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Post by Roughneck on Oct 26, 2004 7:18:00 GMT -5
Here's another interesting trick they're trying to pull. Gore won New Mexico by 300 votes. Well wouldn't you know it that they've stationed I think some 700 troops there for short tours of duty, or whatever they call them stateside. Now where do you think these troops will register to vote? And sad tyo say that even with the way he's handling things, the military is still by and large a Republican group. Coincidence? I think not. But at least New Mexico will be safe from terrorism.
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snizz
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I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
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Post by snizz on Oct 26, 2004 16:03:30 GMT -5
I agree with you on this one. The Yankees were supposed to beat the Red Sox, the Jets were supposed to beat the Patriots and the Cards were supposed to cruise their way to the WS ring and it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe it's a sign of things to come? I'm sure willing to eat that Jets-Pats loss if that's what it means! ;D Go figure. No matter where we are in the standings, the two things that were always a safe bet. Beating the Fish and the Pats. All I can say is, it's got to be a sign.
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Roland
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Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues
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Post by Roland on Oct 26, 2004 22:43:16 GMT -5
Here's another interesting trick they're trying to pull. Gore won New Mexico by 300 votes. Well wouldn't you know it that they've stationed I think some 700 troops there for short tours of duty, or whatever they call them stateside. Now where do you think these troops will register to vote? And sad tyo say that even with the way he's handling things, the military is still by and large a Republican group. Coincidence? I think not. But at least New Mexico will be safe from terrorism. But think of how funny it'd be if, since the 2000 election, 700 democrats have moved there.
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Roland
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Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues
Posts: 235
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Post by Roland on Oct 26, 2004 22:46:46 GMT -5
I'm sure willing to eat that Jets-Pats loss if that's what it means! ;D Go figure. No matter where we are in the standings, the two things that were always a safe bet. Beating the Fish and the Pats. All I can say is, it's got to be a sign. Putting politics before football? I tip my hat to you snizz! ;D My sincerest congratulations, you guys are having a heck of a season so far. Being a Bears and Cubs fan, believe me I can relate. In the battle of the undefeateds, I was pulling for the Jets to keep their streak going. It's really too bad, they almost had it too. How about that Philly-Cleveland game? That was some game too. I really thought Cleveland would pull it off and take down Philly.
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snizz
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I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
Posts: 322
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Post by snizz on Oct 30, 2004 21:46:32 GMT -5
Putting politics before football? I tip my hat to you snizz! ;D Hell I'd be more than happy to donate my right arm and spleen too! ;D You could've bowled me over! I was expecting some improvement so this is an unexpected surprise. That long overdue headcoaching change on offense seems to have worked miracles. ;D I was going all the way for Cleveland-- I really thought they were going to bag it too. I'd like to see NE go down first, but I say give them one more first, just to be safe. ;D The Bears and the Cubs? You from Chicago? I had you pegged as a West Coaster all this time! Kindred spirits we are then. ;D Those Cubbies are my second favorite and I know their day will come soon. The Bears? Just know I feel your pain.
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Roland
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Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues
Posts: 235
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Post by Roland on Nov 2, 2004 16:14:40 GMT -5
Hell I'd be more than happy to donate my right arm and spleen too! ;D I think there's a lot of people that feel that way. You got your first wish, but not the second one. I think that was small potatoes and it won't have any effect. Or so I'm hoping! ;D But the good news is you're back in first. A west coaster? Where did you get that idea? Yes Chicago, relatively speaking. 17 miles outside official city limits, so I guess it's close enough. The Cubs. Since Boston proved that curses can be broken, maybe it'll give them some incentive to break theirs. ;D The Bears. All is not lost, we won another one, that makes two! ;D I do look at the bright side though, Miami fans are having it a lot worse this year. Ouch!
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Post by Roughneck on Nov 8, 2004 12:35:43 GMT -5
Voting Without the Facts By BOB HERBERT he so-called values issue, at least as it's being popularly tossed around, is overrated.
Last week's election was extremely close and a modest shift in any number of factors might have changed the outcome. If the weather had been better in Ohio. ...If the wait to get into the voting booth hadn't been so ungodly long in certain Democratic precincts. ... Or maybe if those younger voters had actually voted. ...
