August 31, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

FED CONSISTENTLY ON SIDE OF THE RICH

The Federal Reserve regulates the country's money flow. One of the chief instruments is interest rates. By raising or lowering rates the Fed can heat up or cool down the economy. The Fed can also pump more money into the economy, which also heats the economy. Now that so many loans are tied to the Fed's prime rate index, raising interest rates tends to hurt borrowers with variable loans on credit cards or home loans. But the Fed's policy of lowering interest rates due to the subprime mortgage crisis is accelerating inflation at a time when wages for most of us are stagnating or actually falling. It makes even essentials like food more expensive. When you're working class it's a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. This article by Nicholas Von Hoffman is at www.thenation.com:

The New York Times reports that "Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows. While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show."

In fact, the inflation damage for most families is worse than these average numbers suggest, since, as the Times says, "the growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000. These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000."

For any individual or family, such figures translate into harsh facts at the checkout counter. Just in the last year the price of oranges and eggs has risen almost 20 percent. Milk is up more than 13 percent, chicken 10 percent, even potatoes are up more than 5 percent.

BUSH'S ECONOMY FOR THE FEW

If anyone needed any more proof that Republican economics are an atrocity for working people, just look at the latest census data. I personally have not had a raise in two years. I'm making less money than I was making in 2002 when I got downsized. Fresno is a terrible place to look for a job. So you find yourself sinking and taking on water. This editorial is from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:

Over all, the new data on incomes and poverty mesh consistently with the pattern of the last five years, in which the spoils of the nation's economic growth have flowed almost exclusively to the wealthy and the extremely wealthy, leaving little for everybody else.

Standard measures of inequality did not increase last year, according to the new census data. But over a longer period, the trend becomes crystal clear: the only group for which earnings in 2006 exceeded those of 2000 were the households in the top five percent of the earnings distribution. For everybody else, they were lower.

This stilted distribution of rewards underscores how economic growth alone has been insufficient to provide better living standards for most American families. What are needed are policies to help spread benefits broadly - be it more progressive taxation, or policies to strengthen public education and increase access to affordable health care.

Unfortunately, these policies are unlikely to come from the current White House. This administration prefers tax cuts for the lucky ones in the top five percent.

August 30, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY

EDWARDS PROPOSES "BROWNIE'S LAW"

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans we needed a competent FEMA to handle the emergency. What we got was a political hack named Michael Brown. Despite George W. Bush's proclamation that, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job," the reality was far different. Bush has appointed mostly political hacks to vital jobs in the federal government. It's a little like saying your friend the janitor should be trying a murder case. The civil service system was created near the end of the 19th century mostly to avoid awarding jobs to political cronies, but Bush apparently likes the old spoils system. Former Senator John Edwards has proposed a new law requiring competence of officials appointed to key federal jobs. This article by Jeff Franks is at news.yahoo.com:

Former Sen. John Edwards said at a Hurricane Katrina conference he would propose what he called "Brownie's Law" requiring that qualified people, not political hacks, lead key federal agencies.

Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, drew laughter when he spoke on Monday of the proposal at the "Hope and Recovery Summit" ahead of the two-year anniversary of the storm on Wednesday.

"It's an absolute travesty to have people who are essentially political hacks in a very responsible position," he told the audience at the University of New Orleans.

August 29, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY

DROWNED NOLA: CONSERVATISM IN A NUTSHELL

If you want to see reactionary conservatism in its most condensed state, just look at New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. We have reached the two year mark of that terrible event. While the Bush administration bails out rich people in the subprime mortgage crisis, New Orleans still swelters and lies broken in pieces. Contrary to what right-wingers say, the "free market" does not and can not solve every problem. Not everything in life should come attached to a profit motive. This article by Walter Moseley is at www.thenation.com:

Not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age.

The disaster named after the hurricane is not confined to the areas affected. Every emergency room, empty bank account and outsourced life's work could be named. We live in a country rife with ignored and condemned poverty. The rich, high on their great corporate steeds, ride over us believing that they are out of the reach of global warming and its symptoms, of terrorism and dwindling natural resources. When government officials tell them to evacuate, they drive their cars, board their corporate jets or simply climb to higher ground with ease. At this very moment they are looking down on Baghdad and New Orleans, Pakistan and Sudan, you and me. The feeling of invulnerability that these people have is unfounded, but nonetheless it makes them reckless. They take chances and cut corners believing that everything will come out all right. Their delusions of grandeur and ultimate power put us in ever more dire straits.

August 28, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY


THE GROPER'S CALLOUS BUDGET CUTS

Passing California's annual budget has become an exercise in political gamesmanship. This year a few Republicans, being Republicans, were holding up the budget. It took some callous cuts by Governor Groper to finally get the budget passed. Republicans consistently prove themselves friendly to the rich and powerful while telling the rest of us to go to hell. This editorial is at www.latimes.com:

In the end, it still could have been a good state budget, despite its unnecessary two-month tardiness. It could have been a fair, though painful, step toward fiscal sanity. It could have been a lesson in balancing social and fiscal responsibility. It could have been forward-looking and smart. But it's not.

We take it as a given that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had to use his veto pen to slash more than $700 million to eliminate the budget's operational deficit and to pick up the two necessary Republican votes in the state Senate. Lean is good. But some cuts seem cruel and gratuitous jabs at California's most vulnerable.

A series of Times stories in 2005 revealed one shocking instance after another of conservators -- appointed by courts to protect the elderly and infirm -- using their positions of trust to instead exploit their often defenseless wards. The darkest possible nightmare for many aging Californians was coming true as they lost their property and their freedom to professional guardians with virtually unsupervised power. A series of legislative hearings forced Sacramento to confront the issue, and Schwarzenegger with great fanfare signed into law reforms to allow the courts to finally oversee the conservatorship industry.

