Oct 27, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
The Stolen Honor is available online for free at http://www.stolenhonor.com/documentary/watch-video.asp
From the site:
Stolen Honor investigates how John Kerry's actions during the Vietnam era impacted the treatment of American soldiers and POWs. Using John Kerry's own words, the documentary juxtaposes John Kerry's actions with the words of veterans who were still in Vietnam when John Kerry was leading the anti-war movement.
Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the WSJ:A study suggests that U.S. senators possess stock-picking skills that even the most seasoned money manager would envy. During the boom years of the 1990s, senators' stock picks beat the market by 12 percentage points a year on average, according to the study. Corporate insiders, meanwhile, beat the market by about six percentage points a year, while U.S. households underperformed the market by 1.4 percentage points a year on average, according to separate studies. The final details of the study will be published in the December issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. ...
Looking at the timing of cumulative returns, the senators also appeared to know exactly when to buy or sell their holdings. Senators would buy stocks just before the shares suddenly would outperform the market by more than 25%. Conversely, senators would sell stocks that had been beating the market by about 25% for the past year just when the shares would fall back in line with the market's performance.
I wonder how many government officials made money off ImClone using the same "inside information" that sent Sam Waksal to jail?
The researchers say senators' uncanny ability to know when to buy or sell their shares seems to stem from having access to information that other investors wouldn't have. "I don't think you need much of an imagination to realize that they're in the know," says Alan Ziobrowski, a business professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta and one of the four authors of the study.
Senators, for example, are likely to know which tax legislation is apt to pass and which companies might benefit. Or a senator who sits on a certain committee might find out that a particular company soon will be awarded a government contract or that a certain drug might get regulatory approval, says Prof. Ziobrowski.
Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
A controversy over whether or not Iraqi stockpiles of RDX and HMX explosives went missing before or after U.S. forces arrived has effectively defused yesterday's "breaking" story as an immediate threat to Bush's campaign. By midday the story was already off CNN's main page as a separate news item (FoxNews, however, still has it front and center). FoxNews reports: When Did Missing Explosives Disappear?.The mystery over tons of missing explosives in Iraq turned Tuesday from a question of what happened to them to when they disappeared.
The United Nations' nuclear department, the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned Monday that insurgents may have stolen the 380 tons of conventional explosives -- the kind used in the car bombing attacks that have killed many soldiers and bystanders in Iraq.
But senior Defense Department officials told FOX News they're not sure whether looters made off with the explosives or whether Saddam moved them before the war began. NBC News reported Monday night that one of its reporters was embedded with the 101st Airborne. She watched the troops conduct what can be described as a "cursory search" of the premises on April 10, and found a great deal of conventional ordnance, but no RDX or HMX.
Such questions haven't stopped Kerry from trying to exploit the issue: Kerry Blasts Bush on Missing Ammo.Kerry accused President Bush on Tuesday of trying to cover up bad decisions relating to the execution of the war in Iraq and alluded to the possibility that more bad news has yet to be uncovered.
"Mr. President, what else are you being silent about? What else are you keeping from the American people?" Kerry said during a speech in Green Bay, referring to the estimated 380 tons of highly explosive material that have gone missing from an arms depot in Iraq.
Although Kerry and the Democrats are blaming the Bush administration for losing the ammo, calling it "one of the great blunders" of the Iraq war, recent reports by NBC and further details given by the Pentagon and International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday suggest that the material may have been missing before the 101st Airborne Division rolled into the Al-Qaqaa facility as Saddam Hussein was being deposed in nearby Baghdad in April 2003.
Vice President Dick Cheney responded for Bush from Florida, saying, "It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad."
Also today, Kerry released a campaign commercial that capitalizes on the story. Apparently they did a quick edit on another commercial and inserted the new claims. (Via Little Green Footballs)
James Taranto has more: The Times Spoils CBS's Surprise.
Update October 27: This story is more complex than yesterday's reports indicated. Belmont Club has more about who saw what when and where: The RDX Problem Resolves Itself. And The Wall Street Journal ponders the political aspects of the story: Munitions Overkill.
