Congratulatory letter to President George W. Bush from Dr. Bob Jones III

November 3, 2004

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America's history. Congratulations!

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

Had your opponent won, I would have still given thanks, because the Bible says I must (I Thessalonians 5:18). It would have been hard, but because the Lord lifts up whom He will and pulls down whom He will, I would have done it. It is easy to rejoice today, because Christ has allowed you to be His servant in this nation for another presidential term. Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years—a brief time only—to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God.

Christ said, “If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my father honour” (John 12:26).

The student body, faculty, and staff at Bob Jones University commit ourselves to pray for you—that you would do right and honor the Savior. Pull out all the stops and make a difference. If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them. Conservative Americans would love to see one president who doesn't care whether he is liked, but cares infinitely that he does right.

Best wishes.

Sincerely your friend,

Bob Jones III
President

BJIII:lw

PS: A few moments ago I read this letter to the students in Chapel. They applauded loudly their approval.

When I told them that Tom Daschle was no longer the minority leader of the Senate, they cheered again.
On occasion, Christians have not agreed with things you said during your first term.

Nonetheless, we could not be more thankful that God has given you four more years to serve Him in the White House, never taking off your Christian faith and laying it aside as a man takes off a jacket, but living, speaking, and making decisions as one who knows the Bible to be eternally true.

GOP plans to revise species protections

Congressional Republicans map a limited forestry agenda and changes in the Endangered Species Act

Friday, November 12, 2004

JIM BARNETT


WASHINGTON -- Despite winning the White House and bigger majorities in Congress, Republicans have mapped out a limited agenda of forestry legislation for the 109th Congress, but they do plan changes to the Endangered Species Act.

The top priority for the second Bush administration will be implementing the Healthy Forests Restoration Act and treating fire-prone timberlands, Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture, said in an interview Thursday.

With money from the 2003 law, federal land managers have increased forest-thinning projects to 4 million acres a year, he said. They hope to boost the rate to 8 million acres a year and ultimately hope to treat a total of 90 million acres.

"If we can get to the point where we are treating 8 to 9 million acres a year, we're looking at a problem we can resolve in about nine years or 10 years time," Rey said. "And that's what we think the right profile for this is."

Republicans in Congress have more ambitious goals. The House Resources Committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., plans to take up a series of bills intended to make the endangered species law more "usable," an aide said.

"We'll be trying to move a lot of legislation," said Doug Crandall, a committee staffer. "I wouldn't say major reforms, but I would say a lot of bills that focus on a lot of little problems in the law that makes it difficult to manage forests."

Among the measures to be considered by the Resources Committee is a plan by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., to create a panel of scientists to review data that regulators use to design plans to protect endangered species.

Other forestry proposals include: Incentives for commercial use of brush and small trees -- also called "biomass" -- cleared from overgrown forests. More aggressive efforts to restore timberlands after catastrophic fires. Opening federal lands for recreational uses.

Sean Cosgrove, a forestry expert with the Sierra Club, said environmental groups plan to keep a close eye on the committee. If not carefully crafted, some proposals before the committee could be abused by timber companies, he said.

Biomass incentives, for example, should specify clearly the maximum sizes of cleared trees and should target overgrown forests that threaten communities, Cosgrove said.

"It's all in how you do it and where you get the material from," he said.

Despite a Republican gain of four seats in the Senate in the Nov. 2 election, Rey said he does not expect an easier path for legislation that streamlines regulations governing management or harvest of federal timberlands.

"From our standpoint, it's better to have a larger margin," Rey said. "But I don't know that the margins have changed so significantly that it's going to be dramatically different in that regard."

Environmental advocates also are braced for the administration to release a less-restrictive version of the Clinton administration's 2001 "roadless" rule. The rule prohibited additional road building and logging in 58.5 million acres of remote, "roadless" forests.

Jim Barnett: 503-294-7604; jim.barnett@newhouse.com

News From The Right

November 10, 2004

Ashcroft

Human Events' Terence Jeffrey on Attorney General John Ashcroft: "When Bush first nominated Ashcroft, Time magazine derided the choice. Said Time: 'The teetotaling son of a famed Pentecostal minister, Ashcroft, a onetime Missouri governor so strict that he refused to dance at his own inaugural ball, is the kind of hard-line conservative who makes liberal toes curl.' Now those liberals better uncurl their toes, get down on their knees, and pray that the next attorney general has the moral courage to ignore them as thoroughly as John Ashcroft did." Read

Judiciary Committee

Cybercast News Service reports that a coalition of anti-abortion groups plans to gather outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to demand that Sen. Arlen Specter be bypassed as Senate Judiciary Committee chair. Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, and Troy Newman, director of Operation Rescue West, are among the protest organizers. Read

The Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell opposes Sen. Arlen Specter as head of the Judiciary Committee: "Then and now, Senator Specter has been one of those to whom what matters is not a judicial nominee's qualifications but how they are likely to vote on abortion, anti-trust laws, or whatever. Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States." Read

Bush Administration Priorities

Focus on the Family interviewed Tim Goeglein, special assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, on the “pro-family” initiatives Religious Right supporters can expect from the White House in the next four years. Read

Critics of President Bush’s immigration proposals express dismay that he now seems to be aggressively pushing them. Read

The Washington Times reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft again tries to block Oregon’s assisted suicide law. Read

Bush Moves to Privatize Social Security

LEIGH STROPE

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Fresh off re-election, President Bush is dusting off an ambitious plan to overhaul Social Security, a controversial proposal that had been shelved because of politics and the administration's focus on tax cuts and terrorism.

Bush envisions a framework that would partially privatize Social Security with personal investment accounts similar to 401(k) plans.

A starting point is a plan proposed by a presidential commission in 2001 that would divert 2 percent of workers' payroll taxes into private accounts. The remaining 4.2 percent - and the Social Security taxes employers pay - would go into the system, helping fund benefits for current retirees. That leaves a shortfall of at least $2 trillion to continue funding benefits for those current retirees. continue

Read Full Article

Administration Rebuked on Human Rights

November 9, 2004

A federal judged ruled decisively against the Bush administration’s legal approach to terrorism yesterday. U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson concluded, "President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions," when he established military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay to try detainees as war criminals. The ruling forced an abrupt halt to the government’s most expansive military tribunals since WWII.

• The Bush administration’s military tribunals violate America’s fundamental sense of legal fairness. Judge Robertson ruled that the commission's set up by the administration did not give defendants a fair shot at defending themselves and allowed the government to use secret evidence and unnamed witnesses to make its case. Robertson found that no American court could operate without "the right to confront one's accuser and the evidence."
  
• Ignoring international human rights accords puts our own soldiers at risk. One of the primary reasons the U.S. originally ratified the Geneva Conventions was to protect American soldiers. Judge Robertson concluded that in placing detainees outside the reach of these international human rights standards, the Bush administration weakened "the United States own ability to demand application of the Geneva conventions to Americans captured during armed conflicts abroad."
  
• We can not win the hearts and minds of those abroad if we ignore our own democratic standards at home. The administration should stop trying to find ways to get around human rights standards and stand up for basic American principles. The fight against terrorists must be resolute but also principled if it is to truly defend what America represents to the world.

News From The Right

November 9, 2004

Judges

According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, "President Bush should give voters what they want: conservative Justices....To set the proper tone, Mr. Bush could begin his new term by re-nominating every candidate who was filibustered and is willing to go through the process again." WSJ also recommends that Bush make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court should Justice Rehnquist retire early. Read

Life News repeats rumors floated by Matt Drudge concerning President Bush’s interest in appointing Clarence Thomas as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Read

Commentator Oliver North on the Supreme Court: "Conventional wisdom holds that during the next four years as many as three seats could open on the Supreme Court. During his first term, Democrats waged an aggressive, obstructionist campaign against the president's judicial nominees. If they are serious about their desire to create a bipartisan spirit of cooperation in Washington, Democrats will have to welcome jurists who value human life, the sanctity of marriage and our Judeo-Christian heritage." Read

The editors of the National Review urge the Senate to keep Orrin Hatch in charge of the Judiciary Committee: "...Senate Republicans need the steady hand of Utah's Orrin Hatch. His experience as chairman of the Judiciary Committee will prove to be a vital resource in the months ahead. The same goes for the bulk of his staff, which has already confronted Democratic obstinacy and won't waver as it joins the battle once more. Forcing Hatch and his aides to quit the committee over blind obedience to a seniority rule whose purpose is to keep the Republican party strong would be the political equivalent of a self-inflicted wound. Given the extraordinary circumstances, now is the time to make a narrow exception." Read

Election

The Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich writes, "So God is indeed a Republican. He must be. His hand helped re-elect a President, with a popular mandate, whose job approval ratings were the lowest since ratings began of any President who has been re-elected." Read

The Independent Women's Forum notes that President Bush has managed to "collapse" the gender gap in a move that is a "big blow to leftist feminist groups like the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority. It really shows that they no longer speak for women." Read

EducationThe American Civil Liberties Union and a group of parents have filed suit in opposition to warning labels on Atlanta biology textbooks that state that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." Read