THE REPREHENSIBLE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Having highly-paid flacks like public relations agencies wasn't enough for the rich and powerful and their corporate buddies. A few years ago the very rich conceived the idea of "think tanks." "Think tanks" spend their time putting together policy papers with a veneer of intellectualism to justify the system their funders want. Heritage is largely funded by that rich creep Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited his money (but never mind) and Joseph Coors of the Coors Brewing Company. According to Heritage, you aren't poor if you have some basic things such as a microwave, a color TV, or a stereo. Boy, I feel better now! This commentary by Bob Higgins is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

In all his quoting of vague "government sources," "Senior Fellow" Rector doesn't mention wage stagnation, the continually rising cost of living in all areas, outsourcing and offshoring of jobs in all sectors of the economy, community crippling layoffs, pension defaults, natural disasters, catastrophic illnesses, death, war and a host of other legitimate reasons why good, honest, working people have fallen into poverty yet still have that embarrassing dishwasher in their kitchen and still reside in the three bedroom house with a patio that they lived in before their jobs were shipped off to Timbuktu.

There may be a difference between the face of poverty in Dorothea Lange's hauntingly beautiful "Migrant Mother" from 1940 at the top of this rant and the modern version in this new century but I doubt it, you have to look at the eyes, close up, and personal to see, to know the despair.

I don't know, Maybe "Senior Fellow" Rector hasn't heard about those things, yeah that's probably it.

August 27, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY


WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

History is filled with lots of "what if" questions. What if Lincoln hadn't gone to Ford's Theater that April evening? What if the fleet at Pearl Harbor knew about the impending Japanese attack? What if JFK's assassination had been prevented? One of the biggest "what if" questions will be, what if Al Gore had become president in 2000 instead of George W. Bush being appointed by the Supreme Court? Would 9/11 have happened? Would we have launched an unnecessary war against Iraq? Would we have gotten started earlier in doing something about global climate change? This commentary by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

Having written several books that span periods of years, I’m often surprised how patterns emerge that aren't apparent to me in day-to-day news coverage. In Neck Deep, our new book about George W. Bush’s presidency, one of those surprises was how often former Vice President Al Gore turned up making tragically prescient comments.

Gore, whose admirers sometimes call him “the Goracle,” comes across more as a Cassandra, warning the nation of looming disasters and finding himself either ignored or mocked by the dominant politicians and media pundits.

Time and again – from Campaign 2000 to the post-9/11 “war on terror” to the invasion of Iraq to Bush’s expansion of presidential powers – Gore pointed to grave dangers when nearly all other national political leaders and media bigwigs were either running with the herd or keeping silent.

August 25, 2007


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RIGHT-WINGERS REJOICE IN TRAGEDY

In the perverse world of right-wing ideology what is bad for most of us is a good thing. Mass layoffs at a company, for instance, can cause the stock price of that company to rise. In this article Rick Perlstein looks at the joy right-wingers experienced after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans. What an opportunity for "free market" policies to be put into place! The article is at www.tompaine.com:

As Katrina's waters began receding, leaving bloated corpses and ruined dreams in their fetid wake, not everyone mourned. Tod Linberg, editor of the right-wing flagship "intellectual" journal Policy Review rejoiced. "Bush has what Social Security and tax reform lacked: a real sense of crisis that places his political opponents in an awkward position," he wrote on September 20, 2005 in the Washington Times. "He can make demands in the name of New Orleans, including demands for substantive policy changes that he could never obtain in the absence of a crisis."

I've already said the conservative response to Katrina proved they weren't patriots. It's worse than that. What language! An occasion for the President not to serve, but to issue "demands."

This is the authoritarian imagination at work, and from what is supposed to be the most "respectable" precincts of the conservative coalition, from a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. This was the conservative response to Katrina all over.

Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation heralded a potential "great era of conservative governance." (Which means, of course, no governance.) Tom DeLay wrote that Katrina "has introduced a valuable forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democrat-controlled Congresses of past decades." Hurray!

August 23, 2007


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IMPEACH CHENEY

THE BUSH-AL QAEDA SYMBIOSIS

George W. Bush wants U. S. troops in Iraq and so, it turns out, does al Qaeda. The occupation in Iraq has turned into a nightmare for the U. S. military. It is also a great recruiting tool for al Qaeda. It really takes nerve for Bush to bring out Vietnam analogies. He and major members of his administration were chickenhawks when we were in Vietnam. Now Bush talks about the aftermath of Vietnam and implies that a similar fate awaits Iraq if we withdraw. He doesn't mention the incredible destruction and loss of life the U. S. inflicted and suffered in Vietnam before we withdrew. It was another war we should never have fought. If we draw any lessons from Vietnam, it's that the time for leaving is here. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

After hearing his selective historical rendition of the Vietnam experience in his Aug. 22 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, one is tempted to ask Bush what he would have done as President in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Presumably, Bush would have prolonged or escalated the Vietnam War, although it’s doubtful he would have called up the Texas Air National Guard where he was safely ensconced, while skipping his flight physical and seeking an early discharge.

In his speech, Bush justified an open-ended Vietnam War by citing the carnage that followed the U.S. military withdrawal.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields,’” Bush said.

In Bush’s version of history, condemnation should fall on Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford for making the painful decisions that eventually extricated the United States from the Vietnam quagmire – rather than on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon for inserting or keeping U.S. troops in the middle of the Indochinese civil war.

