February 12, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH HATES THE TRUTH
Facts are often inconvenient for George W. Bush. A system of checks and balances as mandated by the Constitution is also inconvenient. Bush, according to a CIA analyst, "cherry picked" intelligence to justify attacking Iraq. Bush has made end runs around Congress and the Constitution to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. If Republicans in Congress were true to their oaths to preserve and protect the Constitution, we would already have impeachment hearings for Bush and Cheney. This editorial comes from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:
We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.
This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.
DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.
NOW THEY'RE QUOTING CICERO
Today's right-wing defense of Bush's domestic spying (in The Fresno Bee) offers up a quote from the Roman Cicero. Cicero said that in a time of war the rules are at rest. We should probably remember that ancient Rome went from being a Republic to being a dictatorship. Our writer suggests that Bush "can't win" with us on the left. We criticize Bush for not "connecting the dots" before 9/11 and then we criticize him for his actions post 9/11.
We should remember that Bush had ample warning of an impending terrorist attack before 9/11, including a Presidential Daily Briefing that flatly stated, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." On the day the attacks occurred, Bush was in the classroom of a Florida elementary school even after being informed of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Even as four airliners were hijacked and flight controllers were aware that something was dreadfully wrong, nothing was done to intercept the airliners.
As is typical of right-wingers, this guy says that other administrations have wiretapped too. He mentioned something called Project Echelon during the Clinton years that I'll have to research. He also mentioned that the Kennedy administration wiretapped Martin Luther King. We should probably put that into context, however. Both JFK and Robert Kennedy were supporters of Martin Luther King. They were trying to protect King from the psychopathic J. Edgar Hoover. They weren't trying to to derail the civil rights movement. I don't have confidence that the Bush administration wouldn't use information it gathered to hamper or destroy political opposition.
It was recently revealed that Bush's domestic spying has largely resulted in sending the FBI on wild goose chases. They get directed to people who aren't doing anything terrorist related. So we're devoting resources that should be used to finding real terrorists to spying on totally innocent Americans.
If Bush has such a compelling need for domestic surveillance, he also has the FISA courts, which almost always approve warrants. Warrants can even be obtained retroactively. So I don't buy the argument that Bush has to supersede the Constitution, Congress, and the courts to spy on Americans without warrants.
BUSH HATES AMERICA
If you believe in a United States that promotes peace around the world, or you believe in a United States that offers equal opportunities to all its citizens, or you believe in a United States that stands for human rights, or you believe in a United States that remains true to its greatest ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you have to believe that George W. Bush and his supporters hate the United States. They believe in a country that is an international bully, a country that promotes torture, a country that shoves most of its citizens to the bottom of the economic heap and puts a foot on their necks, and a country that hypocritically espouses freedom while doing everything it can to destroy freedom. This article by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Beyond that, we have the shameful spectacle of Americans who call themselves patriots urging a forfeiture of our rights and liberties as U.S. citizens the rights to due process and the protections devised by the founding fathers to guard against abuses of power.
And beyond that, we have breaches of national security in the outing of a CIA agent for no better reason than spite. We have the staffing of all kinds of highly paid and important government jobs with incompetent administration cronies and partners in crime. We have repeated and massive failures of imagination. No one could have imagined a) people flying planes into U.S. skyscrapers, b) a storm of the magnitude of Katrina, or c) a Palestinian militant group like Hamas winning elections in Palestine these being just a few of the things Condoleezza Rice has said the administration couldn't imagine.
Beyond all of that, we have the growing gap between rich and poor, the exportation of American jobs by the hundreds of thousands, the wasteful and exploitive health care system that continues to bankrupt American industries, the packing of the Supreme Court with judges confirmed despite their stonewalling before the congressional oversight committees charged with vetting them before they assumed lifetime appointments. We have been unable or unwilling to secure our borders. We have seen corruption on an unprecedented scale and massive neglect of dozens of urgent national needs. Science has been disregarded whenever it runs afoul of the profit motive, and we have a foreign policy no one, least of all the people in charge of it, seems to understand.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
February 11, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY
Right-wingers love to bash government as incompetent. So when right-wingers get elected to government it's no major surprise that government becomes grossly incompetent. Conservatives view government as a way to reward their cronies, suppress labor, shut down regulation, and pursue their crackpot ideas of global hegemony. Paul Krugman writes about the gross incompetence of the Bush administration in this column at www.topplebush.com:
We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the Medicare drug program, has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government.
Given the Bush administration's evident inability to govern, Democratic electoral victories should be a sure thing. But they aren't. Why?
Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion -- which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail -- that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
THAT TRADE DEFICIT THING
If deficits were accomplishments, George W. Bush would have rightfully earned his place in history. Unfortunately, deficits are not usually considered a good thing, and under the Bush administration we're seeing massive deficits in both the federal government and in our trade. We frankly have an insane trade policy that allows jobs to be shipped offshore, that takes away our manufacturing base here at home, and that means we import all kinds of stuff we should be making here. And our reliance on oil is a major contributor to our trade deficit. If we could use alternative fuels, we would shore up our economic house. This story by Martin Crutsinger is at www.businessweek.com:
The U.S. trade deficit soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion in 2005, pushed upward by record imports of oil, food, cars and other consumer goods. The deficit with China hit an all-time high as did America's deficits with Japan, Europe, OPEC, Canada, Mexico and South and Central America.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that the gap between what America sells abroad and what it imports rose to $725.8 billion last year, up by 17.5 percent from the previous record of $617.6 billion set in 2004.
It marked the fourth consecutive year that America's trade deficit has set a record and was certain to spark increased debate in Congress over President Bush's trade policies. Since mid-2000 the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs and Democrats blame the administration's policy of emphasizing free trade agreements.
The rising trade deficits must be financed by increased borrowing from foreigners, who so far have been happy to sell us their products and hold U.S. dollars in payment which they invest in U.S. stock, bonds and other assets. The concern is that at some point foreigners will want to reduce their dollar holdings. If the change occurs at a rapid pace it could send the value of the dollar, U.S. stocks and bond prices all plunging.
DOWN THE MILITARY RATHOLE
It's not really accurate to call the Pentagon budget the "defense budget." Far more is appropriated to the Pentagon and to military spending than is necessary to defend the country. It might be more precise to call it the "global domination" budget. Global hawks, such as the members of PNAC, see the United States as an empire. They want the U.S. to extend its reach, economically and militarily, around the world and even into space. This article by Amitabh Pal is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The Pentagon's hunger for money seems to be insatiable. The Bush Administration has requested a whopping $439.3 billion to feed its appetite the next fiscal year, an increase of seven percent.
This is just the regular military budget. There will be an estimated $50 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there's the money proposed to be spent on nuclear weapons, $16 billion, which is separately tallied in the Department of Energy budget. This brings the total to at least $506 billion or so, provided the "supplemental" demand does not reach higher.
What is the reason for this unrestrained expenditure? To maintain U.S. global supremacy in the years to come. Don't take my word for it. Read the primary military strategy document of the Bush Administration, made public in September 2002. "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries for pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling the power of the United States," states the National Security Strategy. No wonder The Washington Post said that the doctrine "gives the United States a nearly messianic role."
IMPEACH BUSH
SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY
Right-wingers love to bash government as incompetent. So when right-wingers get elected to government it's no major surprise that government becomes grossly incompetent. Conservatives view government as a way to reward their cronies, suppress labor, shut down regulation, and pursue their crackpot ideas of global hegemony. Paul Krugman writes about the gross incompetence of the Bush administration in this column at www.topplebush.com:
We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the Medicare drug program, has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government.
Given the Bush administration's evident inability to govern, Democratic electoral victories should be a sure thing. But they aren't. Why?
Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion -- which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail -- that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
THAT TRADE DEFICIT THING
If deficits were accomplishments, George W. Bush would have rightfully earned his place in history. Unfortunately, deficits are not usually considered a good thing, and under the Bush administration we're seeing massive deficits in both the federal government and in our trade. We frankly have an insane trade policy that allows jobs to be shipped offshore, that takes away our manufacturing base here at home, and that means we import all kinds of stuff we should be making here. And our reliance on oil is a major contributor to our trade deficit. If we could use alternative fuels, we would shore up our economic house. This story by Martin Crutsinger is at www.businessweek.com:
The U.S. trade deficit soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion in 2005, pushed upward by record imports of oil, food, cars and other consumer goods. The deficit with China hit an all-time high as did America's deficits with Japan, Europe, OPEC, Canada, Mexico and South and Central America.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that the gap between what America sells abroad and what it imports rose to $725.8 billion last year, up by 17.5 percent from the previous record of $617.6 billion set in 2004.
It marked the fourth consecutive year that America's trade deficit has set a record and was certain to spark increased debate in Congress over President Bush's trade policies. Since mid-2000 the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs and Democrats blame the administration's policy of emphasizing free trade agreements.
The rising trade deficits must be financed by increased borrowing from foreigners, who so far have been happy to sell us their products and hold U.S. dollars in payment which they invest in U.S. stock, bonds and other assets. The concern is that at some point foreigners will want to reduce their dollar holdings. If the change occurs at a rapid pace it could send the value of the dollar, U.S. stocks and bond prices all plunging.
DOWN THE MILITARY RATHOLE
It's not really accurate to call the Pentagon budget the "defense budget." Far more is appropriated to the Pentagon and to military spending than is necessary to defend the country. It might be more precise to call it the "global domination" budget. Global hawks, such as the members of PNAC, see the United States as an empire. They want the U.S. to extend its reach, economically and militarily, around the world and even into space. This article by Amitabh Pal is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The Pentagon's hunger for money seems to be insatiable. The Bush Administration has requested a whopping $439.3 billion to feed its appetite the next fiscal year, an increase of seven percent.
This is just the regular military budget. There will be an estimated $50 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there's the money proposed to be spent on nuclear weapons, $16 billion, which is separately tallied in the Department of Energy budget. This brings the total to at least $506 billion or so, provided the "supplemental" demand does not reach higher.
What is the reason for this unrestrained expenditure? To maintain U.S. global supremacy in the years to come. Don't take my word for it. Read the primary military strategy document of the Bush Administration, made public in September 2002. "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries for pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling the power of the United States," states the National Security Strategy. No wonder The Washington Post said that the doctrine "gives the United States a nearly messianic role."
Friday, February 10, 2006
February 10, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
MORE INDIFFERENCE FROM BUSH ADMINISTRATION
George W. Bush ignored numerous warnings that a terrorist attack was coming against the United States, and then we got 9/11. He has ignored numerous warnings about the effects of global climate change, and we're starting to see the consequences. He ignored warnings about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, according to former FEMA head Michael Brown. But we're supposed to trust Bush with national security. This article by Eric Lipton is at www.nytimes.com:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
THE PHONY CASE FOR WAR
You wonder how long it will take the Bush administration to smear a former CIA official who says the administration manipulated intelligence to justify attacking Iraq. This story by CNN is at www.commondreamsorg:
The Bush administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war, a former CIA senior analyst alleged.
In an article published on Friday in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between U.S. intelligence and policymaking "broken."
"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made," Pillar wrote.
Although the Clinton administration and other countries' governments also believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, they supported sanctions and weapons inspections as means to contain the threat, he said.
FUNDAMENTALISTS THE SAME
Religious fundamentalists, whether you call them Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Hindu, or whatever all seem to be the same. They may call their god or gods different names, but their suppression of speech, their persecution of women, and their lack of reasoning is remarkably consistent. This story by R. J. Eskow is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
It's striking, isn't it? American conservatives are so like the radical Muslims taking to the streets this week. Both claim moral superiority based on religion. Both use the language of hatred as political speech. Both advocate violence against those with whom they disagree. And they both despise the concept of a free press.
Lest we forget, here are a few choice quotes to remind the Bill Bennetts of this world just what they and their friends really stand for:
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Ann Coulter
"And if Al-Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it ... You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." Bill O'Reilly
"I have to say I'm all for public flogging." Ann Coulter
IMPEACH BUSH
MORE INDIFFERENCE FROM BUSH ADMINISTRATION
George W. Bush ignored numerous warnings that a terrorist attack was coming against the United States, and then we got 9/11. He has ignored numerous warnings about the effects of global climate change, and we're starting to see the consequences. He ignored warnings about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, according to former FEMA head Michael Brown. But we're supposed to trust Bush with national security. This article by Eric Lipton is at www.nytimes.com:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
THE PHONY CASE FOR WAR
You wonder how long it will take the Bush administration to smear a former CIA official who says the administration manipulated intelligence to justify attacking Iraq. This story by CNN is at www.commondreamsorg:
The Bush administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war, a former CIA senior analyst alleged.
In an article published on Friday in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between U.S. intelligence and policymaking "broken."