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.
This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."
I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.
A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.
If you don't think this values thing has gotten out of control, consider the lead paragraph of an op-ed article that ran in The LA. Times on Friday. It was written by Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who is now a host on the Christian talk-radio station KKLA.
"Christians, in politics as in evangelism," said Mr. Pastore, "are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology."
Mr. Pastore goes on to exhort Christian conservatives to reject any and all voices that might urge them "to compromise with the vanquished." How's that for values?
In The New York Times on Thursday, Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, declared, "Now comes the revolution." He said, "Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years."
Mr. Viguerie, it is clear, will stand four-square against any such dangerous moves toward reconciliation.
You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?
What the Democratic Party needs above all is a clear message and a bold and compelling candidate. The message has to convince Americans that they would be better off following a progressive Democratic vision of the future. The candidate has to be a person of integrity capable of earning the respect and the affection of the American people.
This is doable. Al Gore and John Kerry were less than sparkling candidates, and both came within a hair of defeating Mr. Bush.
What the Democrats don't need is a candidate who is willing to shape his or her values to fit the pundits' probably incorrect analysis of the last election. Values that pivot on a dime were not really values to begin with.
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Post by Roughneck on Nov 25, 2004 14:01:11 GMT -5
FRANK RICH The Great Indecency Hoax H, the poor, suffering little children.
If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America's youth have been defiled en masse - again. This time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette Sheridan, who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional spot for the runaway hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked off "Monday Night Football" on ABC. "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who increasingly fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to "Son of Flubber."
It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day." Ever since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2 that they cared most about "moral values," opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.
The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral values" story line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).
To see how the hucksters of the right work their scam, there could be no more illustrative example than the "Monday Night Football" episode in which Ms. Sheridan leaped into the arms of the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in order to give the declining weekly game (viewership is down 3 percent from 2003) a shot of Viagra. From the get-go, it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of "The Crucible."
Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone. "I was stunned!" he told his listeners. "I literally could not believe what I had seen. ... At various places on the Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked, folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was naked. There's no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean you don't need that. ...I mean, there are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night Football.' "
Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of them were as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led him to mistake a lower back for a rear end. (He also said that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the Kobe Bryant case; let's not even go there.) The evidence suggests that Mr. Limbaugh's prurient mind is the exception, not the rule. Though seen nationwide, and as early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the spot initially caused so little stir that the next morning only two newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported on it. ABC's switchboards were not swamped by shocked viewers on Monday night. A spokesman for ABC Sports told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he hadn't received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast.
Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn't get around to mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday. Mr. Owens's agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of complaints at his office and Mr. Owens's Web site also didn't start until more than 24 hours after the incident - late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Were any of these complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of "Monday Night Football" or were they just a mob assembled after the fact by "family" groups, emboldened by their triumph in smiting "Saving Private Ryan" from 66 ABC stations the week before? Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had received 50,000 complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it couldn't determine how many of them were duplicates - the kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by political organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger and two seconds of idle time.
Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex tape was now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could revel incessantly in the shock of it all. "People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron Brown of CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the marketplace. And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement spokesman after more than two days of such replays, the agency had not yet received a single complaint about the spot's constant recycling on other TV shows, among them the highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms. Sheridan's bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly hour of 11 a.m.
The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national running gag. As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the N.F.L. maintained it had no idea that MTV might produce a racy halftime show, the league has denied any prior inkling of the salaciousness on tap this time - even though the spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with the full permission of one of the league's teams in its own locker room. Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.
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Post by Roughneck on Nov 25, 2004 14:02:04 GMT -5
But there's another, more insidious game being played as well. The F.C.C. and the family values crusaders alike are cooking their numbers. The first empirical evidence was provided this month by Jeff Jarvis, a former TV Guide critic turned blogger. He had the ingenious idea of filing a Freedom of Information Act request to see the actual viewer complaints that drove the F.C.C. to threaten Fox and its affiliates with the largest indecency fine to date - $1.2 million for the sins of a now-defunct reality program called "Married by America." Though the F.C.C. had cited 159 public complaints in its legal case against Fox, the documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there were actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals. Of those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form letter posted by the Parents Television Council. In other words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about "Married by America" was 3.