Looks like the fuse is still smoldering after all. The story is back on CNN's main page: Missing Iraqi explosives fuel campaign rhetoric.Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Excellent reasons to avoid the barbaric religious practice of circumcision:
If physicians would simply leave the newborn's penis alone, as Dr. Benjamin Spock recommends in the latest edition of Baby and Child Care, the foreskin would be left to fulfill its several functions. In infancy, the foreskin protects the glans from irritation and from fecal material. In adulthood, the function of the foreskin may at first seem obscure. The shaft and the glans of an intact (uncircumcised) man's penis are covered by skin. Retracting the foreskin reveals the glans and makes the skin on the shaft somewhat loose. Of what use is this redundant skin? During erection, the penile shaft elongates, becoming about 50% longer. The foreskin covers this lengthened shaft. It is designed to accommodate an organ that is capable of a marked increase in diameter, as well as length.
In addition, the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis and can enhance the quality of sexual intercourse. Anatomical studies demonstrate that the foreskin has a greater concentration of complex nerve endings than the glans. If there were any possibility that the foreskin could contribute significantly to sexual enjoyment, is that not a cogent reason for rethinking our motives for this ritual procedure?
History shows that the arguments in favor of circumcison are questionable. At the beginning of this century, one of the reasons given for circumcision was to decrease masturbation, which was thought to lead to insanity and other "morbid" conditions. We now know that circumcision does not prevent masturbation, nor does masturbation lead to insanity. More recently, circumcision was promoted as a means of preventing cervical cancer in the man's sexual partners; this notion has been proved incorrect. The current excuses are that failure to remove the foreskin may contribute to urinary tract infections and penile cancer, but neither of these contentions has been proved. Even if either were correct, the risk of urinary tract infection in an uncircumcised infant is only one in one hundred. Performing 100 mutilative surgeries to possibly prevent one treatable urinary tract infection is not valid preventive medicine - it is just another excuse. Penile cancer occurs in older men at the rate of approximately 1 in 100,000. The idea of performing 100,000 mutilating (by definition) procedures on newborns to possibly prevent cancer in one elderly man is absurd. Applying this type of reasoning to women would lead to the conclusion that removing all breasts at puberty should be done to prevent breast cancer. ["Unnecessary Circumcision", George C. Denniston, M.D., M.P.H.]
For more information visit doctorsopposingcircumcision.orgOct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes Stephen Morris on the meaning of John Kerry's election:
Kerry's 34-year record in public life indicates that he never understood what the Cold War was about and that he does not understand the nature of the US's rogue-state or Islamist terrorist enemies now....Kerry thinks that the war on terror is like "the war against organised crime". Both, he insists, are examples of forces of chaos. Really? Since when did organised crime want to create chaos? Have you noticed the Mafia engaged in suicide bombing? Flying planes into buildings? When did any mob consider poisoning the nation's water supply? Have you heard that they are trying to acquire nuclear weapons? And is organised crime anywhere trying to convert Christian infidels to the Muslim religion? ["Stephen Morris, "Danger man John Kerry", October 25, 2004]
On Kerry holding the U.N. above the U.S.:
...As The Washington Post recalled last week, discussing the possibility of US troops being killed in Bosnia in 1994, he said: "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
On Kerry the "moral relativist":
...Unlike many American liberals, Kerry has often expressed his discomfort with the US criticising other nations for their repressive domestic policies. Thus a Kerry administration will be one that not only does not promote democracy, it will be one in which gross human rights abroad are given little attention.
On Kerry's "soft spot" for dictators:
In 1990, in a rare act of post-Cold War political unity, the UN Security Council approved a plan to end the war in Cambodia with a UN temporary administration to organise elections in the country...Kerry opposed it. Instead, he wanted the Vietnamese-installed Hun Sen, formerly of the Khmer Rouge, to organise elections. It seems that Kerry's preference for a UN role in conflict resolution is mainly to shackle American power, but not the power of his favourite little dictatorships.
