September 09, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


PALIN THE RELIGIOUS WACKO

The First Amendment of the Constitution is the First Amendment for a very good reason. It provides for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. The "establishment" clause has been under constant assault by the religious right. They see no problem with government enforcement of their religious beliefs, especially in matters like abortion and school prayer. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, is about as far to the right as you can get and her ideas on religion are dangerous to our democracy. This column by Juan Cole is at www.commondreams.org:

Palin has a right to her religious beliefs, as do fundamentalist Muslims who agree with her on so many issues of social policy. None of them has a right, however, to impose their beliefs on others by capturing and deploying the executive power of the state. The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers' commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to "establish" or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as "agents of intolerance." That he took such a position gave his opposition to similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain's animus against fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted and invidious. You can't say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency.

TRICKLE DOWN DOESN'T WORK

Even though he calls himself a "maverick," John McCain is offering the same old stale and failed policies of trickle down economics that started during the Reagan years. We're told over and over again that more tax cuts for the rich will produce wonders. What we get is more poverty, disappearing jobs, and massive deficits. The Bush administration should be offered as Trickle Down 101, the absolute and abject failure of the right-wing's free market ideology. This column by Dean Baker is at www.commondreams.org:

Senator McCain and his friends no doubt still believe that the economy's fundamentals are strong, but Friday's jobs numbers clearly show how bad things have gotten. The 6.1 percent unemployment rate reported for August is almost as high as the worst levels from the last recession. A broader measure of labor market weakness, that includes people who can only find part-time work or who have given up looking for jobs, is higher than at any point in the last recession.

When the labor market weakens, workers have less bargaining power with their employers. As a result, wages are trailing more than 2 percentage points behind inflation over the last year.

Wages are virtually the entire income for most workers. If the purchasing power of their wages falls by 2 percent, this is the equivalent of a 2 percentage point increase in their tax rate.