שטימט פאר דזשאן קערי

Days before his Democratic opponent met with tribal leaders in Arizona, George W. Bush proved that he does not even understand the meaning of ''tribal sovereignty.''

Speaking at the UNITY 2004 convention of minority journalists, Bush drew open laughter when he attempted to explain the meaning of tribal sovereignty. Bush said, ''Tribal sovereignty means that. It's sovereign. You're a…you're a…you've been given sovereignty and you're viewed as a sovereign entity.''

Perhaps if Bush better understood what ''tribal sovereignty'' actually means, his administration would treat Native American communities with more care and respect.

Kerry is winning college educated voters by 10 points but losing the non-college graduates by 2 points.
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/10/25/the_education_gap.html

'Mission accomplished!

PENTAGON REACTION FROM SPOKESMAN LARRY DiRITA: "We know there were other units in the area who acknowledged finding explosives. It's not at all clear what's in the photos indicate. Some Explosive Ordinance Destruction units have a recollection that some high explosives in the area were taken out of there."

Bad News Dogs Bush As Election Nears

YARDLEY, Pa. - The presidency comes with powerful tools that can help incumbents keep their jobs: a mighty public-relations machine, a bully pulpit, a famous airplane. Yet President Bush (news - web sites) has been powerless to halt a recent tide of bad news, from surging violence and missing weapons in Iraq (news - web sites), to missteps by his own campaign, to a potentially damaging new probe by his own FBI (news - web sites).


The inconvenient news has been magnified in the superheated atmosphere of the final week of Bush's tight race with Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites).


In a Friday speech, Kerry hoped to stoke the latest revelation: news that the FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon (news - web sites) improperly awarded no-bid military contracts to Halliburton Co., formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites).


His running mate, John Edwards (news - web sites), said, "The special treatment of Halliburton is wrong."


For four straight days, Bush had been dogged by a report that nearly 400 tons of explosives disappeared from Iraq's Al-Qaqaa military installation.


Bush aides winced when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a frequent Bush campaign partner and surrogate, said the troops in Iraq, not Bush, bore the responsibility for searching for the explosives.


"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough — didn't they search carefully enough?" Giuliani said on NBC's "Today" program.


There was more: The U.N. nuclear agency said U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at the installation after another facility was looted.


Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV, which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division during the war, released videotape that it said showed soldiers examining explosives at the massive Al-Qaqaa facility nine days after the fall of Baghdad. The video could possibly undermine Bush's suggestion the explosives were looted before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.


The presidency is a mixed blessing for incumbents seeking a second term, said Ken Khachigian, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses.


"You have to take the good with the bad," Khachigian said. "The good is, you're the president of the United States, flying on Air Force One and military helicopters. It's pretty impressive, and that's been helping the president."


At the same time, "there's a natural tendency in the media to try to expose the incumbent," he said.


But some of the headlines hurting Bush are not directly related to the campaign.


Thursday, there was new horror from Iraq: Insurgents slaughtered 11 Iraqi soldiers, beheading one, then shooting the others execution-style.


Two more U.S. soldiers were killed — one in a car bombing in Baghdad, and the other in an ambush near Balad, 40 miles north of the capital. More than 1,100 U.S. service members have died since Bush launched the Iraq war in March 2003.


A new survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months since the U.S.-led invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.


Voters were reminded in the week before the election that the cost in dollars is soaring too.





Bush plans to send Congress a request of up to $75 billion early next year for additional money to finance wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) and operations against terrorism, congressional aides said earlier this week. That's on top of $215 billion that lawmakers have provided since 2001 to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and begin rebuilding those countries.

Bush's camp prides itself on its professionalism, but his re-election campaign acknowledged Thursday that it had doctored a photograph used in a television commercial to remove the president and the podium where he was standing. The campaign said the ad will be re-edited and reshipped to TV stations.

A group of soldiers in the crowd was electronically copied to fill in the space where the president and the podium had been, aides say.

In his addresses Thursday, Bush skated past the bad news, sticking to his prepared remarks and avoiding reporters. On Iraq, he emphasized that elections are scheduled for January.

"Think how far that society has come from the days of torture chambers and mass graves," Bush said in Saginaw, Mich. "Freedom is on the march!"

Khachigian said the Bush White House should counterattack vigorously.

"I'm not going to second-guess what they're doing, but I'd encourage the president to be very aggressive, and it would be to his political advantage to lay the strap to Kerry," Khachigian said. Specifically, Bush should step up his denunciations of Kerry for whipping up the missing-explosives affair, Khachigian said.

