Photoshopped Politicians -- LOL

“Just a local story, but good for a chuckle...


Candidate been playing with Photoshop?

An interesting case of contrasts has cropped up in the current Augusta Commission race.

Take a look at the photo of District 3 candidate John Butler on his business cards and campaign signs dotting Walton Way, and compare it with the photo that recently appeared in The Augusta Chronicle, as well as one shot by the Metro Spirit’s news staff. They look vastly different.

Butler’s campaign photo portrays something resembling a polished politician in his mid- to late-40s, who looks like he’s spent most of his adult life kicking around Capitol Hill.

In actuality, Butler, 31, looks — well, not quite like that.

If you don’t believe it, clip out the photo accompanying this column and compare it to the image on Butler’s signs around town.

Don’t get the Insider wrong. Candidate-furnished photos nearly always lean toward the ideal in terms of appearance (it’s kind of like what the Whopper or Big Mac looks like on the menu board versus what you’re confronted with when you pull it out of the sack; that’s why most newspapers opt to shoot their own candidate photos).

But in this instance, the aesthetic overhaul seems a little extreme.




The Gussied Up version...


while in Reality:

”

“Thanks USA. New wall paper for work :)”

“Oh boy! Now show us the Photoshopped version!”

“Ike Was Right About War Machine
Oct. 2, 2005(CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.


I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving: on our bloated military establishment.

We're paying for weapons we'll never use.

No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. …"

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.


By Andy Rooney © MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.”

“Troubled Waters
War, storms, leak probes—and a growing array of ethics clouds. Dark days for the Republican Party.

NEWSWEEK ON AIR
Politics: Delay Indicted and Other GOP Woes

10/2/05: Jonathan Alter, NEWSWEEK Columnist, NBC analyst; and Stephen Hess, Research Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University

Oct. 10, 2005 issue - In the Tom DeLay era—now at least temporarily ended—a meeting of the House Republican Conference usually was a ceremonial affair, at which "Leadership" (always a single word, spoken with a mixture of awe and fear) clued in the flock on Done Deals. The proceedings had the spontaneity of a Baath Party conclave. But last week the erstwhile majority leader, and the rest of the Leadership he had forged since taking effective control of the House in the late '90s, was struggling to maintain its grip. The members applauded him as he proclaimed his innocence of the charge leveled against him: that he had funneled streams of laundered corporate cash into legislative races in Texas. They cheered as he attacked the Democratic prosecutor in Austin. And they didn't argue when he denounced the conference itself for having written a rule that barred him from continuing to serve as majority leader, even under indictment. Speaker Denny Hastert, ever the avuncular wrestling coach, gave a pep talk on the virtues of unity in adversity.

Still, when it came time to discuss precisely what would happen next, discipline broke down. DeLay and Hastert had wanted Rep. David Dreier to step in as acting majority leader. Instead, the hard-charging Roy Blunt got the job. Members demanded full-scale elections sooner rather than later for a new permanent Leadership, and if DeLay doesn't escape his legal problem by January—hardly a certainty—that vote will occur and he won't be in the race. Reaching for inspiration, one acolyte compared the Speaker to Robert E. Lee and DeLay to Stonewall Jackson: when the latter was wounded, the former still won a crucial battle. But another member elicited wry laughter by pointing out that Jackson had been shot, accidentally, by his own troops. Some backbenchers were gloomy and resentful, but unwilling to say so on the record, for fear that the vindictive DeLay might survive. "Leadership has become ossified and hopelessly out of touch," lamented one such member. "They only care about one thing, hanging onto their own power. I'm not ready to take them on, at least not yet, not unless I have to!"

The president's many visits to the Gulf Coast seem to have shored up, at least somewhat, his eroded standing. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, his job-approval rating inched up two points, to a still-dismal 40 percent. But, safely back in the White House, he now has to deal with another disaster area: Republican Washington. The list of official inquiries is long and growing, involving issues ranging from arguably excusable bureaucratic mismanagement to insider trading to allegations of lawbreaking that potentially lead to the highest levels of the White House staff. "Look, the Democrats' numbers are just as low as the Republicans' are," said James Carville, who helped guide Bill Clinton into the White House in 1992. "People see a lot of this stuff just as 'more Washington.' But the danger for Republicans and for Bush is that there are too many things they can't control—and the odds are that all of them aren't going to work out in their favor."

Bush and his fellow Republicans have little margin for error. Three forces—sky-high gasoline prices, the massive costs of rebuilding the Gulf Coast and ever-gloomier public assessments of the war in Iraq—have combined to weaken Bush's reputation as a strong leader, and leave him vulnerable to the kind of second-term fiascoes that tend to befall all presidents: think Ronald Reagan and Iran-contra, or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Indeed, polltaker Frank Luntz, who helped develop the "Contract With America" message that swept Republicans to power in 1994, was on the Hill last week warning the party faithful that they could lose both the House and the Senate in next year's congressional elections.

The Republicans' power outage is real—and the historical irony is as vast as Texas. Beginning in the 1950s, the Democratic Party of Texans Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn built a congressional machine of unrivaled power. But starting in the '80s, led by a firebrand named Newt Gingrich, Republicans led a revolt from below in the name of smaller government and an ethically cleansed Congress. In 1989 Newt & Co. forced out Democratic Speaker Jim Wright—a Texan, too, who resigned over charges that he profited improperly from book sales—and five years later the GOP took control of the House after a Biblical 40 years in the wilderness. But it took the Republicans only 10 years to become yet another ruling party beset by charges of profligate spending, bloated government and corruption—a party led by two Texans, Bush and DeLay, who don't particularly care whether they are beloved outside their inner circle. To paraphrase David Mamet, the Republicans became what they beheld.

