Political Ideology

Please complete the two political ideology quizzes and print out or write down your results for the next time we meet in class. Click here for Quiz 1 and for Quiz 2. If you want to compare have your parents take the quiz and see if you have differences...the age gap.

Former Aide Blames Bush for Leak Deceit

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

Bush's chief of staff at the time was Andrew Card.

The excerpt, posted on the Web site of publisher PublicAffairs, renews questions about what went on in the West Wing and how much Bush and Cheney knew about the leak. For years, it was McClellan's job to field _ and often duck _ those types of questions.

Now that he's spurring them, answers are equally hard to come by.

Read more @ Washington Post

The Craziest Juggling, Trick Shot Artist I Have Ever Seen!

Check Tim Nolan out!

Obama Makes The Post-Boomer Pitch

The candidate picks up and runs with the central thrust of this essay. Money quote from Obama:

"I think there's no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Senator Clinton can't deliver on and part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they've been fighting some of the same fights since the '60's and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

From "Goodbye To All That":

A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone actively protesting, a war. Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes...

The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

Time will tell....

Argentina’s First Lady Elected President

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the wife of Argentina’s president, Néstor Kirchner, has become the first woman to be elected president in the country’s history, according to the latest official results published today.

Mrs. Kirchner, 54, the center-left Peronist party candidate and a senator, defeated a fractured opposition and avoided a runoff.

With 96 percent of the voting locations reporting, Mrs. Kirchner had 45 percent, ahead of Elisa Carrió, a center-left congresswoman, who had 23 percent, and Roberto Lavagna, a former finance minister, who had 17 percent, according to figures from the Ministry of Interior.

Mrs. Kirchner needed 45 percent of the vote outright, or 40 percent with at least a 10 percentage-point lead, to avoid a runoff.

Rival candidates accused her party of “theft” of ballots and other irregularities.

Mrs. Kirchner is the second woman to be elected leader of a South American nation in two years, after Michelle Bachelet, who became president of Chile last year. Read on @ New York Times