Such letter-writing factories as the American Family Association's OneMillionMoms.com also exaggerate their clout in intimidating advertisers. They brag, for instance, that the retail chain Lowe's dropped its commercials on "Desperate Housewives" in response to their protests. But Lowe's was not an advertiser on the show; the advertiser who actually bought the commercial was Whirlpool, which plugged Lowe's as a retail outlet for its products under a co-branding arrangement. Another advertiser that the family-values mafia takes credit for chasing away, Tyson Foods, had only bought in for one episode of "Desperate Housewives" in the first place. It had long since been replaced by such Fortune 500 advertisers as Ford and McDonald's, each clamoring to pay three times as much for a 30-second spot ($450,000) as those early advertisers who bought time before the show had its debut and became an instant smash.
But perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state of play in American culture in 2004 is "Desperate Housewives" itself. Conceived by Marc Cherry, who is described by Newsweek as a "somewhat conservative, gay Republican," it is a campy, well-made soap opera presenting suburban American family life as a fugue of dysfunction, malice and sex. It's not for nothing that its characters are seen running off to Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder retrospectives or that some of the episodes are named after Stephen Sondheim songs like "Who's That Woman?" and "Pretty Little Picture."
The children of Mr. Cherry's Wisteria Lane can be as poisonous as that small-town brat in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt": one preadolescent girl is an extortionist and one teenage daughter all but pimps for her divorced mother. The career-driven husbands are as soulless as the office rats of Wilder's "Apartment," and their wives are, yes, as desperate as those in the Manhattan high-rises of Sondheim's "Company." Whatever else is to be said about "Desperate Housewives" - and I haven't missed an episode - it is not to be confused with the kind of entertainment that the Traditional Values Coalition wants to impose on the airwaves. It not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" in its cheeky, sardonic tone but brushes right up against them in language and action.
In one recent show the most oversexed character on screen, a 17-year-old jock having an affair with a married woman, is revealed to be a member of his high school's "abstinence club." (Surely it was a coincidence that this revelation butted right up against a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a prescription contraceptive.) In another, a wife collapsing under the burden of stay-at-home motherhood slugs her spouse when he contemplates not using a condom. Then there was the dinner party where another of the wives tries to humiliate her husband by telling the assembled that he "cries after he ejaculates."
"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon. A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Ms. Sheridan on "Monday Night Football" would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series - and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers. Though children ages 2 to 11 make up a small percentage of the audience of either show, there are actually more in that age group tuning into Mr. Cherry's marital brawls (870,000) than into the N.F.L.'s fisticuffs (540,000). "Desperate Housewives" also ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."
Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads .com and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.
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Post by LS on Nov 26, 2004 23:11:03 GMT -5
This one sums it all up...particularly this part. Ah...but yep this is exactly what I was sayin' to SAM in the other thread...Seems violence is perfectly socially acceptable but it's sex that'll be the downfall of humanity. And I'm sorry...but did anyone else find amusement in the White House's statement about the elections in the Ukraine...saying that their election was rigged because the 'winner' was not who was ahead according to the exit polls??
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Post by Roughneck on Nov 27, 2004 0:12:03 GMT -5
I haven't even been able to laugh at them lecturing others on fair elections. Just sit in a stupor over the audacity it takes to do it.
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snizz
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I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
Posts: 322
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Post by snizz on Dec 2, 2004 14:33:49 GMT -5
I haven't even been able to laugh at them lecturing others on fair elections. Just sit in a stupor over the audacity it takes to do it. You have to laugh at their audacity. It exposes the hypocrites for what they are-- nothing but a bunch of phony ass hypocrites. Otherwise it makes them look legit and we all know they're anything but. But let's give them some credit. Over the past 4 years, like somebody said before, they restarted the Civil War, the Vietnam War and the Holy Wars. They're on track to restart the Korean War and from the sound of Putin, they might be on the verge of restarting the Cold War. That's got to go down in the books as a first and count for something.
