As much as it pains me to do this to you, I must give you those gruesome details by embedding this YouTube from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC):
So, stripped of all the cloying nonsense, the basic claim is that John Kerry hasn’t gotten anything passed in 9 years. Now, a discriminating, politically astute individual might look at that and think, “well, most of that time was with a GOP Senate and a GOP President, so it’s not surprising he didn’t get legislation passed.” Well, that discriminating viewer would, unfortunately, be giving the NRSC far too much credit. Because the whole point of the ad is a lie. Bald-faced. Unvarnished. Complete fabrication.
John Kerry has authored and shepherded a number of bills into law. In fact, Knowlegis named Kerry the 12th most powerful Senator because of his effective advocacy for Massachusetts and progressive issues.
Here’s a blog post with a sampling of some of them. Short version: help for veterans. Fairness for our fisheries industry. Ethics reform. And more.
As my friend (and fellow JK staffer) David Wade said:
NRSC must stand for ‘nobody really shows competence.’ When people get their facts this wrong they usually lose on the first round of ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th grader.’ In just the last two years, John Kerry has written and passed legislation that denied congressional pensions to corrupt members of Congress like Duke Cunningham, passed legislation to establish eye injury centers for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, secured $13 million in disaster assistance for Massachusetts fishermen, and put the Senate on record condemning Burma’s military junta.
OK, attacks are part of politics. But, note to NRSC, when you attack, can you please just get the basic modicum of facts right? I mean, really. If you are going to come in to Massachusetts from your GOP DC offices and attack our legislators, I, for one, would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t be so obvious and bald with your lies.
If I can get “meta” for a second, the NRSC is mostly just trying to raise money for itself. It’s far, FAR behind the DSCC in fundraising, and their entire online fundraising haul amounts to a rounding error in a day of Barack Obama’s online fundraising. So they’re trying to juice it any way they can. I’d feel pity, if they had the basic sense to keep their attacks in the realm of reality.
But, the question is, what are our esteemed Republican Senatorial candidates going to do about it? Are they going to allow the NRSC to destroy (well … further destroy) the GOP’s name in Massachusetts in order to fundraise for themselves? Or are Scott, Beatty, and Ogonowski going to move past lying politics and distance themselves from it?
With the ideology and policies of the GOP so thoroughly discredited, I’m sure it seems easier to run on gimmicks like these, but as much as I’m making fun of them here, this is serious. The decisions and work Senators do can make a real difference in people’s lives. It can be the difference between health care for children, or those children going without. It can make the difference between a veteran getting support they need when they get home, or having to go it alone. It can make the difference between a future with new energy sources and a cleaner environment, or one with a warming planet and environmental catastrophes.
As much as the NRSC would like us to think otherwise, politics matters. Results matter. And lies just don’t cut it.
In a post in which you attack the NRSC for their mischaracterization of John Kerry’s record, it’s interesting that you choose to mislead people on John McCain’s. It’s pretty well established by now what McCain meant by “100 years in Iraq.”
I’m sure no one would disagree that John McCain said he had no problem with troops being in Iraq for 100 years. That’s what I said. How was that misleading?
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p>If you want to argue for McCain’s viewpoint, that’s fine, but I didn’t say anything that was misleading.
Oh, and “called for” is perfectly accurate. His exact words, I think, were, “make it a hundred.”
I understand the actual words that he used, but it’s pretty clear what he meant by those words.
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since interpreting “100 years” to mean “100 years” would clearly be unreasonable and partisan.
Interpreting 100 years to mean 100 years of casualties and fighting rather than in its obvious context is partisan and unreasonable
tells us that he doesn’t equate winning the war in Iraq with troops going home. They are staying regardless. Plus his cover up argument is a fantasy, when he later
covered his arseclarified his statement he said “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed”. Okay, when is that going to happen?<
p>What about, what do we do when our troop are in harms way and nothing continues to change, what do we do with our troops then? Has he got an answer for that one?
