Born: November 4, 1946, in Midland, Texas

Born Laura Lane Welch, she graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1968 with a degree in education. She later earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Texas. She worked as both an elementary-school teacher and as a librarian before she married George W. Bush in 1977. Mrs. Bush had her first taste of politics the next year, when her husband ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress.

Despite her shyness, Laura Bush campaigned for her husband when he ran for governor of Texas in 1994. After his election, she took a more active role in public life. She became a strong advocate of early education, reading, and literacy. George W. Bush was reelected as governor of Texas in 1998; this made him a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Mrs. Bush gave the opening speech at the Republican National Convention that year. And she again worked vigorously on his behalf during the presidential campaign.

Image via Wikipedia

During her first four years as First Lady, Mrs. Bush pledged to: “stay in areas I’m already interested in—literacy, libraries, and early childhood.” She convened the White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development. She joined the Library of Congress in launching the first National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Bush worked with various teacher-recruitment programs. She had an active role in the president’s successful reelection campaign in 2004.

Mrs. Bush made Helping America’s Youth, an initiative to assist at-risk children, a priority in her second term as First Lady. She led the U.S. delegation to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. That same year, she hosted the White House Conference on Global Literacy. In 2007, the First Lady became a vocal critic of the military government that was ruling Myanmar (Burma).

President and Mrs. Bush are the parents of twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. In September 2007, Jenna’s nonfiction book for teenagers, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, was published. It was followed in April 2008 by a children’s book written by Laura and Jenna Bush about the joy of reading called Read All About It! Jenna Bush and Harry Hager were married at the family’s Texas ranch on May 10, 2008. Jenna’s sister Barbara, meanwhile, was working for a museum in New York City. Mrs. Bush’s memoir, Spoken from the Heart, written with Lyric Winik, was published in May 2010.

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After Obama was elected and before he entered office he asked President Bush to attain money for a stimulus package he intended to present upon entering office. President Bush was often portrayed as a stupid man, I for one never really believed that. We all have our stupid moments however, he as well as the rest of us, his was agreeing to go ahead and do as Barack Obama requested.

I watched closely as Obama entered his presidency and tried to remain candid and unprejudiced in judging what he did for the country. It seemed the first thing he was interested in was healthcare, an issue that undoubtedly needed attention since the current system really wasn’t working. His plan was to put the system under complete government control, which earned it the nickname Obama care. According to all independent surveys at the time, the Senate did not want it, the house did not want it, and the American public did not want.

Barack Obama cared little what anyone else wanted he was determined to get Obama care. He got it through the Senate by bribing senators. Not necessarily a cash offer to them individually, although I’m not sure this did not happen. He bought these senators by promising tax breaks for their states. Nebraska was one such state. When he tried to get it through the House of Representatives he ran against a solid wall. It was going to be far more difficult to achieve his desired results in the house. Many representatives were outraged at the deals he had made in the Senate to get it passed. The promises he had made to the Nebraska senator were a particular sticking point. This was no problem to Barack Obama though, now that he no longer needed the Senate vote he didn’t need to fulfill his promises, so he simply repealed the promises made to the Nebraska senator to gain the votes he needed from the house. After such dealings I found it hard to believe that anyone could ever trust this man in any way.

By this time the money from the original stimulus package was starting to run out, no one really knew where it was but it was gone. This was not a problem however for Barack Obama, he simply asked for more, after all he was the president of hope and change, and how could he bring about change if we did not simply hand over everything he wanted.

Now that he had borrowed his second truck load of money, the entire world’s economy started to tremble. We did not cause their problems, but they had always felt that as long as US economy was strong it would help pull them back up. Now seeing that the US economy was every bit as fragile as their own they felt vulnerable. By this time we had found where much of the money had gone. A good sized bundle went to buy GM. This was a smart move on Obama’s part because it put the unions firmly in his back pocket. Another good sized wad of money went to bailout the banks.

Watching all of this I could not help but see the genius of his plan. As president he was commander-in-chief of the military, upon buying GM he pretty much had control of the country’s vast unions, and by lending banks bailout money he sought to have the country’s monetary system in his grip. These three points should give him a stranglehold on the country that would be unbreakable. The fly in the ointment however was the banks. Although they have received much bad press for stabilizing themselves and not just handing the money out everyone else, they managed to keep Barack Obama from controlling them by stabilizing themselves and paying back the money they had borrowed.

