“Presidential candidates are touting widespread broadband as a boost for employment and rural education, but a close look at financial interests suggests tech policy may also be a campaign paycheck. Candidates for both of the major political parties are drawing contributions from the technology industry, and from communications firms in particular. But the proportion differs,” Emily Kumler reports for Medill News Service.
“Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts says universal broadband access is necessary for the country to rebuild its tech sector and increase employment in high tech industry. As of mid-June, 38 percent of the $2,415,894 Kerry has received from his top 20 donors has come from contributors with a strong interest in the technology sector, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics,” Kumler reports.
“Meanwhile, 5 percent of the $5,886,487 provided by the top 20 contributors to the incumbent Republican candidate, President George Bush, comes from tech companies or lobbyists. The majority of Bush’s top contributors are financial firms that may have investments in the technology sector but are not directly acting on tech firms’ behalf. Another 5 percent, or $3,332,700, of Bush’s total contributions grouped by business sector came from the communications and electronics industry. At nearly $3.8 million, donations to the Kerry campaign from the communications and electronics industry nearly matched Bush’s, but they account for 9 percent of Kerry’s total donations,” Kumler reports. “Bush says broadband will facilitate a classroom in every living room, giving the most remote citizen access to a wealth of information and opportunity. The president has set the goal but has not outlined its execution other than imploring Congress to permanently ban Internet taxes.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Star-studded list of tech execs to endorse President Bush for another term – May 18, 2004
Apple CEO Steve Jobs advising presidential candiate Kerry on economic issues – May 01, 2004
President Bush calls for ban on broadband Internet tax – April 26, 2004
President George W. Bush calls for universal broadband by 2007 – March 29, 2004
The Mac is Bush to Windows’ Clinton – October 25, 2002
They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times�they had getting rich at expense of the “suckers and peasants”. They play a friendly�game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.
The Devil himself comes up to Bush with a frosty
drink, “Have a�Margarita and relax, Dubya!”.
“Uh, I can’t drink no more, I took a pledge,” says Junior, dejectedly.
“This is Hell, son: you can drink and eat all you
want and not worry, and it just gets better from there!”
Dubya takes the drink and finds himself liking the
Devil, who he thinks is a really very friendly guy who tells funny jokes and pulls hilarious nasty
pranks, kind of like a Yale Skull and Bones brother
with real horns.
They are having such a great time that, before he
realizes it, it’s time to�go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves as Bush steps on the elevator
and heads upward. When the elevator door reopens, he is in Heaven again and St. Peter
is waiting for him. “Now it’s time to visit Heaven,”
the old man says, opening the gate.
So for 24 hours Bush is made to hang out with a
bunch of honest, good-natured people who enjoy each other’s company, talk about things other
than money, and treat each other decently. Not a
nasty prank or frat boy joke among them; no fancy country clubs and, while the food tastes great,� it’s not caviar or lobster. And these people are all
poor, he doesn’t see anybody he knows, and he isn’t even treated like someone special!
Worst of all, to Dubya, Jesus turns out to be some
kind of Jewish hippie�with his endless ‘peace’ and ‘do unto others’ jive.
“Whoa,” he says uncomfortably to�himself, “Pat Robertson never prepared me for this!”
The day done, St. Peter returns and says, “Well,
then, you’ve spent�a day in Hell and a day in Heaven. Now choose where you want to live
for eternity.”
With the ‘Jeopardy’ theme playing softly in the
background, Dubya�reflects for a minute, then answers: “Well, I would never have� thought I’d say this-I mean, Heaven has been delightful and all-but I really think I belong in Hell with my friends.”
So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator and he
goes down,down, down, all�the way to Hell.� The doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren scorched�earth covered with garbage and toxic industrial waste.. kind of�like Houston. He is horrified to see all of his friends, dressed in
rags�and chained together, picking up the trash and putting it in black�bags.
They are groaning and moaning in pain, faces and
hands black with grime.�
The Devil comes over to Dubya and puts an arm around his shoulder.�”I don’t understand,” stammers a shocked Dubya, “Yesterday I was
here and there was a golf course and a clubhouse and we ate�lobster and caviar… drank booze. We screwed around and had a great�time.�Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and everybody looks miserable!”
The Devil looks at him, smiles slyly, and purrs,
“Yesterday we were�campaigning; today you voted for us.”