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Roland
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Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues
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Post by Roland on Dec 7, 2004 22:16:00 GMT -5
You have to laugh at their audacity. It exposes the hypocrites for what they are-- nothing but a bunch of phony ass hypocrites. Otherwise it makes them look legit and we all know they're anything but. So true. Clowns are not meant to be taken seriously. Yes Snizz, that's quite a feat that'll go down for something alright. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the Bushies who ridiculed and scoffed at Kerry when he said he was shooting for the goal to start bringing the troops home from Iraq during his first term? And now Bush is saying the whole war will be finished by the end of his second term? No sooner did he make that statement when the CIA released a status report showing things are even worse than the media is reporting. Is this idiot ever going to learn how to read or does he honestly think we're all as delusional as he is?
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snizz
Full Member
I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
Posts: 322
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Post by snizz on Dec 9, 2004 22:23:22 GMT -5
So true. Clowns are not meant to be taken seriously. ;D Yezsir they did. Now I'm seeing things since the election that are pointing in the direction that Bushie's gotten tired of Iraq. Too messy maybe? A colossal boo-boo afterall? And he's pushing for the elections there to come off on schedule come hell or high water so he can tell them they've got their new government, they're on their own to work it out, so he can wash his hands of it and walk away. Look at how fast he got bored with Osama-- "dead or alive". Newsview: Timely Iraq Vote Is Pride IssueBy ANNE GEARAN WASHINGTON (AP) - For an administration that likes to make the trains run on time, the Jan. 30 elections scheduled in Iraq are light at the end of a dark and violent tunnel. The Bush administration insists that the date should hold firm, over objections from some Iraqi minority politicians, both as a point of pride and a matter of pragmatism. ``This is a president who likes to manage an orderly process,'' said Frederick Barton, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``Post-conflict transitions, and this one in particular, are chaotic.'' Secretary of State Colin Powell was unequivocal this week. ``The Iraqi people want freedom. They want to choose their own leaders. They want to vote, and they want to vote without delay, they want to vote next month,'' Powell said Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, on his last trip abroad as secretary. ``We must not mortgage the future and the hopes of Iraqis to the intimidation of terrorists and thugs,'' he said. Implicit in that statement is that delaying the elections would be a symbolic victory for terrorists and insurgents waging war on U.S. troops. Supporters of postponing the vote say it would allow time to reduce the violence and allow more people to vote. Seventeen minority political parties in Iraq have urged the interim government to put off the election for at least six months. The interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, had been adamant about holding the elections as scheduled, but was quoted by a Belgium newspaper this week as saying Iraq might consider spreading the voting over a period of up to three weeks to defuse the threat and allow for better protection of polling stations. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he doubts the election can be held on schedule. ``Honestly speaking, I cannot imagine how it is possible to organize elections under the conditions of occupation by foreign forces,'' Putin said in televised comments during a Kremlin meeting with Allawi. ``I think there is the sense that it would look embarrassing for the president'' to allow a delay now, said Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and a senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. Galbraith favors a go-slow approach, starting with partial elections in stable parts of the country. ``Yes, the appearance of postponing is bad, but the reality of holding (nationwide) elections is much worse,'' Galbraith said. Larry Diamond, a former official with the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the Bush administration has genuine and practical reasons for pressing early elections. A delay now runs the risk of alienating the Shiite majority, which was shut out of power under Saddam Hussein and is understandably eager to establish political primacy now, Diamond said. Fast elections also tend to favor the current Allawi government, which the United States sees as a valuable long-term ally, Diamond said. ``And thirdly, I think the administration thinks that ... whatever the level of violence that may exist on January 30, it could be worse on April 30 or June 30 if they don't go forward with elections,'' Diamond said. On that point, even sometime critics of the administration agree. ``If you do delay, you just create another target date for the insurgents to go after,'' said Lee Feinstein, a senior State Department adviser in the Clinton administration and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. P.J. Crowley, a military adviser to former President Clinton, said with insurgents apparently prepared for a long fight, there is a risk in hinging the election to some determination that the country is safe enough. ``Delaying once leaves a very real possibility there will be a delay a second or third time,'' Crowley said. The Jan. 30 election is the first step in a lengthy political transition planned in Iraq. Any delay would almost certainly push back the date that American forces can begin a substantial withdrawal. That is a political risk the administration does not want to take, especially after arranging to place thousands of additional U.S. troops in Iraq for the election, said Tufts University political science professor Tony Smith. ``If the Bush administration is planning to get out as soon as announced, there's every reason to keep on schedule,'' Smith said.