To this very day Barack Obama has had one ace in the hole to fall back on whenever he receives criticism. It’s all Bush’s fault. Bush went out of power in 2006. True he was president until 2008 but in 2006 the Democrats received majority in both the House and the Senate, bringing on the famous quote by the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelocy, Mr. Pres. there’s a new sheriff in town. This aptly illustrated that from that day forth President Bush had pretty much been politically castrated. Now it’s 2012, six years into democratic control and still everything is Bush’s fault.

In the past three years i have seen so many things toworry about with Barock Obama as Presedent that race has more or less taken a seat at the back of the bus. Today I saw a headline stating that the US deficient is now $1 trillion. I’ve worked 70 hours or more a week for the past 30 years to try to retain a tenuous grip on middle-class. In doing so I’ve earned the right to be one of the people that must pay off this debt. I will do this, not necessarily gladly, but because i love my country and wish to carry my share of the load, I will work at it probably till the day I die. In a sense I have now been enslaved by the US government, so I guess what they say is true, paybacks a bitch.

I didn’t do well in the last market crash, so I look over job listings for contract work.  Yesterday I saw a posting for a project coordinator/proofreader.  The first line of the job description read: One of the countries fastest growing multi-channel marketing agencies … instead of One of the country’s …. 

The hiring company’s website showed a contact email address, so I sent them an email identifying the error.  A corporate VP in a distant city kindly replied (to my astonishment) and explained that the company’s proofreaders confine their work to customers’ documents.  In other words, if a document doesn’t affect the bottom line, no one proofreads it.

Photo by Adrian Pingstone from Wikipedia (Public Domain)

Should Internet content writers follow the model of this company?  Perhaps they should.  Each and every piece of writing you publish should have a goal.  If you can accomplish this goal without proofreading, maybe you shouldn’t proofread.  For example, if you are writing for search engines (bot fodder), errors may not make any difference in how high the search engine puts your article on the results list.  If you want human beings to forward a link to their friends or to link to your article from their blogs, you may want to correct errors.

Fact Checking

This morning telegraph.co.uk published an article about Leonid Ksanfomaliti’s claim that he’d found evidence of life on Venus in photographs taken by the space probe Venera-13.   The author of the article identified Venus as “the red planet” and stated the planet’s gravity was 9 times that of Earth.  Commenters pounced on these errors, and the paper quickly corrected them.  

The view from Venera-13. Photo from Wikipedia (Public Domain)

If you make statements whose errors could be corrected by an extra minute reading Wikipedia, human readers may bounce to a better article.  They may also fail to link to your article.  You may have to resort to black hat SEO techniques to acquire backlinks.  A few minutes of fact checking can help you avoid the need to generate deceptive backlinks and the risk of getting caught cheating.  On the other hand, you may be writing for true believers who won’t let facts stand in their way.  Once again, it may be a question of the goal of your writing.

Writing Badly is a Right

…everything is given to us by the party and the government and only one thing is taken away: the freedom to write badly. –Isaac Babel

If you publish online, you will slip up and publish errors.  Sure as Brin and Page misspelled googol as google, you will encounter readers who think all your content should come down or that you should never write for publication again because of the errors.  No possible pardon is possible, they think, for those who confuse Mars and Venus.  Only authorities with credentials should write, etc.  I argue against this position by reminding everyone that appeal to authority is a logical fallacy and that even someone as inaccurate and syntax-challenged as George W. Bush deserves the right to speak his mind.

George W. Bush from Wikipedia (Public Domain)

Moreover, even bad articles may do good.  Recently I’ve read some Chinese blogs.  I don’t know Chinese at all, so I either have to wait for translations or read with the aid of translation software.  After struggling with a particularly scrambled machine translation, I asked myself some questions. What if this were as good as it gets?  What if I lived in a country with aggressive Internet censorship?  What if only articles with mangled text and misspelled keywords could slip through to tell me about life outside my country?  In that case I would feel privileged to read even bad articles.

Politicians are “polished chronic liars” deceiving the people they swore to serve. The Supreme Law of the people is the Constitution. A quote from Thomas Jefferson, “let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

An odd title for a small essay, but fitting. There are many disturbances happening on many fronts in the world. There are elections, business negotiations, economic unrest, civil and undeclared wars, religious zealots, and the list continues. Extremism is based on some sort of ideology, and it is a weight on the mental bearing of people. It generates the sense of unbalance in some social situations or it could be said it generates bias in an unbalanced community. Ideologies in general are counter weights. Opinions are the makings of all human groupings. Through Bush’s conceptualisation everyone in the world are extremists.  They are not within his group thereby the world filled with terrorists.

