Mav,

A detailed response. I will address only four points (briefly) as duty calls (most are simply rehashes of arguments we've already had).

1. You claim a number of the programs W plans to cut have failed. Please provide evidence of same. Especially the child care programs.

2. You mention that Republicans love their children and family and so on. I agree. I just don't think that W and his backers in Washington care about children, family or any of the other values you list all that much. There focus is on the old mantra "what's good for General Motors is good for the USA". Their primary concern is their favorite special interest group: Big Business. Anything else is secondary. Or tertiary. Unless you want to argue that Big Business cares about family values?

There is a material difference between the attitudes and actions of a small business (less than 300 employees) and big business. Small businesses tend to be what they should be: local employers, involved in the community and responses to community needs. Concerned with profit, true. But not obsessed by it. These are the "Chamber of Commerce" types. There concerns are community oriented.

I don't see W and his backers as caring much about them. Their focus is on big business whose focus is obsessively and solely with profits. Support for community values starts and stops with a ROI analysis.

3. The issue of CO2 is not why it's there, but that it is and too much of it isn't a good thing. If it is, in part, based on natural causes and if too much is bad, then why add to the problem.

4. The general reason people don't want to be counted by the census is that the distrust the governments motives. Sometimes to the point of pathology. But the do exist and deserve to be counted. Statistical modeling and validation is a lost less esoteric than some of the financial analysis I've seen come out of some of the companies I've worked for. The question is, I suppose, why not count them?

Regards

John