”]…I’m not predicting that Sadr will succeed in evading U.S. forces and in time set up an Islamic republic as extreme as Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet republic – much as he may wish to. But, like Lenin, he has tapped into a popular sentiment that is far broader than the size of his own narrow legion might suggest. It’s also clear that the civil authority that is supposed to take power June 30 will have few reliable domestic forces to defend it – a situation remniscent of the one confronting Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian provisional government who had no loyal forces at his disposal when the Bolsheviks seized power.
What the Iraqi provisional government will have is the Americans. It would be far better off if it had a force under the U.N. banner, with troops from nations that had opposed as well as supported the war, troops from Arab nations in particular.
But the time to have built such a force, I fear, has come and gone. The administration’s utter failure to envision the problems that a U.S.-controlled occupation would encounter kept it from going to the United Nations until the situation on the ground was barely tenable. It’s still worth trying to get a U.N. high commissioner to supplant Paul Bremer, but it grows harder to imagine why the U.N. would sign on at this late date.
In any event, the administration still shows scant desire to surrender its control of the growing chaos. Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s commissioner in Iraq, has just given up his post in reported frustration over his inability to affect any of Bremer’s decisions. And rather than internationalize control, it’s increasingly apparent that we’ve opted to privatize our force – relying on private security guards to supplement our official force on the ground. The decision epitomizes much that’s wrong with the Bush presidency – in particular, its desire to evade responsibility and accountability for its actions. If the bodies of the security guards killed in Fallujah had not been mutilated, how many American voters would have noticed? One recent poll shows that near-plurality of Americans now favors our leaving Iraq. But precisely because this was not a war we had to fight, just up and leaving would be politically and morally duplicitous. We wrested control of Iraq when we did not have to, and leaving it to its own devices as sectarian violence grows worse would be a dismal end.
The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.
Haha:
Yeah, looks like some (not the Washington Post) are once again seeing the sky fall haha. What a bunch of spineless bastards. Hey, come on this is war. Why isn’t anyone bitching about what’s going on in Kosovo and Serbia and Bosnia? Seems very biased to me given that this one has Bush’s imprimatur not Clinton’s.
I am less worried today than two days ago. We will see. 3,000 Sadr supporters and finally getting Fallujah taken care of and it’s about time.
that’s just a column by one of the resident liberals at the wash post. the editorials by the paper are much more centrist.
“Mr. Bush needs to tell the American people in detail what his plan is for uniting Iraq, who exactly the tough new leaders are going to be and how he intends to create a strong enough government to at least offer the possibility of ending the occupation someday. Otherwise, it is becoming hard to see how to define, let alone achieve, victory in Iraq and to understand why it’s worth the constantly increasing toll of young American lives.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/opinion/08THU1.html?hp
Bush will look back on this period in his old age and realize this is the time when he lost the presidency because of his relative silence and lack of strong leadership.
And where are the rest of the Saddam posse now that the going has gotten tough? This is the wrong time for them to lose their nerve.
Oh, well, it’s been a learning experience. I would never have thought I’d prefer a Democrat in office over a Republican but I’ve learned that a Republican president gone bad is worse than a Democrat from Massachusetts.
Saddam has been moved to Qatar because the U.S. was worried insurgents would be emboldened by the current uprising and try to break him out.
[quote][color=green]US Jobless Claims at Three-Year Low[/color]
Thu Apr 8, 8:37 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless aid dropped sharply last week to the lowest in more than three years, the government said on Thursday in a further sign of a reviving employment market.
[/quote]
[color=red]GRADING THE BUSH ECONOMY[/color]
[quote=“Daniel J. Mitchell, the McKenna fellow in political economy at the Heritage Foundation”]President Bush’s critics accuse him of presiding over a weak economy. They claim job creation has been anemic and growth has been uneven. Sure, partisan politics color these charges, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re untrue. What do the numbers actually say?
As is often the case in politics, we find competing answers. Critics use one set of job numbers to make the president’s performance look weak; supporters use another measure of employment to make him look good.
So who is right? Has President Bush done a poor job? Fortunately, there is a way to answer this question without having to pick sides in the partisan fight. The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of Congress has just published a comprehensive report analyzing economic performance among the world’s major economies (available at www.house.gov/jec.) Titled [color=blue]“International Economic Performance Since the Stock Market Bubble,”[/color] the report compares growth rates and job creation in the U.S., Japan, the European Union and Canada.
[color=blue]The report finds the U.S. economy has significantly outperformed other developed economies[/color]. This does not necessarily mean President Bush has done a great job, but it unambiguously means his economic policies have performed better than those of our major foreign competitors. [color=blue]In a global economy, it’s an unbiased
[i]"I reject the ugly politics of division… a uniter, not a divider."
–George W. Bush, Aug. 14, 1999, Ames, Iowa, U.S.A.
Well, he certainly united the Europeans, and now it seems he’s united Iraq as well.
[quote=“NY Times”]EX-RIVALS UNITING
[color=red]Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Fight Americans
[/color]
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: April 9, 2004
AGHDAD, April 8
Herein lies my dilemma, too. Unless Fred really pisses me off between now and November I’ll probably just vote ‘none of the above’ too – unless it becomes clear Bush is going to get a second chance to screw up and dumb down the Republic even more:
Where does the U.S. find more troops?
By ROBERT NOVAK
. . . While Democrats roar, the generals are silent
Why don’t you vote on the issues and forget about me?
I hardly imagine that I rate so highly as to influence anyone’s choice of presidential candidate to vote for in 2004. But thanks for flattering me. Onto Damascus! Syria must be punished.
Fred,
Let me finish your sentence for those of us who are still trying to figure out just what’s motivating you:
“Onto Damascus! Syria must be punished for threatening Israel, too!”
Well let me clarify:
Onto Damascus and then onto Teheran! Then, I will be finished and given those variables, the world should be safe enough for even a Democrat to take over the reins of the White House.
[quote=“The Spectator”]
[color=red]If It’s War You Want, Vote Kerry
[/color]
JOHN LAUGHLAND
…Bush and Kerry agree on almost everything in foreign policy, but where they disagree, Kerry is more hawkish. In an indication of the extent of the militarisation of American political life, John Kerry launched his campaign for the presidency specifically by profiling himself as a Vietnam war hero, and by presenting George Bush as a draft-dodger and a coward. Kerry