A PATTERN OF REPUBLICAN MISMANAGEMENT

The mantra of right-wingers is that the "free market" is god. Anything that happens in the "free market" is good and regulation is just awful. Back in the days of Herbert Hoover we got the Great Depression. In the Reagan era we got the savings and loan crisis. Now we have the subprime lending crisis. It reminds you, in a slightly different context, of the old song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." There's a line about, "When will they ever learn?" We've got to learn that unfettered free market economics is a disaster. It's a petri dish of corruption and ripoffs. This article by Jim Hightower is at www.truthout.org:

The subprime schemes are run through an intricate, intertwined system of loan brokers, mortgage lenders, Wall Street trusts, hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other predators. To entrap borrowers, the industry created an arsenal of arcane financial devices and maneuvers known by such exotic names as "exploding ARMs," YSPs, teaser rates, low-doc mortgages, loan flipping and equity stripping. Ultimately, these schemes are scams, extracting high payments from the families, sucking out any equity they might build up and stealing their homes.

This is one of those economic stories, like the savings-and-loan scam of the 1980s, that are usually buried back in the business section of newspapers. But, just as with the S&L collapse, this debacle is growing too big to contain, and all of us need to be paying attention. The built-in traps of the subprime mortgage market have already taken the homes of more than a million people in just the past year, and the dangers are quickly rising for millions more. This collapse in homeownership for the working poor has begun seeping into the rest of the economy, causing thousands of job losses, shaking the soundness and reputations of some major Wall Street firms, and slowly - ever so sloooowly - forcing lackadaisical bank regulators and clueless politicians out of their laissez-faire stupor.

August 22, 2007

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IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S BAD ANALOGIES

It's interesting how George W. Bush chose to ignore history when he launched an unnecessary and immoral war against Iraq. Bush was warned of the dangers of the invasion and occupation, but he didn't listen then. I suspect Vietnam was mentioned when Bush was leading up to the war. Now that Iraq has turned into a daily horror show Bush wants to invoke Vietnam. He cites boat people, re-education camps, and other atrocities that occurred after the United States pulled out of Vietnam. But it was clear at the time that the United States had to leave Vietnam. The consequences of leaving were horrendous; the consequences of staying were worse. Iraq has now dragged on longer than World War II and there is no end in sight. We're at a point where any choice is a bad choice. We have to make the choice that is the least harmful. We need to get out of Iraq. This analysis by Dan Froomkin is at www.washingtonpost.com:

Mr. Froomkin quotes from an article at The Los Angeles Times:

"Historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, accused Bush of twisting history. 'It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,' he said in a telephone interview.

"'We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will,' he said.

"'What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion,' he continued. 'We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.'"

BUSH: WEALTH INEQUALITY (HO-HUM)

When George W. Bush and his criminal administration took power it was like swarms of locusts descending on the United States economy. The Bushes have devoured everything that benefits working people and transferred it to the economic elite. Wages have stagnated for almost everyone except the people at the top of the pyramid. The administration's response is that wealth inequality is not a very interesting story. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.workingforchange.com:

We are told that when there is a short supply of a good or service that is in demand, the market dictates that the price for that good or service rises (as just one example, we hear this justification all the time when it comes to the supply of oil and the price of gas). This results in higher profits for the corporations producing the good or service. But we are simultaneously told that if there is a short supply of labor that is in demand, the market should not raise the price (aka. wages) for that labor (which would, of course, lessen the wealth disparity in America). No, instead we are told that we should rig the labor market by flooding it with a supply of workers who will exist under a legal framework that makes them more easily exploitable than other workers (ie. they can't form unions to demand better wages/working conditions without fearing their employer will deport them).

This is the governing ethos of economic/globalization policymaking in Washington. Couple it with tax policies that target most of their rewards to the handful of Gordon Gekkos who run Wall Street, and what you have is a pretty open, pretty vicious economic war being waged on America's middle class.

August 21, 2007


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DISMAL REPUBLICAN NUMBERS

If the majority of Americans voted our economic interests, Republicans would never be in power. From the time of Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression, until now, the economy has performed much more robustly under Democratic administrations. When Republicans are in power the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The so-called "fiscal discipline" of Republicans has also been abeyance since the Reagan administration. This article by Robert Weiner and John Larmet is at www.truthout.org:

There is a widely held belief that Republicans are better for business than are Democrats. Let's look at the facts.

The wild stock market ride of recent weeks does not compare to the two worst stock events, the crash of 1929 and the 1987 free fall, which also occurred under Republican administrations. Since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3% annual return on the S&P 500, Republicans only 8%. Gross Domestic Product growth since 1930 is 5.4% for Democratic presidents and 1.6% for Republican presidents.

Bush inherited from President Clinton an annual federal budget surplus of $236 billion, the largest in American history. Clinton balanced the budget for the first time since 1969. Budget surpluses were expected to total $5.6 trillion between fiscal year 2002 and 2011.

Despite this, Bush transformed the surpluses into a $1.1 trillion annual deficit in just three years because of the Iraq war and his relentless push for permanent tax cuts for wealthy Americans, a new iteration of Herbert Hoover's equally catastrophic "trickle-down" theory. Bragging about a $239 billion deficit sets such a low standard that Bush can claim horrific failure as a good thing for the country. The Bush administration's annual loss of three-quarters of a trillion dollars is unprecedented.

August 20, 2007


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THE ARROGANCE OF CAPITALISM

When you get down to the bottom line and cast away all the propaganda, capitalism is really about exploiting other people. Every step of the way someone benefits a little more--or a lot more--than the person at the beginning of the process. The person who performs the labor for wages doesn't get the value for the labor because the boss gets the margin, or profit. The lender who doles out the cash gets not only the original amount back, but a handsome profit in the interest and fees that go with the deal. The system can work just like planes, trains, and automobiles can work with proper maintenance. But let the maintenance or regulation be stripped away from capitalism and you have catastrophe We're seeing that now in the sub-prime mortgage business. We're seeing that in the outsourcing of jobs from the United States, leaving only low-paying service jobs here. Barbara Ehrenreich has a commentary at www.thenation.com:

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were "NINJA" loans, for example, awarded to people with "no income, no job or assets." Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of "economic literacy" that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn't these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don't they have personal financial advisors anyway?

