Albuquerque Tribune Endorses Kerry

Yet another newspaper that endorsed Bush in 2000 has now endorsed Kerry, bringing the flip flopper newspaper tally to 4 (13 total for Kerry vs. 10 total for Bush, all of which endorsed Bush in 2000). Here's what The Albuqurque Tribune has to say:

The United States has lost its way under President Bush, who too often has failed in both foreign and domestic fronts. Worse, he has been unable to unite a deeply divided nation. Bush, whom The Tribune endorsed in 2000, has offered simplistic slogans to complex problems, while Kerry sees complicated problems and offers the promise of appropriate solutions - complex or not.

The reality is the world is not a simple place, seldom black or white, and Kerry knows that intuitively. He understands the gray, the nuance - and that easy-bake solutions like nuclear weapons, Navy carriers and conservative or liberal platitudes usually don't apply or work.

And check out this laundry list of indictments against Bush:

We urge independent and undecided voters in particular to double-check what Bush says against what he has done. Bush continues to insult American intelligence with his:

- Mistaken and unreal views of the war in Iraq, with its mounting costs in American and Iraqi lives, money and good will.

- Failure to focus U.S. military might on pursuing our real enemy, the terrorists.

- Willingness to compromise American freedoms, in contrast to a resistance to develop and implement safeguards to protect our people, borders, ports and infrastructure from future terror attacks.

- Unabashed flip-flop of the conservative fiscal ideal, turning a balanced federal budget - indeed, a huge surplus - into the largest deficit in U.S. history.

- Unrelenting attack on 30 years of environmental promise to benefit political friends in the fossil fuel and utility industries.

- Willingness to accept a $422 billion federal deficit, a ballooning $7.42 trillion national debt and grossly unfair tax cuts.

These all come at the expense of ordinary, hard-working, taxpaying Americans - and our children's children, who will be stuck paying the bill.

And what do they see in a Kerry administration?

Kerry's agenda reflects a recognition that America can do better. He promises a government that stops and reverses the export of jobs; restores fiscal discipline by cutting the deficit in half; rolls back the tax cut for the wealthy to help fund education and health care; reforms the health care and drug industries to lower costs; and doesn't put public schools in a bind in fixing what's wrong in our classrooms.

A Kerry administration also promises to restore sound science to public policy decisions in human environmental protection, medical research and protecting the environment - particularly in the still grand, but threatened, American West.

Kerry embraces ideas. He seeks to represent the most fundamental of American values, ideals and hopes. He is committed to a government contract based on the premise "of, by and for the people."