"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made," Pillar wrote.
Although the Clinton administration and other countries' governments also believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, they supported sanctions and weapons inspections as means to contain the threat, he said.
FUNDAMENTALISTS THE SAME
Religious fundamentalists, whether you call them Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Hindu, or whatever all seem to be the same. They may call their god or gods different names, but their suppression of speech, their persecution of women, and their lack of reasoning is remarkably consistent. This story by R. J. Eskow is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
It's striking, isn't it? American conservatives are so like the radical Muslims taking to the streets this week. Both claim moral superiority based on religion. Both use the language of hatred as political speech. Both advocate violence against those with whom they disagree. And they both despise the concept of a free press.
Lest we forget, here are a few choice quotes to remind the Bill Bennetts of this world just what they and their friends really stand for:
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Ann Coulter
"And if Al-Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it ... You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." Bill O'Reilly
"I have to say I'm all for public flogging." Ann Coulter
Thursday, February 09, 2006
February 09, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
LIBBY IMPLICATES CHENEY IN PLAME LEAK
"Scooter" Libby is already under indictment for his part in allegedly outing the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Now it appears that Libby is saying he was "authorized" by Dick Cheney to leak Plame's name. Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, had published information that didn't suit the Bush administration's propaganda buildup for an attack on Iraq. This story by Murray Waas is at nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm#
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION JUST ISN'T CREDIBLE
Howard Dean was on Good Morning America today and host Charles Gibson was asking Dean about polls that supposedly show Americans trust Republicans more on national security than they trust Democrats. You have to wonder why. We had the most disastrous failure in American intelligence in our history on September 11. Despite countless warnings of an impending terrorist attack, George W. Bush did nothing. Then, either through deliberate lying or gross incompetence, Bush declared Iraq a center of terrorism and attacked that country. We know now that Saddam Hussein had no real ties to al-Qaeda. Bush has not captured the mastermind of September 11, Osama bin Laden. But we're supposed to trust the administration to ferret out terrorists as they shred our civil liberties. This article by Greg Mitchell is at www.editorandpublisher.com:
Given the administration’s track record on accuracy, why does anyone, let alone everyone, in the major media go along with this instead of saying, “Why should we believe these guys know an al-Qaeda operative when they see one?”
Until proven otherwise, they should be considered The Gang That Couldn't Snoop Straight.
This was driven home this week, if not before, by a must-read cover story in the non-partisan National Journal by Corine Hegland. It’s much too exhaustive to detail here, so let me stick to the useful summary provided by the Journal’s much-respected senior writer and columnist Stuart Taylor.
He declares flatly that the Hegland article shows that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Press Secretary Scott McClellan have repeatedly made false statements about the “terrorists” locked up at Guantanomo. And these assertions came “long after the evidence of their falsity should have been manifest to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their subordinates.”
A WASTED OPPORTUNITY
History is filled with "what if" questions. Now that we've been engaged in an oil war in Iraq for the past few years and now that China is competing for oil you have to think back to the l970s when Jimmy Carter was president. President Carter warned us back then that we had to do something about our wasteful ways. We had to find alternatives to oil or we would pay a price. Right-wingers love to denigrate President Carter for saying we needed to conserve. They prefer the fantasy offered by Ronald Reagan, who said we could consume all we wanted. This article by Bill Berry is at www.commondreams.org:
It seemed appropriate that the Enron trial got under way here the same week that Bush admitted in his State of the Union address that time had run out on the big lie, the one first foisted on a gullible public by the Great Deceiver, Ronald Reagan. He's the one who had the solar collectors torn from the White House roof soon after he ousted Jimmy Carter, the only American president to have admonished the nation to look in a mirror and see its wasteful ways.
Reagan is the one who told us we should just go ahead and consume. He's the one who led the charge to weaken fuel efficiency standards, to gut research on new energy technologies, to dampen government support for energy conservation in any way, shape or form. Those who followed him, from the first Bush to Clinton, did nothing to expose the lie, and thus they were accomplices. So is the conservative machine, which has abandoned its own core principles in embracing rapacious consumption.
Odd though it seemed last week, here was Bush, the son of oil, proclaiming more than a quarter century later that Carter was right all along and that America needs to come to terms with its oil gluttony. Bush's words may have been the result of the carefully crafted spin that marks the current regime. They may be a response to an insider's knowledge that the spigot is, indeed, drying up. Perhaps they're a belated nod to renewable energy initiatives under way in more than a third of the states. Bush didn't say much at all, really, but he said something. That is a small step in the right direction.
IMPEACH BUSH
LIBBY IMPLICATES CHENEY IN PLAME LEAK
"Scooter" Libby is already under indictment for his part in allegedly outing the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Now it appears that Libby is saying he was "authorized" by Dick Cheney to leak Plame's name. Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, had published information that didn't suit the Bush administration's propaganda buildup for an attack on Iraq. This story by Murray Waas is at nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm#
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION JUST ISN'T CREDIBLE
Howard Dean was on Good Morning America today and host Charles Gibson was asking Dean about polls that supposedly show Americans trust Republicans more on national security than they trust Democrats. You have to wonder why. We had the most disastrous failure in American intelligence in our history on September 11. Despite countless warnings of an impending terrorist attack, George W. Bush did nothing. Then, either through deliberate lying or gross incompetence, Bush declared Iraq a center of terrorism and attacked that country. We know now that Saddam Hussein had no real ties to al-Qaeda. Bush has not captured the mastermind of September 11, Osama bin Laden. But we're supposed to trust the administration to ferret out terrorists as they shred our civil liberties. This article by Greg Mitchell is at www.editorandpublisher.com:
Given the administration’s track record on accuracy, why does anyone, let alone everyone, in the major media go along with this instead of saying, “Why should we believe these guys know an al-Qaeda operative when they see one?”
Until proven otherwise, they should be considered The Gang That Couldn't Snoop Straight.
This was driven home this week, if not before, by a must-read cover story in the non-partisan National Journal by Corine Hegland. It’s much too exhaustive to detail here, so let me stick to the useful summary provided by the Journal’s much-respected senior writer and columnist Stuart Taylor.
He declares flatly that the Hegland article shows that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Press Secretary Scott McClellan have repeatedly made false statements about the “terrorists” locked up at Guantanomo. And these assertions came “long after the evidence of their falsity should have been manifest to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their subordinates.”
A WASTED OPPORTUNITY
History is filled with "what if" questions. Now that we've been engaged in an oil war in Iraq for the past few years and now that China is competing for oil you have to think back to the l970s when Jimmy Carter was president. President Carter warned us back then that we had to do something about our wasteful ways. We had to find alternatives to oil or we would pay a price. Right-wingers love to denigrate President Carter for saying we needed to conserve. They prefer the fantasy offered by Ronald Reagan, who said we could consume all we wanted. This article by Bill Berry is at www.commondreams.org:
It seemed appropriate that the Enron trial got under way here the same week that Bush admitted in his State of the Union address that time had run out on the big lie, the one first foisted on a gullible public by the Great Deceiver, Ronald Reagan. He's the one who had the solar collectors torn from the White House roof soon after he ousted Jimmy Carter, the only American president to have admonished the nation to look in a mirror and see its wasteful ways.
Reagan is the one who told us we should just go ahead and consume. He's the one who led the charge to weaken fuel efficiency standards, to gut research on new energy technologies, to dampen government support for energy conservation in any way, shape or form. Those who followed him, from the first Bush to Clinton, did nothing to expose the lie, and thus they were accomplices. So is the conservative machine, which has abandoned its own core principles in embracing rapacious consumption.
Odd though it seemed last week, here was Bush, the son of oil, proclaiming more than a quarter century later that Carter was right all along and that America needs to come to terms with its oil gluttony. Bush's words may have been the result of the carefully crafted spin that marks the current regime. They may be a response to an insider's knowledge that the spigot is, indeed, drying up. Perhaps they're a belated nod to renewable energy initiatives under way in more than a third of the states. Bush didn't say much at all, really, but he said something. That is a small step in the right direction.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
February 08, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
SWEDEN AIMS TO BE OIL FREE
The government of Sweden has announced that it plans to become oil free by the year 2020. And Sweden intends to do it without building nuclear power plants. Sweden is offering an example for the rest of the world. We need to end our oil dependency for a number of reasons: oil is becoming more and more scarce, the addiction to oil will create armed conflicts all over the world, and fossil fuels greatly contribute to global climate change. This article by John Vidal is at www.commondreams.org:
Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.
The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.
The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.
"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development. "There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline."
THE DEBATE OVER RETIRING CLEMENTE'S NUMBER
1997 marked the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League baseball's color barrier. Baseball recognized the importance of that anniversary by retiring Robinson's number. Now there are fans and admirers of Latino star Roberto Clemente who believe Clemente merits a similar honor. Surprisingly, Jackie Robinson's daughter opposes giving the honor to Clemente. I think Clemente was one of the most graceful and most intense players ever in the game. The way he died in trying to help others said much about his life. Retiring his number in no way diminishes the importance of Jackie Robinson. This article by Dave Zirin is at www.commondreams.org:
When Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line in 1947, baseball ceased to be just a game. In the dark years of McCarthyism, as his biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote, "only Jackie Robinson insisted day in and day out on challenging America on questions of race and justice." As Martin Luther King said of Robinson, "He was a sit-inner before sit-ins. A freedom rider before freedom rides." In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson's rookie season, MLB commissioner Bud Selig took the unprecedented step of retiring Robinson's number, 42, from the league.
Now a new push is taking place to honor another legend in a similar way. An appeal has been made by Hispanics Across America (HAA) to retire the number 21 of Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente. A native of Puerto Rico, Clemente was not the game's first Latino but its first breakout star. Clemente was a regular season and World Series MVP with 3,000 career hits, but he is especially revered for his efforts to support Latin American communities in the United States and abroad. Clemente's almost Bolivarian reputation was cemented when he perished in a 1972 plane crash taking medical, food and clothing supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua.
But the effort to honor Clemente has met resistance from a surprising source: Jackie Robinson's daughter Sharon. In January, she said, "To my understanding, the purpose of retiring my father's number is that what he did changed all of baseball, not only for African-Americans but also for Latinos, so I think that purpose has been met. When you start retiring numbers across the board, for all different groups, you're kind of diluting the original purpose."
THIS IS FIGHTING TERRORISM?
It's ironic that right-wingers who constantly harp about the inefficiency and fumbling of government are so ready to hand over all their privacy to the government. We have numerous examples of major flubs with people being placed on No Fly Lists who shouldn't be there, including Senator Edward Kennedy and young children. This article talks some of the really bizarre signs government looks for in trying to spot a potential terrorist. This article by James Bovard is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In the mass roundup of more than 1,200 people shortly after 9/11, for example, it took very little for a Muslim or Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a "suspected terrorist," according to a 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at pizza parlors (in violation of their student visas); a Pakistani immigrant was jailed after attracting attention because he and his Queens housemates let their grass grow long and hung their underwear out to dry on the fence; and one Muslim was arrested because "he had taken a roll of film to be developed and the film had multiple pictures of the World Trade Center on it but no other Manhattan sites," the inspector general noted. Some FBI agents were even instructed to look in phone books to find Arab- or Muslim-sounding names, according to Newsweek columnist Steven Brill.
IMPEACH BUSH
SWEDEN AIMS TO BE OIL FREE
The government of Sweden has announced that it plans to become oil free by the year 2020. And Sweden intends to do it without building nuclear power plants. Sweden is offering an example for the rest of the world. We need to end our oil dependency for a number of reasons: oil is becoming more and more scarce, the addiction to oil will create armed conflicts all over the world, and fossil fuels greatly contribute to global climate change. This article by John Vidal is at www.commondreams.org:
Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.
The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.
The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.
"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development. "There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline."
THE DEBATE OVER RETIRING CLEMENTE'S NUMBER
1997 marked the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League baseball's color barrier. Baseball recognized the importance of that anniversary by retiring Robinson's number. Now there are fans and admirers of Latino star Roberto Clemente who believe Clemente merits a similar honor. Surprisingly, Jackie Robinson's daughter opposes giving the honor to Clemente. I think Clemente was one of the most graceful and most intense players ever in the game. The way he died in trying to help others said much about his life. Retiring his number in no way diminishes the importance of Jackie Robinson. This article by Dave Zirin is at www.commondreams.org:
When Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line in 1947, baseball ceased to be just a game. In the dark years of McCarthyism, as his biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote, "only Jackie Robinson insisted day in and day out on challenging America on questions of race and justice." As Martin Luther King said of Robinson, "He was a sit-inner before sit-ins. A freedom rider before freedom rides." In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson's rookie season, MLB commissioner Bud Selig took the unprecedented step of retiring Robinson's number, 42, from the league.
