|
|
''Sure there's a possibility,'' sa
In an article on Thursday, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz interviews Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times. Within the course of the piece we learn, first, that Keller ran a piece containing the supposed revelation that 377 tons of explosives in Iraq ''vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year,'' then we learn that Keller doesn't know if the explosives went missing after the invasion. Kurtz asked Keller if the explosives could have disappeared while Saddam Hussein controlled the country. ''Sure there's a possibility,'' said Keller, ''and I think the original story accounted for that possibility.''
What amazing dishonesty. Go back and look at how Keller's editorial page used that story on Tuesday. It did not account for the possibility that Saddam Hussein moved the explosives. No, it declared authoritatively that a blundering U.S. military effort accounted for the lost explosives. ''James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in Iraq that the United States failed to secure,'' stated the Times editorial titled ''Making Things Worse.'' Where in this statement is the ''possibility'' that the explosives vanished before U.S. troops arrived?
The Times editorial used the news story to crow about U.S. fecklessness. The U.N. monitored the explosives before the war, but American troops lost them after it, the Times editorialized: ''The United Nations inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United States took over the job.'' Donald Rumsfeld's military couldn't ''guards things like the ammunition dump,'' it wrote.
By that 377 tons of explosives
|
|
|
|
|
|
''There is something truly absurd
Here is one of those small signs of Beltway conviction that Kerry is a loser. Anthony Cordesman is no friend of the Administration, but the senior analyst at the Center for International Security is one of the ''go-to'' experts admired by the press. The Washington Post puts him on the front page this morning:
''There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa,'' Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. ''The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total.''
By Why Focusing on 377 tons
|
|
|
Sen Harkin Say GOD is For Kerry
VINTON - Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin says John Kerry has been gaining in the polls every day since Oct. 21, and George Bush has been going down every day.
''That's how God wants it to be,'' Harkin told a group of about 25 people at the Benton County Headquarters in Vinton on Thursday afternoon.
Harkin was touring the state to stump for Kerry and Democratic legislative candidates. He appeared in Benton County on behalf of Mt. Auburn Mayor Dawn Pettengill, who is running against incumbent Republican Dell Hanson for the Iowa House District 39 seat.
Harkin spent the first part of his speech echoing many of the campaign themes of the economy and Iraq sounded by Kerry in his presidential campaign.
Harkin predicted victory for Kerry on Tuesday, saying that the polls that show Bush and Kerry in a tight race do not include the many new Democrats who have recently registered to vote.
(Most polls only use input from likely voters, which mean those who have voted in previous elections.)
Harkin said that in Iowa, 50,000 new voters registered as Democrats recently, but only 20,000 registered as Independents and even fewer - 9,400 - registered as Republicans.
After encouraging the party faithful to get out the vote for Kerry, Harkin turned his attention to the Iowa Legislature, which he called an ''albatross around the neck'' of Gov. Tom Vilsack, whom he referred to as the ''best governor in the United States.''
''This is the worst legislature I've seen since the 1950s,'' Harkin said.
Harkin didn't remember the name of Pettengill's opponent, but told the group, ''he has to go.''
Harkin introduced Pettengill, who used her speech to respond to Republican mailings and television ads blaming her for a tax increase in Mt. Auburn by saying the city council was forced to increase taxes because of budget decisions made by Hanson and other Republicans in the legislature.
By That's how God wants it to be
|
|
|
NEA Gave Over A Million To Kerry
NEA Gave Over A Million To Kerry, Faces IRS Audit
The National Education Association has been busy this election cycle, the Washington Times reports. The teachers union has spent over a million dollars in direct support for John Kerry and $2.78 million supporting Democrats overall, prompting the IRS to investigate its tax-exempt status:The National Education Association (NEA) pumped more than $1 million into 67 mailings for the Kerry-Edwards presidential ticket and against President Bush in the past four months, Federal Election Commission reports show. Twenty-one NEA mailings in behalf of the Kerry campaign, produced by an Arlington firm whose clients include the Democratic Party, went out to hundreds of thousands of public school employees across the country this month at a cost of $468,333. The union paid for all the mailings from its general operating budget, not its political action committee, the reports show.Now that presents two problems. First, using the same production firm as the DNC indicates possible collusion (termed ''illegal coordination'' by McCain-Feingold) in advocacy efforts. Second and more to the point for the IRS, spending the money out of the NEA's general budget instead of its political-action committee violates campaign-finance regulating the influence of corporations and unions, I believe. Conservative teachers have called for reform of the union's political activities as well:In a July interview, NEA President Reg Weaver said about one-third of the union's 2.7 million dues-paying members are Democrats, one-third are Republicans and one-third are independents. FEC reports show that only four Republican congressional candidates received money from the NEA's political action committee from April through July ?— Sens. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Reps. C.W. Bill Young of Florida and Jim Kolbe of Arizona. ...''We need to look toward spending political action committee funds more equitably between the political parties,'' said Diane Lenning, an English teacher from California and past chairman of the NEA Republican Educators Caucus. ''The NEA's teachers speak of fairness, diversity and free speech. Therefore, we need to look toward equal representation of funds spent among candidates across the country from local to national levels,'' Mrs. Lenning said.The NEA's almost-complete Democratic support comes as no surprise, and its motivations are easily understood. The efforts at educational reform have unnerved union leaders due to the administration's determination to hold schools responsible for their performance -- a philosophy that threatens to undermine the ridiculous ''tenure'' model that makes removal of ineffective teachers an almost impossible task. But what they truly fear is an effort to implement a school-voucher plan that would for the first time create a competitive market for educating the children of working families instead of just the richest families in America. Competition would either force public schools to reform themselves and their evaluation processes or face obsolescence. Good teachers, of course, could find work in a boom of private-school openings that vouchers would create or negotiate better conditions for themselves at the public schools that would want to hang onto them. The effect of the NEA's opposition to change is to protect the least competent among them, a fact not lost on several teachers I know personally.The NEA has gone all out to prevent any meaningful reform of our public education system, and they have done so by overwhelmingly supporting John Kerry and other Democrats. That should tell you all you need to know about which party can be trusted to bring change and improvement to the education of our children.
By Faces IRS Audit
|