I have some sympathy for Bush. He thought he had the world in his hands; lots of campaign funds and supporters — big supporters from his dad’s era. Piece of cake … how can anything go wrong? Well, his comfort level is way down. Nobody told him it could be this tough. Truth is, Bush is no more responsible for the war than Reagan responsible for the demise of the Soviet Union (I always LOL when I hear the latter pearl of common wisdom). Superficially, it only looks that way. And superficially isnot the way you should choose a leader.
wow Skully, you sure are smart. Kerry supports terrorsits. thanks for the heads up! I don’t even care how you arrived at that conclusion, or wether you’re smart enough to even understand how you came to that conclusion. I’ll just take it at face value. Thanks!
It will be so nice on Nov 3 when all you dumb asses who voted for Kerry and hated Bush this whole lose. All that wasted energy, you could have used that energy to get a life, and realize only the more savage nation will survive. Kill or be killed.
so when are you going to commit murder skully?
We are at WAR, they are killing us, so we have to kill them. I don’t see how Spank-It can say defending your nation is murder.
“wow Skully, you sure are smart. Kerry supports terrorsits. thanks for the heads up! I don’t even care how you arrived at that conclusion, or wether you’re smart enough to even understand how you came to that conclusion. I’ll just take it at face value. Thanks!”
You liberals say the same think about Bush all the time. And you guys go crazy for it, making t-shirts and stickers. So don’t pull this “wether you’re smart enough” crap with me. I know I’m on the right side. I know how to be a MAN a stand up and defend what is right.
Ok, Mr G-Spank (the smartest man in the world), if Al Gore would have won in 2000, and 9-11 still happened, and we went to war in Afganistan and he also went after Iraq, would you still be saying this war is murder.
I would be supporting Gore, becuase he is defending the USA.
I’m not gonna go into it skully, but i didn’t say war was murder. Anyway, I shouldn’t have jumped at the bait you threw out there saying Kerry supports terrorists. Right then and there I should have said to myself “this guy is retarded” and not responded. But i did, and am now paying the price – arguing with a retard. I realize my mistake, and thats that.
Did I read correctly that SKULLY thinks we should be the most savage nation on earth? I can see why he supports Bush.
They fight, They Bite
They Fight Fight Fight Bite Bite
Fight, Fight, Fight, Bite, Bite, Bite
Its The Bush and Kerry Supporter Show
Heads up MDN. PowerPC roadmap on AppleInsider. This topic here has run out of legs.
The US should turn the heat up much higher on these terrorists. You liberal foreign freaks and US liberals can shiver in the shadows and hope the boogie man doesn’t find you. We are at war. We were attacked and would have continued to be attacked weather we apologized for being attacked as you idiots would like us to or nuked them. I say nuke em. They’re going to nuke us as soon as they get their slimy hands on one. Weather we had attacked or done nothing. Let’s wipe em out. You can thank us later tools.
June 22, 2004 — HOURS after Paul Johnson’s decapitated body was shown Friday in Riyadh, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz announced that government forces had killed the man responsible for the murder, Abdul-Aziz al-Mouqrin, and two of his accomplices.
“This crime was committed by a handful of deviants,” the prince said.
A few deviants? Hardly.
The tragedy that struck Johnson is the product of a culture of hatred, arrogance and cruelty built over decades by the Saudi society.
If I’m a retard, than how could I be so smart to bait you. Doesn’t that take intelligence. G-Spank, my point was that everyone is so gung ho on saying bad Bush is. On the surface Bush doesn’t seem to have the charm and well spoken manner Clinton did. But that is why I like Bush he says what he is going to do. And if he has made this nation less safe by having him in office, the nation will decide that in November. The name calling we say toward each other will not decide the election and it certainly won’t change a voters mind when they are at the ballot, only their beliefs, and judgement will decide who they vote for. Let history decide if Bush was the wrong guy at the wrong time in history. I don’t believe a word a politician says, I believe in what I see them do. I don’t want war but they choice was taken from us on 9-11. Do I want to see innocent people die, of course not. Do I wish to see children with out parents or parents without children, NO, no matter what nation they are from. That is not what life is about. But the terriosts F#@KS never gave the world a choice in that matter.
To be sure, this does not mean that all Saudis think or would, if given the opportunity, behave as the killers did. But there is no escaping the fact that they do bear part of the responsibility, if only by providing the socio-cultural topos in which terrorism thrives.
Until recently, Saudi textbooks taught schoolchildren to regard non-Muslims as sub-humans who did not deserve the same respect due to “true believers,” that is to say the followers of the officially approved Hanbali brand of Islam.
For decades, Saudi society has been obsessed with what could only be described as religious exhibitionism.