Now a new push is taking place to honor another legend in a similar way. An appeal has been made by Hispanics Across America (HAA) to retire the number 21 of Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente. A native of Puerto Rico, Clemente was not the game's first Latino but its first breakout star. Clemente was a regular season and World Series MVP with 3,000 career hits, but he is especially revered for his efforts to support Latin American communities in the United States and abroad. Clemente's almost Bolivarian reputation was cemented when he perished in a 1972 plane crash taking medical, food and clothing supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua.
But the effort to honor Clemente has met resistance from a surprising source: Jackie Robinson's daughter Sharon. In January, she said, "To my understanding, the purpose of retiring my father's number is that what he did changed all of baseball, not only for African-Americans but also for Latinos, so I think that purpose has been met. When you start retiring numbers across the board, for all different groups, you're kind of diluting the original purpose."
THIS IS FIGHTING TERRORISM?
It's ironic that right-wingers who constantly harp about the inefficiency and fumbling of government are so ready to hand over all their privacy to the government. We have numerous examples of major flubs with people being placed on No Fly Lists who shouldn't be there, including Senator Edward Kennedy and young children. This article talks some of the really bizarre signs government looks for in trying to spot a potential terrorist. This article by James Bovard is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In the mass roundup of more than 1,200 people shortly after 9/11, for example, it took very little for a Muslim or Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a "suspected terrorist," according to a 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at pizza parlors (in violation of their student visas); a Pakistani immigrant was jailed after attracting attention because he and his Queens housemates let their grass grow long and hung their underwear out to dry on the fence; and one Muslim was arrested because "he had taken a roll of film to be developed and the film had multiple pictures of the World Trade Center on it but no other Manhattan sites," the inspector general noted. Some FBI agents were even instructed to look in phone books to find Arab- or Muslim-sounding names, according to Newsweek columnist Steven Brill.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
February 07, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
ANOTHER JOURNALISM SCANDAL
In 2003 Time magazine ran an article quoting White House spokesman Scott McClellan denying that Karl Rove leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. But at least three members of Time's staff, including people directly involved in writing the article, knew that was a lie. Why has the press not only bowed down to the Bush administration, but actively supported its crimes? This article is at mediamatters.org/items/200602070006
On October 13, 2003, Time magazine ran an article that included a quote from White House press secretary Scott McClellan insisting that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with outing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. As Media Matters for America has previously noted, at least two Time editorial employees involved in the article knew McClellan's denial was false: correspondent Matthew Cooper and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy. Cooper knew the denial was false because Rove had outed Plame to him. Duffy knew the denial was false because Cooper had sent him an email relating what Rove had told him.
Former Time White House correspondent John Dickerson, in a first-person account of his knowledge of the Plame matter, now acknowledges that he, too, knew that Rove was Cooper's source well before the October 2003 article -- an article on which he, like Cooper, received reporting credit.
Dickerson, now Slate.com's chief political correspondent, wrote a February 7 article in which he described being on a July 2003 presidential trip to Africa when two senior Bush administration officials, speaking to him on background, criticized former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had gone on a 2002 mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there. On July 6, 2003, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Wilson in which he challenged claims made by the administration in making its case for the Iraq war. According to Dickerson, the officials encouraged Dickerson to look into who sent Wilson to Niger. In his Slate article, Dickerson described a conversation he had with Cooper shortly after speaking with the Bush officials:
THE STRAWS IN THEIR OWN EYES
If you read the Gospel accounts in the Bible, you have to conclude that Jesus Christ wasn't real tolerate of hypocrites. He denounced the religious leaders of his day as the vile hypocrites they were. In our time we have the major league hypocrites like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Right-wing evangelicals condemn everyone from gays to women who have abortions, but their own morality isn't as spotless as they would have us think. This article talks about right-wing evangelicals, Jack Abramoff, and gambling. The article by Max Blumenthal is at www.thenation.com:
Gambling might not rank as high as homosexuality or abortion on the list of social evils monitored by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, but its growth has provided many occasions for his jeremiads. The indictment of Indian casino lobbyist and influential GOP activist Jack Abramoff was one such occasion. In a January 6 press release issued three days after Abramoff's indictment, Dobson declared, "If the nation's politicians don't fix this national disaster, then the oceans of gambling money with which Jack Abramoff tried to buy influence on Capitol Hill will only be the beginning of the corruption we'll see." He concluded with a denunciation of vice: "Gambling--all types of gambling--is driven by greed and subsists on greed."
What Dobson neglected to mention--and has yet to discuss publicly--is his own pivotal role in one of Abramoff's schemes. In 2002 Dobson joined a coterie of Christian-right activists, including Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to spearhead Abramoff's campaigns against the establishment of several Louisiana casinos that infringed on the turf of Abramoff's tribal clients. Dobson and his allies recorded messages for phone banking, lobbied high-level Bush Administration officials and took to the airwaves. Whether they knew it or not, these Christian soldiers' crusade to protect families in the "Sportsmen's Paradise" from the side effects of chronic slot-pulling and dice-rolling was funded by the gambling industry and planned by the lobbyist known even to his friends as "Casino Jack."
The only Christian-right activist confirmed to be completely aware of Abramoff's rip-off was Ralph Reed. He and Abramoff have a long and storied history together. When Abramoff chaired the College Republican National Committee in the early 1980s, Reed served as the organization's executive director. They reunited in 1989, when Abramoff helped Reed organize the remains of Pat Robertson's failed 1988 presidential bid into the Christian Coalition. In 1997, with the Christian Coalition under IRS investigation and Reed facing accusations of cronyism from the group's chief financial officer, he left to start his own consulting firm, Century Strategies. Reed contacted Abramoff right away. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts," Reed told him in 1998. "I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."
IMPEACH BUSH
ANOTHER JOURNALISM SCANDAL
In 2003 Time magazine ran an article quoting White House spokesman Scott McClellan denying that Karl Rove leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. But at least three members of Time's staff, including people directly involved in writing the article, knew that was a lie. Why has the press not only bowed down to the Bush administration, but actively supported its crimes? This article is at mediamatters.org/items/200602070006
On October 13, 2003, Time magazine ran an article that included a quote from White House press secretary Scott McClellan insisting that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with outing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. As Media Matters for America has previously noted, at least two Time editorial employees involved in the article knew McClellan's denial was false: correspondent Matthew Cooper and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy. Cooper knew the denial was false because Rove had outed Plame to him. Duffy knew the denial was false because Cooper had sent him an email relating what Rove had told him.
Former Time White House correspondent John Dickerson, in a first-person account of his knowledge of the Plame matter, now acknowledges that he, too, knew that Rove was Cooper's source well before the October 2003 article -- an article on which he, like Cooper, received reporting credit.
Dickerson, now Slate.com's chief political correspondent, wrote a February 7 article in which he described being on a July 2003 presidential trip to Africa when two senior Bush administration officials, speaking to him on background, criticized former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had gone on a 2002 mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there. On July 6, 2003, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Wilson in which he challenged claims made by the administration in making its case for the Iraq war. According to Dickerson, the officials encouraged Dickerson to look into who sent Wilson to Niger. In his Slate article, Dickerson described a conversation he had with Cooper shortly after speaking with the Bush officials:
THE STRAWS IN THEIR OWN EYES
If you read the Gospel accounts in the Bible, you have to conclude that Jesus Christ wasn't real tolerate of hypocrites. He denounced the religious leaders of his day as the vile hypocrites they were. In our time we have the major league hypocrites like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Right-wing evangelicals condemn everyone from gays to women who have abortions, but their own morality isn't as spotless as they would have us think. This article talks about right-wing evangelicals, Jack Abramoff, and gambling. The article by Max Blumenthal is at www.thenation.com:
Gambling might not rank as high as homosexuality or abortion on the list of social evils monitored by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, but its growth has provided many occasions for his jeremiads. The indictment of Indian casino lobbyist and influential GOP activist Jack Abramoff was one such occasion. In a January 6 press release issued three days after Abramoff's indictment, Dobson declared, "If the nation's politicians don't fix this national disaster, then the oceans of gambling money with which Jack Abramoff tried to buy influence on Capitol Hill will only be the beginning of the corruption we'll see." He concluded with a denunciation of vice: "Gambling--all types of gambling--is driven by greed and subsists on greed."
What Dobson neglected to mention--and has yet to discuss publicly--is his own pivotal role in one of Abramoff's schemes. In 2002 Dobson joined a coterie of Christian-right activists, including Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to spearhead Abramoff's campaigns against the establishment of several Louisiana casinos that infringed on the turf of Abramoff's tribal clients. Dobson and his allies recorded messages for phone banking, lobbied high-level Bush Administration officials and took to the airwaves. Whether they knew it or not, these Christian soldiers' crusade to protect families in the "Sportsmen's Paradise" from the side effects of chronic slot-pulling and dice-rolling was funded by the gambling industry and planned by the lobbyist known even to his friends as "Casino Jack."
The only Christian-right activist confirmed to be completely aware of Abramoff's rip-off was Ralph Reed. He and Abramoff have a long and storied history together. When Abramoff chaired the College Republican National Committee in the early 1980s, Reed served as the organization's executive director. They reunited in 1989, when Abramoff helped Reed organize the remains of Pat Robertson's failed 1988 presidential bid into the Christian Coalition. In 1997, with the Christian Coalition under IRS investigation and Reed facing accusations of cronyism from the group's chief financial officer, he left to start his own consulting firm, Century Strategies. Reed contacted Abramoff right away. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts," Reed told him in 1998. "I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."
Monday, February 06, 2006
February 6, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
CREDIT CARD MINIMUM PAYMENTS
In its infinite wisdom, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency dictated that credit card companies raise their minimum payments to a level that in effect doubles the payments for many credit card customers. The rationale for this is that it's "tough love," that it forces consumers to pay down their balances each month instead of being strung along forever. However, this is blatantly unfair when you already have a balance based on the old rules. It also assumes that consumers actually have the money to make the higher payments. The OCC hasn't been quite as concerned about repulsive practices such as "universal default" or incredibly punitive late charge policies. This article by Mark Winston Griffith is at www.thenation.com:
It seems that these days working families just can't seem to catch a break. Short-term interest rates are currently at 4.25 percent. The benchmark rate has been raised thirteen times in a row since the Fed began raising rates in June 2004. Meanwhile, inflation has gone up 3.4 percent since December 2004, and real wages have dropped 0.4 percent over the same period. Recent dips in inflation have helped earnings recover a bit of lost ground, but working families are still not quite as well off as they were just a year ago, much less in November 2001, when the nation began to pull out of recession. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the nation's savings rate was negative in the third quarter of 2005, the first negative savings rate since quarterly updates were made available in 1947.
Ironically, this is partly what has the OCC so spooked in the first place--the day of reckoning for creditors and the cash-strapped consumers on whom they've been aggressively feeding. With families skating on the edge of default and bankruptcy, the effect on consumer spending and the overall health of the economy is potentially calamitous. "This advisory was not intended to help consumers," Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation, recently said on National Public Radio. "It was intended to force banks to essentially clean up their under-performing portfolios.... The average consumer is being penalized by the concern of regulators about the true value of many banks' credit card portfolios."
IRAQ ISN'T CONVENIONAL DEFINITION OF "WAR"
What we've seen since the emergence of George W. Bush on the national and international scene is a complete change in the rules. If there has been a pattern to George Bush and his cronies, it's that rules don't apply. If they don't like rules, they simply ignore them. It was that way when they stole the presidential election in 2000. It has been that way in ignoring international agreements such as the Kyoto Accords. It has been that way in using the United Nations when it's convenient and ignoring the U.N. when it's not convenient. It was that way in declaring "preemptive" war against Iraq and then invading that country. Iraq currently has many of the outward appearances of traditional war. There is the horror of death and destruction, but as this article points out, Iraq is not a war in the sense we've come to understand war. It's more evidence of Bush defying the rules. The article by James Carroll is at www.motherjones.com:
Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes - but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of "war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.
But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, something essential is lacking that would make it a war - and that is an enemy.
THE CASE AGAINST BOTTLED WATER
Right-wingers have this fantasy that if you privatize everything that's the way the world should work. We've seen moves to privatize or deregulate banking, airlines, telephone service, and electrical service. I'm not impressed with the results. There is even a move to privatize water. We see it in the form of bottled water. We've been sold the idea that bottled water is better and healthier than the stuff that comes out of the tap, even though frequently there's no difference. When we get water out of the tap we're also not using oil to make plastic and we're not filling up landfills with discarded bottles. This article by Abid Aslam is at www.commondreams.org:
Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief--often mistaken, as it happens--that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).
For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week.
Members of the United Nations have agreed to halve the proportion of people who lack reliable and lasting access to safe drinking water by the year 2015. To meet this goal, they would have to double the $15 billion spent every year on water supply and sanitation.