Bush plans to cut taxes permanently and overhaul tax system

WASHINGTON (AP) — Buoyed by a clear-cut election victory, President Bush is pledging to make permanent the sweeping tax cuts of his first term and to simplify the nation's tax laws.
The price tag on making the tax cuts permanent is more than $1 trillion, a daunting number in an age of record budget deficits.
At the same time, efforts to enact ambitious proposals to overhaul the tax system often fall victim to a ferocious assault from Washington lobbyists determined to protect special breaks for their clients.
While not discounting the challenges ahead, Bush's supporters are betting that the president will end up getting much of what he wants with the help of bigger Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate.
"Tax reform is a politically dangerous road to travel with a lot of corpses," said Stephen Moore, head of the Club for Growth, which supports an aggressive tax-cutting agenda.
"But the president is very serious about this. He wants to make a major push for overhauling the tax system," Moore said.
Moore and others expect Bush's model will be Ronald Reagan's successful effort to enact the 1986 tax overhaul, one of the broadest rewrites of tax law in history. It dramatically lowered tax rates and paid for those reductions by eliminating or scaling back tax deductions.
So far, Bush has disclosed little about how he wants to simplify the current system, which he has called a "complicated mess."
He first stated his tax overhaul goal in his August acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. He promised that if re-elected, he would create a bipartisan advisory panel to come up with a "simpler, fairer, pro-growth system."
The idea did not attract much attention during the campaign against Democratic Sen. John Kerry. But last week, Bush put the idea front and center again, telling reporters at his first postelection news conference, "We must reform our complicated and outdated tax code."
Bush said any plan should be "revenue neutral," meaning the overall changes would not increase taxes or cut taxes. He also said the proposal should be viewed as fair without tax loopholes for special interests.
Bush indicated he favored protecting "certain incentives" such as deductions for mortgage interest rates and charitable contributions.
"It's going to take a lot of legwork to get something ready for a legislative package," Bush said.
He gave no hint about when he planned to appoint the members of his tax advisory group. The expectation is that none of the proposals will show up in the president's next budget, which goes to Congress in early February.
In August, Bush suggested that a proposed national sales tax was "an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." But the White House quickly backed away from the proposal, which Democrats contended would raise the cost of living for poor families while giving the wealthy a big tax break.
White House political adviser Karl Rove told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that Bush "wants to look at all options."
Some House Republicans, angered by how long it takes people to fill out their tax returns each year, are pushing the idea of replacing the current income tax. Alternatives could include a national sales tax, some other form of consumption tax, or possibly a simplified "flat tax," which taxes all income at a single rate and gets rid of deductions.
Many tax experts say it is unlikely that Bush will propose a national income tax or a flat tax. They say the president could offer a value added tax, a kind of consumption tax.
A value added tax is in effect a sales tax imposed at each level of production of goods and services and is widely used by European governments.
Supporters of this tax see advantages, especially if it were coupled with reducing or eliminating corporate income taxes. Those taxes are getting harder to collect in an era when multinational companies use various loopholes to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
"We need to look at all alternatives," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., whose book this summer urged consideration of a national sales tax, a value added tax or flat tax to replace the income tax. Asked about the possibility of sweeping change to tax laws during Bush's second term, Hastert told "Fox News Sunday," "I think this is the only time in generations that you might have a chance to be able to do it."
Putting in place a value added tax is seen as a way of boosting the competitiveness of U.S. companies and encouraging them to keep their production facilities in the United States.
"The U.S. tax system is out of step with the rest of the world. We are the only major industrial country that does not have either a national sales tax or a VAT," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
Bush's drive to overhaul the tax system could very well be coupled with a major revamping of the alternative minimum tax. This tax was designed to make sure the wealthy do not avoid paying taxes but which is ensnaring more middle-income taxpayers.
But such a fix would cost, by some estimates, more than $500 billion over 10 years.
When that is added to the price of making Bush's first term tax cuts permanent, the president is facing a revenue loss of around $1.5 trillion just on the tax side. His drive to partially privatize Social Security for younger workers carries an additional estimated $1 trillion in costs.
Bush will have to persuade Congress to put in place these costly programs at a time when he is under increasing pressure to deal with the soaring budget deficit, which hit a record $413 billion in 2004.
But Bush's supporters believe the president will benefit from political momentum gained in his re-election victory.
Bush apparently agrees. He told reporters last week when he laid out his second term agenda that he had earned political capital in the campaign "and now I intend to spend it."

The Silent Majority Speaks

by David N. Bass
09 November 2004

Now that evangelical Christians have flocked to the polls and been faithful to the Republicans, the question remains whether President Bush and the House and Senate will remain faithful to them.

