I saw a bumper stcker on my bike ride today.

It was on a toyota truck blaring country music, it read:

John Kerry is a Flip-off.

I laughed.


-Wanna help me get a Felt DA?

I agree with the "wrong place" part, who wants to go to Iraq? We should have fought the Iraq War in Mexico. It's closer and has some nice beaches.

while kerry may have flip-flopped on some issues, what you are saying here is a completely ridiculous leap in logic. saying the iraq war was in the wrong place at the wrong time does not mean in any way, shape, or form that he feels the u.s. would be better off with saddam in power.

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f/k/a mclamb6

I think Kerry would be better off if he just said "I now oppose the war" instead of constantly trying to explain what he really means, which is (I think), that he voted to give Bush the authority to explore all the options, but not to go to war the way he did. His explanations of his positions make some sense to me, but in the 5-second soundbite world, he sounds awful. His message is too complex and nuanced for most people. Kerry sees many shades of gray....no black and white issue for him. I don't think he will win in November, too many people don't know what it is he stands for. He is is his own worst enemy. He should be 10 points ahead by now.

Number dead in Iraq: 1002
Number of funerals attended by the President: 0
Number of WMD's found: 0
Cost of war: $200B
Number of mentions in acceptance speech of Osama Bin Laden: 0
Number of mentions in acceptance speech of accomplishments: 0
Number of use of the word "will" in acceptance speech: 43
Required number of monthly new jobs for unemployment to stay flat : 240k
Monthly effect President said of tax decrease: 350k
Increase last month: 144k
Average monthly increase during Clinton: 350k

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iambigkahunatony.com

You need a disclaimer in your statistics: Bush inherited a recession and Clinton's distruction of our national security. And I am pretty sure that Bush has attended some funerals/memorials. I know he has visited injured soldiers and risked his life to visit soldiers in Iraq.

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I agree that Bush will probably win in November, however I was reading "The Guardian", an English newspaper yesterday and I think it said Kerry still holds a slight electoral college lead. If he did win without the popular vote it would make my year, possibly my decade. Imagine the stink the republicans would throw up over that one.

"what you are saying here is a completely ridiculous leap in logic."

So Kerry supports the outcome but not the conflict? It was a great thing we did, but we shouldn't have done it?

Yeah, that's the guy I want leading America!! (sarcasm off).

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Cousin Elwood - Team Over-the-hill Racing
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"Because the Dems have not offered a better candidate."

Do you get the impression that the fix is in? It reminds me of the pubbies running Dole against Clinton. You could have run just about ANYBODY and done better. It was like they didn't want to win...

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Cousin Elwood - Team Over-the-hill Racing
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Interesting article from Business Week Online about the Clinton recession... Inventing the 'Clinton Recession'

The CEA is trying to alter the start date in a way that benefits Bush. 'Tain't fair

No one should be surprised when economic or budget forecasts coming out of Washington are influenced by politics, especially during an election year. But when economic history is rewritten -- with political consequences -- that's going too far. President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, is trying to get away with exactly such revisionist history. The CEA's Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's reelection bid. Instead of using the accepted start date of March, 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush Administration to term it the ``Clinton Recession.'' In a subsequent press conference, Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and ``made the call.''

This simple statement masks an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality. For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private nonpartisan research group based in Cambridge, Mass.

While there have been complaints over the years, this arrangement has been accepted by economists, government agencies, and politicians -- until now. ``For the first time, the federal government is intervening in the process,'' says Robert Hall, an economist at Stanford University and the conservative Hoover Institution who since 1978 has chaired the NBER panel of seven prominent economists who make the actual decision. The NBER's decisions have been dragged into the political arena before, but without impact. In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the NBER to combine the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions into a single downturn that could be called the ``Carter Recession.'' During the '92 election season, the first Bush Administration kept hoping that the NBER would announce that the recession of 1990-91 was over -- a statement that didn't come until December, 1992.

To be fair, even if the latest recession did begin after Bush took office in January, 2001, no one can say he caused it. And Mankiw is also under attack from Republicans for what they consider his overly tin ear on other subjects, most notably his statement that the outsourcing phenomenon is ``a plus for the economy in the long run.''

Still, his decision to fiddle with economic convention can't be seen as anything less than manipulation in an election year. In his press conference, Mankiw justified his decision by saying, correctly, that the NBER panel was already considering moving the recession start date forward. Some key data that the NBER watch -- including industrial production and inflation-adjusted business sales -- peaked in mid-2000. On the other hand, the latest revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shifted the peak of nonfarm employment slightly later, from February to March, 2001. That's important, because the recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91 both started in or after the month that employment fell.

But rather than waiting for the NBER's decision, Bush's CEA jumped the gun. And it made the biggest change possible, despite considerable debate within the NBER panel. The revised date is ``very much up in the air,'' says Hall. Adds Jeffrey Frankel, a member of the NBER panel, an economist at Harvard University, and a former member of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers: ``The way I read the data, there isn't a strong case for moving the date up by more than one month.'' That puts the start date at February, 2001, after Bush took office. The lack of a clear picture has led the NBER to hold off making a final decision pending more accurate data. There's ``no sense of time pressure,'' says Hall. ``We want to do this right.''

Economists who go to Washington always struggle to maintain their objectivity against the political demands of the administration they work for. Based on its latest performance, the CEA seems to have lost the battle.

"Interesting article from Business Week Online about the Clinton recession..."

With the speed of these things, it doesn't matter if the recession started in lat '00 or early '01, anyone who understands momentum knows youi can't lay it on Bush.

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Cousin Elwood - Team Over-the-hill Racing
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