August 19, 2007


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DESERTING LIKE RATS

Prominent members of the Bush administration have been leaving in droves. It's a little like Indiana Jones being chased by the big boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They're fleeing from the scandals about to overtake them. The Republican party is a party of white bread elitists, racists, homophobes, sexists, anti-life, anti-earth, corrupt to its core, warmongers, and incompetent to boot. Karl Rove and Tony Snow are just the latest two miscreants to flee the sinking Bush administration. This article by Frank Rich is at www.welcometopottersville.com:

BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president's chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. "You don't introduce new products in August," he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you're Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove's departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic "for the sake of my family" rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

CONSERVATIVE MALPRACTICE

After seeing the horrendous results of conservative governance, with its concomitant lack of regulation of big business, you'd have to conclude that conservative politicians would lose their licenses if they were doctors or be disbarred if they were lawyers. It's a combination of adherence to a ridiculous idea about "free markets" and greed. This article by Robert Borosage is at www.tompaine.com:

Three lives are lost and counting in the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah. The flamboyant, camera-hogging mine owner, Bob Murray, has called this a "once in a lifetime" accident, like a car crushed by a boulder suddenly dislodged. These horrors happen.

Yes, but when we add one plus one plus one, we don't call three an accident. We call it a product, a sum, the result. And the Utah disaster wasn't random; it is the product of conditions just waiting to be added up.

Murray, a self-made millionaire, owns companies producing more than 20 million tons of coal annually. He's known as a hard-driving executive who pushes the limits in his mines, seeking to extract the last dime from the coal.

At Crandall Canyon, the miners were working at depths that test the limits of safety. Although Murray denies it, federal regulatory officials say that retreat mining was being practiced. Retreat mining is a perilous technique in which pillars of coal hold up portions of the roof, and when the area is mined, the pillars are pulled down, capturing the useful coal and collapsing the roof.

August 18, 2007


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LOATHSOME CREDIT CARD COMPANIES

The creed of banks that issue credit cards must be: Let nothing get in the way of profit. Don't let conscience, compassion, integrity, decency, or justice get in the way. Use every method available, especially the help of politicians, to find ways to squeeze more and more out of credit card customers. Ding them for outrageous fees for the slightest pretext, change the contract terms of the card in midstream, move the due dates around so someone might make a late payment and you can charge late fees, and use "universal default" so you sock it to the hapless customer for being late somewhere else. When Bush is gone I hope the next president will take action to help millions of credit card customers who are getting the royal shaft. This article by Marney White is at www.commondreams.org:

There’s a sure way that a presidential candidate could get the attention of even the most politically apathetic citizen this year: vow to outlaw outrageous interest rates legally being charged to American consumers by credit card and student loan corporations. These rates are causing real and enduring pain to hard-working Americans and their families who find themselves behind the eight-ball.

Like me.

I’m not much different from a lot of people. Not long ago, I had a credit rating of 755, all my bills were paid on time, and I had no credit card balances outstanding. Then suddenly, I found myself out of work for over 6 months at the age of 39, with two kids in tow (ages 9 and 11). While interviewing for “career positions”, I even tried a stint at Starbucks to tide us over. In my interview, they assured me I’d be able to get forty hours per week as a “barista” (woo-hoo!). But, during my illustrious five-week career, they never gave me more than 10 hours a week (at $7.25 an hour). I was told by fellow employees that my experience was par for the course. As my childcare bill was always bigger than my paycheck, I had to quit. (But I can still make a killer venti decaf cinnamon soy latte.)

RELIGION AND SPORTS

I love sports. In the years I've watched baseball, football, and basketball I don't know how many times I've seen a hitter in baseball "cross" himself before stepping into the batter's box, or heard some reference to God in a post-game interview. I've seen football players kneeled in prayer after a game. Now things are going even a step further. Evangelical Christians are having "faith days" at major league ballparks. It's the height of hubris to play "God Bless America"; why should God, even if God exists, play favorites with nation states? Sports should be about enjoying the skills of great athletes, not forums for jingoistic patriotism or evangelical religion. This article by Tom Krattenmaker is at www.latimes.com:

Critics of the Christianizing of pro sports -- including interfaith groups, Jewish leaders and secular progressives -- have voiced reservations about the seemingly ever-closer relationship between evangelical sports ministries and major professional sports teams. Frequent on-field religious gestures by players already rankle many -- does it really honor God to knock the snot of your opponent on the football field and then point to the sky? And shout-outs to God during live post-game interviews offend those fans who would prefer to enjoy their sports without a dose of in-your-face religion.

Remember the owner and the coach of the Indianapolis Colts who both praised God before a worldwide television audience while collecting the Super Bowl trophy last winter? It's no accident that scenes like that have become a common feature of the pro sports landscape. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and similar sports ministries have been operating behind the scenes for decades to minister to sports figures and encourage them to use their high-profile platform to spread the Christian message.

August 16, 2007


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WAL-MART SHOOTS ITSELF IN THE FOOT

You could almost hear the wheels spinning from the advocates of globalization Wal-Mart style. It went something like this: big companies like Wal-Mart are so much more efficient than local Mom and Pop stores. Using its tremendous clout Wal-Mart can keep prices and wages low. Even though the Mom and Pop stores go the way of the dinosaur, Wal-Mart is there to replace them and offering those low-price goods from China. Other big businesses see the Wal-Mart model and say "Ah hah!" That's what we'll do too. All of a sudden the middle class jobs in the United States aren't there anymore and no one here has the money to buy anything even at Wal-Mart. This article by Stephen Pizzo is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Walmart misses, cuts outlook
Economic pressure around the world blamed for poor showing
Reuters: August 14, 2007 -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reported a lower-than-expected quarterly profit and cut its full-year earnings forecast on Tuesday, saying its customers remain under economic pressure..."It is no secret that many customers are running out of money toward the end of the month," Scott said on a recorded conference call. (Full)

What? The great American working class, running out of money? How can that be?