The nouveaux riches have tried to secure a place in the next world by building mosques, some 4,000 in Riyadh alone, and by contributing to so-called “Islamic causes.”
What can only be described as a “religion industry” employs more muftis, preachers, teachers, enforcers, muezzins and theologians than the oil industry that produces 80 percent of the nation’s income. Saudi universities churn out more “religious scholars” each year than doctors and engineers.
I agree with Jay, let’s nuke everyone!!! After three million years, it’s time for another species to take over the planet anyway.
The state has spent an estimated $100 billion on “Islamic” causes since the mid ’70s. No doubt part of the money went to humanitarian causes and the financing of development projects in the poorer Muslim countries. But there is also no doubt that vast sums of money were funneled to radical organizations that believe they have a mission to conquer the world for Islam through terrorism and war.
Today, the Saudi authorities insist that no more government money is going to terrorist groups. This may be true. After all, the Saudi rulers now realize that the ultimate aim of the monster they helped create is to devour them. But what about wealthy Saudi individuals who, either to buy personal protection or because they wish the ruling family to be overthrown, continue to fund the terrorists?
The problem goes beyond textbooks and ready money for terror. The average Saudi citizen is subjected to systematic Islamist brainwashing.
Let us just cite one example, immediately relevant to Johnson’s murder.
The group that beheaded Johnson calls itself “The Fallujah Brigade,” named after the Iraqi city which was the scene of a brief insurgency a few weeks ago.
The Arab media, especially the satellite TV channels, presented the Fallujah insurgency as “one of the greatest battles the Arabs have ever waged against the Crusaders,” as an editorial in the daily Al-Arab claimed.
The fact that the Arabs had hardly played a role in the historic Crusades (which were largely fought by Turks, Kurds and the Mamelukes) did not prevent the propagandists from exaggerating the “Epic of Fallujah” far beyond an understandable degree of hype.
Dominated by pan-Arabists and Islamists, the Arab media claimed that the United States had deployed “all its military might” to conquer Fallujah and had failed. The “heroes of Fallujah” fought like lions and, supported by non-combatants, including women and children (who died in thousands), succeeded in winning “a spectacular victory,” thus “saving Arab honor.”
More than a dozen Arab poets have already committed odes and sonnets to commemorate Fallujah as “the Arab Stalingrad.” One Syrian composer is working on an opera about “the heroes of Fallujah,” while a couple of Egyptian hacks are breaking their typewriters to produce scripts for a film and a TV series on this latest of imaginary Arab victories.
The phrase “the Fallujah butchery” has been hammered into the Arab consciousness to justify an almost pathological hatred of the United States as a power responsible for “many thousands of civilian deaths.”
The beheading of Paul Johnson, therefore, is presented as an act of revenge for deaths that, in fact, never happened.
What is interesting is that the satellite channels that peddled those lies are all owned by Arab governments (including the Saudi one) or individuals related to the ruling families.
The average Arab, including the average Saudi, was never allowed to know what actually happened in Fallujah. The few who tried to offer an accurate account were relieved of their positions or denied a chance to offer their take.
One account that never found an echo in the Arab satellite TV was provided by the Red Crescent (the equivalent of the Red Cross) of the United Arab Emirates whose representatives were present in Fallujah (where the group has a hospital) throughout the insurgency.
Here is part of the UAE Red Crescent’s version as related by Muhammad Salim al-Harthi from Abu Dhabi:
“The Arab media have wildly exaggerated what happened at Fallujah. The fighting concerned only a few districts [of the town]. There never was any fighting on a big scale. There certainly was no clash involving thousands of the town’s inhabitants. The number of those who died did not exceed 270, almost all fighters, not civilians. The resistance (i.e. the insurgency) was made up of former [Iraqi army] officers with a small number of [non-Iraq] Arabs representing Salafist [i.e. radical Islamist] groups.”
Why would the Arab states allow their media to build a deadly myth to foment hatred and incite violence? They hope that by diverting hatred from themselves to the United States, they might escape being targeted by the terrorists.
That, of course, is a forlorn hope. Those who beheaded Johnson would, when the time comes, also behead the Arab ruling elites, including those who’ve turned the Arab media into a myth-making machine.
Paul Johnson was killed by lies spread by Arab elites. He was killed by those who wrote those textbooks and those who taught them for decades.
He was killed by the sheiks who finance Arab television, and by the anchormen and women who, with tones of false emotion in their voices, told all those lies about Fallujah � just as they have been telling lies about other conflicts involving the Arabs for decades.