5 years of chaos
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4000 dead Americans
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President John McCain
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p>95 years of rainbows, unicorns and a NBA franchise in Baghdad!
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p>Come on, America, turn those frowns upside down because the instant John McCain is sworn in as President– all the violence in Iraq will end!
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p>It’s too bad because it’s so freakin’ romantic over there in Iraq, with all the IED’s and random maimings. When President McCain brings peace and Bud Light and his cougar wife to Iraq, the only losers will be all those brave, young, romance-addicted American service members who won’t get to spend 15 months away from their family anymore.
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p>Well, I mean, they’ll still be spending years in Iraq, thousands of miles away from their families but the time will really drag minus the suicide bombers and roving sectarian death squads that now make a deployment in Iraq such a romance-filled fairy tale.
Again, how did I interpret those words that way? In fact, how did I interpret those words at all? I simply stated a fact.
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p>I’ll leave others to argue the merits of McCain’s statement – johnk and Masshole are doing a fine job of it – but I’ll just mention again that you are implying something about what I said that just isn’t true.
Can we reasonably expect our troops to be in Iraq for 100 years and not facing casualties and fighting each and every day. By the good grace of who knows who, we’ve luckily been able to avoid decades of fighting in North Korea… but just because McCain would like to pretend we could have a presence in Iraq just like we do in South Korea, doesn’t mean in actuality we could. The situations are completely different in just about every possible way imaginable. So, 100 years means 100 years means 100 years. Every day our soldiers are in Iraq means that more and more of them are likely to come home in a casket. If you want more caskets returning from Iraq for ‘as long as it takes,’ then, by all means, vote for McCain and the Republicans. The only thing partisan about that statement is the fact that the Republicans choose to employ that as their partisan strategy for getting more oil defeating them terrorists in Iraq who attacked us on 9/11, or something…
just asking. It seems like its been 63, 63, and 55 years respectively no?
If you really equate the end of World War II and the occupation of Germany and Japan or end of the Korean War with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, times must be getting really desperate over in Republican land.
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p>This has to be a joke, right? You couldn’t have seriously just written that the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, which at one point controlled all of continental Europe from the Atlantic to the outskirts of Moscow, was systemically murdering every Jew, homosexual and anyone else who didn’t fit it into their Aryan worldview, was poised to crush Stalinist Russia and likely force England to sue for peace, thus leaving America as virtually the world’s last true democracy was the same thing as the overthrow of some petty dictator like Saddam Hussein?
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p>But maybe I’m just getting my facts wrong. I mean, I don’t remember my Social Studies teacher talking about the warring factions in a defeated Germany, the post-war religious civil war, the influx of foreign fighters from Poland, Austria, Denmark and Holland, the lone American occupiers abandoned by the international community or every Fritz, Dirk and Greta becoming a suicide bomber but then again I was usually daydreaming about Alyssa Milano so who the hell really knows.
Tell you what: find me an example where the US occupied a country for the first five years in insurgent violence, and then things turned on a dime and we stayed for another 50 amidst peace, democracy, and a humming Western-style industrial economy.
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p>Sorry, but if you want to talk about historical comparisons, we’ll be talking about Vietnam.
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p>Cheers.
then can you please link me to his excellent explanation? because to he he just looks like like another fear/war monger to me.
So John McCain only wants American troops in Iraq for 100 years if no one is getting killed. Geesh, these commie liberals and their insatiable need for some sort of plan to actually end the violence in Iraq so it can finally be safe enough for American college students to hit for spring break.
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p>It’s not like McCain favors any of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle policies that have resulted in thousands of American deaths, an Iraqi civil war and a recession on the homefront, right? I mean, if the guy wants peace in Iraq, it would seem that the first thing he would want to do is take a long, hard look at just how Bush, et al. have run this war and then basically do the exact opposite.