...Kerry's soft spot for the dictators of Third World countries was not confined to Vietnam and Cambodia. During the Cold War Kerry was opposed to using force against all adversaries. This was especially so in the case of Nicaragua, where Kerry began his diplomatic showboating with the Sandinistas in 1985, but also in Grenada and the 1991 Gulf War to evict Saddam from Kuwait. Kerry's benign attitude towards dictators will affect one of the US's two greatest contemporary security threats: the nuclear arming of North Korea and Iran.
Read Dr. Harry Binswanger's article for more analysis on the 2004 elections.Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
What a culture of submissiveness means--and how it is enforced:
On August 26, Qatar TV aired a panel discussion that included Dr. Ibrahim Elias, and the Director of The Women's Development Society, Imam Bibars, who discussed a study she performed in the Arab world: "I'd like to say that I found something that took me by surprise. I call it 'a culture of the electricity cable.' The men in the study did not know one another, but they all used to beat their wives with electricity cables. These cables are large and they would beat their wives." In defense of beatings, Dr. Elias, a lawyer, explained, "If you beat your wife and it's only light beatings in order to set things straight -- that's it...We tell him, 'They are not considered an assault, but discipline.'" Responding to the question, "What do you mean by light beatings?" he gave an example of when a man should be beat his wife: "For example, a man comes home from work and finds his wife watching TV. She doesn't even get up to make him food. He tells her once, twice, and asks again. If only once he would raise his voice and beat her, she would get up to prepare food for him and by the next day she'd be obedient. This will last for a week and when she forgets, he will remind her." ["Arab TV Instructs On Wife-Beating", NYSun, October 20, 2004]
The whole article is worth reading.Oct 25, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky:
...The tale of Franco-American harmony is a long-standing and pernicious myth. The French attitude toward the United States consistently has been one of cultural suspicion and dislike, bordering at times on raw hatred, as well as diplomatic friction that occasionally has erupted into violent hostility. France is not America's oldest ally, but its oldest enemy.
The true story of Franco-American relations begins many years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian Wars. Lasting nearly a century, these conflicts pitted the French and their Indian comrades against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonists. French military officers used massacres as weapons of imperial terror against the hardy men, women, and children who settled on the frontier. At the age of twenty-two, George Washington nearly fell victim to one of these brutal onslaughts and was reviled in France as a murderous villain for many years (an opinion sustained by French propaganda and reversed only when the American Revolution made it politically necessary). Amid this tumult, the first articulations of a recognizably American national consciousness came into being. Indeed, America's first authentic sense of self was born not in a revolt against Britain, but in a struggle with France.
Although the French provided American colonial rebels with crucial assistance during their bid for independence, direct French military intervention came only after the Americans had achieved a decisive victory on their own at Saratoga. The French crown regarded the principles of the Declaration of Independence as abhorrent and frightening. French aristocrats viewed Lafayette with contempt and branded him a criminal for traveling to America against King Louis XVI's explicit command. The king and his government overcame their revulsion to the young republic only because they sniffed an opportunity to weaken their ancient rival Britain. To be sure, France did become an ally to the colonists for a few years in the late 1770s and early 1780s when American sovereignty served French geopolitical aims. But then the French believed that double-dealing against their erstwhile friends after Yorktown served their interests as well. During the peace talks, France sought to limit American gains because it feared the new nation might become too powerful. If the French had achieved all of their objectives in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States today might be confined to a slender band of territory along the eastern seaboard, like a North American version of Chile...
Oct 24, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
AP reports: Kerry: Bush Allowed Bin Laden to Escape. (Via Little Green Footballs)"Can you imagine trusting them [Afghan warlords] when you have your 10th Mountain Division, the United States Marine Corps, when you had all the power and ability of the best-trained military in the world?" Kerry told a rally at the University of Nevada-Reno. "I would have used our military and we would have gone after and captured or killed Osama bin Laden. That's tough." ...
