nankerphelge wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 8:26am:


This calls for an Appreciation Thread!!!! 

nankerphelge wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 8:26am:


Those are mostly really, really lame.  It was Obama's fault that Roberts screwed up the oath of office?  And it's a gaffe that Chavez doesn't approve of him? He doesn't spend enough on gifts to visiting dignitaries? His wife returned the Queen's gesture of friendliness by (gasp) momentarily touching her?

It's his 100th day....they could only come up with 37 "gaffes"?  

I know lameness when I see it, having miraculously healed a fair amount of it back in the day.  
And this list is LAME.



Here's a much more positive article...many of his dead-enders could learn a bit from their former American Idol.


Grading George W. Bush's First 100 Days Out of Office

by Mario Almonte

While the media obsesses over grading President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office, few realize that former President George Bush is also observing a similar milestone, though in reverse. The latest polls give Obama high marks for effort; yet, one might also be inclined to give Bush at least a passing grade for good behavior. The fact is that, since leaving office, Bush has graciously faded into the background. He has repeatedly refused to criticize Obama publicly, even as Obama and members of his administration soak in the adulation at his expense.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello
It's no coincidence that the amount of love people showed incoming President Obama was almost in direct proportion to the amount of hate they showed outgoing President Bush. Yet, in his retirement, a new side of George W. Bush appears to be slowly emerging - and it may actually be one that people could come to...well...like.

The Bush of this alternate universe first made his appearance on his last day in office. Bush welcomed Obama to the White House - not with icy formality - but with a few, genuinely friendly pats on the back. He then left the White House for the last time, not with a sour face, but with "a shrug and a smile." Throughout the inauguration ceremonies, Bush sat by quietly and never made even one of his famous faces as Obama spoke - not even stick out his tongue.

Later in March, speaking before the business community in Calgary, Canada, Bush refused to criticize Obama and actually wished him well. Even as Republicans back home stumbled over themselves in an effort to justify their partisan posturing over Obama's stimulus package, Bush demurred.

"I want the president to succeed," he said. "I love my country a lot more than I love politics....he deserves my silence...."

Bringing it all Back Home

Since his retirement, Bush seems to have completely severed his Republican affiliations and partisanship, and now seems eager to live the life of the amiable, happy-go-lucky fellow he once was - before the dirty world of politics soiled his mind and desensitized his conscience.

At the Boao Forum in China recently, he again refused to bad-mouth Obama. "He was not my first choice, but now that this election was made, it speaks volumes about the United States of America," he said.

Even Vice President Joe Biden's recent assertion that he boldly chastised Bush to his face in a private meeting could not entice Bush out of his easy chair. As Biden's now-legendary account goes, when Bush described himself as "a leader," Biden claimed to have responded: "Mr. President, turn and around and look behind you. No one is following."

That brought out the fighting spirit of former presidential adviser Karl Rove, who seems to be on a hair-trigger these days, lashing out at anything and everything related to the Obama White House. Rove called the conversation fictional and described Biden as a "serial exaggerator."

Other Bush aides agreed, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and chief of staff Andy Card. The target of these assertions, however - Bush himself - remained curiously silent on the matter.

It's quite likely that, while others are popping their tops, Bush himself is simply popping open another cold one and kicking back at the ranch.

Therefore, in grading Bush's first 100 days since leaving office, I would give him an "A" for sportsmanlike conduct.

nankerphelge wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 10:03am:



WHY do you make Jesus weep and shit liquid? WHY????

nankerphelge wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 10:03am:

I was going to say the same thing to you and your fellow dead-enders.

In case you missed it, the article was ABOUT Bush being gone.

In stark contrast to Darth Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Riffhard, and other
spewers of GOP talking points, former president Bush is being downright
upright.

"I want the president to succeed," he said. "I love my country a lot more
than I love politics....he deserves my silence...."

Within probably the next few pages or so some one from the Axis of Dread {Riffy, Nanky, GC} will blame Obama and Mexicans for the flu. Mark my word!

"Within probably the next few pages or so some one from the Axis of Dread {Riffy, Nanky, GC} will blame Obama and Mexicans for the flu. Mark my word!"