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p>Thank God for that. For a minute, I thought someone was going to tell me that McCain is actually going to stick to Bush’s playbook and that would be, in purely technical terms, “completely f*cking retarded.”
At least the NRSC doesn’t, because they know that if they ran a fact-based campaign against Kerry, they would not stand a chance in our state.
Not that they have much of one now, but they know the only way they can even hope to make any headway is by claiming the same old nonsense:
‘What has Senator Kerry done for you lately?’, implying that he was not doing anything of note in the Senate and for Massachusetts – a flat-out lie, as evidenced by the link you provided above.
I will take for granted you’re statement re Kerry’s bills.
The eye center for vets–rates an attaboy.
Burma—who gives a crap. No one in USA does.
Duke Cunningham? I would venture to guess that Duke Cunningham lost his mind. The deviancy of his behavior would point to that. The difference between Cunningham and most members of congress is that Cunningham lost his marbles and sent out a menu on the dollar value of his dishonesty. (0% of those in congress who steal ( by various methods and various dollar amounts) do so in such a manner to have their fellow colleagues look the other way. The motto on Capitol Hill is “Steal in such a fashion as to not embarrass us and not exhorbitantly”. Steal tastefully.
Global warming? You gotta be pulling my leg right? John and Theresa hop aboard the “Flying Squirrel” and go for an ice cream and burn up how much jet fuel and foul up how much atmosphere—and you have the temerity to tell us that Kerry is acting responsibly? “Those aren’t my SUV’s those are my families.” How many houses do they own? The problem with many politicians, republican and democrat is they think everyone in the American public is a frigg’n idiot. Actions speak louder than words and you lead by example. Moving fire hydrants, having convoys of SUV’s and jet planes is not acting responsibly. John Kerry is not royalty. He is a public servant who married a woman with a lot of money and he should be practicing what he preaches.
Kucinich, though odd, practices what he preaches. He’s probably one of the few democrats who do.
John Kerry may be looking for new employment next December. Time for some new blood in the Masachusetts delegation. No doubt in my mind that we have a few congressman that would like that seat.
or the Duke Cunningham act introduced by Kerry, and passed. You think that was a bad idea? Explain it to me, you think convicted criminals, those who were found guilty in a court of law of abusing the power of office should get hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars as pension?
Instead he has this nonsense that should have been federal law a hundred years ago—-but being the corrupt body they essentially are—congress looks the other way. And as I stated previously–Cunningham should have used an insanity defense—simply because what he did was insane.
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p>And speaking of which—you brought up a good point. Why are our ‘career” legislators receiving a pension at all. Do I get a pension because I vote regularly? These thieves voted themselves a pension. Tell me that isn’t larceny!
like those young whipper-snapper Massachusetts Congressmen.
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p>I’m just waiting for Ed O’Reilly to smite John Kerry and emerge as the single greatest Lobsterman-Prison Guard-DUI Lawyer-Fire Fighter-Native American Legal Advocate-Former One Term City Councilor-CPR Instructor-Senator since LBJ.
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p>Ed was on with Jon Keller the other day- http://wbztv.com/video/?id=614… and unlike John Kerry, who is not certified in CPR and didn’t catch a single lobster in Vietnam, Ed never comes across as elitist.
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p>With Kerry, it’s always “I know this” or “The answer is this” or “Here are the facts.” I’m so sick and tired of John Kerry and his elitist habit of actually knowing stuff. I like Ed’s everyman, wily-nily, ranting, nonsensical, “I have no freakin’ idea what I’m talking about or how the Senate even works but look at me, world, I’m on Channel 4 and I’m sure as shit ain’t gonna stop puking up stupidity until someone drags me outta here” style.
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p>I just hope Obama doesn’t tag Ed to be his running mate because then I would be despondent and spend all my days writing best-selling fiction novels about Ned O’Kiley, the curley-haired Massachusetts Senator who moved to Washington and took my heart with him.
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Food stock
Medicine stock
Equipment check
Fade off the electronic surveillance grid.