This conjecture or grandiose reasoning is behind The United States profession as the World Police Force. It doesn’t make sense. Don’t buy it. This thinking could only be true, if extremists equals terrorists and only when you’re not a loyal American, if you don’t think this way. The counter weight grows so heavy balance is lost again. You are damned if you do or damned if you don’t creating a non-functional Congress. These enigmas are popular in psychological analysis. For instance — in a drug councilor’s database, alcoholics always negate they have alcohol problems. The test starts with “do you think you’re an alcoholic.” What is your answer?

By all indications, forethought generated the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through an over simplistic whimsy to show the US citizens they should be the “World’s Police Force, and rest of the world they need a “World Police Force.” The linear events states, expedience is “How To Show” everyone, while using the presentation of concern.  It paints the portrait the world needs to see. 

Over zealousness is extremism by-passing fundamentalism. Politicians are very similar to used car sells people. Hard sells relate to the consumer’s condition and consumers require to test drive a car. The people of the United States got their test drive before they could look for any alternatives.

When you buy a car, you look long and hard not wanting to make a mistake. You take your time walking around and kicking multitudes of car tires. You are about to make a decision that will affect you for several years. You are weighing your needs and/or the needs of your family. Family is perhaps smallest and the most basic community based on emotional unification, however status is also a social requirement on the world scale. By the way, Presidents don’t choose their automobiles. Their vehicles are chosen for them, and protocol is in the mix, however the President (George W. Bush) made the people’s choice in expedience.

Newt has problems and his political career grew during the same years of George W. Bush. His past has more controversy and still the Republican Conservatives want another conservative to do their bidding. This ideology is doing the same thing, and balance has been lost. If you make jam, you preserve the fruit in a rich sauce. To preserve and to conserve is the same thing so to keep a reactionary in office, to Hell with The Constitution Newt’s the choice. In my opinion, The United States needs a leader and not a thoughtless reactionary.

The plan began to erode almost at once. Schools were forced to dumb down their standards to ensure their schools abide by NCLB’s rigid rules. Eight months after the law was in place, the Department of Education released it’s first report of failing shcools, nearly 9,000 schools were named, and they were not just inner city schools. There were failures at suburban schools where high grade majorities had masked the low achievment of minorities.

States were on the defensive. They were embarrassed and angry. They were creative. Utah and Ohio removed the more difficult questions on the statewide exams and refined how schools were judged to be failing. Failing schools dropped from 760 to 200. Other states followed suit. More than 20 states banded together, urging Congress to exempt them from the law. In addition to forcing states to release annual scores, the National Assessment of Education is often called the nation’s report card, testing samples of fourth and eighth graders every two years to compare students progress in states that have different standards.

There is no consquence for not learning and the students know it, says superintendant John Dale. If students fail the reading or math test, the school might not let them play in the band, but they wont be held back a year or forced to attend summer school. The worst thing is when students have questions and interests and the teacher has to say, “We don’t have time to talk about that.” There is little time for students to pursue any special interests or electives.

NCLB was supposed to find schools that were truely failing their students. The government would direct more resources to help the schools turn around, or shut them down. Neither happened and now even people who wrote the law thinks the law needs to be replaced. It has hurt rather than helped students. Deficiencies have been known from the beginning. The law decreed that 100% of students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014 but did nothing to help schools reach that goal. NCLB is a law that everyone knows isn’t working, but it lingers, neglected where it will stay, at least until after this year’s election.

Ruby Hawk’s articles:

http://socyberty.com/education/punishment-at-school-30-years-ago/

http://socyberty.com/activism/the-coal-industry-said-what/

http://socyberty.com/politics/baptist-and-bootleggers-make-strange-bedfellows/

http://socyberty.com/people/charles-and-emma-darwin-the-marriage-of-science-and-religion/

http://socyberty.com/history/president-roosevelts-tree-army/

According to the survey, conducted by The Washington Post and ABC television network, 30% of Americans believe that their financial situation is worse today than in January 2009, when Obama took office.

By contrast, close to 15% judged their most enviable position now than three years, while 54% believe their standard of living has not undergone any change.

The consultation revealed that 54% of respondents attributed their economic and financial hardship to the policy pursued by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, versus 29% who accuses the incumbent.

About 9% believe that the responsibility falls on the two and 6% that neither one nor the other are to blame.

Recession Since 2008

America suffered from the fall of 2008 the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In October 2009, the unemployment rate had jumped to 10% of the population. Last December, the index had dropped to 8.5%.

