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BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 28 Jan 05 - 10:58 PM Beat ya |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 28 Jan 05 - 11:00 PM Well, fittingly, I didn't. But at least it was to mah main man, Amos, and not to Martin... Now, on to 2000, Amos... Bobert |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 28 Jan 05 - 11:01 PM Taddddaaaaaa!!!! And to top it off, the last piece of masterful research and report for this thread is from Yale University, his old Skull and Bones stomping ground: http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=28052 Bush's lip service to liberty isn't serving anyone Most Recent Columns THE LOW-DOWN | ROGER LOW Bush's lip service to liberty isn't serving anyone (Thursday, January 27, 2005) E-mail this article Format this article for printing Comment on this article Most Read Articles This Week After eight years as top dog, Handsome Dan dies (Monday, January 24, 2005) Pornographic audio disrupts D.S. lecture (Thursday, January 27, 2005) Brawl breaks out in Gourmet Heaven 2 (Tuesday, January 25, 2005) Physics professor emeritus is hit by car (Monday, January 24, 2005) There was something nauseatingly depressing about George Bush's second inauguration -- and not just because it was George Bush's second inauguration. His face a studied mask of optimistic determination, our president looked into the cameras squarely and vowed, as he has vowed so many times before and as so many past presidents have vowed before him, to fight tyranny and champion liberty. The United States will use its influence to back democracy everywhere with the "ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," he said during a 20-minute speech in which he used the words "liberty" or "freedom" a total of 42 times. The assembled audience of Washingtonians, eager to get started on their weekend of schmoozing, clapped politely. I'm glad to know that the president really, really supports freedom. I do, too. Now that Bush has been safely re-elected and never has to run for another office in his life, however, I was naively hoping that he would drop his folksy platitudes for an hour, seize the national microphone and give the country some idea of how he intends to make the world safe for democracy. Because so far, his master plan seems to be blowing other countries up. This is not idle sarcasm. To those few, those happy few, Republican Yalies currently salivating over the prospect of four more years, I would ask one simple question: Can you explain what our president's foreign policy strategy is? Let us set aside, for the moment, the wisdom of invading Iraq. Even supposing that somehow, miraculously, a stable democracy does manage to crystallize in that country, surely we can all agree that the strategy is not repeatable. The Iraq mission, when all is said and done, will cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives and will tie down vast portions of our military for years to come. With the United States already facing its largest deficit in history and with army recruitment at a dangerously low level, no serious politician can talk with a straight face about America undertaking another large-scale military venture in the foreseeable future. ... Well, thanks, boys and girls. It has been fun, I must admit, and I have really enjoyed being baited by the rednecks in these parts, accused of loose screws and obsessive compulsive what-nots. IF he acts up again, you can be sure I will let you know. :D A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 28 Jan 05 - 11:20 PM I'm so sick of hearing Bush and his peons tout "freedome & liberty" since they don't even know what those words mean, let alone have any particular interest in it... But they'll wave their flags and talk of grandeuos visions of freedom and liberty while stickin' their hands into working America's pocketbook. These guys are nuthin' more than rag team carnival pick-pockets... Meanwhile, if you needed a standardized national IQ test all you'd need to do was figure that anyone who is happy gettin' pick-pocketed by these thugs should be the standard for retardation... Bobert |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: DougR Date: 29 Jan 05 - 01:31 AM Congratulations Amos ( I guess). You managed to keep this thread going for a thousand plus posts. The fact that most of them were your own probably shouldn't enter into the equation I guess because you probably hold some kind of record. That record (a single contributor writing the most posts in a single thread)is ...ah ...laudable ...probably ...I guess ... At least it speaks well of your ...stick-to-it-ness. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 29 Jan 05 - 08:57 AM Very kind words, Dougie, but, hey, you hung in their with the few of us that comprised the supporting cast so I congratulate you as well... Sniff... Bobert |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 29 Jan 05 - 10:20 AM Dougie: There well over 1000 opportunities to uncover hypocrisy, two-faacedness, rampant ignorantism, barbarian offenses against civilized codes, and plain old stupidness on the part of "the President". My stick-to-itness is equalled only by his dull-witted obdurance. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Little Hawk Date: 29 Jan 05 - 11:27 AM You just reached post 1007. This will be post 1008. This gives me an opportunity to mention the Cant. Z 1007 Italian bomber of WWII! It was quite a nice looking plane, though not as famous as the Savio-Marchetti Sparviero, another Italian bomber of the day. Here's a picture of it: Cant. Z 1007 The Cant. Z 1007 was, like many Italian planes of the time, a trimotor aircraft. Like the English Mosquito fighter/bomber it was made almost entirely out of wood. It proved reasonably successful in North Africa and the Med. Over 500 were built. Thank you very much. Resume your discusssion of G.W. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 29 Jan 05 - 11:37 AM Talk about being a thread creep, LH!!! A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 29 Jan 05 - 11:38 AM I liked the Ford Trimotor, myself 'cause it didn't drop nuthin' on no one... Now back to G.W., as in wuss... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 03 Feb 05 - 01:49 PM Some lines are just too good not to pass on. Here's an excerpt from Maureen Dowd's latest essay in the New York Times: "I misunderestimated this ambitious president. His social engineering schemes in the Middle East and America are breathtakingly brazen. He doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice. The White House seems to think Social Security was corrupt from the moment it was enacted in 1935. It wants to replace it with private accounts that will fatten the wallets of stockbrokers and put the savings of Americans who didn't inherit vast fortunes at risk. Mr. Bush and his crew not only want to scrap the New Deal. By weakening environmental and safety protections and trying to flatten the progressive income tax, they're trying to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after the progressive legacy of Theodore. With their brutal assault on history and their sanctimonious manner, they give a whole new meaning to Teddy's philosophy of the presidency. Bully pulpit, indeed." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 04 Feb 05 - 07:49 PM Nightmare come true? Globalist Perspective > Global Politics George W. Bush: My Life as a Democrat By The Globalist | Wednesday, February 02, 2005 Freshly sworn in for a second term, President Bush is looking forward to implementing his agenda with fellow Republicans in charge in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. One of our readers engaged in an intriguing thought experiment: What if the president woke up a Democrat — and all his old allies viewed his current policies through a different political lens entirely? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Don(Wyziwyg)T Date: 05 Feb 05 - 04:03 PM Having seen a report that GWB said "We're gonna catch those suicide bombers, and bring them to American justice", I feel that he is now eligible for canonisation, the primary qualification being the ability to perform miracles. The new Saint George would then be quite safe, as the other qualification is that the candidate be dead (which he is, from the neck up at least). Don T. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 06 Feb 05 - 10:33 AM The following article is one of the more interesting commentaries on Mister B., and is not hateful. I recommend the whole piece. It is polite. A The Thinker The Washington Post By Michael Kinsley Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page B07 The strangest aspect of President Bush's new War on Tyranny is the connection he draws between tyranny and terrorism. It's not the connection you would suspect, or the one Bush was making during his first term. When Saddam Hussein was still in charge of Iraq, it was enough to say that bad guys are bad guys. A sadistic dictator is just the type of person who would also harbor terrorists and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. But now Bush says that terrorists are actually the victims of tyranny. In his inaugural address, this seemed like a bit of transitory, use-once-and-discard highfalutinism. But Bush returned to the theme in his State of the Union address Wednesday. "In the long term," he said, "the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America. . . . " The legendary anarchist writer Emma Goldman said much the same thing in a 1917 essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence." It is "the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" that drives some of them to acts of terror. Can one question the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character exerted by great social iniquities?" She quotes a pamphlet from British-ruled India: "Terrorism . . . is inevitable as long as . . . tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Don(Wyziwyg)T Date: 06 Feb 05 - 01:00 PM All fine and well, but when the bomb goes off, does anybody believe that it will kill even one of the actual oppressors. Blowing up a bus that may contain up to 50% muslims seems a rather dumb thing to do in support of Islam. Ditto for Basques in Spain, and in fact almost all of these "Freedom fighters", who risk killing their own, while having a negligible chance of scoring one of the people they are fighting against. Remove oppression, they'll fight about religion; solve that, they'll fight about land; and so on and so on............ad nauseam. I've come to the bitter conclusion that the last two humans left on earth will find something to fight over, and the survivor will say "God, what do I do now"? And God will take one of his ribs, AND BEAT HIM TO DEATH WITH IT, and good riddance. DT |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Don Firth Date: 06 Feb 05 - 01:46 PM I just started another thread, "Christians – Moral vs 'Moral'" (just what the world needs! Another thread on that subject!) with THIS link, but I think it's also appropriate here. It's a speech given by a minister, and it begins as follows: As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University.And he goes on from there. It needs to be said, loud, clear, and often. Don Firth |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Rt Revd Sir jOhn from Hull Date: 07 Feb 05 - 12:26 PM waht all this is about? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 07 Feb 05 - 02:56 PM JhOn: PleezE reed All the thdread frits and tHeN aks. Amso |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 07 Feb 05 - 06:03 PM Bush's Budget: The Bad Math Is No Secret 02/07/2005 @ 4:47pm If it's budget time, it must be disinformation time. That's how it goes in the Bush II era. George W. Bush released a budget today that he claims is responsible, honest, and designed to cut the $400 billion-plus deficit in half by 2009. Not so. By now, you probably have heard the obvious criticisms. The budget does not include the $80 billion Bush is asking for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (And that probably won't cover the full tab.) It doesn't account for the $1 trillion to $2 trillion that Bush needs to pay for the private investment accounts he wants to carve out of Social Security. It also doesn't recognize that several hundred billion dollars will disappear from the revenue stream when the government rejiggers the alternative minimum tax--which it must--to prevent this tax (written to apply to corporations that make creative use of loopholes) from hitting middle-class individual tax filers. There are few secrets about Bush's budgetary shenanigans. While the military gets a hefty boost, housing, education and environmental protection gets hammered. Every advocacy group concerned with federal spending was issuing press releases today. Folks on Capitol Hill were doing the same. Senator Jim Jeffords, the Republican-turned-independent from Vermont, put out a short list of the worst of Bush's proposed cuts. Here it is: * Environment. Cuts the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget by 5.6 percent from $8.02 billion to $7.57 billion, culminating in an almost 10 percent cut over two years. Most cuts come in efforts to maintain and improve the nation's clean water infrastructure. * Veterans. More than doubles the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using the Veterans health care system. * Health Care. Cuts Medicaid funding by $45 billion over 10 years and eliminates 28 health programs, totaling $1.36 billion. These programs range from rural hospital grants (cuts $39.5 million) to emergency medical services for children (cuts $20 million). * Job Training. Cuts federal spending on job training by a half-billion dollars. Federal job training programs, including dislocated-worker training, will be cut by $200 million. Federal aid to states for job training, including funding to train veterans, will be cut by $300 million. * Amtrak. Eliminates all funding for Amtrak, calling bankruptcy proceedings as the solution for our nation's rail system. * Low Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP). Cuts LIHEAP by over 8 percent, from $2.2 billion to $2 billion. * Parks. Cuts the National Park Service by 3 percent from $2.31 billion to $2.24 billion. The Bush White House defends its cuts, claiming it is targeting programs that don't work. Could it be that the Bushies are right? That those darn bureaucrats running the clean water programs at the EPA are flushing taxpayer dollars down the drain? Perhaps. But here's the thing: if Bush is not being honest about the macro dimensions of his budget--and he's not--then how can he be trusted on the details? Short answer: he cannot. I am willing to believe waste and unnecessary spending can be found throughout government. Maybe even at the Pentagon. (Gosh, no!) But I am not willing to hand the scalpel to Bush and his lieutenants when they spin numbers and refuse to acknowledge the true budgetary problems that they have caused and overseen. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 08 Feb 05 - 12:32 PM Editorial: Bush's lies won't catch up to him, they'll get you in the end Will you trust your future to a man with four failed companies, an endless trail of lies and a history of deficit spending to his credit? by Brian Richards WASHINGTON, D.C. -- (OfficialWire) -- 02/04/05 -- Anyone who has read The Lies of George W. Bush (David Corn, Three River Press) already knows that the current President of the United States is a liar. What is truly amazing is that despite his lies, George W. Bush continues to occupy a space in the White House. It is perhaps a measure of the true state of the Union, that the American public have been able to forget that they didn't vote this man into office, that he lied to the world about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that he has illegally kidnapped and continues to imprison hundreds of innocent men (he thinks) outside the jurisdiction of any law or country and all the while touting the red, white and blue banner of freedom. In just four years, the Bush administration has raped and pillaged the U.S. Treasury in support of those who brought them to power. Now in his second term, having retained his post under a further cloud of deceit and trickery, President Bush II now prepares to dismantle an American institution: Social Security as we know it. As this man lies his way through the process, consider that "The Bush Plan" will not fix the problem, it will make it worse. Americans have become brain-dead |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,Amos Date: 09 Feb 05 - 02:43 PM Rove Is Promoted To Deputy Staff Chief Job Covers a Broad Swath of Policy By Peter Baker Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 9, 2005; Page A21 During President Bush's first term, outsiders often suspected that Karl Rove was really behind virtually everything. Now it's official. Rove, the political mastermind behind two presidential elections, yesterday was named White House deputy chief of staff in charge of coordinating domestic policy, economic policy, national security and homeland security. Karl Rove has long been a close confidant to George W. Bush. (Susan Walsh -- AP) For a man who spent a lifetime in the business of polls and campaign strategy, it is an expansive portfolio cutting across virtually the entire policy spectrum. But many in the White House said the new position largely formalizes what was already true, noting that Rove has quietly played a vital role in shaping domestic policy from the inception of the Bush presidency. Now, for the first time, he will have a formal hand in foreign policy as well. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 09 Feb 05 - 02:49 PM Bush Request to Fund Nuclear Study Revives Debate |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,Amos Date: 09 Feb 05 - 03:05 PM Three things stand out in President Bush's proposed budget: ¶He would rather continue the tax cuts for a few rich Americans than save government programs that affect much more needy Americans. ¶By stating that spending cuts are necessary to rein in the growing deficit, he conveniently ignores that his previous two irresponsible tax cuts are the primary reason for that deficit. ¶The savings from all the proposed spending cuts barely add up to a fraction of what we will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president's budget reveals his true priorities. But we need not worry, as the budget provides plenty of instant-gratification rhetoric and clever use of the English language. Ravishankar Palanivelu Chicago, Feb. 8, 2005 President Bush is proposing a tight budget in which the poor, the police and the sick will take up the burden of balancing the budget so that wealthy Americans won't have to pay fair taxes. If Mr. Bush were a fair president, he would make sure that the burden of taxation would be shared. But of course he doesn't pretend to be fair, only moral. I wonder about the morality of this country, both domestically and internationally, when a deficit of Mr. Bush's own making promotes a dismantling of the federal government's duty to people who don't have trust funds to see them through life. Mr. Bush seems to want the safety net in this country to have worm holes so that he can make an unfair tax cut permanent. Perhaps the majority of people in this country want more of our goods to be made by cheap labor, want more of our legislators to be in the pay of lobbyists for multinational companies, and want to throw away the First Amendment. This is not the United States I once knew and felt great pride in. Phyllis Berlant Abrams Plymouth Meeting, Pa., Feb. 8, 2005 • When I look at President Bush's budget cuts, I find exactly what I have been expecting - a set of priorities that provide for grandiose war games at the expense of the fundamental needs of our society. I suspect that we are about to discover the real cost of our unnecessary war and the extent to which our insensitive and well-insulated leadership will go in its search for scripted adventure and personal adulation. I have never been more concerned about the future of this country. Frank Reardon Olathe, Kan., Feb. 8, 2005 To the Editor: President Bush's proposed budget is a blatant example of his disdain for the poor and middle class. He proposes cuts in Medicare, Amtrak and programs for veterans, students, the police and others that mostly benefit the poor and middle classes. But the president adamantly defends all the tax cuts for the rich. There is no equal sharing in this one! None of these proposed cuts would need to be discussed if the tax cuts for the top 10 percent were rescinded. After Afghanistan and Iraq, is class warfare Mr. Bush's third war? Frank Zaski Franklin, Mich., Feb. 8, 2005 A few voices among millions who are protesting Bush' dramatizations. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: DougR Date: 09 Feb 05 - 09:41 PM Hey, Amos, I just figured out why this thread is of value to some folks. They can read it and find out all the left-wing crap the liberals are writing these days without subscribing to one of the left-wing newspapers like New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, etc., etc. You're doing a community service! But hurting circulation. :>) DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Bobert Date: 09 Feb 05 - 09:55 PM Haha.............ha, Dougie................................................................................................................................................... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 09 Feb 05 - 10:54 PM Thanks, Dougie. It always tweaks my fancy to notice that getting close to an issue gets you tuh snarling and cussing instead of talking up and speaking to the issues. Not just you, it seems to be a fall-back position fer a lot of them right-wingers. Kinda like a substitute for confronting the factors. But thanks for the kind thoughts, anyway. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 10 Feb 05 - 12:51 PM Today's NYT has a column from my favourite redhead, Maureen Dowd, excerpt below. "...This guy should be on the Bush team. Controlling what does not need to be controlled is its specialty. Condoleezza Rice plays hardball with foes and allies around the world. But she's afraid of a few French schoolkids? Keith Richburg reported in The Washington Post that the Bushies ensured that Condi's appearance at the elite Institute of Political Sciences was more sheep pen than lion's den. "Only a handful of the school's 5,500 students were allowed near the auditorium where Rice spoke," he wrote, "and the initial questions were vetted in advance by the school and the State Department." The article said Benjamin Barnier, the son of Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, asked the first question, about the possibility of a theocratic government in Iraq. But the real question he wanted to ask was vetoed after he submitted it to the school on Monday. It was: "George Bush is not particularly well perceived in the world, particularly in the Middle East. Can you do something to change that?" Surely, the "princess warrior" and "Madame Hawk," as she has been dubbed in France, could have handled that one. But Bush officials prefer to write the script, or "create their own reality," as one Bushie put it, whenever they can. Besides the W.M.D. scare, there was the Kabuki "Ask President Bush" campaign sessions where voters had to take written pledges of support before they were allowed in, and the micromanaged town hall debates, where Bush strategists would not allow truly undecided voters to ask W. questions. And don't forget the administration's payments to conservative "journalists" to sell programs they would have promoted anyway. The administration is obsessed with controlling the script in ways it doesn't need to, while it drops the ball on controlling the script in ways it should. With the occupation plan in Iraq and the approach to Iran and North Korea, the Bush team often seems to be improvising. The smug French, who have been riveted by what they regard as American self-delusion, were also riveted by Condi's lèse-majesté seduction in pumps and pearls. Her message boiled down to a silky version of: "Now that we've blown you off and ignored you, we're going to give you an opportunity to admit we were right all along and join us on the ramparts to crush Islamic fundamentalism." As Elaine Sciolino wrote in The Times, the new secretary of state sent a frisson through the American ambassador's residence yesterday at breakfast with six French intellectuals when she referred to Iran as a "totalitarian state," rather than an "authoritarian" one - since totalitarian is a term ordinarily reserved for violent regimes like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. "It was scary," said one guest, François Heisbourg, and it inflamed French fears that the U.S. is eyeing regime change in Iran next." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 10 Feb 05 - 11:32 PM Torture, American Style (New York Times) By BOB HERBERT Published: February 11, 2005 Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet." In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan." Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured. The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition." This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings. Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.? As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts." Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist. "Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote. The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada. Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody. She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside." Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators. There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong. Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army three decades ago. Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing good can come from it. E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 10 Feb 05 - 11:36 PM Yet another analysis of the scandalous budget irresponsibility: When Math Is Worse Than Fuzzy Published: February 10, 2005 Whenever the Bush administration wants to sell a costly new program, look carefully before you accept any numbers it puts out. The math isn't just fuzzy, as the current euphemism would have it - it is often downright misleading, and deliberately so. The latest example is the newly acknowledged cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill, which the administration bulled through Congress in late 2003 over the objections of conservatives who railed that the price tag would be too high. The number that had deficit hawks choking then was a projection that the drug benefit would cost $400 billion over 10 years, from 2004 through 2013. The administration already had an internal estimate that the cost would exceed $500 billion for that period. But it made sure to suppress that figure as it strong-armed Republicans who had already approved irresponsible tax cuts and an expensive war in Iraq, whose true costs were also being hidden. Now it turns out that the earlier discrepancy was small beer compared with the latest upsurge in the projected 10-year cost of the drug benefit. As pointed out in an article yesterday by Robert Pear in The Times, the drug benefit is actually expected to cost some $720 billion over the first 10 years, from 2006, when the benefit kicks in, through 2015. The previous numbers were lower because they included in the 10-year projections two years when the program would not yet be up and running. The higher numbers are bound to infuriate conservative Republicans who feel that they were bullied into supporting an expansion of Medicare despite their deep misgivings. But even those of us who supported the Medicare drug benefit as a needed modernization of the program have a right to feel duped. Congress went out of its way to deny Medicare officials the right to negotiate for lower drug prices from manufacturers. That was a mistake when the costs were projected at $400 billion. It is doubly disastrous at $720 billion. ... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 11 Feb 05 - 12:05 AM GENERATION RED, WHITE AND GRAY If the children are the future, we're screwed. By Alexander Zaitchik Excerpt: Last week was a busy one on the creeping-fascism index. So busy, in fact, that I finally accepted there is even such a thing as a creeping-fascism index. Over the past few years, I've held fast to a belief that America is too sprawling, too diverse and too fundamentally committed to its Constitution to ever change its flag to red, white and black. Now I'm not so sure. It wasn't a delayed reaction to the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Iraq or the confirmation of torture hombre Alberto Gonzalez that did it, but a modest blip on the post-9/11 radar: a poll finding that a third of high school students think the First Amendment "goes too far." At least that's what they think of the First Amendment once it's explained to them. After interviewing 100,000 teens in the largest study of its kind, the John S. and James C. Knight Foundation reports fast shrinking respect for bedrock constitutional freedoms of speech, press and assembly. Among the findings widely commented on last week—but not widely enough—only 51 percent said newspapers should be allowed to publish content without state approval. Three-quarters actually thought flag burning was illegal—and didn't care—while almost one-fifth said Americans should not be allowed to express unpopular views. News of the poll triggered a few easy comparisons to the fear-driven conformity of the early Cold War. But that analogy is wishful thinking. Even at its worst, the paranoid patriotism of the 1950s existed uneasily alongside a respect for and knowledge of American history and the Constitution. Even as critics were stripped of their passports and driven out of the academy and Hollywood, and even as the CIA subverted popularly elected governments abroad, in U.S. high schools one of the most frequently assigned books was Howard Fast's Citizen Tom Paine. However airbrushed that era's celebratory view of America's past, kids still had a sense of that past as something to honor, if only in theory. However dramatically the country deviated from its stated ideals, the baseline culture still instilled a reverence for the founding fathers and the Bill of Rights. Every teenager at least knew what those things were. What we have now is the worst elements of the 1950s without the literacy and understanding of the American creed that made possible the corrective revolts of the 1960s. Last week's Knight poll is an ominous sign of more than just another paranoid burst of American politics, one that will flame out or be eclipsed by some inevitable Aquarian renewal. It is a glimpse into the brain of the first videogame generation to come of age during the war on terror. Post-9/11 political culture plus ADD equals those poll results. There is no good reason to expect the trend to reverse on its own. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Teresa Date: 11 Feb 05 - 02:05 AM Scary stuff, Amos; mighty scary. And uh, Doug ... I don't bother with the moderate press like the Los Angeles Times. I go right to The Nation and Indymedia.org, yes I do. :) teresa |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 12 Feb 05 - 07:07 PM Bush's Class-War BudgetBy PAUL KRUGMAN Published: February 11, 2005 It may sound shrill to describe President Bush as someone who takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends. Yet his latest budget proposal is top-down class warfare in action. And it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they're willing to take it. First, the facts: the budget proposal really does take food from the mouths of babes. One of the proposed spending cuts would make it harder for working families with children to receive food stamps, terminating aid for about 300,000 people. Another would deny child care assistance to about 300,000 children, again in low-income working families. And the budget really does shower largesse on millionaires even as it punishes the needy. For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities informs us that even as the administration demands spending cuts, it will proceed with the phaseout of two little-known tax provisions - originally put in place under the first President George Bush - that limit deductions and exemptions for high-income households. More than half of the benefits from this backdoor tax cut would go to people with incomes of more than a million dollars; 97 percent would go to people with incomes exceeding $200,000. It so happens that the number of taxpayers with more than $1 million in annual income is about the same as the number of people who would have their food stamps cut off under the Bush proposal. But it costs a lot more to give a millionaire a break than to put food on a low-income family's table: eliminating limits on deductions and exemptions would give taxpayers with incomes over $1 million an average tax cut of more than $19,000. It's like that all the way through. On one side, the budget calls for program cuts that are small change compared with the budget deficit, yet will harm hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Americans. On the other side, it calls for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and for new tax breaks for the affluent in the form of tax-sheltered accounts and more liberal rules for deductions. The question is whether the relentless mean-spiritedness of this budget finally awakens the public to the true cost of Mr. Bush's tax policy. Until now, the administration has been able to get away with the pretense that it can offset the revenue loss from tax cuts with benign spending restraint. That's because until now, "restraint" was an abstract concept, not tied to specific actions, making it seem as if spending cuts would hurt only a few special interest groups. But here we are with the first demonstration of restraint in action, and look what's on the chopping block, selected for big cuts: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health insurance for children and aid to law enforcement. (Yes, Mr. Bush proposes to cut farm subsidies, which are truly wasteful. Let's see how much political capital he spends on that proposal.) ... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 13 Feb 05 - 10:37 AM No Mullah Left Behind By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: February 13, 2005 The Wall Street Journal ran a very, very alarming article from Iran on its front page last Tuesday. The article explained how the mullahs in Tehran - who are now swimming in cash thanks to soaring oil prices - rather than begging foreign investors to come into Iran, are now shunning some of them. The article related how a Turkish mobile-phone operator, which had signed a deal with the Iranian government to launch Iran's first privately owned cellphone network, had the contract frozen by the mullahs in the Iranian Parliament because they were worried it might help the Turks and their foreign partners spy on Iran. Advertisement The Journal quoted Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, as saying that for 10 years analysts had been writing about Iran's need for economic reform. "In actual fact, the scenario is worse now," said Mr. Ansari. "They have all this money with the high oil price, and they don't need to do anything about reforming the economy." Indeed, The Journal added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel "free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference." This is a perfect example of the Bush energy policy at work, and the Bush energy policy is: "No Mullah Left Behind." By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that? The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a "geo-green" strategy. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 14 Feb 05 - 10:05 AM The Importance of Being Earnest Published: February 14, 2005 Excerpt: For all its talk of deficit reduction, President Bush's 2006 budget is a map of reckless economic policies and shows how they have backed the United States into a precarious position in the global financial markets. Mr. Bush needs to convince foreign investors that he's serious about cutting the budget deficit. Here's why: Each day, the United States must borrow billions of dollars from abroad to finance its enormous budget and trade deficits. Without a steady stream of huge loans, the country would face rising interest rates, higher inflation, a dropping dollar and slower economic growth. The lenders want to see less of a gap between what the government collects in taxes and what it spends, because a lower budget deficit always eases a trade deficit. A lower trade deficit also implies a stronger dollar. And a stronger dollar would reassure foreign investors that dollar-based assets remain their best choice. As it is, their belief is being sorely tested: in 2003, the European Central Bank lost $625 million to the weak dollar and reportedly stands to lose $1.3 billion for 2004. Japan's central bank, which has the world's largest foreign stash of dollars - some $715 billion - could lose an estimated $40 billion if the dollar weakened to around 95 yen, a level many analysts expect to see this year. No wonder that a week before Mr. Bush released his budget, Japan's finance minister said that Japan had to be careful in managing those dollar-filled foreign currency reserves. It's not hard to see what brought the United States to this juncture. Mr. Bush's first-term tax cuts were too expensive and too skewed toward top earners to work as effective, self-correcting economic stimulus. Instead, predictably, they've driven the nation deep into the red. Having reduced tax revenue to a share of the economy not seen since 1959, the cuts are a huge factor in the swing from a budget surplus to a $412 billion deficit. The administration also erred big in deciding to deal with the ballooning trade imbalance by letting the dollar slide. That might have been a winning gambit if it had been paired with a commitment to cut the deficit. Theoretically, a weakening dollar would have begun the process of easing the trade imbalance, while deficit reduction, which takes longer to bring about, would have addressed the gap in a more lasting way. Instead, Mr. Bush has unceasingly pursued deficit-financed tax cuts, even as the weak dollar has failed to fix the trade imbalance. The result is that the country's deficits - and borrowing needs - remain enormous even as dollar-based investments are becoming less attractive. Lately, Mr. Bush has been talking the deficit reduction talk, but there's no sign that he is willing to walk the walk. In his 2006 budget, he pledges to slash spending, but largely in areas that would have only a small impact on the deficit and where cuts would be politically difficult, not to mention cruel, such as food stamps, veterans' medical care, child care and low-income housing. Meanwhile, he is pounding the table for more deficit-bloating measures - making his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a 10-year cost of as much as $2.1 trillion; putting into effect two high-income tax breaks that were enacted in 2001 but have been on hold, at a 10-year cost of $115 billion; and introducing new tax incentives to allow high earners to shift even more cash into tax shelters, at a cost that would ultimately work out to more than $30 billion a year when investors cashed in their accounts tax-free. Oh, yes. Mr. Bush also wants to borrow some $4.5 trillion over two decades to privatize Social Security, which is a bad idea even without the borrowing and a horrendous one with it. The global financial community won't be fooled. The dollar may have bouts of relative strength, as it has recently. But these are due largely to currency traders' focus on short-term advantages, like Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes, which are perceived as a positive for the dollar, or the appearance of profit-taking opportunities. Inevitably, the budget and trade deficits will reassert their drag on the dollar, and then on Washington's ability to comfortably borrow money from abroad. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 14 Feb 05 - 10:28 AM Bush Administration Removes Critical Report From Website, Replaces Civil Rights Commission Chair By Drog (Canada), Section United States of America Posted on Fri Feb 11th, 2005 at 10:38:31 AM PST From Wikinews: A report documenting the civil rights record of the Bush administration has been removed from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' website. The report was submitted to the administration in December by a committee, chaired by Mary Frances Berry, who has served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for nearly 25 years. The report, Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration (pdf link) described setbacks to a range of civil rights issues from policies that have further polarized communities. One week after Berry submitted the report, the Bush administration forced her out, announcing her replacement before she had actually resigned. The new chair, attorney Gerald A. Reynolds, was quoted in a New York Times article as saying he believed traditional civil rights group "overstate the problem" of racial discrimination. His appointment has been termed "a disaster" by NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond. In an exclusive interview with Tolerance.org February 9, Berry warns of further erosion to civil rights, with a weakened Civil Rights Commission unable to press the Justice Department to enforce the laws..... Here is a link to the report the Bush Administration suppressed: Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration Here is a link to the original article on this subject.. Here is a link the interview with Mary Berry on the current condition of Civil Rights. A week before the Bush administration forced her out, Berry and vice-chair Cruz Reynoso submitted a 166-page report critical of the President — Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration. In a letter to President Bush accompanying the report, Berry and Reynoso wrote, "your administration has missed opportunities to win consensus on key civil rights issues ranging from affirmative action, to fair housing, to immigration, to voting rights. Instead, you have adopted policies that further divide an already deeply torn nation." Response to the report was swift. The White House announced a new appointee before Berry actually resigned. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,donuel Date: 14 Feb 05 - 10:36 AM Amos, Yesterday I heard on C Span newspaperclips that Bush had received a group of black leaders (actually several) for Black History month. TV reported this as well as many papers. The thing is that ~10,000 black leaders had assembled in Nashville in part to protest Bush. The only news source to cover this was a Chicago paper. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 14 Feb 05 - 11:18 AM Bush is a master of fraudulent tokenism, making assertions or gestures that imply positions that he will not in fact fulfill, promising solutions he will not implement, or insinuating conditions that he knows perfectly well do not obtain, in order to glean approval anywhere he can find it. He is a bottom feeder in this respect. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 14 Feb 05 - 10:37 PM Gonzales Is Sworn In as Attorney General By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM Published: February 14, 2005 Alberto R. Gonzales was sworn in as 80th attorney general of the United States today, replacing John Ashcroft as nation's chief law enforcement officer, and becoming the first Hispanic to hold the office. The ceremony at the White House came after months of controversy about Mr. Gonzales's role in the Bush administration's policies on torture. The Senate approved his nomination in Feb. 3 on a vote of 60 to 36, with most Senate Democrats strongly opposing, giving Mr. Gonzales fewer Democratic votes than John Ashcroft received when he was confirmed in 2001. Following Mr. Gonzales's swearing-in, President Bush praised him, saying that the "attorney general has my complete confidence" and that he has been "a model of service" with a "deep dedication to the cause of justice." The president said Mr. Gonzales was now on "an urgent mission to protect the United States from another terrorist attack." The ceremony, however, was not only about Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Bush also used the occasion to promote some of his own ideas, saying that "we must not allow the passage of time, or the illusion of safety, to weaken our resolve in this new war." And Mr. Bush called on Congress "to promptly renew all provisions of the Patriot Act this year." Mr. Ashcroft's aggressive efforts to enforce the USA Patriot Act, which loosens restrictions on government surveillance, draw considerable criticism from civil libertarians. The main provisions of the sweeping antiterrorism law, enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are set to expire at the end of the year. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 15 Feb 05 - 10:03 AM Bush's Budget Means Cutting Only Peanut Butter: Gene Sperling 2005-02-14 00:19 (New York) (Commentary. Gene Sperling, who was President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser, is a columnist for Bloomberg News and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The opinions expressed are his own.) By Gene Sperling Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine the following: The father of a financially stretched family decides to live it up by leasing three fully loaded Hummer H1s for the bargain price of $9,750 a month. As the family's financial situation deteriorates, the father calls the family together for a belt-tightening discussion. He holds up a jar of Whole Foods chunky peanut butter and says, ``Do you realize we are spending $4.49 on this? We could be saving $2.04 if we bought Skippy peanut butter for only $2.45.'' His teenage son responds, ``Like, dad, man, why are you busting us about two bucks on peanut butter when you're spending, like, almost $10,000 a month on cars?'' The father sternly responds, ``Don't change the subject. We are talking about peanut butter.'' On Feb. 7, President George W. Bush sought to use his 2006 budget to emerge as a born-again fiscal belt tightener. His goal was clear: Focus the fiscal debate on cutting programs for hardworking families and the poor -- which are the financial equivalent of peanut butter -- while ruling out any effort to add up, put on the table or even acknowledge the budgetary equivalent of luxury Hummers -- his tax cuts for the highest-income Americans. The Cuts Like the son in the family fable, most Americans understand the basic law that money is always fungible -- a dollar on cars could also be a dollar spent on peanut butter. Yet Bush's entire budgetary case rests on the assumption that no one will notice or change the subject to mention that his proposed spending cuts are dwarfed by the deficit-exploding tax reductions that he is seeking for high-income Americans. Consider some of the cuts Bush is claiming are necessary to get tough on the deficit: First, he would cut $500 million for job training and dislocated workers in the midst of what is still the slowest jobs recovery since the 1930s. Second, he would virtually eliminate the $500 million Community Oriented Policing Services program when we are concerned about domestic terrorist threats. Third, Bush would impose $4.5 billion in net cuts to Medicaid for the poor and disabled when health-care costs and the number of uninsured are rising. And fourth, he would scrap the $1 billion a year in funding for the GEAR-UP and TRIO programs that reach out to economically disadvantaged children early and encourage them to go to college when our economy desperately needs a larger share of this population to obtain college degrees. The Exemptions Yet while these cuts add up to only about $6.5 billion a year, no one is supposed to mention that in the same budget Bush calls for implementing two obscure tax provisions that increase personal exemptions and itemized deductions that the top 2 percent of Americans can use to reduce their tax payments to the tune of $115 billion over the next decade. That's enough to prevent all these cuts and still reduce the deficit by $55 billion. Nor can we mention that if we pulled back on the income-tax cut (leaving alone capital gains and dividends) for the 0.5 percent of Americans making more than $400,000 a year, we could save $300 billion over the next decade -- enough to buy a lot of peanut butter and still make a big dent in the deficit. Anyone who took seriously Bush's commitment to deficit reduction might assume that his tight cap on domestic programs was motivated by the deficit exploding because such spending had gotten out of control. One-Sided Reality Yet, in an analysis conducted at the Washington-based Center for American Progress, it was found that when you exclude expenditure on defense, homeland security and international affairs, discretionary spending has actually decreased from 3.