John Kerry for President
   The   New York Times | Endorsement  

   Sunday 17 October 2004  

   Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a   base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own   candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than   just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities   that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest   improvement on the incumbent.  

   We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide   knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was   reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to   re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in   Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has   been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He   strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.  

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   There is no denying that this race is mainly about   Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court   awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation   that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center.   Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.  

   Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the   far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney   general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after   another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda   including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem   cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the   Univer sity of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did   for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.  

   When the nation fell into recession, the president   remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's   war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to   strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate   funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his   signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems   without providing enough money to meet them.  

   If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on   which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have   picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the for mer New Jersey governor chosen   to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition.   Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and   industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in   every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic   weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental   issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.  

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   The president who lost the popular vote got a real   mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush   had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only   limit was his imagination.  

   He asked for another tax cut and the war agains t   Iraq.  

   The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting   agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking   example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically   altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money   it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also   made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's   security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still   goes uninspected.  

   Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had   near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney   general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the   hallmarks of the administra tion's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian   obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.  

   American citizens were detained for long periods   without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and   forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found   were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held   incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice   Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and   treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.  

   Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to   announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent,   harmless braggarts or extremely low-l evel sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who,   while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice   Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has   squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in   2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so   long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or   unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison   in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the   world standard for human rights could behave that way.  

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   Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam   Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the   American people , and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq   had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation   was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on   two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical   materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other   evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant   for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been   thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting.   Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway.   None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their   misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war   that followed .  

   The international outrage over the American invasion   is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate   Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted   by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim   world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught   decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to   acquire nuclear weapons themselves.  

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   We have specific fears about what would happen in a   second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far   gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of   an infamous Justice Department memo justifying t he use of torture as an   interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush   selection, J Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives   must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to   Nazis.  

   Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has   never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for   projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.  

   If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign   financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with   record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like   an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.  

   The Bush White House has always given us the worst   aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical   goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling   of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The   Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its   inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without   providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed   to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to   respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.  

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   Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He   has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across   the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he   would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he   understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his   sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do   without.  

   Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases   innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and   oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate,   he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and   Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system   has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always   understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a   willing community of nation s, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.  

   We look back on the past four years with hearts   nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities   so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a   heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with   John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.  

   Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate   can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile   Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid   plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the   candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general   character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiast ically endorse John   Kerry for president.  

You got that from somebody at work?

The newspaper of Walter Duranty, that still defends the "honors" he received,  should be trusted only by caged birds needing a place to shit.

Quoted: You got that from somebody at work?

yup from another employee. she sent it out to everyone. looks like she is trying to get fired. at least i hope so.

hey but that "artice" wasnt biased at all.... was it?

Save it.  Send back a polite "please don't sent this type of material to me again" email.

Any further mail you get along these lines should be forwarded (along with the previous ones) to HR.  Let them handle it.

oh btw. she has a few copies of farenshite 911 at her desk and asks evertone who walks by to borrow it and watch it.

Stick a pencil in her eye.

Quoted: oh btw. she has a few copies of farenshite 911 at her desk and asks evertone who walks by to borrow it and watch it.

Swap them out with Farenhype 9/11 - leave the jackets, just replace the videos.  

She'll keep on thinking that she's passing out the old vids.  hee-hee-hee

Sneak a copy of Faren Hype 9/11 into the DVD case.

bwahahah. that would be funny, but too expensive for my tastes

Why not beat them at their own game? My wife and I own a restaurant and if we were to overtly let it be know that we are Bush supporters we would lose half our customers (many yellow dogs here). I get around this by posting cartoons/email messages in the restrooms.

The photograph of the 2 Marines in Iraq holding the "Fuck Michael Moore, Go Bush" message is seen by everyone taking a leak.  It has been torn down 3 or 4 times but I just put up a new one.

I'm sure you could do the same thing in the workplace heads. Make someone prove you are doing it.

Quoted: Save it.  Send back a polite "please don't sent this type of material to me again" email. Any further mail you get along these lines should be forwarded (along with the previous ones) to HR.  Let them handle it.

Send the reply and cc HR and tell them you are OFFENDED.

Quoted: bwahahah. that would be funny, but too expensive for my tastes

C'mon...only $10.00 for all that fun.
Hell, thats cheaper than going to the rifle range.

Quoted: John Kerry for President    The   New York Times | Endorsement      Sunday 17 October 2004      Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a   base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own   candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than   just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities   that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest   improvement on the incumbent.      We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide   knowledge and clear thinking

That's as far as I got before I had to run to the bathroom and  

Is it even possible to count the number of positions he's taken and stories he's told on his military service, Iraq, etc?

The only clear thought he's had this whole campaign was to hire James Carville & Paul Begala.  I can't stand those two smarmy, weasley individuals, but there are very politically astute and far from stupid.

Quoted: Quoted: Save it.  Send back a polite "please don't sent this type of material to me again" email. Any further mail you get along these lines should be forwarded (along with the previous ones) to HR.  Let them handle it. Send the reply and cc HR and tell them you are OFFENDED.

And then he'll have a job for life.  A company will hardly ever layoff an employee who had a hr complaint for fear of a lawsuit.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Save it.  Send back a polite "please don't sent this type of material to me again" email. Any further mail you get along these lines should be forwarded (along with the previous ones) to HR.  Let them handle it. Send the reply and cc HR and tell them you are OFFENDED. And then he'll have a job for life.  A company will hardly ever layoff an employee who had a hr complaint for fear of a lawsuit.

dont have to worry about it. i have a shitload of options and the company have .6 billion in the bank. with 3 drugs in trials and a 30 million burn rate. so layoffs arnt comming anytime soon so i dont care. but damn.............. that is almost hate speech. in fact if it wee the other way around i bet it would be considered hate speech.

must be nice to be a commie lib and not have to worry about offending people. but then again it is the party of tollerence. as long as you agree with them

Quoted: Stick a broken pencil in her eye.

Fixed it for ya.

Don't wait for the next time to rat her out. Do it now. Would she wait if you sent out a pro-Bush email?

Send her links and copies of every piece of pro-President Bush propaganda, information, videos, swift vets, until she complains.

Fill up her mailbox.

Then fill it up again.

Exactly.  To let it go now will only make it tougher to make a case for personal offense later.  Just think about kids, if they smart off and need a spanking, you don't wait until the next time--do it now or the line has moved and you are backing up.