The poll by The Washington Post and ABC was conducted telephone surveys of 1,000 adults between 12 and January 15 last and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

The ‘urinating event’ showed memories of previous abuses committed by US troops in Iraq and during the decade-long Afghan war. 

In 2010, a so-called “kill team” was found responsible for a series of murders of Afghan civilians. Troops had planted weapons on the bodies to make them look like fighters, and removed teeth and fingers to show off as trophies.

In 2005, the bodies of two Taliban were burned, in blatant violation of Islamic customs, sparking tensions between Afghanistan and the US. Although there are many cases of body desescrations in conflict zones (Images of a slain US soldier’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu caused shock in 1992), but those carried out by a ligitimate army spark the most outrage.

SBS spoke to Dr Lynne McCormack from the University of Canberra about the psychology behind this type of behaviour.

While important, most of the discussion on what to do until the end of 2012 does not address America’s overall macro-economic problems.  Leadership in America has never been found in people who don’t understand the concept of public service.  It would be nice if political calculations of self-preservation were put aside, so that our problems could actually begin to be addressed.  Wishful thinking!  Someday, things will be so bad that politicians are forced to act.  Until then, let us consider the merits of the Republicans opposition to government spending, “On principle.”

The great tax cutter in chief, George W. Bush, used the threat of moving the Texas Rangers to get approval of a half-cent sales tax to build a new stadium.  To obtain the land they would build the stadium on, they had the city of Arlington use eminent domain.  George W. Bush and his fellow investors paid $86 million for the Rangers.  Nine years later, they sold the taxpayer subsidized asset for $250 million.  The prime location, a new stadium, and a sweetheart bond deal to finance this project, paid big dividends to Bush & Co.  On his 1998 income tax return, Bush reported a long term capital gain of $17 million from the Rangers sale.  Sweet!

What a far cry from the specious rhetoric on taxes Republicans have been repeating every election cycle.  How much of that taxpayer money ended up helping Bush succeed in the presidential run shortly thereafter?  As a businessman, Bush would be considered a failure if judged only on the ventures that were not subsidized by taxpayers. If only Republicans required their own to “pull themselves up by the boot straps,” we could have saved America from eight years of poor leadership.

In Milwaukee, Brewers owner Bud Selig needed to sell the public on the idea of a tax to build a new stadium.  Conservative radio talk show hosts, Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner, spent hours of WTMJ radio time voicing support for the tax, and fear of losing the Brewers without it.  WTMJ was owned by Selig’s good friend, Robert Kahlor.  Sykes later acknowledged, “I used up a lot of my credibility with my audience, and to be a conservative pushing a tax increase is a difficult thing.”  Former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson was upset at the opening of Miller Park for not being recognized for his role in getting the stadium deal, and vowed to never set foot in the park again.  Selig sold the team to Mark Attanasio in 2004.  Most of that $220 million value being accrued with Republican approval, at taxpayer expense.  The park actually cost $413.9 million, and 78% came out of the taxpayers’ pocket.  The team’s main financial contribution came from selling the naming rights to Miller Brewing Company.

Conservative political commentator George F. Will is one of Selig’s closest advisors.  He claims that the fifteen new or renovated ballparks that Selig has lobbied for, with $3.22 billion in public subsidies, are monuments to Selig’s status as the greatest baseball commissioner of all time.  Greatness, in the eyes of George Will, is measured in how much taxpayer money a person can divert into corporate welfare.

How many schools, roads, and bridges could have been built with that money?  Why do Republicans, who are so smug when lecturing on the vice of spending taxpayers money, feel so comfortable giving it away to millionaires who don’t need it?  They can’t resist their superficial sense of elitism, which is stroked whenever they shmooze and scheme with the filthy rich, who epitomize everything they wish they could be.  While much ado is made by Republicans about honoring God, their actions reflect a preference for paying homage to Mammon.

Republicans have no problem giving away land, money, or both for their projects: wars, stadiums, prisons, oil wells, and other macho items.  If you want money for education, health care, environmental protection or preservation, building infrastructure, why you’re a gosh darn communist.  Other than a difference in how to spend tax dollars, what exactly is their overall economic plan?  That’s just it, there’s no need for a plan.  If you would just listen, you’d realize that the “free market” will sort itself out.  But that can only happen if we just give rich people everything they want.