''While this amount may seem large, it pales in comparison to the estimated $100 billion spent each year on bottled water,'' said EPI researcher Emily Arnold.
IMPEACH BUSH
CREDIT CARD MINIMUM PAYMENTS
In its infinite wisdom, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency dictated that credit card companies raise their minimum payments to a level that in effect doubles the payments for many credit card customers. The rationale for this is that it's "tough love," that it forces consumers to pay down their balances each month instead of being strung along forever. However, this is blatantly unfair when you already have a balance based on the old rules. It also assumes that consumers actually have the money to make the higher payments. The OCC hasn't been quite as concerned about repulsive practices such as "universal default" or incredibly punitive late charge policies. This article by Mark Winston Griffith is at www.thenation.com:
It seems that these days working families just can't seem to catch a break. Short-term interest rates are currently at 4.25 percent. The benchmark rate has been raised thirteen times in a row since the Fed began raising rates in June 2004. Meanwhile, inflation has gone up 3.4 percent since December 2004, and real wages have dropped 0.4 percent over the same period. Recent dips in inflation have helped earnings recover a bit of lost ground, but working families are still not quite as well off as they were just a year ago, much less in November 2001, when the nation began to pull out of recession. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the nation's savings rate was negative in the third quarter of 2005, the first negative savings rate since quarterly updates were made available in 1947.
Ironically, this is partly what has the OCC so spooked in the first place--the day of reckoning for creditors and the cash-strapped consumers on whom they've been aggressively feeding. With families skating on the edge of default and bankruptcy, the effect on consumer spending and the overall health of the economy is potentially calamitous. "This advisory was not intended to help consumers," Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation, recently said on National Public Radio. "It was intended to force banks to essentially clean up their under-performing portfolios.... The average consumer is being penalized by the concern of regulators about the true value of many banks' credit card portfolios."
IRAQ ISN'T CONVENIONAL DEFINITION OF "WAR"
What we've seen since the emergence of George W. Bush on the national and international scene is a complete change in the rules. If there has been a pattern to George Bush and his cronies, it's that rules don't apply. If they don't like rules, they simply ignore them. It was that way when they stole the presidential election in 2000. It has been that way in ignoring international agreements such as the Kyoto Accords. It has been that way in using the United Nations when it's convenient and ignoring the U.N. when it's not convenient. It was that way in declaring "preemptive" war against Iraq and then invading that country. Iraq currently has many of the outward appearances of traditional war. There is the horror of death and destruction, but as this article points out, Iraq is not a war in the sense we've come to understand war. It's more evidence of Bush defying the rules. The article by James Carroll is at www.motherjones.com:
Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes - but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of "war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.
But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, something essential is lacking that would make it a war - and that is an enemy.
THE CASE AGAINST BOTTLED WATER
Right-wingers have this fantasy that if you privatize everything that's the way the world should work. We've seen moves to privatize or deregulate banking, airlines, telephone service, and electrical service. I'm not impressed with the results. There is even a move to privatize water. We see it in the form of bottled water. We've been sold the idea that bottled water is better and healthier than the stuff that comes out of the tap, even though frequently there's no difference. When we get water out of the tap we're also not using oil to make plastic and we're not filling up landfills with discarded bottles. This article by Abid Aslam is at www.commondreams.org:
Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief--often mistaken, as it happens--that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).
For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week.
Members of the United Nations have agreed to halve the proportion of people who lack reliable and lasting access to safe drinking water by the year 2015. To meet this goal, they would have to double the $15 billion spent every year on water supply and sanitation.
''While this amount may seem large, it pales in comparison to the estimated $100 billion spent each year on bottled water,'' said EPI researcher Emily Arnold.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
February 05, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE NEVER ENDING WAR
It's hard to believe that as recently as 1989 we were celebrating the end of the Cold War and talking about a "peace dividend." We went from the initial claims by the Bush administration after the attacks on 9/11 that Bush would "smoke out" Osama bin Laden , to attacking Iraq, to claims the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes," and now to a plan for a twenty year war. It's chillingly like the world in George Orwell's 1984 when Big Brother kept his country in a perpetual war. This article by Ann Scott Tyson is at www.washingtonpost.com:
The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.
Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.
REPUBS INCREDIBLY BAD RECORD
Issue, issue, give me an issue. That must be the Republicans' collective thought in the middle of the night as they toss and turn and break out in night sweats. Unless they are magicians like David Copperfield, it's difficult to turn monstrous deficits, unending war, Jack Abramoff, war crimes, and incompetence into a winning strategy. Harold Meyerson writes about it in this column at www.washingtonpost.com:
For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?
I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.
THE ANTI-SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION.
In the 1960s NASA was an agency Americans could look to with pride. We were in a race with the Soviets to land a man on the moon. It was like science fiction dreams come true. We had men in space, men taking space walks, and finally we went to the moon and actually landed there in 1969. But instead of building and moving forward on those achievements, we're moving backward. A political appointee of Bush's has tried to censor talk of things like the Big Bang because it doesn't conveniently fit the beliefs of right-wing fundamentalists. In the meantime, information about the impact of global warming gets censored, even though global warming threatens all life on this planet. This item is from americablog.blogspot.com:
A week after the Bush administration told NASA global warming experts to stop talking about global warming, we now know have 24 year olds just out college telling senior scientists to water their lectures about Einstein. Literally. That's what the kid did. The scientists were going to be talking about Einstein and the big bang, and the Bush appointee got upset because the big bang might conflict with people's religions.
So NASA is now a church.
And we wonder why space shuttles blow up. Screw the repair job. Just slap some tape on that baby, put her on the launch pad, and let's all just pray why she takes off. After all, an intelligent designer would only blow up the shuttle as part of his plan, so who are we to say otherwise?
IMPEACH BUSH
THE NEVER ENDING WAR
It's hard to believe that as recently as 1989 we were celebrating the end of the Cold War and talking about a "peace dividend." We went from the initial claims by the Bush administration after the attacks on 9/11 that Bush would "smoke out" Osama bin Laden , to attacking Iraq, to claims the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes," and now to a plan for a twenty year war. It's chillingly like the world in George Orwell's 1984 when Big Brother kept his country in a perpetual war. This article by Ann Scott Tyson is at www.washingtonpost.com:
The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.
Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.
REPUBS INCREDIBLY BAD RECORD
Issue, issue, give me an issue. That must be the Republicans' collective thought in the middle of the night as they toss and turn and break out in night sweats. Unless they are magicians like David Copperfield, it's difficult to turn monstrous deficits, unending war, Jack Abramoff, war crimes, and incompetence into a winning strategy. Harold Meyerson writes about it in this column at www.washingtonpost.com:
For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?
I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.
THE ANTI-SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION.
In the 1960s NASA was an agency Americans could look to with pride. We were in a race with the Soviets to land a man on the moon. It was like science fiction dreams come true. We had men in space, men taking space walks, and finally we went to the moon and actually landed there in 1969. But instead of building and moving forward on those achievements, we're moving backward. A political appointee of Bush's has tried to censor talk of things like the Big Bang because it doesn't conveniently fit the beliefs of right-wing fundamentalists. In the meantime, information about the impact of global warming gets censored, even though global warming threatens all life on this planet. This item is from americablog.blogspot.com:
A week after the Bush administration told NASA global warming experts to stop talking about global warming, we now know have 24 year olds just out college telling senior scientists to water their lectures about Einstein. Literally. That's what the kid did. The scientists were going to be talking about Einstein and the big bang, and the Bush appointee got upset because the big bang might conflict with people's religions.
So NASA is now a church.
And we wonder why space shuttles blow up. Screw the repair job. Just slap some tape on that baby, put her on the launch pad, and let's all just pray why she takes off. After all, an intelligent designer would only blow up the shuttle as part of his plan, so who are we to say otherwise?
Friday, February 03, 2006
February 3, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
STANDARD OF LIVING IS GOING, GOING, GONE
The truly inspirational economic policies of the Bush administration have resulted in mountainous deficits, lower wages, stagnant job growth, increasing health care costs, rising gasoline and heating oil costs, and NO health care for millions of Americans. Six million more Americans have been added to the rolls of people without health insurance since Bush took office. This item comes from www.democrats.com/node/7637
As you can see, 39.8 million of us had no health insurance when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency and 45.8 million have no coverage as of the end of 2004. The numbers aren’t out yet, but you can bet that figure will go still higher when we see how many people lost their insurance in 2005.
So there you have it. Six million more Americans unable to go to the doctor since Bush took office and he crows that his team is “meeting that responsibility” on keeping America healthy and well.
"I am the master of low expectations," Bush once said of himself.
You can’t say he didn’t warn us.
ANYTHING FOR A WAR
It's like the snow melting in the spring. Everything that the snow covered and hid is coming into view. That's the way it is with George W. Bush and the war against Iraq. The snow keeps melting and more odious details about how Bush maneuvered us into war are becoming visible. We had the Downing Street Memos. We had the lack of WMDs in Iraq. We had the phony claim that Niger was selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Now we learn that Bush and Blair wanted to send in U.S. planes disguised as U.N. planes in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into firing on the planes and justifying a war. This story by Andy McSmith is at www.commondreams.org:
George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.
The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.
PROFITING FROM DEATH
The war in Iraq has been very profitable for some people. Billions of dollars have gone missing there even as the troops don't have adequate body armor, decent food, or armored vehicles. This story about corruption is just the tip of the iceberg. The story by the Associated Press is at www.msnbc.msn.com:
A former U.S. occupation official in Iraq pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to steal more than $2 million and rigging bids on $8.6 million in reconstruction contracts.
Robert J. Stein, 50, of Fayetteville, N.C., admitted that he and his coconspirators smuggled millions of dollars out of Iraq into the United States aboard commercial airliners and laundered cash through multiple bank accounts in Switzerland, Amsterdam and Romania.
Stein was a Defense Department employee who served as a contract official for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, controlling more than $82 million in funds slated for rebuilding the Middle Eastern country.
IMPEACH BUSH
STANDARD OF LIVING IS GOING, GOING, GONE
The truly inspirational economic policies of the Bush administration have resulted in mountainous deficits, lower wages, stagnant job growth, increasing health care costs, rising gasoline and heating oil costs, and NO health care for millions of Americans. Six million more Americans have been added to the rolls of people without health insurance since Bush took office. This item comes from www.democrats.com/node/7637
As you can see, 39.8 million of us had no health insurance when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency and 45.8 million have no coverage as of the end of 2004. The numbers aren’t out yet, but you can bet that figure will go still higher when we see how many people lost their insurance in 2005.
So there you have it. Six million more Americans unable to go to the doctor since Bush took office and he crows that his team is “meeting that responsibility” on keeping America healthy and well.
"I am the master of low expectations," Bush once said of himself.
You can’t say he didn’t warn us.
ANYTHING FOR A WAR
It's like the snow melting in the spring. Everything that the snow covered and hid is coming into view. That's the way it is with George W. Bush and the war against Iraq. The snow keeps melting and more odious details about how Bush maneuvered us into war are becoming visible. We had the Downing Street Memos. We had the lack of WMDs in Iraq. We had the phony claim that Niger was selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Now we learn that Bush and Blair wanted to send in U.S. planes disguised as U.N. planes in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into firing on the planes and justifying a war. This story by Andy McSmith is at www.commondreams.org:
George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.
The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.
PROFITING FROM DEATH
The war in Iraq has been very profitable for some people. Billions of dollars have gone missing there even as the troops don't have adequate body armor, decent food, or armored vehicles. This story about corruption is just the tip of the iceberg. The story by the Associated Press is at www.msnbc.msn.com:
A former U.S. occupation official in Iraq pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to steal more than $2 million and rigging bids on $8.6 million in reconstruction contracts.
Robert J. Stein, 50, of Fayetteville, N.C., admitted that he and his coconspirators smuggled millions of dollars out of Iraq into the United States aboard commercial airliners and laundered cash through multiple bank accounts in Switzerland, Amsterdam and Romania.
Stein was a Defense Department employee who served as a contract official for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, controlling more than $82 million in funds slated for rebuilding the Middle Eastern country.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
February 02, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY?
In the State of the Union speech George W. Bush made a big deal about breaking our "addiction" to oil and to finding alternative energy sources. Isn't it strange, then, that the Energy Department is laying off workers who do research in alternative fuels? You can discard about 99% of what Bush says. This article by Elisabeth Bumiller is at www.nytimes.com:
The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation's oil imports.
The budget for the laboratory, which is just west of Denver, was cut by nearly 15 percent, to $174 million from $202 million, requiring the layoff of about 40 staff members out of a total of 930, said a spokesman, George Douglas. The cut is for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.
