If you want the quality of healthcare to decrease for most Americans, keep fighting. You can choose to have no healthcare for a very small portion of the population (and, indeed, there is care available to many of those people anyway) or you can choose to have crappy healthcare for almost everyone.yeah, to a select few who are fortunate enough to get their care...i want it to be an equal opportunity thing for everyone, whomever and wherever they may be in the country, covering not just regular clinic visits, but hospital visits, operations, etc. as well
And it's going to cost money. It's nice to see that you don't care if our nation becomes bankrupt. When your kids enjoy a lower standard of living than most Mexicans, you can thank your enormously expensive and inefficient healthcare plan.
AH, I just had to post the image...it's priceless
Link
CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''
Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812 (). The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.
The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "
Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the do ents in hand did not match up with other do ents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."
The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. (
After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''
The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''
George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.
Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''
''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''
''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.
I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.
Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.
You know SW, "atwitter" is one of my favorite words.
You know there have been some very insightful, intelligent and witty posts in this thread but basically...
I support Bush over Kerry because I think everyone, including terrorist s, know that Bush will bomb some mother ers if they continue being terrorists. Countries know that if they continue to talk about of both sides of their ass, comdemning terrorist on one hand and supporting it on the other...those countries know that if they do that and **** with us there is a very good chance Bush will send the US Millitary to bomb them back into the stoneage and overthrow their govt...
I think those are messages that need to be sent...and if that philosophy still doesn't work, I think there's a better chance that Bush will nuke em than Kerry.
These are good countries that should not be nuked:
England
Poland
Denmark
Australia
Italy
South Korea(although if they keep ing about gold medals I think we should keep a nuke with their name on it just in case)
These countries need to go **** themselves and need to be kept on the nuke list:
France
Germany
Iran
Palestinian refugees
Syria...
The rest of the countries are on the bubble or I forgot where they stand...I'm not really sure what I feel about Canada anymore and Russia may be starting to figure it out...
Unless they happen to be called "Saudi Arabia"....Countries know that if they continue to talk about of both sides of their ass, comdemning terrorist on one hand and supporting it on the other...those countries know that if they do that and **** with us there is a very good chance Bush will send the US Millitary to bomb them back into the stoneage and overthrow their govt...
Hey! They're on my "to-be-nuked" list.
What bothers me about our current president who has no idea of what war is really like that he believes he can defeat terrorism (and win re-election) by touting his war on Iraq and his 9/11 speech.
Looks like many on this board have fallen for his rhetoric.
Having seen the evil of war, I guess I just view things differently. How people can say that the media is liberal when all I see when there is another casualty of war is a small blurp on the evening news or in the papers is beyond me.
Not to mention the thousands of wounded not only of our own military but the thousands in Iraq.
Just like those of you that have fallen for Kerry's rhetoric on how he's going to save the world with his $1-trillion-dollars-over-10-years health care plan that won't do anything but diminish the care provided by those who already pay for their own insurance by driving private insurance companies out of business, and his inability to stand firm in on any particular point?
If the democrats could have provided a better candidate I would certainly have considered him/her. But Kerry? No thanks.
I don't want him to retire before he's completely humiliated.
I think anyone is assenine who can sit there and say that Bush doesn't know what war really is like. He was standing at Ground Zero in NY, in case you forgot, that was about as close to as you could get without being there with Satan himself.What bothers me about our current president who has no idea of what war is really like that he believes he can defeat terrorism (and win re-election) by touting his war on Iraq and his 9/11 speech.
Looks like many on this board have fallen for his rhetoric.
Further, Bush has met with lots of vets/injured, so spare me he doesn't know what's happening over there...
As for Bush's war on terrorism, let's see...
1. No attacks on American soil since 9/11
2. Multiple terrorists killed or captured
3. Taliban out of power in Afghanistan
4. Hussein out of power in Iraq
5. Insert one of the many AQ leaders busted here
6. Shifting the frontline of the battle against terrorists from our airplane aisles to staring down the barrel of an M1
The only thing disappointing, misguided, the only evidence of manipulated rhetoric, is the people like yourself who think that if the US goes and hides in a damn corner that Osama will leave us alone.
It's stupid, shortsighted, but hey, Kerry said it so you know it must be true...
Here's a newsflash for you: radical Islam is the single biggest threat to the future of humanity. Bigger than poverty, global warming, universal health care, Bush missing a physical in '73, and all the other stupid that liberals cry about.
This is about the future of mankind, and it's going to take a lot more of leaders like Bush and a lot less of pussies like Kerry for the US (and the rest of the world, who will join us in time when the threat becomes imminent to them), as well as a lot of sacrifices by young men and women from our armed forces as well as others, for the good guys (that would be us for all the ignorant libs) to come out on top.
I think anyone is assenine who can sit there and say that Bush doesn't know what war really is like. He was standing at Ground Zero in NY, in case you forgot, that was about as close to as you could get without being there with Satan himself.
Don't forget that he personally fed the troops a fake turkey on Thanksgiving, and proclaimed major combat over and 'mission accomplished' with a sock stuffed into his flight suit on the flight deck of a carrier parked 30 miles of the American coast (humm..wonder how much that cost, **** it, it's only tax-payer money).
