Archives for the Month of November 2005 on College Conservative Movement
The economy IS BOOMING at a similar pace to that of the Clinton years according to GDP data
Click here to see the GDP data Note the similarity in the numbers between now and the 90's... I guarantee that I won't find a democrat that says the 90's economy was not a booming economy. However, with similar numbers, why do the liberals refuse to call the current economy booming? Is it just because of the blind hatred towards President Bush?
I credit Brian Gray for pointing me to this data.
The economy IS booming....
I received much criticism about saying that our economy is booming... WAKE UP! As much as the liberal media tries to downplay it, the economy grew 4.3 percent in the 3rd quarter. link to article
"GDP reading shows economy humming at a solid clip with few signs that inflation's a major problem."- CNN.com
New Home Sales Unexpectedly Surge in Oct.
Online Sales Surged on 'Cyber Monday,' Visa Says
How can people complain about our economy? We had a disastrous hurricane season and our economy was resilient and it is still booming.
The House voted 403-3 to keep troops in Iraq
The republicans made a smart move by bringing this to a vote. The democrats were forced to take a stance on this war. Out of 406, only 3 troops voted for the pullout of troops. The reality is... as much as the democrats try to appease their anti-war base... they voted to stay in Iraq. 0.7% of congress thinks we should pull out! Sorry anti-war left.
Althought the dems won't admit it... OUR ECONOMY IS BOOMING!!!!
Here are some articles that give snapshots of our booming economy. Even with the liberal media's attempts of being doom and gloom... the facts cannot be hidden. They can say whatever they want... but face it... Bush's economic strategy is working like a charm!
Weekly Jobless Claims Beat Expectations
Thursday, November 17, 2005
STORIES
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Weekly Jobless Claims Higher Than Expected
WASHINGTON — The number of U.S. workers filing for initial jobless aid fell sharply last week, a government report showed Thursday, pushing the claims total to its lowest point since April.
First-time claims for state unemployment insurance benefits dropped 25,000 to 303,000 the week ended Nov. 12, from an upwardly revised 328,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.
Wall Street economists had forecast new claims to slip to 322,000 from the original reading of 326,000 the week ended Nov. 5.
There were about 10,000 new claims last week related to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, bringing the total since Sept. 3 linked to the devastating Gulf Coast storms to 545,000 claims, not adjusted for seasonal factors, a Labor Department analyst said.
Hurricane Wilma, which struck Florida late last month, led to about 9,000 unadjusted claims for a running total of 16,400 related claims since the storm hit.
The closely watched four-week moving average of claims, considered a better gauge of labor market activity because it flattens weekly volatility, fell for the sixth straight week.
The four-week average dropped to 321,500 the week ended Nov. 12 from 335,000 the prior week.
The number of people still on the rolls after drawing a week of benefits rose slightly to 2.79 million the week ended Nov. 5, the latest period for which data are available.
Factory Output Rebounds Strongly in Oct.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
STORIES
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ISM Survey: Factory Activity Expanded in Sept.
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ISM Survey: Service Sector Grew Faster in August
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ISM: Service Sector Activity Growth Slows
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ISM Manufacturing Activity Index Rises
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ISM: Factory Activity Expanded at Faster Rate
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ISM: Service Sector Growth Slows
WASHINGTON — Industrial production at U.S. factories, mines and utilities rose at the fastest pace in 17 months in October, posting a solid rebound from the Katrina devastation.
The Federal Reserve reported that industrial output was up a healthy 0.9 percent last month as refineries and oil and natural gas platforms began production again after widespread shutdowns caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Output was in line with analysts' expectations.
"The rebound in manufacturing output was stronger than generally thought. A lot of it is concentrated in aircraft," said Kevin Logan, senior economist, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in New York, noting the end of a strike at Boeing.
"Overall it does appear that manufacturing is doing OK. ...(But) we can't really see what the underlying trend in manufacturing is this month," he said.
Last month's increase followed a 1.5 percent plunge in September, which had been the biggest one-month drop in industrial production in more than two decades.
The Fed's report on industrial production showed that manufacturing output was up 1.4 percent last month, the biggest increase in six years, reflecting not only increased activity after the hurricane shutdowns but also the end of a strike at aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing (BA).
The strong increase in manufacturing output offset a 1.9 percent drop in output at the nation's utilities and a 0.5 percent drop in mining output.
Retail Sales Outside of Autos Post Gains
Nov 15 8:38 AM US/Eastern
Email this story
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON
Retail sales performed far better than expected in October as consumers took encouragement from falling gasoline prices to head back to the shopping malls.
The Commerce Department reported that overall sales dipped a slight 0.1 percent, but that was significantly better than the 0.7 percent decline economists had been expecting. The weakness came from a big 3.6 percent drop in auto sales, which have weakened with the removal of attractive discounts automakers had used during the summer.