OBSCENE OIL PROFITS FINE WITH BUSH
While Americans are getting hammered by high gasoline and fuel oil prices, major oil companies are making record profits. We're talking about billions of dollars in profits. Is Bush concerned about the average American who is having to give up other necessities to afford gasoline? Of course not. Bush loves the "market" because the "market" is great for rich people. This article by Terence Hunt is at news.yahoo.com:
In a wide-ranging interview, Bush defended the $36.13 billion profit Exxon Mobil Corp. posted in 2005 — the highest ever for a U.S. company. He said the profit reflected the market and that consumers socked with soaring energy costs should not expect price breaks.
"I think that basically the price is determined by the marketplace and that's the way it should be," said Bush, a former Texas oil man.
But he added: "There's also a responsibility for energy companies to continue to invest and improve the ways that the American people can get energy.
"I would very much hope that Exxon would participate in the development of a pipeline out of Alaska, for example, in order to make sure there's more natural gas available for families and small business owners so the economy will grow," the president said.
DATA MINING IS A SERIOUS PRIVACY THREAT
I think the Internet is one of the greatest technological marvels in human history. But the Internet's dark side is that information is being gathered at an almost exponential rate on all of us who use the Internet. Every search we makes is on record somewhere. The government and private industry build profiles on us based on what information we seek, what we buy, and what we talk about in e-mails and other communications. Couple that with other databases that have our drivers license records, our insurance records, our medical histories, our employment histories, our credit histories, and other records, and you have a massive trove of information. I don't particularly like anyone building a profile on me without my consent. This article by Robert S. Boyd is at www.commondreams.org:
You may never have heard the term "data mining," but it's at the core of the argument that's raging over government eavesdropping on Americans. It's also how commercial companies learn about who you are, where you go, what you eat, what you like, what you buy.
Data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that's buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.
"A lot can be learned about a person through the combination of massive amounts of data and the use of sophisticated analytical techniques," said Daniel Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University in Washington.
Whenever you search for information or a product on the Internet, say on Google or Yahoo, you leave a trace.
IMPEACH BUSH
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY?
In the State of the Union speech George W. Bush made a big deal about breaking our "addiction" to oil and to finding alternative energy sources. Isn't it strange, then, that the Energy Department is laying off workers who do research in alternative fuels? You can discard about 99% of what Bush says. This article by Elisabeth Bumiller is at www.nytimes.com:
The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation's oil imports.
The budget for the laboratory, which is just west of Denver, was cut by nearly 15 percent, to $174 million from $202 million, requiring the layoff of about 40 staff members out of a total of 930, said a spokesman, George Douglas. The cut is for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.
OBSCENE OIL PROFITS FINE WITH BUSH
While Americans are getting hammered by high gasoline and fuel oil prices, major oil companies are making record profits. We're talking about billions of dollars in profits. Is Bush concerned about the average American who is having to give up other necessities to afford gasoline? Of course not. Bush loves the "market" because the "market" is great for rich people. This article by Terence Hunt is at news.yahoo.com:
In a wide-ranging interview, Bush defended the $36.13 billion profit Exxon Mobil Corp. posted in 2005 — the highest ever for a U.S. company. He said the profit reflected the market and that consumers socked with soaring energy costs should not expect price breaks.
"I think that basically the price is determined by the marketplace and that's the way it should be," said Bush, a former Texas oil man.
But he added: "There's also a responsibility for energy companies to continue to invest and improve the ways that the American people can get energy.
"I would very much hope that Exxon would participate in the development of a pipeline out of Alaska, for example, in order to make sure there's more natural gas available for families and small business owners so the economy will grow," the president said.
DATA MINING IS A SERIOUS PRIVACY THREAT
I think the Internet is one of the greatest technological marvels in human history. But the Internet's dark side is that information is being gathered at an almost exponential rate on all of us who use the Internet. Every search we makes is on record somewhere. The government and private industry build profiles on us based on what information we seek, what we buy, and what we talk about in e-mails and other communications. Couple that with other databases that have our drivers license records, our insurance records, our medical histories, our employment histories, our credit histories, and other records, and you have a massive trove of information. I don't particularly like anyone building a profile on me without my consent. This article by Robert S. Boyd is at www.commondreams.org:
You may never have heard the term "data mining," but it's at the core of the argument that's raging over government eavesdropping on Americans. It's also how commercial companies learn about who you are, where you go, what you eat, what you like, what you buy.
Data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that's buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.
"A lot can be learned about a person through the combination of massive amounts of data and the use of sophisticated analytical techniques," said Daniel Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University in Washington.
Whenever you search for information or a product on the Internet, say on Google or Yahoo, you leave a trace.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
February 1, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
SELECTIVELY PRO-LIFE
I think it's a misnomer to call anti-abortion advocates "pro-life." They're not pro-life at all. They're anti-choice. If they were truly pro-life, they would be opposed to capital punishment. They would be opposed to all war. And they would want all children in this country and the world to have decent lives. Their entire focus is on the fetus. In this article Joyce Marcel looks at the hypocrisy of the anti-choice crowd and the possible ramifications of a Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
I could get behind any movement that takes as its starting point, "Thou shalt not kill." But these anti-abortion folks are the same ones who treasure capital punishment. They're the ones who scorn those of us who seek rehabilitation as well as retribution.
They call abortionists "baby killers" and support those who have the nerve to kill them, their secretaries and their patients. And if they don't themselves kill, they are the ones who hide the killers when they're running from the law and bring food to them in the woods.
Then there's the war-mongering. It's hard to take the Christian right seriously about being pro-life when the one thing they seem to agree upon is the right to bomb the hell out of Muslim countries - mothers, babies, fathers, dogs and cats - whether it's for oil, natural gas, religion or just because they have a different skin color or language. If the pro-life people were leading the anti-war movement, I would be a bit more reassured.
The general joke about pro-lifers is that for them, "Life begins at conception and ends at birth." That's when the poor, the disenfranchised, the overworked, the overloaded and the undersupported women without access to good health insurance have to start raising these unwanted children.
FEAR ITSELF
One of the most famous quotes from FDR is, "All we have to fear is fear itself." In the year 2006 all the Bush administration has to offer us is fear itself. Wrap fear around everything: tax cuts for the rich, destroying the environment, stealing civil liberties, starting unnecessary wars, torture, and using predator drones to kill innocent people. Strip away the wrapping of fear and what has Bush offered us? Gene Lyons writes about the fear-mongering that is the modus operandi of George W. Bush. This column is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Constantly invoking that fear, Bush has turned bin Laden into a political asset--evil incarnate, Satan in a turban. That's one reason the president remains so popular in the Deep South, where fundamentalist black / white thinking and a taste for authoritarianism run strong. But it's worse than useless against the actual threat. Granting the president king-like powers to spy on anybody he chooses not only diminishes our own freedoms, it simply doesn't work. FBI and CIA agents complain of being flooded with a tsunami of useless information they can't even translate, much less use. Real investigations grow narrower, not wider, as they proceed. Meanwhile, such tactics as torture, kidnapping combatants' wives and firing missiles from pilotless drones into Pakistani villages don't make terrorists fear us. They merely drag us down to their level, eroding America's moral authority while sowing rage like dragon's teeth.
IMPEACH BUSH
SELECTIVELY PRO-LIFE
I think it's a misnomer to call anti-abortion advocates "pro-life." They're not pro-life at all. They're anti-choice. If they were truly pro-life, they would be opposed to capital punishment. They would be opposed to all war. And they would want all children in this country and the world to have decent lives. Their entire focus is on the fetus. In this article Joyce Marcel looks at the hypocrisy of the anti-choice crowd and the possible ramifications of a Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
I could get behind any movement that takes as its starting point, "Thou shalt not kill." But these anti-abortion folks are the same ones who treasure capital punishment. They're the ones who scorn those of us who seek rehabilitation as well as retribution.
They call abortionists "baby killers" and support those who have the nerve to kill them, their secretaries and their patients. And if they don't themselves kill, they are the ones who hide the killers when they're running from the law and bring food to them in the woods.
Then there's the war-mongering. It's hard to take the Christian right seriously about being pro-life when the one thing they seem to agree upon is the right to bomb the hell out of Muslim countries - mothers, babies, fathers, dogs and cats - whether it's for oil, natural gas, religion or just because they have a different skin color or language. If the pro-life people were leading the anti-war movement, I would be a bit more reassured.
The general joke about pro-lifers is that for them, "Life begins at conception and ends at birth." That's when the poor, the disenfranchised, the overworked, the overloaded and the undersupported women without access to good health insurance have to start raising these unwanted children.
FEAR ITSELF
One of the most famous quotes from FDR is, "All we have to fear is fear itself." In the year 2006 all the Bush administration has to offer us is fear itself. Wrap fear around everything: tax cuts for the rich, destroying the environment, stealing civil liberties, starting unnecessary wars, torture, and using predator drones to kill innocent people. Strip away the wrapping of fear and what has Bush offered us? Gene Lyons writes about the fear-mongering that is the modus operandi of George W. Bush. This column is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Constantly invoking that fear, Bush has turned bin Laden into a political asset--evil incarnate, Satan in a turban. That's one reason the president remains so popular in the Deep South, where fundamentalist black / white thinking and a taste for authoritarianism run strong. But it's worse than useless against the actual threat. Granting the president king-like powers to spy on anybody he chooses not only diminishes our own freedoms, it simply doesn't work. FBI and CIA agents complain of being flooded with a tsunami of useless information they can't even translate, much less use. Real investigations grow narrower, not wider, as they proceed. Meanwhile, such tactics as torture, kidnapping combatants' wives and firing missiles from pilotless drones into Pakistani villages don't make terrorists fear us. They merely drag us down to their level, eroding America's moral authority while sowing rage like dragon's teeth.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
January 31, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE TRAITORS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Some of the Senators who voted against the filibuster yesterday voted against the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court today. That isn't good enough. The only way to stop Alito from getting on the Court, along with his extremist right-wing ideology, was to vote for a filibuster yesterday. I'm sick and tired of getting shafted by people who are supposed to represent me. They vote for this vile war, they vote for the despicable bankruptcy bill, they vote for any nominee Bush sends to them. They aren't exactly what JFK would have called profiles in courage. Maybe it's time for a new party built around the ideas of a Democratic party that once represented working class people. This bunch can only be counted on to sell us out every time.
DEPRESSION ANYONE?
Those reruns of The Waltons set during the Great Depression may not seem so quaint anymore. For the first time since 1933, the personal savings rates of Americans dropped into negative territory. And today the Federal Reserve, in its infinite wisdom, raised interest rates again. We're getting hammered by both higher gas prices and by higher interest rates. The leadership we have in this country now is truly amazing. This article by MARTIN CRUTSINGER is at news.yahoo.com:
Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items.
The Commerce Department reported Monday that the savings rate fell into negative territory at minus 0.5 percent, meaning that Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income last year but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing.
The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before — in 1932 and 1933 — two years when the country was struggling to cope with the Great Depression, a time of massive business failures and job layoffs.
HOUSING CRISIS IN KERN COUNTY
It's time for a little local flavor. When you see the way things are in the San Joaquin Valley in 2006 you'd almost swear John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was a brand new novel. Instead of Okies, it's Mexican immigrants, but it's pretty much the same. The irony is that the local right-wingers love immigrants when they want the crops picked, but they despise immigrants the rest of the time. This story shows that low income people in Kern County can't even find adequate housing. The story is from www.fresnobee.com:
With almost 6,000 names on the waiting list for low-income housing, Kern County faces a housing crisis among its working poor and low-income residents, officials and residents said.
The number of people seeking low-cost apartments stood at 5,944 earlier this month, almost seven times the 895 total units available in the county. The shortage has residents seeking shelter in dilapidated trailers and wooden shacks and using sewage systems made from open trenches, according to a report by The Bakersfield Californian.
"Oh my God, it's a disaster out here," Lamont resident Gregoria Zuniga told the newspaper. "Nothing works, including the water and the electrical plug-ins. I buy candles and get water from the store."
IMPEACH BUSH
THE TRAITORS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Some of the Senators who voted against the filibuster yesterday voted against the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court today. That isn't good enough. The only way to stop Alito from getting on the Court, along with his extremist right-wing ideology, was to vote for a filibuster yesterday. I'm sick and tired of getting shafted by people who are supposed to represent me. They vote for this vile war, they vote for the despicable bankruptcy bill, they vote for any nominee Bush sends to them. They aren't exactly what JFK would have called profiles in courage. Maybe it's time for a new party built around the ideas of a Democratic party that once represented working class people. This bunch can only be counted on to sell us out every time.
DEPRESSION ANYONE?