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Post by Roughneck on Jan 7, 2005 13:55:44 GMT -5
Bush Accused of Influencing Canada on Drug Exports Mail-Order Industry Says U.S. Is Behind Health Ministry's Plans to Curb Inexpensive Shipments to Americans By Doug Struck Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, January 7, 2005; Page A13
TORONTO, Jan. 6 -- The Canadian health minister plans to restrict the supply of inexpensive prescription drugs shipped to about 2 million patients in the United States each year, and industry officials here are saying President Bush is behind the move.
Bush "is getting Canada to do the dirty work" of shutting down a cheap supply of foreign-made drugs that are popular with American consumers but unpopular with U.S. drug companies, charged David MacKay, executive director of an association of Canadian mail-order pharmacies.
A White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said Bush "did not make any suggestions on what Canada should do" about the mail-order drug industry. But Duffy said by telephone from Washington that the issue was discussed at a Nov. 30 meeting in Ottawa between Bush and Prime Minister Paul Martin. Canadian officials confirmed this account.
Since then, Canada's health minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, has stepped up his criticism of Canadian firms that supply mail-order prescription drugs. His spokesman, Ken Polk, confirmed Thursday that Dosanjh planned to ask "in the next couple of months" for regulatory restrictions on the industry. MacKay and others asserted that the changes would shut down their industry, but Polk denied that was the intent.
"The intention is to create a regulatory framework in which Canadians can be assured the business is being done ethically and that they need not worry that the [U.S.] demand for drugs threatens the Canadian drug supply or price," Polk said in a telephone interview from India, where Dosanjh is reviewing tsunami relief efforts.
Last year, at least 1.8 million Americans sent prescriptions written by U.S. doctors to Canada. The prescriptions were reissued by Canadian physicians, and the medicines were then mailed to the U.S. consumers, at a cost typically 30 to 40 percent cheaper than at U.S. drug stores.
U.S. drug companies have chafed at the arrangement, saying it undercuts their market. But officials in several U.S. states and cities have encouraged people to shop in Canada for low-cost prescriptions.
The Bush administration has questioned the safety of getting prescriptions filled in Canada. An administration panel studying the matter concluded that there was "a significant and untenable risk to Americans" who send prescriptions north of the border, Duffy said.
Canadian authorities reject that concern, saying Canadian pharmacies are tightly controlled and regulated. But health officials here worry that Canada's pharmacies could be overwhelmed if the doors are open to the huge American market.
"It's common sense that Canada, with 33 million people, cannot be the drug store for 295 million Americans," said Polk, the Health Ministry spokesman.
He said Dosanjh is considering asking the cabinet to create a list of drugs that could not be exported if there were a shortage in the country. Dosanjh also might prohibit Canadian doctors from rewriting prescriptions for patients outside Canada.
Those changes would likely "shut us down," said Andy Troszok, president of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association, which represents 35 major mail-order pharmacies. He said Canada's Health Department was supportive of the four-year-old mail-order industry until Bush came to Ottawa.
MacKay said Canadian authorities "turned on a dime" after that meeting. He said he has learned that "President Bush threw out an ultimatum," demanding that Canada shut down the mail-order sales, possibly in exchange for U.S. concessions in lifting the ban on imports of Canadian beef. He said Bush did not want to publicly oppose the sales because many U.S. senior citizens and members of Congress are fans of the lower prescription prices.
But spokesmen for Martin and Bush denied that the president made any demands of the prime minister. White House press secretary Scott McClellan, speaking at a news conference in Washington, called MacKay's charges "nonsense," while Polk said "no such pressure was put on whatsoever."
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