Excluding autos, retail sales rose a solid 0.9 percent last month. The strength in sales last month was led by big gains at specialty clothing stores and department stores, lifting the outlook for the upcoming holiday sales season.
More trouble for the dems voting base
One demographic that has traditionally been democrat is the African Americans. In Orlando, FL, we are starting to see signs of something new. Perhaps the dems' lack of direction is causing more minds to change. Perhaps another contributing factor to this shift is the fact that the secretary of state and one of the supreme court justices, two of the nation's most powerful positions, are both African American and Republican.
NAACP chief makes switch to GOP
Published November 17, 2005
For decades, Republicans have struggled to reach out to black Americans. But now in Orange County, the GOP has to reach no further than the NAACP.
As of this week, Derrick Wallace, head of Orange County's NAACP, has switched parties -- to become a Republican.
"I've thought about this for two years," Wallace said Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours after returning from the elections office. "This is not a decision I made yesterday."
It is, however, a decision that rang out like a shot among political circles.
Republican Party leader Lew Oliver described himself as "extraordinarily pleased," while Democratic leader Tim Shea said he was disappointed.
Wallace, a construction-company exec, was candid about the fact that his business life was a big part of his decision to change.
"It's purely a business decision. Ninety percent of those I do business with are Republicans," he said. "Opportunities that have come to my firm have been brought by Republicans."
To that, Shea responded: "I'm a little confused. Are we talking about the National Association for the Advancement of Construction Professionals -- or Colored People?"
Wallace elaborated that his "business" line of thought also referred to the NAACP. Behind many of the power desks in this town sit Republicans. And he said he wants his organization to be part of that structure. Just as importantly, he said, he didn't want people to immediately brand -- or dismiss -- NAACP concerns as synonymous with those of liberal Democrats. "I want this branch to be respected," he said.
Oliver said they already are, noting that all of the members of the GOP executive board joined the NAACP a few years back to show that they were serious about outreach. "We have taken pains to do our very best to reach out," he said.
But Shea and other Democrats have long maintained that Republican talk about inclusion is little more than that: talk. They cite GOP policy after policy -- on everything from voting rights to health care -- that disproportionately negatively affects blacks.
Wallace's party switch may not be a complete surprise. After his own long-shot bid for mayor of Orlando fell short in 2003, he twice supported Republican candidates for the post.
Still, Wallace's new GOP standing is historic for the NAACP -- an organization that is vastly Democratic.
"I don't think my doing this hurts anything. In fact, I think it helps," Wallace said. "But we'll hear what others have to say. I'm sure I will."
Clinton can't make up his mind on the war!
Clinton seems to be changing his mind as history is rewritten by his anti-american friends in congress.
2004 Courtesy of CNN.com:
Clinton defends successor's push for war
Says Bush 'couldn't responsibly ignore' chance Iraq had WMDs
Wednesday, June 23, 2004 Posted: 7:55 AM EDT (1155 GMT)
(CNN) -- Former President Clinton has revealed that he continues to support President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq but chastised the administration over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
"I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over," Clinton said in a Time magazine interview that will hit newsstands Monday, a day before the publication of his book "My Life."
Clinton, who was interviewed Thursday, said he did not believe that Bush went to war in Iraq over oil or for imperialist reasons but out of a genuine belief that large quantities of weapons of mass destruction remained unaccounted for.
Noting that Bush had to be "reeling" in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining "chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material."
"That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for," Clinton said in reference to Iraq and the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.
"So I thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, 'Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.' You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks," Clinton said.
Pressed on whether the Iraq war was worth the cost to the United States, Clinton said he would not have undertaken the war until after U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix "finished his job."
Weapons inspectors led by Blix scoured Iraq for three and a half months before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 but left after President Bush issued an ultimatum to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to leave the country.
"I want it to have been worth it, even though I didn't agree with the timing of the attack," Clinton said.
Clinton blamed the Abu Ghraib prison abuses on poorly trained National Guard personnel and higher-ups in the Bush administration.
The former president said he was not surprised by the abuses committed by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib but that he was surprised by their extent.
"There is no excuse for that," Clinton said.
Clinton blamed the abuses on the higher echelons of the Bush administration.
"The more we learn about it, the more it seems that some people fairly high up, at least, thought that this was the way it ought to be done," he said.
Implying that the United States should lead by example, Clinton said of the abuses, "No. 1, we can't pull stunts like that, and No. 2, when we do, whoever is responsible has to pay."
Now Courtesy of the Associated Press:
JPost.com » International » Article
Nov. 16, 2005 14:32
Clinton says Iraq invasion was a big mistake
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
The United States made a "big mistake" when it invaded Iraq, former President Bill Clinton said Wednesday, citing the lack of planning for what would happen after dictator Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done, " Clinton told students at the American University of Dubai.