Those reruns of The Waltons set during the Great Depression may not seem so quaint anymore. For the first time since 1933, the personal savings rates of Americans dropped into negative territory. And today the Federal Reserve, in its infinite wisdom, raised interest rates again. We're getting hammered by both higher gas prices and by higher interest rates. The leadership we have in this country now is truly amazing. This article by MARTIN CRUTSINGER is at news.yahoo.com:
Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items.
The Commerce Department reported Monday that the savings rate fell into negative territory at minus 0.5 percent, meaning that Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income last year but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing.
The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before — in 1932 and 1933 — two years when the country was struggling to cope with the Great Depression, a time of massive business failures and job layoffs.
HOUSING CRISIS IN KERN COUNTY
It's time for a little local flavor. When you see the way things are in the San Joaquin Valley in 2006 you'd almost swear John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was a brand new novel. Instead of Okies, it's Mexican immigrants, but it's pretty much the same. The irony is that the local right-wingers love immigrants when they want the crops picked, but they despise immigrants the rest of the time. This story shows that low income people in Kern County can't even find adequate housing. The story is from www.fresnobee.com:
With almost 6,000 names on the waiting list for low-income housing, Kern County faces a housing crisis among its working poor and low-income residents, officials and residents said.
The number of people seeking low-cost apartments stood at 5,944 earlier this month, almost seven times the 895 total units available in the county. The shortage has residents seeking shelter in dilapidated trailers and wooden shacks and using sewage systems made from open trenches, according to a report by The Bakersfield Californian.
"Oh my God, it's a disaster out here," Lamont resident Gregoria Zuniga told the newspaper. "Nothing works, including the water and the electrical plug-ins. I buy candles and get water from the store."
Sunday, January 29, 2006
January 29, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
FILIBUSTER ALITO
GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MIKE MALLOY
I discovered Mike Malloy a few years ago on the ieamerica network. I had to listen to his show on the Internet. Then ieamerica folded and Mike was off the air for about six months, which was a depressing time. Along came Air America Radio and Mike got back on the air. I admire Malloy for being absolutely uncompromising in fully illuminating the crimes and lies of George W. Bush and his administration. Mike is doing what all the media, if they really cared about decency and the good of the country, would be doing. A criminal in the White House is still a criminal no matter how many photo-ops he does or how many times he repeats buzzwords like "freedom" or "democracy" or how much gushing praise he gets from the likes of Cokie Roberts or Wolf Blitzer and Katie Couric and other media hacks. This article by Sheila Samples at www.democraticunderground.com:
"I'm pissed off -- and I'm Mike Malloy."
Malloy, clean-up guy for Air America Radio (10pm-1am), rode in on the strident vibrations of Pink Floyd's Run Like Hell and, for the next three hours, relentlessly hit both spineless Democrats and Republican "sonszabitches" with the truth about the Bush crime family, pummelled them with the truth about spineless and quivering democrats, bitch-slapped them with the truth about where we're headed if we don't wake up, stand up and speak up...
CLIMATE CHANGE MAY BE HAPPENING FASTER THAN THOUGHT
You're reminded of the famous Robert Frost poem where he talks about the road not taken. We're at the fork in the road in dealing with global climate change. We can pretend it's not happening and go along with right-wing ideologues who think short term profit is more important than the environment, or we can start taking serious action to stop human effects on global climate change. Scientists who study the issue say we have to take dramatic steps within the next fifty years or the changes to the climate may be irreversible. This article by Juliet Eilperin is at www.washingtonpost.com:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
GREED ISN'T GOOD
It would seem like common sense that transferring all the world's wealth to a very few hands isn't a good idea. It's like the old cliche about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Even more, it's about justice . How long are the have-nots supposed to tolerate grossly unfair economic systems that reward just a few people? This article takes a look at the transfer of wealth from the developing world to the industrialized world and how that system isn't sustainable. The article from Reuters is at www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-01-28-davos-rdp_x.htm?csp=26
Massive flows of capital from the emerging to the developed world are unsustainable and risk damaging both poor and rich countries, some of the world's top finance officials said on Saturday.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said that the current global investment pattern was "profoundly abnormal" and in no country's interest.
"It is not sustainable in the long run that the emerging world would finance the industrial world. It doesn't correspond to the interest of the emerging world, neither to the interest of the industrialised world," he said.
Then, with a friendly and quiet "watch your back," he was gone. I just sat there, grinning. Maybe we aren't doomed to slip-slide into fascist hell after all. By sheer luck, I had stumbled across a guy with the ability to see the truth and the courage to tell the people...
IMPEACH BUSH
FILIBUSTER ALITO
GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MIKE MALLOY
I discovered Mike Malloy a few years ago on the ieamerica network. I had to listen to his show on the Internet. Then ieamerica folded and Mike was off the air for about six months, which was a depressing time. Along came Air America Radio and Mike got back on the air. I admire Malloy for being absolutely uncompromising in fully illuminating the crimes and lies of George W. Bush and his administration. Mike is doing what all the media, if they really cared about decency and the good of the country, would be doing. A criminal in the White House is still a criminal no matter how many photo-ops he does or how many times he repeats buzzwords like "freedom" or "democracy" or how much gushing praise he gets from the likes of Cokie Roberts or Wolf Blitzer and Katie Couric and other media hacks. This article by Sheila Samples at www.democraticunderground.com:
"I'm pissed off -- and I'm Mike Malloy."
Malloy, clean-up guy for Air America Radio (10pm-1am), rode in on the strident vibrations of Pink Floyd's Run Like Hell and, for the next three hours, relentlessly hit both spineless Democrats and Republican "sonszabitches" with the truth about the Bush crime family, pummelled them with the truth about spineless and quivering democrats, bitch-slapped them with the truth about where we're headed if we don't wake up, stand up and speak up...
CLIMATE CHANGE MAY BE HAPPENING FASTER THAN THOUGHT
You're reminded of the famous Robert Frost poem where he talks about the road not taken. We're at the fork in the road in dealing with global climate change. We can pretend it's not happening and go along with right-wing ideologues who think short term profit is more important than the environment, or we can start taking serious action to stop human effects on global climate change. Scientists who study the issue say we have to take dramatic steps within the next fifty years or the changes to the climate may be irreversible. This article by Juliet Eilperin is at www.washingtonpost.com:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
GREED ISN'T GOOD
It would seem like common sense that transferring all the world's wealth to a very few hands isn't a good idea. It's like the old cliche about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Even more, it's about justice . How long are the have-nots supposed to tolerate grossly unfair economic systems that reward just a few people? This article takes a look at the transfer of wealth from the developing world to the industrialized world and how that system isn't sustainable. The article from Reuters is at www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-01-28-davos-rdp_x.htm?csp=26
Massive flows of capital from the emerging to the developed world are unsustainable and risk damaging both poor and rich countries, some of the world's top finance officials said on Saturday.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said that the current global investment pattern was "profoundly abnormal" and in no country's interest.
"It is not sustainable in the long run that the emerging world would finance the industrial world. It doesn't correspond to the interest of the emerging world, neither to the interest of the industrialised world," he said.
Then, with a friendly and quiet "watch your back," he was gone. I just sat there, grinning. Maybe we aren't doomed to slip-slide into fascist hell after all. By sheer luck, I had stumbled across a guy with the ability to see the truth and the courage to tell the people...
Saturday, January 28, 2006
January 28, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
FILIBUSTER ALITO
BUSH TAX CUTS HURT ECONOMY
According to the wackos who tout supply side economics, along with big tax cuts for the rich and corporations, government revenues are supposed to surge and a good time is to be had by all. A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows that Bush's tax cuts are actually hurting the economy. When Bill Clinton raised taxes modestly on the very wealthy the economy prospered by historical standards. This article by Aviva Aron-Dine is at www.cbpp.org/1-27-06bud.htm
New forecasts issued by the Congressional Budget Office confirm that if the tax cuts and Alternative Minimum Tax relief are extended, the nation faces large and growing deficits over the next ten years, with total deficits of between $3.5 and $4 trillion over that period.[1]
While still quite high, CBO’s current deficit projections are somewhat lower than those issued last January and August. A key reason for the lower deficit estimates is that CBO has revised its revenue projections upwards.
Some proponents of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts may try to seize on CBO’s new budget forecasts to argue that “tax cuts are working.” They may claim that tax cuts have led to stronger economic growth and that this growth is the source of the higher revenue estimates.
DARK AGES REVISITED
In the age of Bush we see the worst combination of militarism, jingoism, torture, and religious fundamentalism. It's like the Dark Ages Version 2.0. Gore Vidal has some thoughts in this article at www.truthdig.com:
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”
THE ECONOMY NOSEDIVES
Last quarter Bush apologists were cheering the "robust" economy, but the economic growth was an illusion. We see the reality of the Bush economy in the fourth quarter that showed just a 1.1% annual growth. Some people are quick to blame higher gas prices, which are certainly a factor. But the fact is most of us in the middle class and the poor don't have any money. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation. The government has made things worse by raising minimum credit card payments and by passing a Draconian bankruptcy law. Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve have also increased interest rates several times for God only knows what reason. What we're seeing now is the real Republican economy at work. This article by Dan Arnall is at abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1548547&ad=true
A surprising government report this morning showed U.S. economic growth slowed considerably in the fourth quarter of 2005, an indication that skyrocketing energy prices were hitting consumers' wallets and slowing spending.
The Department of Commerce report showed that the nation's economy grew at an anemic 1.1 percent — the worst performance in three years.
IMPEACH BUSH
FILIBUSTER ALITO
BUSH TAX CUTS HURT ECONOMY
According to the wackos who tout supply side economics, along with big tax cuts for the rich and corporations, government revenues are supposed to surge and a good time is to be had by all. A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows that Bush's tax cuts are actually hurting the economy. When Bill Clinton raised taxes modestly on the very wealthy the economy prospered by historical standards. This article by Aviva Aron-Dine is at www.cbpp.org/1-27-06bud.htm
New forecasts issued by the Congressional Budget Office confirm that if the tax cuts and Alternative Minimum Tax relief are extended, the nation faces large and growing deficits over the next ten years, with total deficits of between $3.5 and $4 trillion over that period.[1]
While still quite high, CBO’s current deficit projections are somewhat lower than those issued last January and August. A key reason for the lower deficit estimates is that CBO has revised its revenue projections upwards.
Some proponents of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts may try to seize on CBO’s new budget forecasts to argue that “tax cuts are working.” They may claim that tax cuts have led to stronger economic growth and that this growth is the source of the higher revenue estimates.
DARK AGES REVISITED
In the age of Bush we see the worst combination of militarism, jingoism, torture, and religious fundamentalism. It's like the Dark Ages Version 2.0. Gore Vidal has some thoughts in this article at www.truthdig.com:
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”
THE ECONOMY NOSEDIVES
Last quarter Bush apologists were cheering the "robust" economy, but the economic growth was an illusion. We see the reality of the Bush economy in the fourth quarter that showed just a 1.1% annual growth. Some people are quick to blame higher gas prices, which are certainly a factor. But the fact is most of us in the middle class and the poor don't have any money. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation. The government has made things worse by raising minimum credit card payments and by passing a Draconian bankruptcy law. Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve have also increased interest rates several times for God only knows what reason. What we're seeing now is the real Republican economy at work. This article by Dan Arnall is at abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1548547&ad=true
A surprising government report this morning showed U.S. economic growth slowed considerably in the fourth quarter of 2005, an indication that skyrocketing energy prices were hitting consumers' wallets and slowing spending.
The Department of Commerce report showed that the nation's economy grew at an anemic 1.1 percent — the worst performance in three years.
Friday, January 27, 2006
January 27, 2006
FILIBUSTER ALITO
IMPEACH BUSH
THE MASTER OF PAIN AND SUFFERING
If you could measure the pain and suffering caused by the policies of George W. Bush, there wouldn't be a scale large enough. The unnecessary war in Iraq has caused needless death and injuries to tens of thousands. Bush has deliberately allowed the torture of other people. He has made life more difficult for the poor and the middle class in this country with his onerous tax policies. He has paid scant attention to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. His prescription drug plan will undoubtedly cause many seniors to die because they can't get their medications. Bob Herbert has a good column linked at www.topplebush.com:
The fiasco in Iraq and the president's response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe were Mr. Bush's two most spectacular foul-ups. There have been many others. The president's new Medicare prescription drug program has been a monumental embarrassment, leaving some of the most vulnerable members of our society without essential medication. Prominent members of the president's own party are balking at the heavy hand of his No Child Left Behind law, which was supposed to radically upgrade the quality of public education.
The Constitution? Civil liberties? Don't ask.
Just keep in mind, whatever your political beliefs, that incompetence in high places can have devastating consequences.