Stimulus is an economic tool, not an ideology.  It cannot be purely embraced or condemned.  The problem with Republicans is that they are so hypocritical in trying to score a political point on this issue.  Every tax dollar is a redistribution of wealth, if you want to be honest about it.  Rather than politicians trying to figure out what they stand for, and making all kinds of arguments on their own behalf, let’s focus on fixing the economy.  All I can see in this upcoming election cycle is an opportunity for politicians to really piss off a lot of people by showing how out of touch they are with main street America.

Image by Dave Delay via Flickr

I remember the 2004 elections – the first election I was eligible to vote in.  I was young and impressionable, and full of optimism for the future.  I felt like my vote really, really counted and that I was The Great Decider, the kingmaker of America.

At the time, you might remember, George Bush was running for re-election, which seems like such a long shot to me now.  How did we re-elect him?  He lied, he unbalanced the lovely budget Clinton left us with, and even at the time it was obvious that America was barreling toward financial crisis, due in no small part to the enormous amount of spending involved in two wars and the massive fraud Halliburton (ahem, excuse me, Cheney) was perpetrating on the country.  How on earth did such a manifestly bad president get elected twice?

I’m confused until I remember who he was up against.

The Democratic Party was going through kind of a crisis.  They’d been burned, a little, by the Republican witch hunt over Bill Clinton’s wandering…er…eye.  They needed a candidate who was flawless - one untouched by the stigma of the Clinton impeachment trial, a surefire win.  And so, they went with the candidate so safe he was embarrassing.

Mitt Romney is the Kerry of the 2012 elections, while Obama – and I mean this in the nicest way possible – is the George W. Bush.

Obama’s a controversial president.  But as such, the Republican party is throwing itself behind the guy so safe that no one cares about him.

People don’t really care about Romney – not the way they care about any of the people who he’ll eventually be sucking up votes from.  Romney doesn’t have a passionate, nigh-rabid base of supporters the way that, say, Ron Paul or Michelle Bachmann do.  Far from the way that Barack Obama did in the 2008 elections.  He might be a safe choice, but he’s not the sort of person that people rally behind.

That’s why Obama has the election in the bag this year.  The difference between Obama and Romney is that Romney doesn’t really stand for anything in particular.  Obama might have lost a lot of the massive support he enjoyed in 2008, but he still has a few talking points: Occupy Wall Street, health care, killing Osama bin Laden, and the repeal of DADT.  Romney has – what?  Generic Republican sentiments, which won’t really get him that far.

That’s why pretty much everyone except Romney has been a strong front-runner so far – they stand for something big.  Cain? Simpler taxes.  Santorum?  Gays.  Gingrich?  Moon colonization.  Paul?  The Fountainhead.  They each have a strong position that can be boiled down to a catchphrase, one thing that you can “get” about them to feel like you understand their candidacy.  You know why you want to vote for Santorum over Bachmann, or Gingrich over Huntsman.  Not the best way to pick a candidate, maybe, but it’s what we’ve got.

Ultimately, the remaining Republican candidates will fall out of favor, either by shooting themselves in the foot (like so many have already) or simply by being too extreme for many Republican voters (I’m looking at you, Mr. Santorum) and Romney will be the nominee.  But he’s barely pulling ahead even as it is, and he’ll be a consolation candidate for the majority of voters.  In the end, Republicans will barely be able to motivate themselves to go to the polls, or will write in other candidates for whom they’re still carrying a torch.

Oh, well, Republicans.  You’ll have four more years to re-brand yourself and find a cause people actually want to rally behind.  Onward to 2016!

In the new strategy document issued by the Pentagon’s defense over the Internet, it is mentioned that the U.S could still serve the threat of war from an enemy country in a region by mobilizing the full power and can anticipate threats in other areas involving cooperation with its allies. The new strategy is different from that applied to the U.S during the reign of George W. Bush. Themed “War on Terrorism,” Bush to deploy troops in two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time of Obama, the U.S has been to repatriate troops from Iraq and also to immediately withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

However, Defence Minister Leon Panetta dismissed the notion that U.S military power was weakened. “Make no mistake, we have the ability to confront and defeat more than one enemy at the same time,” said Panetta.

Obama realizes that the U.S military must face tightening budgets. “Within the next ten years, the rate of defense spending will slow but still will increase because we have a global responsibility that demands our leadership,” Obama said.

Currently 565,000 U.S. troops reinforced from the Army and 201,000 Marines. However, each unit will be reduced by between 76,000 to 114,000 personnel. The Pentagon had to downsize because it would have a reduction in budget of around U.S $487 billion.