You mean like a conspiracy?
Don't think I have been that off-the-rails like the 9/11 Bush conspiracy nuts!

But all kidding aside, the idea of a flu pandemic that could really impact much of the world's population is not new.  There have been several serious outbreaks in the last 100 years, and scientists and health care folk the world over have been worried about a flu pandemic (namely avian) for many years now.

So I will say this.  If this flu does become a global pandemic, which the WHO has said today it could be.  And if the US suffers significantly because this Administration was asleep at the wheel - you can rest assured that I will be the first to point it out!!!
-------

BERLIN (AP) -- The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the swine flu outbreak is moving closer to becoming a pandemic, as the United States reported the first swine flu death outside of Mexico, and Germany and Austria became latest European nations hit by the disease.

In Geneva, WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji Fukuda told reporters that there was no evidence the virus was slowing down, moving the agency closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission.

But he said the health body not yet ready to move the pandemic alert level up from its current level of 4, which means the virus is being passed among people. Phase 6 -- the highest in the scale -- is for a full-scale pandemic.

As fear and uncertainty about the disease ricocheted around the globe, nations took all sorts of precautions, some more useful than others.

Britain closed a school after a 12-year-old girl was found to have the disease. Egypt slaughtered all its pigs and the central African nation of Gabon became the latest nation to ban pork imports, despite assurances that swine flu was not related to eating pork.

Cuba eased its flight ban, deciding just to block flights coming in from Mexico. And Asian nations greeted returning airport travelers with teams of medical workers and carts of disinfectants, eager to keep swine flu from infecting their continent.

In Mexico City, the epicenter of the epidemic, the mayor said Wednesday the outbreak seemed to be stabilizing and he was considering easing the citywide shutdown that closed schools, restaurants, concert halls and sports arenas.

Swine flu is suspected of killing more than 150 people in Mexico and sickening over 2,400 there.

Dr. Richard Besser, the acting chief of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said 91 cases have now been confirmed in 10 states, and health officials there reported Wednesday that a 23-month-old Mexican boy had died in Texas from the disease.

Across Europe, Germany confirmed three swine flu cases and Austria one, while the number of confirmed cases rose to five in Britain and ten in Spain.

WHO conducted a scientific review Wednesday to determine exactly what is known about how the disease spreads, how it affects human health and how it can be treated.

Dr. Nikki Shindo, a WHO flu expert, said the review would focus on the large trove of data coming from Mexico and from a school in New York City that has been hard-hit by the outbreak.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the country's three cases include a 22-year-old woman hospitalized in Hamburg, a man in his late 30s at a hospital in Regensburg, north of Munich, and a 37-year-old woman from another Bavarian town. All three had recently returned from Mexico.

Austria's health ministry said a 28-year-old woman who recently returned from a monthlong trip to Guatemala via Mexico City and Miami has the virus but is recovering.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said health officials were ordering extra medicine and "several million more" face masks to deal with the virus.

British media reports, citing an unidentified European surgical mask manufacturer, said the U.K. was seeking 32 million masks to protect its health workers from a possible pandemic.

"We've decided to build stocks of anti-virals, from 35 million to 50 million," Brown said, adding that the government had put in enhanced airport checks and was going to mail swine flu information leaflets to every household in Britain.

In addition to a couple in Scotland who got swine flu on their Mexican honeymoon, new British cases included a 12-year-old girl in the southwest English town of Torbay. Brown said her school had been closed as a precaution.

He said the other two cases were adults in London and in Birmingham. All three had visited Mexico, were receiving anti-viral drugs and were responding well to treatment, Brown said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Cabinet ministers to discuss swine flu and his health minister said France will ask the European Union to suspend flights to Mexico.

The U.S., the European Union and other countries have discouraged nonessential travel to Mexico. Cuba suspended all regular and charter flights from Mexico to the island but was still allowing airlines to return travelers to Mexico.