CNN poll: Bush maintains 7-point lead over Gore
October 29, 2000
Web posted at: 12:54 p.m. EST (1754 GMT)

By CNN Polling Director Keating Holland

WASHINGTON (CNN) - GOP presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush continued to maintain an advantage over Democratic Vice President Al Gore in Sunday's CNN/USA Today/Gallup tracking poll.

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they supported Bush while 42 percent said they would vote for Gore, no change at all from Saturday's poll.

Kerry is Best for Israel

John Kerry has been accused falsely of many sins in this campaign, but none is more unfair than the notion that he is not a true friend of Israel.

Before President George W. Bush even entered politics, Senator Kerry had already amassed a long history of defending Israel in the halls of the Capitol. In 1997, before Bush ever visited Israel, Kerry delivered a passionate speech at the annual conference of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he left no doubt about his views regarding the dangers Israel faces on a daily basis.

Standing side-by-side with then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Kerry stated that, "Terrorism is an incontrovertible evil, and an unacceptable response and the idea that every bitter dispute between Israelis and the Palestinians can somehow justify Palestinian violence... or excuse the PLO's failure to rewrite its covenant - all of this reflects a moral blindness, a failure for courage that only encourages the cowards, the haters and the killers...."

Despite these words and Senator Kerry's strong pro-Israel record in the Senate, the Republican spin machine has worked tirelessly to instill fear within the American Jewish community and among supporters of Israel by casting doubt on Kerry's commitment to Israel and by characterizing Bush as the "best friend Israel ever had."

Not only has this strategy obscured the facts, but it has removed from the debate the question of which candidate's policies would best protect the security and well-being of Israel.

DESPITE THE conventional wisdom, during his first term in office Bush has no particular achievement on the Arab-Israeli front. Ironically, the president's Israel policy can best be described as one of disinterest. Bush looks deceptively good towards Israel because no one remembers any disputes, any ideas or any plans he tried to implement. However, there have been a series of critical missed opportunities - missed opportunities to end the violence, to pressure the Palestinian Authority to reform, and to improve Arab-Israeli relations.

As a result, Israel has been left to its own devices. Despite the heavy casualties Israel has sustained, it has done well in limiting suicide bombings and devising a new unilateral disengagement plan for Gaza. The Bush administration has done nothing practical to assist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with his dramatic plan other than to pat him on the back. Indeed, Bush's passive policy makes it easier for Sharon's political opponents to openly oppose disengagement.

Supporters of President Bush have also argued that the war in Iraq has greatly enhanced Israel's overall security. Yet, experts have now begun to question the president's assertion that the war in Iraq is contributing to the global fight against terror. In fact, a leading Israeli strategic think tank, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, recently stated in its annual report that on a strategic and operational level the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism and "has created momentum for many terrorist elements, but chiefly al-Qaida and its affiliates." Unfortunately, the bombings in Taba demonstrate the mounting threat that al-Qaida poses to Israel.

Let us be honest. Iraq spinning out of control threatens Israel in ways that cannot be balanced simply by mere pats on the back from Bush.

Not only has the Iraq war become a distraction from the fight against global terrorism, it has also diminished America's ability to check the growing nuclear threat posed by Iran. An Iranian nuclear force would directly threaten Israel, embolden Hizbullah and Syria, and encourage states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to seek an Arab bomb.

Instead of aiding Israel, Bush's policies have the potential to significantly compromise Israel's security. The Bush campaign is trying to scare voters into believing that Kerry would pressure Israel to make dangerous compromises. As his longstanding support for Israel suggests, Kerry would not only maintain the pro-Israel rhetoric of the Bush administration but he would match his words with deeds. He would vigorously pursue efforts to implement Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan. And he would refocus US efforts to defeat al-Qaida, confront Saudi Arabia, increase and widen sanctions against Iran, pursue energy independence, and work to restore stability in Iraq.

In fact, Kerry's policies align neither with Bush's passivity nor Clinton's activism. Rather, Kerry's policy is a measured approach that adjusts to today's realities after four years of intifada since 2000. As Kerry National Security Adviser Rand Beers has said, "A lot has changed since then. You need to solve first the problem of violence and of Palestinian representation before you can go into any kind of negotiations."

John Kerry may or may not succeed in these endeavors, but we can be confident that he will not ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way Bush has. The president's lack of attention has left Israel in a weaker position today than it was four years ago.

With more than 1,000 of its people dead and its economy in unprecedented decline for most of his administration, can supporters of Israel really afford four more years of George W. Bush's "friendship?"

U.S. Jews turning against war —
because of its impact on Israel