Arizona: White House

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Arizona's Neoconservative Senator John McCain is at it again. This is the man who was a patron of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress which fabricated intelligence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. This is the man who advocated for war with Iraq and confidently predicted before the war that the U.S. would “win easily”:

“Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.” [CNN, 9/24/02]

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Off-year elections are typically the subject of wild speculation and over interpretation by political observers. The conventional wisdom (CW) of the media villagers and Beltway bloviators is that the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia are "bellwether elections" that are a "referendum" on newly elected presidents and are predictive of the outcome of mid-term elections.

Sorry to burst your Beltway bubble boys, but as Larry J. Sabato, Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, has noted What are the national implications of the "mini mid-terms" in Virginia and NJ?

We go through this exercise every four years, just like clockwork.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

From the White House Blog "This Is About Whether We Value One Another":

[On Wednesday] the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act became law, and the President hosted a reception to celebrate a victory decades in the making and steeped in blood and pain. Amongst those attending were the families of the victims for which the law was named, as well as civil rights community leaders. Below are the President’s remarks in full.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you so much, and welcome to the White House. There are several people here that I want to just make mention of because they helped to make today possible.

by David Safier

If you want a copy of the Presidential Family Photo, you can download it in a number of sizes: small, medium, large and unbelievably large.

The photo comes with the following guidelines (this is for real, by the way):

"This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House."

This has been a public service.