New Zealand's number of swine flu cases rose to 14, 13 of them among a school group that recently returned from Mexico. Officials say the swine flu strain infecting the students is the same as that in Mexico. All were responding well to antiviral drugs and in voluntary quarantine at home.

New Zealand has 44 other possible cases, with tests under way.

Mexico was taking drastic measures to fight the outbreak. It closed all archaeological sites and allowed restaurants in the capital to only serve takeout food in an aggressive bid to stop gatherings where the virus can spread. Schools remained closed until at least May 6.

A regional beach the real football championship in Mexico was postponed and all Mexican first-division the real football games this weekend will be played with no audiences. Cruise lines were avoiding Mexican ports and holiday tour groups are canceling holiday charter flights there.

The Philippine health chief appealed to dozens of Filipino legislators to abandon plans to visit Las Vegas to cheer for boxing idol Manny Pacquiao -- even though Las Vegas is more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) from the Mexican border.

Egypt's government ordered the slaughter of all pigs in the country as a precaution, though no swine flu cases have been reported there. Egypt's overwhelmingly Muslim population does not eat pork, but farmers raise up to 350,000 pigs for its Christian minority.

In Australia, officials were testing more than 100 people with flu symptoms for the virus and the government gave health authorities wide powers to contain contagious diseases.

"(We can make) sure that people are isolated and perhaps detained if they don't cooperate and are showing symptoms," said Health Minister Nicola Roxon.

Okay, enough already about the flu and the Obama Administration.

How about something more uplifting, like North Korea uping the ante today on its nuclear programs!!  Hell of a job ol' Hillary and Obama are doing keeping NoKo at the bargaining table!

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea threatened Wednesday to conduct nuclear and missile tests and start an uranium-enrichment program in addition to its existing plutonium-based one, unless the U.N. apologizes for criticizing its recent rocket launch, dramatically raising its stake in the worsening standoff over its atomic programs.
Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said in a statement the country "will be compelled to take additional self-defensive measures" unless the U.N. Security Council apologizes immediately. "The measures will include nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles."


The North's ministry also said the country would build a light-water nuclear reactor and start developing technologies to produce nuclear fuel, a threat that experts said indicated the country would start enriching uranium—another type of nuclear bomb ingredient.

The current nuclear standoff flared in late 2002 after Washington raised allegations that Pyongyang had a clandestine nuclear program based on enriched uranium in addition to a separate one based on plutonium. The North has strongly denied the allegations.

North Korea is known for brinksmanship and harsh rhetoric, but it is unusual for it to threaten a nuclear test.

Pyongyang conducted its first-ever atomic test blast in 2006 and is thought to have enough plutonium to make at least half a dozen nuclear bombs. But experts have said the country is not believed to have mastered the technology to make a nuclear warhead small enough to put on a missile.

The U.N. Council adopted a statement this month denouncing the North's April 5 rocket launch and calling for tightening sanctions. Pyongyang has claimed the rebuke is unfair because the liftoff was a peaceful satellite launch. But the U.S. and others believe it was a test of long-range missile technology.

Wednesday's threat came days after the North said it had begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear complex—a move aimed at harvesting weapons-grade plutonium. That announcement came hours after the U.N. blacklisted three North Korean companies.

The Security Council should apologize for infringing on the North's sovereignty "withdraw all its unreasonable and discriminative resolutions and decisions" against the North, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Later Wednesday, South Korea's Foreign Ministry expressed "serious concerns" over the North's threat, accusing the country of "directly challenging" the international community.

"We make it clear that the international responsibility for worsening the situation will be entirely on North Korea," the ministry said in a statement.

Professor Kim Yong-hyun at Seoul's Dongguk University said the North's threat "appears to be rhetoric for now."

"The North is trying to maximize the stakes as the United States keeps ignoring it," he said. But the expert also said the communist could gradually put the threat into action depending on reaction from Washington.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, said the North appears to have already begun preparations to conduct nuclear and missile tests, given it is demanding "an unrealistic, unprecedented" demand—a U.N. apology. He said the threat to build a light-water reactor "of course" meant Pyongyang would start a uranium enrichment program.

Maybe they are.
Maybe they are not.

Doesn't matter though.

