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.