Live,breathe, know and spread the word this “government” is the enemy of mankind.
the last time he introduced a bill that became law was earlier than 1999?
Try again.
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Fisherman—double edged sword. God bless our fisherman—I did it once a long time ago—-but they cut their own throats by overfishing. As a matter of fact—we have some species of salmon that may be going extinct. When have you seen anything on the news about that?
Let’s look at John Kerry’s response at JohnKerry.com.
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p>He got an amendment to a bill passed! Yeah for him but still he didn’t get one of his own bill’s passed.
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p>See above.
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p>See both above. Boy this is fun…..
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p>See all of the above.
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p>See everything above.
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p>Ditto…
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p>Oooohhh “it’s the sense of the Senate”… still not a law..
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p>Let’s just look at the rest all together.
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p>The first five were amendements.
According to Thomas.loc.gov public law 110-186 was House Resolution 4253.
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p>With all due respect BriVT it is you and the Senator that are spinning and the NRSC and Jim Ogonowski that are telling the truth based on the facts. But I guess I wouldn’t expect less from a team that decided to be against something before they were for it and vice versa.
And with all due respect to you, you don’t know how the Senate works. You introduce bills, and then you work to make them law. Almost always that is by amending legislation to include your bills. That’s a list of legislation Kerry introduced and shepherded into law.
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p>That’s just the way it works. Perhaps now it’s me who is giving the NRSC too much credit, and they don’t actually understand how the Senate works. But I sort of doubt that, so I feel pretty confident that they’re lying and counting on people not to know the difference.
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p>In the end though, like I said, this is mostly to try to whip up their own base into giving them money, probably. The national base of the GOP doesn’t like John Kerry because he’s an effective progressive voice, so the NRSC is going all “booga-booga” to try to shake the trees for money.
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p>It’s just too bad they are choosing MA in which to spread their lies. I hope Beatty, Ogonowski, and Scott come clean and distance themselves from it.
There are only two declared candidates – Beatty and Ogo. Who is Mr./Ms. Scott?
I think he means Kevin Scott. He obviously hasn’t been paying attention because Kevin has dropped out of the race to endorse Mr. Ogonowski, who he sees as our best hope to beat Bri’s boss.
I wasn’t paying attention to Kevin Scott. I’ll drop him from my mind immediately. Thanks!
How is the Senator trying to take credit for that.
that there are two houses in Congress? The Senate and the House of Representatives.
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p>Part of the sausage-making process means that when a law is created, it means that 2 bills, one introduced in the SENATE and one introduced in the HOUSE, must be passed by the respective entities. The bills are not necessarily identical, hence, that committee known as the Conference committee meets to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions after the bill has been passed in both houses.
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p>Senator Kerry indeed was responsible for that bill in the Senate. He doesn’t vote in the House of Representatives.
And you can also have a bill introduced in one house that when passed by that house is sent to the other house for debate and a vote. It does not always happen the way you state.
And it was the way it happened on this one.
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p>It’s a rare thing when a House bill goes through the Senate unchanged and becomes law. Very rare …
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p>Often a bill gets introduced in the House, goes to the Senate, where it is introduced with a Senate designation. Then it gets amended, usually sent back to the House and introduced with a House designation, then, if it passes the House, it moves on with the House designation. Or it can go to a conference committee either at that point or after the Senate version to get reconciled into one bill, which is then voted on by both Houses. It can go the other direction, too, with a bill introduced in the Senate (with some exceptions, mostly tax bills which have to be introduced in the House).
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p>The exact same measure has to pass both chambers (down to the commas and periods) to be ready for the President’s signature, so if it gets amended at all in the Senate, it has to go back to the House or be reconciled in conference. Which chamber’s designation is on the bill is largely irrelevant to the question of who is responsible for the underlying features of the bill. Sometimes a bill that passes with a House designation is nearly entirely the product of the Senate, and vice versa.