"You want to talk about the war on terror, Mr. President? Let's talk about it," Kerry yelled while his supporters cheered him on. "Let's talk about what happened when you let Osama bin Laden escape in Afghanistan.
"Let's talk about what happened when we had the world's number one terrorist, number one criminal, cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora. What did the president do? Do you know what he did? He outsourced the job of capturing him, just like he outsourced a lot of American jobs. He gave it to Afghan warlords who only one week earlier were fighting against us."
Fortunately retired General Tommy Franks -- who, unlike Kerry, was actually involved with the operations around Tora Bora -- put these charges to rest last week in The New York Times: War of Words.As commander of the allied forces in the Middle East, I was responsible for the operation at Tora Bora, and I can tell you that the senator's understanding of events doesn't square with reality.
First, take Mr. Kerry's contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.
Second, we did not "outsource" military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.
Third, the Afghans weren't left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help - as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Contrary to Senator Kerry, President Bush never "took his eye off the ball" when it came to Osama bin Laden. The war on terrorism has a global focus. It cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Both are part of the same effort to capture and kill terrorists before they are able to strike America again, potentially with weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist cells are operating in some 60 countries, and the United States, in coordination with dozens of allies, is waging this war on many fronts.
As we planned for potential military action in Iraq and conducted counterterrorist operations in several other countries in the region, Afghanistan remained a center of focus. Neither attention nor manpower was diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq. When we started Operation Iraqi Freedom we had about 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, and by the time we finished major combat operations in Iraq last May we had more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Kerry could have learned similar information from Melanie Kirkpatrick of The Wall Street Journal who over a week ago wrote: Tora Bora Baloney. Kirkpatrick, like Kerry, wasn't involved in the military operations Tora Bora either. But unlike Kerry, she at least listens to people who were, such as Gen. Tommy Franks and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Michael "Rifle" DeLong:Getting the Tora Bora story right is important because Mr. Kerry's accusation goes to the heart of his broader charge against Mr. Bush -- that he bungled the war in Afghanistan. It's hard to be convincing on this point, when, less than three years later, 10 million Afghans have just gone to the polls in the first free election in their 5,000-year-old history. It's even harder to see how sending in thousands of U.S. troops to secure Tora Bora would have helped win that war faster -- even if it had resulted in bin Laden's death or capture. Mr. Kerry's criticism of the Tora Bora campaign also belies his promise to rely more on allies if he were commander-in-chief.
Oct 23, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
This cartoon is from the run-up to the 2002 congressional elections. Unfortunately, it's still relevant. AFP reports: Kerry campaign deploys army of lawyers in Florida. (Via Little Green Footballs)Still reeling from the 2000 election debacle in Florida, Democrats have deployed an army of lawyers in the battleground state that gave George W. Bush the presidency after five weeks of recounts and legal wrangling.
Less than two weeks from the November 2 presidential election, the legal team of Democratic contender John Kerry, as well as activist groups, have already filed a number of voting-related lawsuits in the state.
Many Democrats claim the Republicans stole the 2000 election after the Supreme Court halted 36 days of recounts and legal battles in Florida, leaving Bush with a 537-vote lead in the state that delivered him the presidency.
While both sides expect some trouble this time around, analysts generally doubt it will descend to the level of the last election, when lawyers, party leaders and state officials battled over hanging chads, butterfly ballots and other electoral oddities that turned Florida into an international laughing stock.
Oct 23, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Comments Steve H. on two Kerry supporters in Arizona--Phillip Edgar Smith and William Zachary Wolff--failed attempt to smother Ann Coulter with a pie:
...As always, I am confused by the complexity of liberal thinking. They rant about freedom of expression, but isn't throwing pies at people who disagree with you sort of at odds with the concept of free speech? I don't get it. There must be nuance involved. The same kind of nuance that makes Castro a hero for torturing people for writing poems he doesn't like.
I think I'll write one now.
There once was a guy named Fidel.
One day at a lectern, he fell.