Well to begin with they aren't the "American" working class any more. They've become the WalMart working class. Yes, WalMart is a nation. To be precise it's the world's 4th largest economy. Over the last decade or so WalMart has had more impact on the lives of America's working classes - from the working poor to skilled blue collar workers - than Uncle Sam.

August 14, 2007


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COMPLICITY IN SHREDDING THE CONSTITUTION

When members of Congress take the oath of office they swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. I would suggest we have a strong domestic enemy of the Constitution in the form of the Bush administration. Bush himself has referred to the Constitution as " a expletive piece of paper." It's far more than that. It's something that people have fought and died for. It's not a perfect document, but it established the best form of government the human race has yet devised. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 didn't give Bush or anyone the right to disregard the oath of office. This article by Jonathan Alter talks about the recent assault on the Fourth Amendment that, unfortunately, had the complicity of Democrats in Congress. The article is at www.msnbc.msn.com:

I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.

THE MAJOR MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARD

Those talking heads of the right, the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter types can say almost anything, including advocating the murder of presidents and Supreme Court Justices, and the mainstream media don't have a problem. Stand up for the Constitution or suggest that maybe predatory capitalism is a pretty filthy system and you get called a "left wing extremist." It's interesting that even in letters to the editor right-wing yahoos can throw around the word "socialist" as a pejorative, but I don't recall seeing any letters using the word "fascist" to describe people on the right. This commentary from A. Alexander is at www.progressivedailybeacon.com:

It is perfectly "mainstream" American political discourse for Limbaugh to claim that Democrats are in bed with al-Qaeda or that Hillary Clinton murdered someone that she didn't. When Coulter calls for the assassination of former presidents or infers that, perhaps, John Edwards, married with children, is gay - she is booked on every corporate-owned program in the country. Bill O'Reilly can, one day, be on the phone forcing an intern to describe her favorite method of masturbation and the next day, condemn America for not having enough "Christ in Christmas" and no one points out the lunacy.

Yet, should someone from the "Left" call Limbaugh a liar or rightfully accuse him of fomenting a dangerous nationalistic and very Nazi-like political environment, and the corporate-owned media will immediately brand that person as being, "a left-wing radical."

August 13, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSCIENCE

I don't believe in religion, but I do believe in conscience. President Abraham Lincoln talked about the "better angels of our nature," which is really about conscience. Conscience is that little voice that motivates you to do what is right even when no one is looking. Conscience is the twin of empathy, which allows you to put yourself into another person or living creature's place. You feel their pain. Conscience should be a far more prominent part of our government policy. There is a new book by an Iraq war veteran named Joshua Key. Mr. Key talks about seeing other soldiers kicking severed Iraqi heads around like soccer balls. He deserted the military, not because of cowardice, but because his conscience wouldn't allow him to be a participant in this atrocity any longer. The book is called The Deserter's Tale.

FUTURE VALUES

Since Dan Quayle and the first Bush administration we've heard a lot about "family values." Right-wingers like to lecture us about "traditional values." Maybe it's time to take a look at values that haven't evolved yet, things like ending war and deprivation and racism for all people on this planet. "Traditional values" have given us war, torture, oppression, racism, homophobia, sexism, slavery, and exploitation. That is what makes the space program something worthwhile, the chance to move beyond the boundaries that have always gripped us and seek something better. I have an interest in the shuttle Endeavour's mission because astronaut Barbara Morgan is from Fresno. I hope the shuttle returns safely to earth and that space exploration evolves into a peaceful quest for all people on this planet. This article by Tad Daley is at www.alternet.org:

Bertrand Russell taught us that the greatest moral imperative was this: "One must care about a world one will never see." So in addition to all of our urgent work on all of our urgent struggles, progressives should consider joining and participating in the work of hardy and underappreciated space advocacy organizations like the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, the Mars Society and the Space Frontier Foundation.

Perhaps the single best line of the Heinlein Centennial was uttered to us on an enormous video screen, from Sri Lanka, by 90-year-old Arthur C. Clarke, when he said, "Robert Heinlein will be revered by future generations. If any."

Stephen Hawking, similarly, in remarks just before boarding his widely publicized zero-gravity airplane flight in April, said, "Life on Earth is at risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus. ... I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space."

August 12, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

NAME CALLING IS ALL THEY HAVE

Right-wingers have their inordinate share of venom, for whatever reason. They hate intellectuals. They hate gays. They hate women and racial minorities. They hate poor people. They hate other ethnic groups. They hate scientists. Their "philosophy," such as it is, of imposing a perverted form of Christianity on everyone else in the world, dividing the world into a very few rich people who work like robber barons, and lots and lots of poor people doesn't work well except for the chosen few. So, inevitably, their "arguments" come down to name calling because their "philosophy" is indefensible. This column by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The right wing in America has had its way for a long time now, for all of the century thus far. The wealthiest people in the nation have gotten unimaginably more wealthy, environmental regulations have been undermined or under-enforced. American jobs have been exported by the hundreds of thousands without any protections for American workers in the form of taxation on corporations that sell-out American workers in order to exploit sweatshop labor overseas.

Meanwhile, the HMOs and the insurance companies reap ever greater profits off the pain and suffering of the sick and dying, and the oil companies harvest ever-greater bounty through price fixing and periodic gouging.

Regulatory agencies are staffed with lobbyists from the industries they were created to regulate. Political resistance to campaign finance reform ensures that those who buy influence will keep that influence. The Supreme Court has been successfully stacked so that rulings favorable to the powerful right wing interests in the nation can be expected for a long time to come as that august body begins the work of turning back the clock on things like civil rights, women's rights, and a host of other issues that have long been targeted agenda items for the most reactionary elements in our society.