BUSH AN ABJECT FAILURE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
The traitorous Karl Rove recently told a group of Republicans that national security was the major Republican issue for the 2006 elections. Rove claims that Republicans are much stronger than Democrats at protecting the country. An examination of the facts, however, shows the dismal failure of the Bush administration to provide for the common defense. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is still on the loose. Our military has been grossly misused and overcommitted to a war in Iraq that wasn't even necessary. Iraq has become a quagmire with no good way out. This article comes from americanprogressaction.org:
Our homeland is still not secure. Almost two years after the 9/11 Commission gave its report on the state of our nation’s security and steps that needed to be taken, the administration received failing grades from the Public Discourse Project. Thomas H. Kean, former chair of the 9/11 Commission, said that homeland security is "not a priority for the government right now.” Only 6 percent of national security spending is devoted to homeland security, and as Hurricane Katrina showed us, first responders still lack the crucial communications apparatus they need to operate during an emergency.
THE END OF SOCIAL MOBILITY
Reactionaries like George W. Bush deliberately pursue policies that eviscerate the chance to climb into the middle class or beyond. The policies of this administration seek not only to preserve the status quo, but to take us back to a harsher, more unequal society. During the years of this administration productivity of American workers has been reaching record levels, but that productivity is not being rewarded by better wages. The gains are instead going to CEOs and big stockholders. This article by Bob Burnett is at www.commondreams.org:
However, in the same time period, The Economist ran an article noting that while Americans continue to believe that anyone can change social class through hard work, "A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." This, and more recent studies, indicate that opportunity is disappearing for those who would become triumphant individuals.
FILIBUSTER ALITO
IMPEACH BUSH
THE MASTER OF PAIN AND SUFFERING
If you could measure the pain and suffering caused by the policies of George W. Bush, there wouldn't be a scale large enough. The unnecessary war in Iraq has caused needless death and injuries to tens of thousands. Bush has deliberately allowed the torture of other people. He has made life more difficult for the poor and the middle class in this country with his onerous tax policies. He has paid scant attention to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. His prescription drug plan will undoubtedly cause many seniors to die because they can't get their medications. Bob Herbert has a good column linked at www.topplebush.com:
The fiasco in Iraq and the president's response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe were Mr. Bush's two most spectacular foul-ups. There have been many others. The president's new Medicare prescription drug program has been a monumental embarrassment, leaving some of the most vulnerable members of our society without essential medication. Prominent members of the president's own party are balking at the heavy hand of his No Child Left Behind law, which was supposed to radically upgrade the quality of public education.
The Constitution? Civil liberties? Don't ask.
Just keep in mind, whatever your political beliefs, that incompetence in high places can have devastating consequences.
BUSH AN ABJECT FAILURE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
The traitorous Karl Rove recently told a group of Republicans that national security was the major Republican issue for the 2006 elections. Rove claims that Republicans are much stronger than Democrats at protecting the country. An examination of the facts, however, shows the dismal failure of the Bush administration to provide for the common defense. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is still on the loose. Our military has been grossly misused and overcommitted to a war in Iraq that wasn't even necessary. Iraq has become a quagmire with no good way out. This article comes from americanprogressaction.org:
Our homeland is still not secure. Almost two years after the 9/11 Commission gave its report on the state of our nation’s security and steps that needed to be taken, the administration received failing grades from the Public Discourse Project. Thomas H. Kean, former chair of the 9/11 Commission, said that homeland security is "not a priority for the government right now.” Only 6 percent of national security spending is devoted to homeland security, and as Hurricane Katrina showed us, first responders still lack the crucial communications apparatus they need to operate during an emergency.
THE END OF SOCIAL MOBILITY
Reactionaries like George W. Bush deliberately pursue policies that eviscerate the chance to climb into the middle class or beyond. The policies of this administration seek not only to preserve the status quo, but to take us back to a harsher, more unequal society. During the years of this administration productivity of American workers has been reaching record levels, but that productivity is not being rewarded by better wages. The gains are instead going to CEOs and big stockholders. This article by Bob Burnett is at www.commondreams.org:
However, in the same time period, The Economist ran an article noting that while Americans continue to believe that anyone can change social class through hard work, "A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." This, and more recent studies, indicate that opportunity is disappearing for those who would become triumphant individuals.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
January 26, 2006
FILIBUSTER ALITO
IMPEACH BUSH
THE BUSH TWO STEP
What is being called Spygate is just getting uglier and uglier. We know that George W. Bush said publicly that the government needed a warrant to eavesdrop on people. Even then the administration was spying on Americans. But an interesting twist to this story is that a few years ago the administration said they believed a law that would enable what they've been doing was unconstitutional. Huh? They said at the time they didn't need the law. These guys can't even do corruption competently. This item comes from http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-is-huge-in-2002-bush.html
The Bush Administration opposed legislation that would have given them the very power they now claim they needed, power they now claim they didn't have under FISA. It's because they didn't have this power, they now claim, that they had to break the law and spy without a warrant. But this law would have given them much of the legal power they wanted. Yet they said they didn't need it, and worse yet, that the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. But now we know they did it anyway.
And it was all discovered by a blogger, and now it's a big story in Thursday's Washington Post and LA Times. Amazing.
And when you read through the story, below, note what the administration NOW says. They claim the new legislation wouldn't have gone far enough. Really? First, the administration said at the time that the legislation went too far and wasn't needed, so bull.
Second, the Bush administration now is changing their story and claiming that they opposed the legislation because it wouldn't have permitted them to snoop as much as they wanted. But back in 2002 the Bush people said that even the lesser-snooping-power in the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. So if the lesser power was likely unconstitutional, imagine how unconstitutional Bush's ACTUAL domestic spying program was and is? A program that by the Bush administration's own admission went (and goes) far beyond what the proposed law would have allowed.
EVEN GROVER NORQUIST OPPOSES SPYING
I don't like Grover Norquist and his philosophy of turning everything over to private interests. Norquist is famous for saying we should shrink government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub. So it comes as a genuine surprise that even Grover Norquist is on record as opposing the Bush administration's warrantless spying. This item by James Sterngold is at www.commondreams.org:
Larry Diamond, a Democrat and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, went to Baghdad in 2004 as a consultant for the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, believing strongly in the Bush administration's goal of building a democracy there. While critical of many aspects of the Iraq war, he has, he says, wholeheartedly supported President Bush's aggressive approach to the war on terror.
Grover Norquist is one of the most influential conservative Republicans in Washington. His weekly "Wednesday Meeting" at his L Street office is a must for conservative strategists, and he has been called the "managing director of the hard-core right" by the liberal Nation magazine. Perhaps the country's leading anti-tax enthusiast, he is, like Diamond, a hawk in the war on terror.
Despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they agree on one other major issue: that the Bush administration's program of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency without obtaining court warrants has less to do with the war on terror than with threats to the nation's civil liberties.
"My view on the terrorists is that we should find all of them and kill them," said Norquist. "But we should also protect our civil liberties, which the terrorists are trying to destroy."
THE RICH-POOR DIVIDE
It should come as no surprise that another study shows the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is widening. We have seen deliberate policies by the federal government to create a small group of very rich and to slam the door on everyone else. Failure to raise the minimum wage above its disgraceful $5.15 an hour is just one of the most egregious examples of catering to the wealthy. Tax policies that consistently lower taxes on the most affluent, while slashing programs for the poor and the middle class, contribute to the divide. This article by Mark Johnson is at www.sfgate.com:
The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the federal minimum wage has remained flat for years, union membership has declined and industries have faced global competition, according to a study released Thursday.
The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, both liberal-leaning think tanks, found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said.
Families in the middle fifth saw their incomes rise 28 percent, or $10,218.
FILIBUSTER ALITO
IMPEACH BUSH
THE BUSH TWO STEP
What is being called Spygate is just getting uglier and uglier. We know that George W. Bush said publicly that the government needed a warrant to eavesdrop on people. Even then the administration was spying on Americans. But an interesting twist to this story is that a few years ago the administration said they believed a law that would enable what they've been doing was unconstitutional. Huh? They said at the time they didn't need the law. These guys can't even do corruption competently. This item comes from http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-is-huge-in-2002-bush.html
The Bush Administration opposed legislation that would have given them the very power they now claim they needed, power they now claim they didn't have under FISA. It's because they didn't have this power, they now claim, that they had to break the law and spy without a warrant. But this law would have given them much of the legal power they wanted. Yet they said they didn't need it, and worse yet, that the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. But now we know they did it anyway.
And it was all discovered by a blogger, and now it's a big story in Thursday's Washington Post and LA Times. Amazing.
And when you read through the story, below, note what the administration NOW says. They claim the new legislation wouldn't have gone far enough. Really? First, the administration said at the time that the legislation went too far and wasn't needed, so bull.
Second, the Bush administration now is changing their story and claiming that they opposed the legislation because it wouldn't have permitted them to snoop as much as they wanted. But back in 2002 the Bush people said that even the lesser-snooping-power in the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. So if the lesser power was likely unconstitutional, imagine how unconstitutional Bush's ACTUAL domestic spying program was and is? A program that by the Bush administration's own admission went (and goes) far beyond what the proposed law would have allowed.
EVEN GROVER NORQUIST OPPOSES SPYING
I don't like Grover Norquist and his philosophy of turning everything over to private interests. Norquist is famous for saying we should shrink government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub. So it comes as a genuine surprise that even Grover Norquist is on record as opposing the Bush administration's warrantless spying. This item by James Sterngold is at www.commondreams.org:
Larry Diamond, a Democrat and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, went to Baghdad in 2004 as a consultant for the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, believing strongly in the Bush administration's goal of building a democracy there. While critical of many aspects of the Iraq war, he has, he says, wholeheartedly supported President Bush's aggressive approach to the war on terror.
Grover Norquist is one of the most influential conservative Republicans in Washington. His weekly "Wednesday Meeting" at his L Street office is a must for conservative strategists, and he has been called the "managing director of the hard-core right" by the liberal Nation magazine. Perhaps the country's leading anti-tax enthusiast, he is, like Diamond, a hawk in the war on terror.
Despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they agree on one other major issue: that the Bush administration's program of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency without obtaining court warrants has less to do with the war on terror than with threats to the nation's civil liberties.
"My view on the terrorists is that we should find all of them and kill them," said Norquist. "But we should also protect our civil liberties, which the terrorists are trying to destroy."
THE RICH-POOR DIVIDE
It should come as no surprise that another study shows the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is widening. We have seen deliberate policies by the federal government to create a small group of very rich and to slam the door on everyone else. Failure to raise the minimum wage above its disgraceful $5.15 an hour is just one of the most egregious examples of catering to the wealthy. Tax policies that consistently lower taxes on the most affluent, while slashing programs for the poor and the middle class, contribute to the divide. This article by Mark Johnson is at www.sfgate.com:
The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the federal minimum wage has remained flat for years, union membership has declined and industries have faced global competition, according to a study released Thursday.
The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, both liberal-leaning think tanks, found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said.
Families in the middle fifth saw their incomes rise 28 percent, or $10,218.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
January 25, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
ROVE'S GAME PLAN
Republicans for years have tried to represent themselves as the better party on national security. They often resort to innuendo and outright lies. Richard Nixon was a master at painting his political opponents as Communist sympathizers or at least weak on Communism. Karl Rove, Bush's Nixon, is using the old tried and true tactic to suggest Democrats are weak on terrorism. Never mind that it was Rove himself who undoubtedly outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Never mind that the Bush administration ignored the dangers of a terrorist attack until we got hit on 9/11. Never mind all the holes in our security outlined in the 9/11 Commission Report. E. J. Dionne looks at the Rove game plan at www.washingtonpost.com:
And, yes, the core questions must be asked: Are we really safer now than we were five years ago? Has the Iraq war, as organized and prosecuted by the administration, made us stronger or weaker? Do we feel more secure knowing the heck of a job our government did during Hurricane Katrina? Do we have any confidence that the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies will clean up their act if Washington remains under the sway of one-party government?
Imagine one Super Bowl team tipping the other to a large part of its offensive strategy. Smart coaches would plot and plan and scheme. You wonder what Democrats will do with the 10-month lead time Rove has kindly offered them.
WHEN WORKERS COUNTED
This is an article in part about the Remington Company that made guns and the anti-capitalist sentiment that prevailed in the 19th century during the Remington Company's heyday. It was a time when work and workers were honored. We've seen a major paradigm shift. Now it is capitalists who are revered and workers are treated as so much refuse. This article by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman is at www.commondreams.org:
Doukas, who is now a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, says that in the late 1800s, corporations, once they took control of production, tried to change the culture of the United States.
From the gospel of work to what Andrew Carnegie called the gospel of wealth.