He was killed by the over 1,500 Arab lawyers who have volunteered to defend Saddam Hussein but were nowhere to be seen when he was engaged in genocide against the Iraqi people.
Johnson was killed by the wealthy Arabs who continue to finance the terror organizations.
To say that killing Johnson was wrong would mean accepting that he, though not a Muslim, was a full human being with an equal right to live. And that is the huge historic, indeed doctrinal, leap that Islam must take before it can contain and defeat the terrorists who are trying to change it beyond recognition.
The U.S. ambassador in Riyadh, James Oberwetter, has called on the Saudi government to “bring Paul Johnson’s murderers to account.” The ambassador may not know it, but his demand involves a whole culture and millions of its human products, who must be brought to account if they are to be ultimately rescued from the inferno of lies, hatred and terror that is wrecking their lives as well.
“Tech sectors has abig say in this Election.”
What a maroon. – Poontang
Are you sure you are not the moron? We know that the next election in the US will use electronic voting, designed by Diebold. And the Diebold CEO publically said that he wanted to deliver the November election to Bush. Coupled with all the security holes, the lack of paper trail, the refusal to acknowledge problems, the politicking and the relative ease to change the election results in trials, you can draw your own conclusion.
FRIG the frogs. Screway les Fran�ais. If not for us France � a countrylet that can’t pronounce the word “loyalty” � would be a suburb of Germany.
I realize this emotionally misdirected anger should be at those sickos who committed last week’s unspeakable atrocity against another American. And it should be at the Saudis, who have their fingers into everything but Al Qaeda. And that ought to give you a clue as to where the Saudis should really stick their fingers. And that includes their Washington ambassador, oily Prince Bandar, who’s so tight in high places that he does drop-in potluck dinners at the White House.
But with no way to handle our enemies in the Middle East, I have to tear at those pigs in Europe who call themselves “friends.” With friends like them who needs enemies.
I was just in France. Three days. Personal reasons. I house-guested, I bought nothing, I flew an American carrier. I did not nourish their economy. I was there when news of this horror hit us. While human beings globally were numbed, around the South of France? Only another day at an outdoor caf�.
Nothing changed with these ungrateful behinds which our country has saved in war after war. At the Hotel du Cap a maitre in snowy white suit bowed to maestro James Levine who, in shorts, was helping himself to the luncheon buffet. A pair of locals lazily pointed out Aujourdhui Villa, the seaside mansion that once belonged to movie mogul Jack Warner. “Even after he died his man servant kept his favorite clothes out and ready,” they said. A driver showed the house in Mougin where Picasso had lived.
Me, I was glued to the phone. Obsessed about the tragedy, I kept calling New York. Nobody, nothing, not a word, zippo, zero from the French. It did not dominate their TV. The Paris Herald Tribune did not position it as their lead story. It was not conversation around the local coffee bars. I wondered, was I losing my mind?
Amirtaheri a link would suffice. You must be getting tired with all that copy and pasteing.
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A restaurateur in Cannes sighed: “Ach! The Americans. Always the Americans. Again the Americans. Always trouble with the Americans. This is not France’s problem. It is America’s problem.”
In his caf� they said: “The problem is Bush thought he could go into a foreign country and then go out when he was finished going in. He did this. He created another Vietnam.”
A shopkeeper in Cap D’Antibes: “America’s war, it is bad for our business.”
This from weasels who sound like they should blow their nose and whose speech long ago was the language of the air, the international language, the language of diplomacy � and no longer is. They cannot make a pissoir out of the greatest country on Earth.
A driver, who chugs around a land that � except for schmattas � hasn’t been known for anything since Coco Chanel, dared to say: “America is a bully. Always it shows its big stick. Your country lied. It said Iraq had these terrible weapons. They do not. We do not have to care for this mess you made. We are not responsible.”
At a gathering, I asked one person how can he bear the atrocity Al Qaeda just visited upon American civilian Paul Johnson and he replied: “Oh, yes, I have heard of this. But we have not seen too much of it in our news. It has not been widely reported.”
An act of man’s inhumanity to man in such proportion that it can not even be believed and he says, “Oh, yes, I have heard of this?!”
He spoke off-handedly. As if some Le Figaro fashion writer announced Dior was lengthening its hemlines again. He “has heard of this?!”
Another: “This is the American war. Why are French penalized? Today I filled my car [a Mercedes] with gas. It wasn’t even empty and it cost $45. Yesterday, $40. Two days, $85, and all because of the Americans.”
High season for travel is upon us. If that one guy thinks his business is bad now . . . wait. Let him sit and wait for the Americans who, hopefully, are not going to come.