BUSH HAS ALLOWED AL-QAEDA RESURGENCE

In the days shortly following the attacks on 9/11 George W. Bush made the cowboy pronouncement that we would get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." As we approach the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still at large. The U. S. military is mired in Iraq, a war that was never necessary, and al-Qaeda has grown stronger. Bush's policies have severely weakened U. S. security. He has made generations of enemies of the United States. He has weakened our military and created monstrous fiscal deficits. This editorial is from The Albuquerque Tribune is at abqtrib.com:

One of the blunt realities of this week's al-Qaida threat assessment, which found the terrorist group "considerably operationally stronger" and "regrouped to an extend not seen since 2001," should be that Bush's policies not only permitted this to happen by waging an unnecessary and all-consumptive war in Iraq, but it also created a grand opportunity for al-Qaida to do battlefield training during our four-year occupation of Iraq.

Given that U.S. forces have been largely pinned down in the bloody Iraq occupation and civil war for the past four years, should it surprise anyone in Washington, Peoria or Albuquerque that al-Qaida has regrouped and grown stronger in its historic stomping grounds of Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Is it also coincidence that almost nobody is talking about persistent homeland vulnerabilities here, including U.S. ports, power plants, refineries, depots and other vital elements of infrastructure?

August 10, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


KARL ROVE'S MACHINATIONS

It's disturbing to realize how many people who are not elected and not even on a ballot have so much influence in our domestic and political affairs. Even people who are elected, such as Senators, hold undue sway over my life and yours. A Senator from Wyoming or Alaska or Rhode Island has as much influence in the Senate as a Senator from California. Sure, the House has representation based on population, but it is the Senate and the Senate alone that has the filibuster, where a minority group can block the will of the majority. It is the Senate that confirms appointments to the Supreme Court, another institution that is not democratic. It is the Senate that ratifies treaties.

Even worse than the undue influence of people in the Senate, though, are aides to the President such as Karl Rove. Rove has exerted great and mostly malignant influence since Bush stole the presidency in 2000. Rove has had a major role in the Iraq war, in the insidious plan to privatize Social Security, and such asinine proposals as medical savings accounts. This article by John W. Mashek is at www.usnews.com:

In the 2004 election, aided by Democrat John Kerry's mistakes, Bush won another narrow victory. Rove acted like it was a landslide from the start.

With his new prominence for policy matters, Rove had a master plan. In an excellent piece by Joshua Green in the latest Atlantic, the author points out the collapse of that plan. Rove's first call for action was to privatize or at least partially privatize the Social Security system. It flopped, as did immigration reform and changing Medicare to include private accounts, other Rove ideas.

Amid all this, the war in Iraq grew more unpopular by the day as a backdrop to the domestic problems. Bush's popularity numbers went south and have remained in the mid- or low 30s for months.

Rove's negative campaign tactics have gone on for years, and his arrogance in the White House has left him and his boss with little to show for nearly seven years in power.

BERNSTEIN ON BUSH

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke one of the most important political stories in our history. They fought through the obstruction tactics of the Nixon administration to reveal the truth about the Watergate break-in and, even more, the long list of crimes that were related to Watergate. Now Carl Bernstein says that Bush is worse than Nixon. This article by John Nichols is at www.commondreams.org:

Carl Bernstein will always be known as the journalist who brought down a president whose disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law disqualified the errant executive from completing a second term in the White House. And Bernstein still gets a round of applause when mention is made of the role he played, as part of a Washington Post investigative team that also included Bob Woodward, in exposing the high crimes and misdemeanors of a president named Nixon.

But 33 years after Nixon resigned in order to avoid an inevitable impeachment — on August 9, 1974 — Bernstein is more concerned about a president named Bush.

When we appeared together recently at The Aspen Institute’s first symposium on the political reporting of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Bernstein recalled the old stories of when he and Thompson were busy revealing the sordid details of Nixon’s presidency.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author was under no illusions regarding the extent of Nixon’s wrongdoing as compared with that of Bush and those around the current president.

August 08, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE COUNTRY'S MIXED UP PRIORITIES

We have millions of people without health insurance. We have millions of people living in poverty. We have millions of kids who go hungry. We have an infrastructure that is dangerously inadequate. We have a few very rich people who get richer by the second. But we spend money on tax cuts for the wealthy, on a needless war, and on sports. A book a few years ago called Lords of the Realm talked about baseball's owners of a few years ago. Sports owners were greedy then and they're even more greedy now. It's time we spent money on things that are constructive and things that matter. This article by David Usborne is at news.independent.co.uk:

It may be the wealthiest nation in the world but the US sure has odd priorities when it comes to spending all that cash. Bridges and roads at home are allowed to crumble until the worst happens, while wars and weapons are never too expensive.

Budget analysts in Congress last week reckoned the $500bn (£250bn) of taxpayers money allocated so far on wrecking and then rebuilding Iraq will double before it's all over to $1 trillion. The war now accounts for 10 per cent of everything the government spends.

It is even more depressing when you consider the things that should have public funding lavished on them. It would be nice to see universal health care introduced, but that is too expensive and sounds like socialism. More money for the arts, education and the poor would be good too. And how about choking the torrents (albeit partly from private sources) spent on electing presidents?

No one could help but be astounded by last week's images of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The miracle, given the timing in the middle of rush hour, was that more people did not perish. That it happened is not such a surprise, however. We now learn there are tens of thousands of bridges across the US considered "structurally deficient" and in need of repair.