Then he lay on the floor
like a two-dollar whore,
and everyone thought it was swell.
In the workers' paradise that is Cuba, that would buy me a stay in a dungeon.
Oct 22, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
According to Lawrence Solomon, writing in the National Post, "vaccinate-anything-that-moves" are creating an artificial demand for the flu vaccine by manufacturing a "phony crisis" not based on science. Writes Mr. Solomon,
..."Epidemics of influenza typically occur during the winter months and are responsible for an average of approximately 20,000 deaths," the CDC stated in 2002. That number mutated to "36,000 flu-related deaths" in November, 2003, and by December a gathering of public health officials warned that the toll could reach 70,000 this year. In concert with the ramp-up in death statistics, the government-steered vaccination industry has run an elaborate bureaucracy designed to hype vaccine use, as seen in a slide show presentation last April by Glen Nowak, the CDC's spokesman for the National Immunization Program, to the American Medical Association. Here is the "Recipe that fosters influenza vaccine interest and demand," in the truncated language that appears on his slides: "Medical experts and public health authorities [should] publicly (e.g... via media) state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes) – and urge influenza vaccination."...
But don't vaccinations save countless lives?
In truth, no one knows, because the studies haven't been done, even in the case of highly sensitive childhood vaccinations. During the last flu season, for example, the CDC received reports of 152 flu deaths among children. Is this high or is this low? "The answer to this question is not known," the CDC stated. "Because the number of influenza deaths in children has not been tracked before, it's not possible to compare the number of deaths in children this year with previous years." As for evidence of the efficacy of flu vaccinations in the general population, again, the CDC is operating in the dark...the CDC's Nancy Cox, chief of its influenza branch, admitted, "There is no systematic follow-up to see, to document whether the general population who receives a flu vaccine is infected by a flu virus..." To add to the futility of even trying, Dr. Cox explained that most cases of flu-like illnesses – about 80% – in fact are caused by "many other pathogens."
The bottom line on the medical benefit of flu shots for healthy people? No one knows. The benefit is entirely a matter of faith among the true believers in the vaccination bureaucracy. The bottom line on the medical harm caused by flu vaccines? Again, no one knows. Various studies do raise concerns, however. One year ago, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences found weak evidence that the flu vaccine triggers neurological disorders....New flu vaccines, such as those made from live viruses, pose new types of risks since the vaccines themselves could become unintended disseminators of the flu....The biggest risk of all from flu vaccines, however, may come from weakening the human body's natural defences...["Vaccine fevers", Lawrence Solomon, National Post, October 22, 2004]
Must reading.
Recommended Reading:
Hygiene, Sanitation, Immunization, and Pestilential Diseases by Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD
In the 1950s, there were 20,000 cases of polio annually causing more than 1,000 deaths(4); many more thousand victims were left in iron lungs. This was caused because of the predilection of the polio virus for the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord and consequent paralysis of the respiratory muscles. But, what is less known, and this is quite disconcerting to me, is that between 1923-1953, before the Salk (dead virus) vaccine was discovered in 1955, the polio death rate in the U.S. and England declined on its own by 47 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
Jenner, Pasteur, and the Dawn of Scientific Medicine by Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD
Let us take a retrospective look at the history of vaccination and touch upon the development of the germ theory of disease to which it's necessarily entwined.Oct 22, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
IRVINE, CA--On Wednesday, despite legal and moral concerns, doctors performed the first transplant operation with an organ brokered through a for-profit Web site.
Even though the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) prohibits the selling of organs, the doctors were assured that the kidney they transplanted, though brokered through the commercial Web site, was donated for free.
But what if the donor wanted to sell, instead of give away, his kidney? Why shouldn't he be able to do it? And why should the potential recipient be deprived of the right to buy the kidney to save his own life?
Dr. Andrew Bernstein, ethicist and senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, thinks it is well past time to rethink the ethical assumptions at the base of NOTA, which condemn to suffering and death thousands of Americans.