"If we look at the United States in the 19th century, we see a popular culture that was, in a word, anti-capitalist," Doukas said. "And this was reflected very much in the political scene of the time. You had to be in favor of the working man. You had to support and praise the common man. The basic idea is that work is what dignifies a person. It is an anti-aristocratic ideology. It goes way back, really. Aristocrats were characterized as parasites, as people who lived off the work of others. Whereas good, virtuous American people worked hard and were expected to enjoy the fruits of their labor."
So, for example, Abraham Lincoln, in his first annual message to Congress in 1861, makes his statement about capital and labor: "Capital is only the fruit of labor. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration."
THE PEEPING TOM PRESIDENT
The voices are speaking to George W. Bush. They're the voices that he says told him to attack Iraq and that he was appointed by God, not the Supreme Court, to be president. The voices tell George that he must know everything about everyone because the enemy is out there lurking in the shadows. Is it America that George is protecting, or is it the fear that he, George W. Bush, is being revealed before the world and history as a massive fraud. Mark Morford has some interesting thoughts about the Bush administration's foray into Internet searches. You wonder how much farther they're willing to go to invade our lives. This column is at www.sfgate.com:
Simply couple this latest move with BushCo's outright love and defense of torture, along with Dubya's recent enthusiastic declaration that his team of flying monkeys has been secretly wiretapping whomever it wants in this nation for the past four years without any sort of warrant and, well, you've got yourself one hell of a big sticky taste of happy neofascism.
What, not enough? Fine. How about how Bush's insane rate of issuing those now-infamous "signing statements," those little firebombs of judicial misprision wherein your mumbling president gets to reserve for himself the right to ignore any law he signs -- yes, any law he desires: anti-torture, surveillance, you name it -- whenever he feels like it, if he deems that law unconstitutional. Screw Congress. Screw the system of law. And screw, well, you.
For the record: Ronald Reagan issued 71 signing statements during his unholy term. Bill Clinton issued 105 over the span of eight years. Bush 41 signed off on 146, the previous record.
IMPEACH BUSH
ROVE'S GAME PLAN
Republicans for years have tried to represent themselves as the better party on national security. They often resort to innuendo and outright lies. Richard Nixon was a master at painting his political opponents as Communist sympathizers or at least weak on Communism. Karl Rove, Bush's Nixon, is using the old tried and true tactic to suggest Democrats are weak on terrorism. Never mind that it was Rove himself who undoubtedly outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Never mind that the Bush administration ignored the dangers of a terrorist attack until we got hit on 9/11. Never mind all the holes in our security outlined in the 9/11 Commission Report. E. J. Dionne looks at the Rove game plan at www.washingtonpost.com:
And, yes, the core questions must be asked: Are we really safer now than we were five years ago? Has the Iraq war, as organized and prosecuted by the administration, made us stronger or weaker? Do we feel more secure knowing the heck of a job our government did during Hurricane Katrina? Do we have any confidence that the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies will clean up their act if Washington remains under the sway of one-party government?
Imagine one Super Bowl team tipping the other to a large part of its offensive strategy. Smart coaches would plot and plan and scheme. You wonder what Democrats will do with the 10-month lead time Rove has kindly offered them.
WHEN WORKERS COUNTED
This is an article in part about the Remington Company that made guns and the anti-capitalist sentiment that prevailed in the 19th century during the Remington Company's heyday. It was a time when work and workers were honored. We've seen a major paradigm shift. Now it is capitalists who are revered and workers are treated as so much refuse. This article by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman is at www.commondreams.org:
Doukas, who is now a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, says that in the late 1800s, corporations, once they took control of production, tried to change the culture of the United States.
From the gospel of work to what Andrew Carnegie called the gospel of wealth.
"If we look at the United States in the 19th century, we see a popular culture that was, in a word, anti-capitalist," Doukas said. "And this was reflected very much in the political scene of the time. You had to be in favor of the working man. You had to support and praise the common man. The basic idea is that work is what dignifies a person. It is an anti-aristocratic ideology. It goes way back, really. Aristocrats were characterized as parasites, as people who lived off the work of others. Whereas good, virtuous American people worked hard and were expected to enjoy the fruits of their labor."
So, for example, Abraham Lincoln, in his first annual message to Congress in 1861, makes his statement about capital and labor: "Capital is only the fruit of labor. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration."
THE PEEPING TOM PRESIDENT
The voices are speaking to George W. Bush. They're the voices that he says told him to attack Iraq and that he was appointed by God, not the Supreme Court, to be president. The voices tell George that he must know everything about everyone because the enemy is out there lurking in the shadows. Is it America that George is protecting, or is it the fear that he, George W. Bush, is being revealed before the world and history as a massive fraud. Mark Morford has some interesting thoughts about the Bush administration's foray into Internet searches. You wonder how much farther they're willing to go to invade our lives. This column is at www.sfgate.com:
Simply couple this latest move with BushCo's outright love and defense of torture, along with Dubya's recent enthusiastic declaration that his team of flying monkeys has been secretly wiretapping whomever it wants in this nation for the past four years without any sort of warrant and, well, you've got yourself one hell of a big sticky taste of happy neofascism.
What, not enough? Fine. How about how Bush's insane rate of issuing those now-infamous "signing statements," those little firebombs of judicial misprision wherein your mumbling president gets to reserve for himself the right to ignore any law he signs -- yes, any law he desires: anti-torture, surveillance, you name it -- whenever he feels like it, if he deems that law unconstitutional. Screw Congress. Screw the system of law. And screw, well, you.
For the record: Ronald Reagan issued 71 signing statements during his unholy term. Bill Clinton issued 105 over the span of eight years. Bush 41 signed off on 146, the previous record.
Monday, January 23, 2006
January 23, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
NEW YORK TIMES SAYS NO TO ALITO
Samuel Alito might be fit to head up the Federalist Society or some other right-wing extremist group, but he doesn't belong on the Supreme Court. His judicial record clearly shows he would support the government against the citizen and big business against workers and consumers. We can be fairly certain he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which may set off a civil war in this country. This editorial opposing Alito comes from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:
There is every reason to believe, based on his long paper trail and the evasive answers he gave at his hearings, that Judge Alito would quickly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it is hard to see how Senators Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, all Republicans, could square support for Judge Alito with their commitment to abortion rights.
Judge Alito has consistently shown a bias in favor of those in power over those who need the law to protect them. Women, racial minorities, the elderly and workers who come to court seeking justice should expect little sympathy. In the same flat bureaucratic tones he used at the hearings, he is likely to insist that the law can do nothing for them.
The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around this nomination. But there is no reason to believe that Judge Alito is any more popular than the president who nominated him. Outside of a small but vocal group of hard-core conservatives, America has greeted the Alito nomination with a shrug - and counted on senators to make the right decision.
The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.
FREE MARKET BRAINWASHING
Almost from the moment you're born in the United States you start getting brainwashed with free market orthodoxy. You hear the old Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth recited to you in a variety of ways. Success is defined by how much material wealth you own. Free market propaganda the past few years has emphasized the benefits of a global economy. We're supposed to think it's a good thing that we see jobs going off shore and wages falling. It's particularly galling on the day that the Ford Motor Company has announced up to 30,000 job cuts. This item comes from David Sirota at www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-dishonest-economic-fa_b_14263.html
What's really going on is obvious: the political/media Establishment is trying to dishonestly create the perception that it is just a fact that the Big Money position on key economic issues (ie. corporate-written trade deals and neoliberal economics) has resulted and always will result in major benefits to society. The Establishment does this even though almost every factual indicator about these policies of import to ordinary people - real wages, trade deficits, health care & retirement benefit levels - are on the negative swing. Oh sure, corporate profits continue to skyrocket - but the indicators that actually matter to the vast majority of hard working Americans in their day-to-day lives are not.
The most interesting question of all is why? Why would the Establishment so deliberately bias its economic coverage? For politicians, the answer is easy - the more they toe the corporate line, push economic policies that screw over ordinary citizens and pad Big Money's bottom line, the more our corrupt, pay-to-play political process rewards them with huge wads of campaign cash. For the media, it is more complex, having partly to do with the fact that the media is owned by corporations with a huge incentive to push ultraconservative economic policies and partly to do with the fact that in today's journalist-as-celebrity era, many of the most important opinion-setting reporters are upper-crust elites who never have to deal with the consequences of the economic prescriptions they push.
BROKE AND UNDER SURVEILLANCE
In Bush world Pollyanna would feel right at home. We're told the economy is robust, the war in Iraq is going swell, and the American dream is brighter and healthier than ever. The facts show otherwise. Most of us are just going broke and we're under surveillance lest we offend Fearless Leader. This article by Ed Naha is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
After inflation is taken into account, the wages of 80% of American workers have gone down every year for the past four years.
The amount of Americans living in poverty has gone up every year for five years.
The number of bankruptcy cases filed in the 12-month period ending on September 30th, 2005, totaled a record 1,782,643, up 10.1% from the same period the year before. (600,000 in last October alone before Scrooge's new bankruptcy laws went into effect.)
Last year was the first time since the Great Depression that Americans spent more than they earned.
According to SAMNow (Save American Manufacturing), as of last October, 48 out of 50 states have lost manufacturing jobs under Georgie's reign, with California losing 350,000, Ohio over 165,000, Illinois and New York over 135,000 each and Pennsylvania over 150,000.
IMPEACH BUSH
NEW YORK TIMES SAYS NO TO ALITO
Samuel Alito might be fit to head up the Federalist Society or some other right-wing extremist group, but he doesn't belong on the Supreme Court. His judicial record clearly shows he would support the government against the citizen and big business against workers and consumers. We can be fairly certain he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which may set off a civil war in this country. This editorial opposing Alito comes from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:
There is every reason to believe, based on his long paper trail and the evasive answers he gave at his hearings, that Judge Alito would quickly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it is hard to see how Senators Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, all Republicans, could square support for Judge Alito with their commitment to abortion rights.
Judge Alito has consistently shown a bias in favor of those in power over those who need the law to protect them. Women, racial minorities, the elderly and workers who come to court seeking justice should expect little sympathy. In the same flat bureaucratic tones he used at the hearings, he is likely to insist that the law can do nothing for them.
The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around this nomination. But there is no reason to believe that Judge Alito is any more popular than the president who nominated him. Outside of a small but vocal group of hard-core conservatives, America has greeted the Alito nomination with a shrug - and counted on senators to make the right decision.
The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.
FREE MARKET BRAINWASHING
Almost from the moment you're born in the United States you start getting brainwashed with free market orthodoxy. You hear the old Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth recited to you in a variety of ways. Success is defined by how much material wealth you own. Free market propaganda the past few years has emphasized the benefits of a global economy. We're supposed to think it's a good thing that we see jobs going off shore and wages falling. It's particularly galling on the day that the Ford Motor Company has announced up to 30,000 job cuts. This item comes from David Sirota at www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-dishonest-economic-fa_b_14263.html
What's really going on is obvious: the political/media Establishment is trying to dishonestly create the perception that it is just a fact that the Big Money position on key economic issues (ie. corporate-written trade deals and neoliberal economics) has resulted and always will result in major benefits to society. The Establishment does this even though almost every factual indicator about these policies of import to ordinary people - real wages, trade deficits, health care & retirement benefit levels - are on the negative swing. Oh sure, corporate profits continue to skyrocket - but the indicators that actually matter to the vast majority of hard working Americans in their day-to-day lives are not.
The most interesting question of all is why? Why would the Establishment so deliberately bias its economic coverage? For politicians, the answer is easy - the more they toe the corporate line, push economic policies that screw over ordinary citizens and pad Big Money's bottom line, the more our corrupt, pay-to-play political process rewards them with huge wads of campaign cash. For the media, it is more complex, having partly to do with the fact that the media is owned by corporations with a huge incentive to push ultraconservative economic policies and partly to do with the fact that in today's journalist-as-celebrity era, many of the most important opinion-setting reporters are upper-crust elites who never have to deal with the consequences of the economic prescriptions they push.
BROKE AND UNDER SURVEILLANCE
In Bush world Pollyanna would feel right at home. We're told the economy is robust, the war in Iraq is going swell, and the American dream is brighter and healthier than ever. The facts show otherwise. Most of us are just going broke and we're under surveillance lest we offend Fearless Leader. This article by Ed Naha is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
After inflation is taken into account, the wages of 80% of American workers have gone down every year for the past four years.
The amount of Americans living in poverty has gone up every year for five years.
The number of bankruptcy cases filed in the 12-month period ending on September 30th, 2005, totaled a record 1,782,643, up 10.1% from the same period the year before. (600,000 in last October alone before Scrooge's new bankruptcy laws went into effect.)
Last year was the first time since the Great Depression that Americans spent more than they earned.
According to SAMNow (Save American Manufacturing), as of last October, 48 out of 50 states have lost manufacturing jobs under Georgie's reign, with California losing 350,000, Ohio over 165,000, Illinois and New York over 135,000 each and Pennsylvania over 150,000.
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