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p>It’s really rare for any bill to get introduced in one chamber and go through no revisions in the other.
Where is the paper trail on Thomas.loc.gov that shows that Senator Kerry had a hand in this. You must be able to show me. I’ve been so far unable to find it.
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p>Reminds me of Marty Meehan in 2002 saying that he sponsored “Renewal Community Legislation” when he didn’t and in fact it was JC Watts bill…… But when you have no economic record to run on you make it up right. The peons won’t know anyway.
The ending bill number means very little. The original House bill can even sometimes be completely gutted, leaving only the boilerplate at the top, and then new language re-inserted, and the original House bill still shows up as the bill that passed.
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p>You can tell in Thomas that the Senate has reconciled a House bill with its Senate counterpart when they agree to pass the House bill “in lieu of [Senate bill number].” That’s pretty much your tip-off that you should look at that Senate bill to see what’s in the bill that just passed. So, in this case, the House bill was passed in the Senate on 12/19/2007 “in lieu of S.1784,” which is the Kerry bill. Then in the House, you have H.RES.921 which, “Provides for the concurrence by the House in the Senate amendment to H.R. 4253 (Military Reservist and Veteran Small Business Reauthorization and Opportunity Act of 2008), with a specified amendment.” That’s the House agreeing to the Senate amendment (the Kerry bill) to clear the bill for the President’s signature. Then, on February 14, the bill is signed into law.
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p>Got that? House passes bill, Senate inserts Kerry bill into the House bill and passes that bill in lieu of the Senate bill, House concurs with the change, President signs it. End result: Kerry bill is law, and veterans get help.
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p>Perhaps if John Kerry were more interested in slapping his name on the bill than he is about helping veterans, he could have fought for the Senate bill to go to the House and make the legislative process more complicated. But, the point of all this is to help people, not make it easier for Beatty or Ogonowski to figure out what’s going on.
he didn’t even vote for number two on your list. Oh I guess he was for it before he was against it…..
Change the topic and repeat an old taunt.
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p>Speaking of changing the topic and taunting, how about that article in the Phoenix about the state of the Republican party.
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p>Awesome!!!
Surely you can see that fighting to get an amendment into a bill, but then finding you can’t support the overall, omnibus bill because the rest of it is so bad are not mutually exclusive.
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p>If you’d like to argue that the overall Bankruptcy Bill was a good thing, feel free. Our credit market is in such good shape, after all.
For Disclosure purposes, are you being paid by the taxpayers to post this information in defense of John Kerry?
Not for the United States Senate.
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p>So the answer is no.
Where was John Kerry when this critical bill was being written? What, was he too busy windsurfing or reading Moliere to bother to get off his effete ass and do his job? Looks that way because it’s Dick Lugar who got a bill passed and because of Dick Lugar now there’s some sort of US-Poland youth exchange thingy that has absolutely no impact or apparent value to anyone in entire world.
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p>What are some of the other legendary Senate bills that became law this session– and I’m talking in the strictest, most literal, most “I watched that cartoon bill walk up the steps of the Capital on Saturday morning when I was little and it was at that moment that I knew all I ever had to about our legislative process”, Eabo type of way. Check out some of these new laws that will have way more impact on Massachusetts residents than fishing disaster assistance, new vet centers or $10 billion to help people keep their homes.
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p>S.1916 : A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to modify the program for the sanctuary system for surplus chimpanzees by terminating the authority for the removal of chimpanzees from the system for research purposes.
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p>S.2110 : A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 427 North Street in Taft, California, as the “Larry S. Pierce Post Office”.
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p>S.2174 : A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 175 South Monroe Street in Tiffin, Ohio, as the “Paul E. Gillmor Post Office Building”.
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p>S.2484 : A bill to rename the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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p>S.801 : A bill to designate a United States courthouse located in Fresno, California, as the “Robert E. Coyle United States Courthouse”.