WASHINGTON -- Acting with unusual speed, the House on Wednesday adopted a $3.4 trillion budget outline that endorses much of President Barack Obama's ambitious agenda while permitting the national debt to continue to spiral higher.

While a welcome victory for Democrats, the 233-193 House vote approving the House-Senate compromise budget is only a first, relatively easy step toward Obama's goal of providing health care coverage for all Americans. Next would come arduous negotiations among lawmakers, the Obama administration and a vast array of interest groups.

Not a single Republican voted for the measure; 17 Democrats, mostly from GOP-leaning districts, voted against it.

The Senate will vote on the measure Wednesday afternoon.

With the economy in recession and the bailout of the financial sector costing hundreds of billions of dollars, deficits would rocket to $1.7 trillion for the ongoing budget year, dipping to a still-astonishing $1.2 trillion in 2010. The national debt would rise from today's $11.2 trillion level to $17 trillion at the end of 2014.

"The same Democrats who were outraged over a $455 billion deficit last year came to us this year with a budget that would lead to trillion dollar deficits," said Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

The budget measure is a nonbinding outline for follow-up tax and spending legislation. It is Congress' response to Obama's $3.6 trillion budget plan released in late February.

Perhaps most significantly, the budget plan would give Democrats a stronger hand in advancing Obama's health care initiative this fall by allowing it to go forward without threat of GOP stalling tactics in the Senate. Democrats pledge to first try passing health care legislation with GOP support.

"The budget also allows us ... an up-or-down vote on reforming health care -- not as an option of first resort, but as a fallback if partisanship blocks progress," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

But the budget plan skirts difficult decisions on how to pay for Obama's health care plan, which is expected to cost more than $1 trillion over the next decade. It allows the new president's signature $400 tax credit for most workers to expire in 20 months -- but devotes $512 billion over five years to extend tax cuts passed during President George W. Bush's first term for middle-class workers, investors and families with children.

And votes in the Senate made it clear that Obama's initiative to combat global warming by making it more expensive to emit greenhouse gases faces great obstacles.

Democrats say they and Obama inherited a record budget mess and deserve credit for cutting the deficit by two-thirds over the next five years. Most of those deficit savings, however, are expected to come automatically as the economy recovers, tax revenues rebound and the Iraq war winds down.

Republicans say Democrats rely on the usual bag of budget tricks: savings that won't appear, spending caps that won't hold, and tax cuts that aren't "paid for" as promised.

The Democratic plan assumes Congress will devote only $50 billion a year for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2011 and beyond and pass an annual fix for the alternative minimum tax without adding to the deficit over 2013-14.

The Democratic plan embraces several of Obama's key goals besides a health care overhaul, including funds for domestic programs and clean energy, and a tax increase for individuals making more than $200,000 a year or couples making more than $250,000.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said that Wednesday's news that the economy had shrunk by 6.1 percent in the first quarter highlighted the likelihood that the deficit numbers are even worse than predicted in the budget.

"Put reality into the budget and the deficits and debt go much higher," Ryan said.

at least we now have a President that can read.

If only Bush had built a wall on the border...

Bush may be gone, but the effects linger on and probably will for some time.
Much of the criticism of Obama sounds a hypocrisy alert to the progressive's mind, and comparisons are hard to resist.

Still I agree, it's time to let it go. We're kicking a dead elephant.

Saint Sway wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 1:45pm:


pfffft.  You're obviously overlooking the really important issues.

1.  You can't bring up Bush because none of his supporters ever blamed anything on Bill Clinton.

2. Haven't you heard? Obama uses a TELEPROMPTER.



No other President in the history of the Republic has EVER used a teleprompter. (Except for all of the ones who have served since its invention.) Ergo, (or is it ergot?) Obama is the worst president ever.

Some Guy wrote on Apr 29^th, 2009 at 2:14pm:

Pdog?  Nah.  I'm thinkin' it's the great Fleabit Peanut Monkey C10.  BTW, Happy 100th Day!  Let's hope the next 2,822 are just as great.

Christ is sharp.

I got dibs on Feej