"It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country."
Clinton did however say that the United States had done some good things in Iraq: the removal of Saddam, the ratification of a new constitution, and the holding of parliamentary elections.
Bush Punches Back at Left Wing Deception And Lies About The Start of The Iraq War
Here is the few key paragraphs from President Bush's speech:
When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support. I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq, and that is their right, and I respect it. As president and commander in chief, I (accept ?) the responsibilities and the criticisms and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision. While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.
Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security."
That's why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.
The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send to them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that when -- whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less then victory.
More Authors
There will now be multiple authors from the Case College Republicans so that there will be new material more often.
Opposition of Abortion In Our Culture Comes From Unexpected Place... Jimmy Carter?
Carter condemns abortion culture
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 4, 2005
Former President Jimmy Carter yesterday condemned all abortions and chastised his party for its intolerance of candidates and nominees who oppose abortion.
"I never have felt that any abortion should be committed -- I think each abortion is the result of a series of errors," he told reporters over breakfast at the Ritz-CarltonHotel, while across town Senate Democrats deliberated whether to filibuster the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. because he may share President Bush and Mr. Carter's abhorrence of abortion.
"These things impact other issues on which [Mr. Bush] and I basically agree," the Georgia Democrat said. "I've never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion."
Mr. Carter said his party's congressional leadership only hurts Democrats by making a rigid pro-abortion rights stand the criterion for assessing judicial nominees.
"I have always thought it was not in the mainstream of the American public to be extremely liberal on many issues," Mr. Carter said. "I think our party's leaders -- some of them -- are overemphasizing the abortion issue."
While Mr. Carter has previously expressed ambivalence about abortion, his statements yesterday were "astonishing," said Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute at Concerned Women for America.
"He has long professed to be an evangelical Christian and yet he had embraced virtually all the liberal political agenda," said Mr. Knight. "Maybe with Jimmy Carter saying things he never uttered before, more liberals will rethink their worship of abortion as the high holy sacrament of liberalism."
Running for president in 1976 -- just three years after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision -- Mr. Carter took a moderate stance.
"I think abortion is wrong and that the government ought never do anything to encourage abortion," he said during that campaign. "But I do not favor a constitutional amendment which would prohibit all abortions, nor one that would give states [a] local option to ban abortions."
In Washington to promote his latest book, "Our Enduring Values," Mr. Carter acknowledged he made mistakes in office.
"I can't deny I'm a better ex-president than I was a president," said Mr. Carter, who in recent years has traveled the globe with his wife Rosalyn, "trying to help hold 61 elections" in developing countries.
He has been outspoken in condemning Mr. Bush's policy toward Iraq. "I think all Christians -- and certainly all Baptists -- are different," Mr. Carter said yesterday. "I have a commitment to worship the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of Preemptive War."
But he praised Mr. Bush's policy toward war-torn Sudan, and declared that the best treatment he has received since leaving the Oval Office was from the first President Bush, and the second-best treatment he got was during the Reagan administration, especially from Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The worst treatment he's received, the former president said, was from President Clinton.
Mr. Carter said his party lost the 2004 presidential elections and lost House and Senate seats because Democratic leaders failed "to demonstrate a compatibility with the deeply religious people in this country. I think that absence hurt a lot."
Democrats must "let the deeply religious people and the moderates on social issues like abortion feel that the Democratic party cares about them and understands them," he said, adding that many Democrats, like him, "have some concern about, say, late-term abortions, where you kill a baby as it's emerging from its mother's womb."
36 Billion Dollar Budget Cut Passed By Senate
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday narrowly approved the first cuts since 1997 to benefit programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and farm subsidies, giving Republicans a modest victory against ever-rising government spending.
It's only a small cut... but this is a start. You have to start somewhere.
LIBBY BEING INDICTED DOES NOT QUESTION IRAQ WAR REASONS!!!!!!!!!!
I know this was said earlier... but I've been getting emails that indicate to me that people still don't get it. I know the left wants this to bring out "the fake reasons for the war in Iraq." Give it up... here is a direct quote from the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald:
Excerpt from the press conference with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald courtesy of CNN.com
QUESTION: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person -- a person, Mr. Libby -- lied or not. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone's who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
He can't be any more clear than that...
Let's also get something else straight... Libby was indicted for obstruction of justice, perjury, etc. This does not deal with the leak itself. There were no charges for anything directly related to the leak. As far as the law is concerned... Rove and Libby are not guilty of any crime based on the leak alone. Had they really leaked a covert agent's name unlawfully, they would have been charged with a crime for doing so. They were not. GIVE IT UP!