If anything is evident in the aftermath of the November 2 elections, it’s that evangelical Christians are largely responsible for President Bush’s victory. To the glee of the Bush camp, the 4 million Christian conservatives who failed to show up at the polls in 2000 came out in droves last Tuesday. I don’t think it’s too bold to say they handed President Bush his second term.

Read entire article

News From The Right

November 8, 2004

Marriage

The Washington Times reports that the Bush administration and Republican leaders are signaling that a domestic agenda including a constitutional amendment on marriage will dominate the congressional calendar, even though foreign policy and the war in Iraq dominated the presidential campaign. Read

Congress and the JudiciaryThe Right reacts angrily to comments from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) regarding the hazards of appointing of judges hostile to Roe v. Wade. Many groups argue that, because of his comments, Specter should not be picked to head the Senate Judiciary Committee. For example, Concerned Women for America asserts that Specter ‘Borked’ himself from Senate Judiciary Committee. Read

The Center for Reclaiming America urges its members to oppose Specter as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee: "It is imperative that these same 'values voters' rise up and prevent Senator Specter from using such a position to muzzle the representative will and mandate of the American people." Read

The editors of the National Review also oppose Specter for Judiciary Committee Chairman: "For the social conservatives who just elected Republicans to office for the very purpose of getting sound judges confirmed, Specter's elevation would not just be a symbolic slap in the face but an actual betrayal. Find the man another sinecure." Read

ConservativePetitions.com circulates a petition urging the Senate to deny Specter the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. Read

The Eagle Forum says: "WE MUST ACT! [Specter's] election as chairman is not a done deal. Members of the Judiciary Committee and the Senate Republican Conference have to vote on electing a chairman. We must let all Republican senators know that a vote for Sen. Specter is unacceptable." Read

Election

Michelle Easton, president of the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute offers advice to the GOP for "carrying out the mandate" of last Tuesday's election. Easton's recommendations include: "school choice for all children," amending Title IX, and ending affirmative action. Read

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, has some suggestions as well. He calls for the partial privatization of Social Security, standing "firm when it comes to judicial appointments, " and replacing the Medicare Act of 2003 "with an expanded system that empowers individuals and families to make their own health-care decisions, free of government direction." Read

G.O.P. Plans to Give Environment Rules a Free-Market Tilt

By FELICITY BARRINGER and MICHAEL JANOFSKY

November 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - With the elections over, Congress and the Bush administration are moving ahead with ambitious environmental agendas that include revamping signature laws on air pollution and endangered species and reviving a moribund energy bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration.

In addition, the administration intends to accelerate conservation efforts by distributing billions of dollars to private landowners for the preservation of wetlands and wildlife habitats. The White House also plans to announce next month a new effort to clean up the Great Lakes.

The groundwork for the push was laid down in the past four years even as environmental groups, Congressional moderates and the courts put the brakes on major changes. But the election returns that gave Mr. Bush a clear victory and expanded the Republicans' majorities in Congress have emboldened those determined to hard-wire free-market principles into all environmental policy.

"The election is a validation of our philosophy and agenda," Michael O. Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. "We will make more progress in less time while maintaining economic competitiveness for the country. That is my mission."

Representative Joe L. Barton of Texas, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said he was eager to get the process started and encouraged the environmental groups and Democrats who typically oppose Republican initiatives "to come out of the trenches and meet me halfway."

But with industry groups anticipating relaxed regulations and environmental groups fighting to retain stiff regulations, the environmental debate over the next four years could be contentious.

"What you're going to see is an administration focused on setting broad goals and then letting states and companies and individuals work to achieve those, within an economic framework," said Charles Wehland, a lawyer for Jones Day in Chicago who represents clients like the OGE Energy Corporation and the Great Lakes Chemical Corporation. But Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a nonprofit group, warned the White House and Congressional leadership that it would be risky to further push the agenda of the last four years.

"George Bush doesn't have to run again, but Republican lawmakers do," Mr. Clapp said. "They know there is a cost to their political association with rolling back environmental laws."

Nationally, the environment was a sleeper issue that never awoke. But concern for environmental and conservation issues was sometimes visible at the local level. Montana voters, for instance, rejected an initiative to overturn a ban on a form of mining cyanide, effectively blocking a large new mine on the Blackfoot River.

Bush administration officials say that among the first measures moving toward enactment will be those that govern air pollution levels. The administration initiative known as Clear Skies, which generated lukewarm support in Congress during Mr. Bush's first term, is about to come out of mothballs. Will Hart, a spokesman for Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, said it was Mr. Imhofe's "No. 1 environmental issue."

