"Charles Bayly Franklin" was an engineer and a motorcycle motorcycle sport/racer. He is most notable for designing motorcycles for the Indian (motorcycle)/Indian Company, including the original Indian Scout (motorcycle)/Indian Scout of 1920, the original Indian Chief of 1922, and the Indian 101 Scout of 1928. Prior to this, he had been part of the Indian motorcycle team that won first, second, and third place in the 1911 Isle of Man TT, finishing in second place.

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How tragic it is. How none of us would ever have seen this happening to someone that we know and that is so lovable.

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For the peace activists, they are good, symbolic results. They can use them to impress people with how widespread opposition is. But they're misleading as far as aggregate public opinion. It's an April election, which has very low turnout. So as a public opinion specialist, I have to point out how unrepresentative highly motivated voters are in an April election.

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Presidents who are low in the polls have a hard time getting Congress to go along with them. He has to persuade the people in Congress to follow his legislative agenda and they're all worried about 2006.

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All the way back to 2002 and 2004, the issue of security and terrorism was supposed to be the strength that drives Republican victories and generally has been the strongest suit of the president. Now they don't have a strong suit to play.

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This is someone who has staked his presidency on strong leadership through crises, and now he has faced three major challenges. Sept. 11 fundamentally altered what this administration is going to be remembered for, which is the response to terrorism, the Iraq war and now obviously Katrina and the aftermath.

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This war, as bad as it is, touches a far smaller percentage of the population than Vietnam did.

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The base is his last refuge at this point.

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If I were in the White House, I would be pretty pleased about this. It does suggest pretty strongly that the president has the opportunity to drive public opinion on this.

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