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p>Get off your ass, Kerry, and start passing your own bills and not piggybacking onto what are clearly bills written by just one Senator and in no way any sort of huge, omnibus, “this is the way the Senate works” type of bills. I mean when I see that John Thune, all on his lonesome, wrote S.1716 : A bill to amend the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007, to strike a requirement relating to forage producere and that no other US Senator had anything to do with it, I have to wonder why John Thune can’t just represent Massachusetts as well.
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p>OGO! OGO! OGO! OGO! OGO! OGO! OGO! He’s a dim man who will make all our futures brighter. OGO in 2008. Do it for the children.
had nothing to do with how “middle america perceives progressives”.
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p>Just because the man is plainspoken doesn’t make him a “dim man” The thousands of hard working, tax paying, middle class voters that speak like Jim in the Merrimack Valley might take exception to your characterization.
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p>But that seems to be your line of attack on Jim isn’t it. I’ve seen it on numerous occasions. “Jim’s to dumb to be a Senator”. Well I would think the US Air Force would not risk the lives of Pilots who needed refueling services over the Atlantic to a dumb man, but hey that’s what they did. Jim was in charge of the whole North Atlantic Refueling program. Keep up the good work guys.
He in no way mentioned that the way he speaks or how he carries himself is the reason. It could be his policies? You are the one who defines him a being plain spoken, I would say that your characterization of Ogo is what might seem to be offensive. You know what else is offensive, your characterization of voters:
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p>What? Care to explain what what you are talking about. First are you saying Jim doesn’t speak well, and link that to a statement that he is dim. Then you insult voters in the region who you personally believe don’t meet some kind of speech requirement and liken them to Ogo. What are you trying to tell us?
I’m from there. Don’t give me that John, please.
for someone else. I read a statement that you tried unsuccessfully to twist to something else and instead you stuck your own foot in your mouth. Don’t know if that’s what you truly believe of voters in a place where you are from or you just made up a false statement to make a point.
EaBo, I know you want to save your energy for your daily 300 post catfight with Ken Pittman over on RMG but give me a break.
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p>It’s like a gag reflex with Ogo backers– someone questions whether or not he would make a good a Senator and instantly it’s “HE WAS IN THE AIR FORCE!” Not taking anything away from his military service but if you truly thought that one’s service to his/her country was the determining factor in one’s fitness to serve in elected office than you would have donated thousands of dollars and man hours to John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.
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p>When your BFF Pittman uses that same line of reasoning over on RMG in one of his Jeff Beatty Kills Terrorists Dead diatribes and dismisses Ogo as being a pencil-pusher to Beatty’s warrior, you go ballistic.
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p>Stop wrapping Ogo in the flag anytime somone suggests that maybe a guy with absolutely no real plan to do anything to help the people of Massachusetts isn’t fit to be our Senator.
Burned again!
I haven’t heard Mr. Beatty say anything in support of continuing in Iraq. If anything, Mr. Beatty has known all along it was not a good idea in the first place.
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p>Don’t know where you’ve been looking.
He doesn’t believe in time lines because it will embolden our enemies, but has a plan that will bring troops home in 24 months. Isn’t that a time line?
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p>Plus for added bonus, he has a plan!
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p>Got any details?
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p>Why yes, it’s a comprehensive plan!
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p>How so?
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p>Well, it has several phases.
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p>Go on,
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p>Once implemented we will draw down 100,000 troops in 24 months. See isn’t that a great plan!
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p>So, what’s the plan again???
that’s hardly a concern. đŸ˜‰
Meet the man. Framingham State College, Heineman Ecumenical Center, 1:30 today Wednesday April 16, 2008. Beatty is a WINNER, not a flip-flopping loon we have now.
that he actually doesn’t have to win elections to be considered a WINNER. He just keeps on losing and what do you know– he’s a WINNER.
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p>I like billxi– he comes from the Tee Ball Wing of the Republican Party where everyone is a WINNER.