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[...] One of these years, the U.S. will elect a president .... who will have the balls .... to not worry about placation or hurt feelings, and will honestly answer the lame question, "Why should the U.S. be the country that makes all the decisions?"
Whiners worldwide have been asking this...:
The truth is plain and simple: the U.S. gets the biggest say in things because, within a measly 229 years, starting from nothing at all, we've built the most powerful, most experienced, richest, most generous, and most scientifically and technologically advanced country on earth.
Deal with it!!
Today's Wall Street Journal Europe attacks those who complain that the US needs to export more and import less. These people believe that "the economy is being put in jeopardy by some monster called the current account deficit".Much of the same thinking abounds in the UK, too. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gets attacked for an 'imbalance' in our economy due to a 'trade deficit'. A 'trade deficit' sounds like a bad thing. But as the Journal points out, the only country which exports more current account goods than the US is Germany, and it is not doing too well. Despite a 'trade surplus', Germany's growth was only 1.2% following three years of near-total stagnation. It also has double the unemployment rate of the US.
In other words, having a 'trade surplus' is no indication of economic success.
Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may
have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W.
Bush in Florida.
-
Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic
voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases
in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect
cannot be explained by differences between counties in income,
number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of
Hispanic/Latino population.
-
In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received
approximately 72,000 excess votes.
-
We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to
chance.
Because of the gravity of the subject and the President’s unique access to classified information, members of Congress and the public expect the President and his senior officials to take special care to be balanced and accurate in describing national security threats. It does not appear, however, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice met this standard in the case of Iraq.