Clear Skies establishes lower emission standards for pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, but environmental groups complain that it does not reduce them as much or as soon as levels set forth in a competing bill or by enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member of the committee and a co-sponsor of the competing bill, said it saddened him that Mr. Bush was leading efforts to undermine air standards that his father, the first President Bush, supported. Citing the new alignment in the Senate - 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and himself - Mr. Jeffords said, "We have the power to block any measure detrimental to the environment."

New York Times

The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

November 7, 2004

AROUND 8 p.m. Tuesday, a gloomy mood was settling over the dozen conservative stalwarts gathered with martinis and glasses of red wine in an office in Arlington, Va., to watch the returns. Early exit polls showed President Bush trailing, and Richard Viguerie, dean of conservative direct mail, thought he knew who was to blame: the neoconservatives, the group associated with making the case for the invasion of Iraq.
"If he loses, they are going to have a bull's-eye on their back," Mr. Viguerie said.

Ronald Godwin, a top aide to Dr. Jerry Falwell, agreed. "I see a real battle for the Republican Party starting about Nov. 3," he said.

The euphoria of Mr. Bush's victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit.

They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives' disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. Their growing outspokenness recalls the dynamics of American politics before Vietnam, when Democrats first became identified as doves and Republicans hawks, suggesting to some the complicated political pressures facing the foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

"Clearly, the war in Iraq was a drag on votes, and it is threatening to the Bush coalition," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a strategist close to the administration who had not spoken up about the war's political costs before. He contended that the war reduced Mr. Bush's majority by 6 percentage points to 51 percent of the vote.

Mr. Bush now has two years to "solve Iraq" to protect Republican candidates at the midterm elections, he said. His suggestions: withdrawing United States troops to safe citadels within Iraq or by "handing Falluja over to the Iraqis and saying, 'It's your headache.' "

On Thursday, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, issued a call to conservatives for a serious debate about the administration's foreign policy. "The consequences of the neocons' adventure in Iraq are now all too clear," he said. "America is stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight. Our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats. And our real enemies, nonstate organizations such as Al Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country."

Proponents of the war, however, argued that Mr. Bush would not have won re-election without it because Americans did not want to change the commander in chief. "Bush's foreign policy decisions seem to have been exactly why he won this huge victory that he did," said the neoconservative David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He argued that candidates who opposed the war - Gov. Howard Dean the most, and Senator John Kerry to a lesser extent - suffered the biggest losses.

IF the Democrats have silenced some of their loudest complaints about the war, however, some on the right said they were turning up the volume on their own previously muted objections.

"A lot of the antiwar conservatives had to hold their tongue during the campaign because the No. 1 goal was to get Bush re-elected," said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an important conservative fund-raiser.

Even on the eve of the election, William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review, was decorously edging closer to full-throated opposition to the war. "At War With What or Whom?'' was the headline of his column on Oct. 19.

A few months ago, Donald Devine, a vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, publicly apologized to Mr. Bush after it was reported that in disgust at the war he had failed to applaud a presidential speech. But in a column shortly before the election, Mr. Devine wrote that conservatives should vote for Mr. Bush precisely because he was likely to withdraw from Iraq sooner than Senator Kerry would.

Arguing that the president had dropped hints like a quickly retracted statement in a television interview about the impossibility of winning a war against terror, Mr. Devine argued that "the president's maddening repetition of slogans" about the war was the "only politically possible tactic for a candidate who has already made up his mind to leave at the earliest reasonable moment." He added: "The neoconservatives will be devastated."

But Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, dismissed those theories, pointing to the president's statement in his post-election news conference that troops would stay in Iraq as long as needed: "Our commanders will have that which they need to complete their missions," the president said.

New York Times

Oregon: Right-wing vandals leave mark of hatred at OSU Pride Center

Pride Center vandals missed the memo

.......No windows were shattered, no graffiti tagged, and presumably, no laws were broken.

But the people who covered OSU's newly relocated Pride Center with "Yes on Measure 36: One Man, One Woman" signs and stickers damaged more than this university's reputation as a place for "open minds" and "open doors.".....

....A "Yes" on Measure 36 vote adds to the Oregon Constitution a declaration that only marriage between one man and one woman is valid or legally recognized as marriage.

It can be argued that supporters of the measure are not necessarily homophobic, but believe instead in the preservation of marriage as it has traditionally been recognized in this country -- exclusive to husband and wife.

Therefore, it seems that those who vandalized the Pride Center on Thursday missed the memo: Supporters of Measure 36 do not necessarily want to be represented as anti-LGBT......