November 04, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

ABORTION IS NOT MURDER

Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue to energize the Christian right for a long time. The Christian right takes the unequivocal position that abortion is murder. They don't have a problem with capital punishment or killing children in wars, but they insist that a fetus is "human life" and killing the fetus is murder. Garry Wills presents some strong arguments against the evangelical position in this column at www.latimes.com:

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

BUSH THE MASTER OF ECONOMIC DISASTER

It's amazing that Republicans have tried to represent themselves as the fiscally responsible party when it is they who have run up gargantuan deficits and gone on drunken sailor spending sprees. We got the first run of this under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush makes Reagan look fiscally prudent. This commentary is from www.americablog.com:

Bush can conveniently blast the Democrats for spending but nobody can deliver destruction to the economy the way Bush can do it. Some of his greatest hits include:

- Largest decline in housing prices since 1991.
- Crumbling US dollar, weakest showing against leading five currencies since early 1970s. This includes 37 year low against Canadian dollar. Against the UK pound, it's over $2 to buy only one.
- Skyrocketing and "out of control" oil prices, record highs at the pump.
- Billions of US taxpayer dollars lost, missing, and who knows what from Iraq. Costs for war to drag out for decades.
- Record high budget deficit, compounded by GOP spending boondoggles.