He argues that "America's political system is based on an implicit ethics of rational self-interest, which contradicts in every particular and principle the explicit morality of self-sacrifice that most of us are taught in our churches and schools--and which forms the ethical base of NOTA. NOTA demands that organs not be sold but self-sacrificially given away; the practical result is few donations and thousands of needless deaths. A morality that sanctions the selfish pursuit of happiness would not prohibit the for-profit sale of organs; the practical result would be an increase in the availability of organs and thousands of lives saved each year."Oct 21, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From FOXNews:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Paul Hamm can keep his Olympic gold medal. Sports' highest court rejected a South Korean appeal Thursday, ruling that Hamm is the rightful champion in the men's all-around gymnastics competition at the Athens Games. [...] There are no more appeals available to Yang. [...] "I feel like I had to win my medal in three ways, really," Hamm said last month in an interview with The Associated Press. "Obviously, in competition. Then with the media. Then in court. It really feels like I've been battling this whole time." [FoxNEWS, "Court: Paul Hamm Can Keep Gold Medal", Thursday, October 21, 2004]
Related Article: Olympic Gold All Around Gymnast Paul Hamm: Only Human
Oct 21, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Deroy Murdock, a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has put together a summary of "Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror."
Oct 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
The first time I ever heard of this idea, and the fact that some Canadian politicians were encouraging it, I said "Hurrah!" Nothing could please me more than bankrupting the Canadian government, but I figured the Canadians would back down if American politicians actually allowed re-importation to occur. I am not worried about drug company profits because the Canadian government is picking up the regular bulk price of all the drugs it buys and is then selling them back to Canadians at a subsidized discount under the universal health care plan in Canada. The main reason I am not worried about drug company profits though is because it is readily apparent the Canadian government will not allow America to re-import the drugs en masse, because the Canadian government would in effect have to buy drugs for a population many times their own, an even more untenable situation than the situation already in place.
Sure enough, this is already beginning to dawn on Canadians as demonstrated by this article. I wish people would study economics more, but the chances of that are slim. The only reason drugs are "cheap" in Canada is because the government taxes the hell out of its citizens to pay for those drugs and then resells them to Canadians at a loss. Were Canada to engage in this dopey practice for their population and ours then their whole government would run out of money within 10 years at the maximum. Not only that, but as the article suggests, they will end up having massive drug shortages for their own citizens.
Let us see what ingenious idea John Kerry comes up with next to replace this idea when the Canadians recognize reality (for the first time in a long, long while) and tell him it isn't going to happen. Such an eventuality almost makes a Kerry victory worth it.Oct 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the Washington Post:
Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
Classic Kerry.
Related Article: Thinking it Alone: U.S. Must Reject the Evil Doctrine of "Multilateralism"
Oct 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From an AP report at NJ News Flash:
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that terrorists are aiming to derail President Bush's chances at re-election through their attacks in Iraq. [...] "International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," he said. "If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power." Still, Putin didn't say which candidate he favored in the Nov. 2 election. "We unconditionally respect any choice of the American people," he said. ["Putin: Terrorist aiming to derail Bush bid", October 18, 2004]
Oct 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Yahoo News:
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Tuesday he hopes George W. Bush wins a second term in office, and praised the U.S. president for his "great leadership to the world in the fight against terrorism." Howard, whose conservative government recently won a fourth term in office, is a key regional ally of Washington and contributed 2,000 troops to the invasion of Iraq last year. "I wish him (Bush) well and I hope he gets re-elected," Howard told reporters in Jakarta after meeting with President-elect Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.[...] Australia lost 88 citizens in the Bali bombings in 2002, and last month Islamic militants attacked the country's embassy in Jakarta, killing nine people, including one suicide bomber. Since the attacks, Howard's anti-terror rhetoric has mirrored that of Bush, and he has spoken of the need for pre-emptive strikes against suspected militants outside of Australia. [...] [AP, "Australia's Howard says he wants to see Bush win"]
At least Kerry has Arafat, Chirac, and Saddam's support.