CHURCH-STATE SEPARATION ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY

Many of the earliest European transplants to North America came here to escape religious persecution in Europe. The Catholics and Protestants were constantly making war on each other. The Founding Fathers were influenced by secular thinkers in the design of the Constitution in part because they knew the history of religious strife in Europe. And yet right-wingers still continue to assert that the United States is a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian traditions. This article by Carol Hamilton is at www.commondreams.org:

Locke was not only the first influential proponent of religious toleration and freedom. His ideas inspired every Revolutionary in the Founding generation-all those who signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Ideas, passages, and phrases from his two treatises on civil government are echoed in numerous speeches and pamphlets of the American Revolution, including those of the teenaged Alexander Hamilton.

Right now, both a Marxist group and the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, as well as many universities, have the second treatise of Locke posted online. Although the YAF calls it “a timeless classic of conservative thought,” Locke is widely considered to be the father of liberalism, in the original sense of that word. The renowned historian C. Vann Woodward wrote of “the Lockean liberal consensus, from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln, and on down.” All major American statesmen and politicians, Woodward asserted, have been to varying degrees “apostles of Locke” and thus “liberals under the skin.”

It’s therefore all the more unfortunate that American citizens like my recent correspondents are ignorant of, or hostile to, our intellectual history and credit the Bible for every idea under the sun. It’s unfortunate also that the MSM, particularly CNN, sees fit to interrogate presidential candidates about their “faith,” because such interrogation is profoundly un-American. ” I never told my own religion, nor scrutinized that of another,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816.

August 07, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE OLD "SOCIALISM" CANARD

When right-wingers trash a progressive idea or program, the word "socialism" pops out of their mouths almost automatically. Calling something "socialist' automatically means something isn't even worthy of consideration. But consider how many things we take for granted could be called "socialist" under the right-wing definition. You could call Social Security, public roads, airports, the military, and numerous other things "socialist" because they're funded by government money. The fact is that pure capitalism doesn't work. It would be a nightmare society for most of us. This is a case for national health care. This article by Pierre Tristam is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Best care in the world? Think again. Opponents of a single-payer system quickly say that in other countries you have to wait umpteen months to get this or that elective procedure done, as if waiting times don't exist here. Yet the 1.1 billion visits for care in 2004 added up to a combined 36 million days of waiting time for Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and that's just in the waiting halls of doctors' offices and emergency rooms -- not the week- and month-long waits to see specialists. That's if you're lucky enough to have coverage. Once you do get to see a care-giver, good luck. Last March, The New England Journal of Medicine exploded the myth of quality care with a study that showed that half the time, patients don't receive the care they need. They're mis-diagnosed, mistreated (literally) and mis-referred. Then they're billed enough to induce fresh coronaries.

August 06, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

LIKE QUIVERING JELLYFISH

Chicken Little might have been a good member of the Bush administration, although Chicken Little wasn't scuttling around screaming, "The sky is falling!" to cynically manipulate people and ram through an onerous political agenda. The Bush administration has managed to make lots of Americans afraid of the dark, metaphorically speaking. The threat of being killed by terrorism is almost nothing compared to various other threats we face. But we've allowed the Bush administration to spy on us, shred civil liberties, torture, start preemptive wars, and funnel billions of dollars to defense contractors because that boogeyman terrorist might be hiding under the bed. This article by Allan Uthman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

More Americans have been killed in the war in Iraq than have ever been killed by terrorism in the history of the country. A San Francisco Chronicle piece puts the odds of being killed by terrorism as slightly lower than dying in an avalanche. How much are we spending on avalanche prevention? Why is there no counter-avalanche czar? How many news stories have you seen about the threat of avalanches? Think about it: “Avalanches: Are we safer than we were?” Or “Democrats: Soft on avalanches?” Why does the liberal media ignore the avalanche threat?

You get the idea. From a purely rational perspective, we are spending a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time, money and attention on what amounts to a tiny threat. Not only that, but we have failed miserably in even reducing that threat, despite the astounding scope of our backwards approach to it.

It's truly amazing: we spend more on defense and security than the entire rest of the world, and the enemy is a shabby assemblage of repressed losers. Yet somehow the media manages to effectively convey the feeling that the country is some soft, white, utterly vulnerable blob of flesh, a giant, defenseless belly with no arms or legs, practically begging to be punctured and devoured by a teeming mass of impossibly disciplined super-criminals.

INFRASTRUCTURE, POVERTY, AND TAX CUTS

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency it was a seismic shift in our politics. We went from an era where government policies helped to bolster the growth of a middle class. The Reagan tax cuts for the very rich and his assault on unions gave power and wealth to the plutocrats. It has only gotten worse since George W. Bush waltzed into office. Even achieving the middle class is getting more and more difficult. A college education is almost a necessity in getting a middle class job, and college is getting almost impossibly expensive for working class people. Even a person with a college degree may have a difficult time attaining middle class status because so many jobs get outsourced to places like India. This article by Thom Hartmann is at www.commondreams.org:

Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (they’re still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.

In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, Reagan’s tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadn’t been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.

August 05, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TRAFFIC DEATHS WORSE THAN TERRORISM

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, there have been 245,000 traffic fatalities in the United States, including over 42,000 last year. The number of traffic deaths makes deaths due to terrorism seem inconsequential. But you don't see much on the TV news, see any newspaper headlines, hear about major policy proposals from the government, or get chatter around the water cooler about traffic deaths. It's assumed traffic deaths are just unavoidable. They're not. This article by Gregg Easterbrook is at www.latimes.com:

While the tragedy of 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 has justified two wars, in which thousands of U.S. soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice, the tragedy of 245,000 lives lost in traffic accidents on the nation's roads during the same period has justified . . . pretty much no response at all. Terrorism is on the front page day in and day out, but the media rarely even mention road deaths. A few days ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that 42,642 Americans died in traffic in 2006. Did you hear this reported anywhere?