A photo op at ground zero 3 days after the attack is hardly the same a having your ass hanging out in combat for two tours of duty.
Oh, well, no terrorists attacks in the U.S., that's good. Never mind that the rate of world-wide terrorism has steadily increased since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Never mind that genocide is currently being administered indiscriminately in Sudan while the world community sits on it's hands and the U.S. to committed in Iraq to react. Never mind that the Invasion of Iraq has destabilized about the only part of the Middle East that was stable almost longer than the existence of Israel. Never mind that the U.S. lost it's 1000th troop recently, more than 10,000 Iraq civilians have been killed and more than 100,000 others maimed or injured in the war even though they had nothing to do with 911 or posed no threat to America.No attacks on American soil since 9/11
Never mind that there seems to be no end in sight to the continued needed existence of a large American military presence in Iraq at a costs of hundreds of billions of dollars more to the American taxpayer. Never mind that the administration can't seem to find what they did with more than $1 billion dollars of taxpayer money in Iraq.
Everything is just cheery here.
[
And, somewhere in North Korea, the Buddha is smiling.
Again.
George W. Bush's Military Lies: The Real Story About the Undeniable Service Gaps He Got Away With
The CBS report at the heart of a new film might have been false. But the underlying question about his service remains.
The parallel here should be underscored. Rather’s career with CBS was ended because he built his story on apparently fraudulent memos (their actual status remains undetermined) from Lt. Colonel. Jerry B. Killian. The most notable one, labeled CYA for “cover your ass,” claimed Killian was being pressured from above to give Bush undeserved better marks in his yearly evaluation. However, shortly after the original airing, Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, placed the memos’ status in an almost exact parallel to Woodward and Bernstein’s false reporting of an underlying true fact. “I didn’t type them,” Knox said in a broadcast interview, “However, the information in those is correct.”
Smith’s point here is simple:
Even if the do ents could be criticized (falsely, it turns out), we can draw a close parallel with Woodward and Bernstein’s story on Haldeman: the story about Bush abandoning his service in the Air National Guard was also true.
Indeed, the gaps in Bush’s service record were undeniable. They were reported, but virtually ignored four years earlier, in the 2000 election cycle, when the media was focused on their self-fabricated narrative of Gore being the untrustworthy one who told tall tales about his past.
On May 23, 2000, Boston Globe reporter Walter V. Robinson reported finding a “one-year gap in Bush’s Guard duty,” saying that “22 months after finishing his training, and with two years left on his six-year commitment, Bush gave up flying — for good.” Beyond a momentary flurry, there wasn’t much other corporate media interest in that cycle, though Martin Heldt published a detailed analysis of Bush’s guard records at the Online Journal in September 2000. Fast forward to the morning of the “60 Minutes” report, and Robinson wrote another story “Bush fell short on duty at Guard,” with “Records show pledges unmet,” as the subhead. The framing had shifted from Bush’s attendance gap, to Bush violating his sworn duty — and getting away with it:
Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service — first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School — Bush signed do ents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.
He didn’t meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 do ent has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 do ent has received scant notice.
The Globe’s analysis was supported by two other independent analysts. The first, retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, wrote a highly detailed 32-page analysis, which the New York Times put on its website, but never seriously built upon in its reporting or its editorial page. Lechliter was also interviewed by the Globe.
The second was a civilian analyst, Paul Lukasiak, whose website the AWOL Project (Sept 2004 web.archive version) had attracted considerable attention online, and was discussed at length by Eric Boehlert at Salon the day after the "60 Minutes" report. Both Lechliter and Lukasiak placed the Bush do ents in the framework of contemporary military rules, regulations, policies and procedures, which were absolutely crucial for understanding what was really going on, and not being easily spun by Bush apologists. All three of these analyses reached similar conclusions, without any reliance on the “60 Minutes” memos. I summarized the broad outlines of these misadventures in a story three weeks later:http://www.alternet.org/george-w-bus...ps-he-got-away
Bush’s problems began in late Spring on 1972, when he first tried to transfer to a non-flying unit — a back door way of breaking his signed service agreement approved by his Texas superiors, but rejected at the federal level. He then failed to take a mandatory flight physical and was suspended from flying, stopped attending drills for at least six months, and was not observed by his superior officers for a full year. (He never took another physical again, and was, apparently, never disciplined for it.)
A hurried spate of training unlawfully packed into a brief two-month period was then followed by his discharge from the Texas Air National Guard (TXANG), but he never fulfilled his obligation to finish his service at a unit in Massachusetts when he returned to New England to get an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Truly, in the long list of ty Presidents, dubya was, always will be, one of the tiest.
Here is where I have a problem with a news source. This is just like Fox. They blame THE media in the US as if it where some monolithic structure slanted against their point of view.
when the media was focused on their self-fabricated narrative of Gore being the untrustworthy on
how so?
Be just doesn't give up.
He is the Black Knight of Monty Python.
Blaming THE MEDIA.
Who is THE MEDIA?
Read my post from your article, THE MEDIA after Gore...
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