Day: August 22, 2005
Poll: Bush’s Approval Drops Again
George W. Bush’s overall job approval ratings have dropped from a month ago even as Americans who approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president are turning more optimistic about their personal financial situations according to the latest survey from the American Research Group. Among all Americans, 36% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 58% disapprove. When it comes to Bush’s handling of the economy, 33% approve and 62% disapprove.
Among Americans registered to vote, 38% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 56% disapprove, and 36% approve of the way Bush is handling the economy and 60% disapprove.
BuyBlue.org Tells Where Companies Put Their Greenbacks
The impetus behind the creation of a new Web site, BuyBlue.org is that those of us who vote blue should support companies that support blue candidates and causes. The idea is to encourage left-leaning folk to spend their money with companies whose executives donate to liberal and progressive causes and candidates:
You may have voted blue, but every day you unknowingly help dump millions of dollars into the conservative war chest. By purchasing products and services from companies that donate heavily to conservatives, we have been compromising our own interests as liberals and progressives.
BuyBlue.org is a concerted effort to lift the veil of corporate patronage, so consumers can make informed buying decisions that coincide with their principles.
On the site’s handy color-coded list of companies and how they spend, bluest of the blue (100% to liberal/progressive) includes Barnes & Noble, Benihana, Google Onc., Starbuck’s and Tom’s of Maine. In the 90% range are 7-Eleven, Apple Computer, Gateway, Costco and LL Bean.
The reddest of the red ($0 to liberal/progressive) include Ace Hardware, BestBuy, Citgo, Domino’s, Fruit of the Loom, Lowe’s Corp., PetSMART, RE-MAX, Exxon, Geico and McDonald’s.
In politics, it pays to know where your money goes. Buy blue!
German Pagans Organize Against Pope’s Youth Day
In Cologne, Germany, the Committee for Pagan Fun, has been formed in opposition to the Roman Catholic Church’s World Youth Day, and has called for the creation of “religion-free zones.”
Cologne was flooded last week by hundreds of thousands of young Roman Catholics from all over the world, who came to take part in World Youth Day activities that began Tuesday and included a visit by Pope Benedict XVI.
The Committee, which is made up of artists, psychologists, philosophers, pacifists, atheists and people who do not identify with any religion, organised marches against World Youth Day, which officially ended Sunday.
The Committee also complained that one denomination — Catholicism — had temporarily taken over Cologne, and, to a lesser extent, nearby Düsseldorf and Bonn.
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The Angry Right – They Can’t Accept That They Are Wrong
“What I really want to know is why conservatives are so angry. Always snarling and snapping about evil liberals. Heck, they control everything. If something’s wrong, it’s their fault. Not the powerless Democrats snipping at their heels.
“If Democrats had the trifecta I’d be in heaven. It’d be bliss. Every day would be a party. Confetti, good beer, and party hats, all around.
“But not them. They’re still angry.
“Of course, now that I think about it, if Democrats had the trifecta and they fucked shit up as bad as these jokers have, then I suppose I’d be angry. It must be hard seeing the real world make a mockery of everything you stand for.”
– Kos
Has the ‘Tipping Point’ on Iraq Been Reached?
Jim Lobe, writing for the Inter Press News Service, offers some trenchant analysis of the current state of the anti-war movement, the Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq war and the growing groundswell of sentiment against the war.
Has the U.S. public lost so much confidence in the George W. Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war that its current strategy — to the extent one actually exists — is unsustainable?
With Pres. Bush himself besieged by anti-war protesters on his seemingly endless and ill-timed vacation at his Texas ranch, that appears to be The Big Question, just two weeks before the resumption of official business back in Washington.
Both Republican lawmakers, who face mid-term elections in 15 months from now, and the military itself, which, as a result of the Vietnam debacle, has taken as an article of faith that the loss of civilian support must be avoided at all costs, appear increasingly restive and unhappy with the course of events.
“There are more and more voices within the party and military who are beginning to acknowledge that the situation in Iraq is not only not improving, but is actually getting worse,” said Jim Cason of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a lobby group that opposed the war.
“The administration is under more and more pressure from within — especially from the Pentagon and influential Republicans on Capitol Hill — and it clearly hasn’t figured out what to do about it.”
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GOP Senator: ‘Stay the Course Is Not a Policy’
“Stay the course is not a policy…. And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil production down… any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning…. The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.”
– Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska)
Health Officials Concerned About Large-Scale Bird Flu Outbreak in Russia
Russian officials have quarantined a large poultry farm in Siberia because of a suspected outbreak of bird flu, news reports said Saturday, Aug. 20, 2005. If confirmed, it would be the first major occurrence of the lethal virus among birds in Russia, and international health officials expressed concern that the disease had spread closer to Western Europe.
About 142,000 birds are being monitored at a commercial farm in the Omsk region of Siberia, the Russian news agency Interfax reported, quoting a federal agency that tracks the disease.
The presence of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza was reported in July 2005 in Siberia, but only among wild birds and free-range chickens on small family farms.
International officials fear that in September migrating birds escaping the Russian winter might carry avian influenza across the Black Sea and into southeastern Europe and North Africa.
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