This phenomenon is not just American, it is global. Traffic deaths are the fastest-rising cause of death in the world. Yet you've heard far more about H5N1 avian influenza, which has killed 192 people worldwide since being detected five years ago, than about the 6 million people who have died in traffic accidents in the same period. Last year alone, 1.2 million people were killed on the world's roads, versus about 100,000 dead as a result of combat. The last decade is believed to be the first time in history that roads posed a greater danger to human beings than fighting (which is partly a reflection of the decline of war).

August 03, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


FOR CONSERVATIVES, THINKING HURTS

Conservatives like bumper sticker "thinking." "Support the troops," or other such weighty ideas are their concept of political discourse. A few days ago a right-winger had a letter in The Fresno Bee referring to the Democrats in the California legislature as "socialistic." I doubt he even knows what socialism is. He just knows it's bad and those "luminaries" like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity use the word a lot. After my experience with predatory capitalism, I'm not so sure socialism is bad. This article by David Michael Green is at www.commondreams.org:

We in the progressive community know that not everybody in America thinks the way we do. But we would probably be well served also by a recognition that some people in this country don’t want to think at all. It is possible that some of these Borg could be knee-jerk progressives instead of knee-jerk regressives were they somehow to be re-assimilated into the reality-based community, but the odds are not high. So much of progressive thinking requires careful reflection, extended analytical probing, and a collection of just plain data - factual information - about what is going on in the world. So much of regressive ‘thinking’ fits nicely, and completely, on a bumper sticker.

“Support our troops!”, to wit, and quite literally a bumper sticker seen all over the place (though noticeably less ubiquitous than it was in 2003). Literally a bumper sticker, that is, but not so literal in its meaning, especially since the most obvious way to support our troops - right here, right now - would be to pull them out of harm’s way, where they sit today for no conscionable purpose whatsoever. Otherwise, short of that, really supporting our troops today would mean screaming and hollering at the top of our lungs to make sure that they get adequate training, armor, and rest before being deployed. While we’re at it, we might even ask that they be paid at the same rate as the nearly equivalent numbers of mercenaries fighting alongside them, to the tune of three or four times the soldiers’ salary. And if we really, really wanted to support the troops, we’d call for a draft, so that we’d have a massively enlarged military, and each soldier would have far less of a share of the burden to carry. Hmmm - that may be a bit more than our friends with the bumper stickers had in mind. Perhaps that’s why they’ve been seen lately ducking out to the garage in the wee hours of the night to scrape the things off their Hummers.

DEATH FOLLOWS RIGHT WING POLICIES LIKE A SHADOW

Right-wing wars are the most obvious example of how right-wing policies are killing people. But there are other less obvious killers. The lousy health care system in the United States exists largely thanks to right-wing obstructionism in creating a national health care system. Polluted air and water, thanks to lack of regulation, kill people. The insane drug policies that we have in this country, which penalize offenders rather than treat them, kill people. Now we see the results of neglecting the country's infrastructure in the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. We neglect the public good so a few rich people can get tax breaks. This article by ABC News is at www.abcnews.go.com:

Highway engineers say the neglect of America's infrastructure costs lives every day. More than 40,000 people die in highway accidents each year.

Road conditions, the engineers say, are a factor in almost one-third of those deaths.

America's most important road system — 46,000 miles of interstate highway — is now half a century old.

A report card two years ago from the American Society of Civil Engineers said that 34 percent of major roads are in poor or mediocre condition.

August 02, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


DOMESTIC SPYING ISN'T ABOUT TERRORISTS

The Bush administration has used the attacks on 9/11 as a carte blanche excuse to step all over the Constitution and civil liberties. The attacks on 9/11 were orchestrated by a few people with box cutters. They were mostly from Saudi Arabia. There is no evidence that anyone within the United States aided the terrorists, or that the operations were planned inside the United States. Yet, the Bush administration has greatly expanded spying on Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. You have to think the domestic spying is to identify the administration's political opponents. It's dangerously close to a totalitarian form of government that suppresses any and all dissent. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

So what's the real explanation for all the secrecy about the overall structure of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program?

The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the data-mining operations, appears to be Bush’s political need to prevent a full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans' privacy.

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking “total information awareness” on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.

The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during the course of their everyday lives – from the innocuous to the embarrassing to the potentially significant.

The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and countless other examples.

Bush’s aides argued that their access to this electronic data might help

August 01, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE "MCMANSION" BLIGHT

Obesity isn't confined to the body shape of Americans. Americans drive gas hog SUV's and the affluent are building bigger and bigger houses. I don't know the psychological reasons for conspicuous consumption, but it's a blight on the environment and shameless when you consider how many people don't even have adequate nutrition. People don't need big gas-hogging vehicles or massive houses to have a good life. This article by Dan Glaister is at www.commondreams.org:

Since 1973 the median size of a new home in the US has grown from 1,525 sq ft (142 sq metres) to 2,248 sq ft. At the same time, the number of people per household has fallen from 3.1 to 2.6. Huge mansions are a common site across the US, dotting the landscape alongside motorways in Colorado, or squeezed into tiny plots in urban areas. Wherever they are found, they share common features: large atrium-style hallways, showpiece kitchens, multiple bathrooms, walk-in wardrobes, built-in garage and garden statuary; a style familiar to viewers of the Sopranos. While McMansion is the most frequently used pejorative term, “plywood palazzo” is another.

But the trend has alarmed planners and conservationists. In Boulder County, Colorado, which has recently adopted measures to cap the size of new homes, houses have grown from an average of 3,900 sq ft in 1990 to 6,300 sq ft last year. Last month in Los Angeles, the city’s planning commission passed a motion to restrict the size of new homes. If the city council adopts the measure it could affect 300,000 properties in the city. Similar measures have been adopted in Minneapolis and in Florida.

“I think people are suspicious of development in the US right now,” says John Chase, architecture critic and urban designer for the city of West Hollywood. “People have an unconscious cultural association with a place. Mansion-building takes away from a person’s sense of the identity of a place.”