And there is much to behold. Michael Brown, the hapless yet arrogant former head of FEMA, managed to anger even putative Republican allies in an appearance before a House committee. Democrats consider the probe a whitewash in waiting, but Republican Chairman Tom Davis vowed a thorough look at the government's pre- and post-Katrina performance. Questions have already arisen about no-bid contracts awarded to companies with ties to one of Bush's closest political friends from Texas, former FEMA head Joe Allbaugh, who has denied any wrongdoing—and who, in any case, has the hide of a rhino.”

“U.S. Generals Now See Virtues of a Smaller Troop Presence in Iraq

By Mark Mazzetti Times Staff Writer Sat Oct 1, 7:55 AM ET

WASHINGTON — The U.S. generals running the war in
Iraq presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem.

During a trip to Washington, the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East.

For all these reasons, they said, a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops was imperative.

American officials backtracked on their expectations of what the U.S. military can achieve in Iraq months ago. But this week's comments showed that commanders believe a large U.S. force in Iraq might in fact be creating problems as well as solutions.

"This has been hinted at before, but it's a big shift for them to be saying that publicly," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It means they recognize that there is a cost to staying just as there is a benefit to staying. And this has not really been factored in as a central part of the strategy before."

The generals' comments reflect an evolving outlook that senior military officials and even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have articulated in recent months. The battle against Iraqi insurgents will not be won by the U.S. military, they have said, and the insurgency will persist long after U.S. troops have left.

"If [the insurgency] does go on for four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever … it is going to be a problem for the people of Iraq," Rumsfeld said in June.

"They're going to have to cope with that insurgency over time. They are ultimately going to be the ones who win over that insurgency."

The generals' words also represent a less ambitious definition of military success than what
President Bush has put forth in recent statements.

At his ranch near Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush said that "when the mission of defeating the terrorists in Iraq is complete, our troops will come home."

More recently, Bush has offered a more nuanced view of success, emphasizing the importance of training Iraqi troops as part of the U.S. mission to defeat the insurgents.

But the ground commanders told Congress on Thursday that the number of Iraqi units at the highest state of combat readiness had dropped from three to one since June. And they pointed this week to problems caused by the presence of U.S. troops.

During his congressional testimony, Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that troop reductions were necessary to "take away one of the elements that fuels the insurgency, that of the coalition forces as an occupying force."

A smaller U.S. presence could alleviate some of the anger feeding the insurgency, Casey suggested.

The same approach may prove helpful across the Middle East, commanders said. The Central Command's Gen. John P. Abizaid, who supervises all U.S. troops in the region, said the broader fight against Islamic extremism required the United States to "reduce our military footprint" across the region and push governments in the Middle East to fight the extremists themselves.

Although Abizaid advocates a troop reduction, he does not favor total withdrawal. He envisions such an exit preceded by the establishment of stable governments in Iraq and
Afghanistan and accompanied by an assured flow of oil and enhanced regional security networks.

A smaller U.S. contingent would also encourage greater self-reliance among Iraqi forces in the face of an insurgency that could last a decade or more. A reduction in American forces is essential to push more Iraqi troops onto the front lines, Casey said.

"This is about dependency," he said.

Even among themselves, military officials have differed in their assessments of the number of Iraqi troops ready to take on the mission.

During a briefing Friday, Casey was asked whether there were enough Iraqi troops in Tall Afar to permanently keep insurgents out of the western town, where U.S. and government forces recently launched a major offensive.

"We do have enough force," Casey said.

Yet the U.S. commander of the Tall Afar operation, Army Col. H.R. McMaster, said Sept. 13 that it would be some time before the town had enough trained Iraqi troops to keep insurgents from filtering back.

"Is there enough force here right now to secure this area permanently? No. Are there opportunities for the enemy in other areas within our region? Yes," McMaster said.

Among Americans, support for the war continues to dwindle, as growing numbers conclude that U.S. troops should be partially or completely withdrawn. Only 32% of those surveyed for a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released last week approved of Bush's handling of Iraq, compared with 40% in August and 50% earlier this year.

The survey also showed that 59% considered it a mistake to have sent U.S. forces to Iraq, up from fewer than half during the summer. And 63% said the troops should be partially or completely withdrawn, up 10 percentage points from August. Just 21% of those surveyed believed U.S. forces would win the war, while 34% said they considered the conflict unwinnable.

Military officials and others familiar with Casey's strategy in Iraq say the U.S. plans a phased withdrawal, first pulling its troops out of the 14 provinces that commanders believe are most secure. Initially, they would maintain a presence in the predominantly Sunni provinces of central Iraq, where most of the violence is occurring and the U.S. military suffers most of its casualties.

"Withdrawing from the secure areas would be a good signal to the rest of Iraqis that this is coming for them eventually," said a Central Command advisor who has traveled frequently to Iraq and requested anonymity because he was speaking about a classified strategy.

The advisor said that U.S. commanders were concerned that Iraqi troops could become too dependent on the American presence, but that there were no plans for a hasty pullout from the violent provinces before the Iraqis were up to the task.

"There's a line between what constitutes casual dependence and what constitutes not being ready to fight," he said. "For the most part, [Iraqi troops] are not ready to do the job. And stepping back is just going to leave them vulnerable to a battle-tested army of insurgents."”