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2001 to 3.3 percent in 2005. On the other hand, the decision to pass and extend three tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug benefit without any offsets is set to increase the deficit by more than $5 trillion over the next decade, including interest costs. Even when looking at our long-term capacity to deal with the challenge of the baby boomers' retirement, Bush is trying to construct this same one-sided budgetary reality. While the Social Security Trust Fund is solvent, the president laments that in 2018 the government as a whole will have to ``somehow'' borrow an additional $200 billion to meet its legal Social Security commitments. Yet he seems oblivious to the fact that his own tax and spending policies will increase government borrowing that year by more than $500 billion. Eat the Generic Bush wants members of Congress to go home and tell their constituents that there is simply no choice but to achieve Social Security solvency entirely through benefit cuts with new price- indexing rules. Yet he disallows any discussion of the fact that making permanent his tax cuts for only the top 1 percent of earners -- as his budget calls for -- costs almost as much as is needed to keep Social Security solvent for 75 years. Still, I get it, Mr. President, I'm changing the subject. This budget isn't about finding numbers that lead to deficit reduction, it's about using the pretext of deficits to limit government's role to help those most in need. Perhaps you think the father was right to forbid any discussion of luxury Hummers. Let them eat Costco generic peanut butter |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 16 Feb 05 - 12:19 PM Once upon a time, Republicans were good for one thing and one thing only - keeping an eye on the books, making sure that deficits didn't balloon and that the economy didn't overheat. But under Ronald Reagan, the new generation of Republicans threw down their eyeshades and became warriors of the right. Now, under George W. Bush, any semblance of responsibility has been erased from the party's soul, leaving us with only war (religious, cultural and shooting) and debt. James Day Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 14, 2005 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 16 Feb 05 - 12:27 PM One leads by example. If the United States wishes to encourage greater respect for human rights in the world, it must set a good example. It is doing the exact opposite, so that on Jan. 19, the Cuban government handed formal protest notes to United States representatives in Havana and Washington on the abuse of prisoners at the Guantánamo Naval Base, which, as the notes pointed out, is on Cuban territory. What chutzpah, one might say. Perhaps, but what did we expect? At a time when the our country is calling Cuba an outpost of tyranny and demanding that it release political prisoners, our own abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo puts the shoe on the other foot. One can imagine the Cubans asking, "Are we to do as you say, or as you do?" Wayne S. Smith Washington, Feb. 15, 2005 The writer, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was chief of the United States Interests Section in Havana, 1979-82. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 16 Feb 05 - 11:28 PM Arrived today by e-mail, the following notice to G.W. Bush from the State of California: California's Secession letter to Bush Dear Mr. President, Congratulations on your victory over all us non-evangelicals. Actually, we're a bit ticked off here in California, so we're leaving. California will now be its own country. And we're taking all the blue states with us. In case you are not aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and all of the Northeast. We spoke to God, and she agrees that this split will be beneficial to almost everybody, and especially to us in the new country of California. In fact, God is so excited about it, she's going to shift the whole country at 4:30 pm EST this Friday. Therefore, please let everyone know they need to be back in their states by then. So you get Texas and all the former slave states. We get the Governator, stem cell research and the best beaches,. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. (We will keep Martha Stewart, but having served her sentence she will now be a contributor to society rather than the unindicted contributors to your campaign) We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand, we get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss. We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get all the technological innovation in Alabama. We get about two-thirds of the tax revenue, and you get to make the red states pay their fair share. Since our divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families, You get a bunch of single moms to support, and we know how much you like that. Did I mention we produce about 70% of the nation's veggies? But heck the only greens the Bible-thumpers eat are the pickles on their Big Macs. Oh yeah, another thing, don't plan on serving California wine at your state dinners. From now on it's imported French wine for you. Ouch, bet that hurts. Just so we're clear, the country of California will be pro-choice and anti-war, Speaking of war, we're going to want all blue state citizens back from Iraq. If you need people to fight, just ask your evangelicals. They have tons of kids they're willing to send to their deaths for absolutely no purpose, And they don't care if you don't show pictures of their kids' caskets coming home. Anyway, we wish you all the best in the next four years and we hope, really hope, you find those missing weapons of mass destruction. Seriously, Soon. Sincerely, California |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 17 Feb 05 - 12:45 PM A startling expos´of the Bush administrations effort to adulterate the news media with their own additives in a highly dishonest and corrupt manner can be found in the New York Times today. Excerpt: Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted" while it was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon" apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is scripted. The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind? It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned "minders" - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message. The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen. For a case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on the day after Mr. Olbermann did his fake-news-style story on the fake reporter in the White House press corps. ... This sort of rampant slick-willy dishonesty is criminal enough on the face of it, but it annoys me even more because it shows such disdain for the role of media (the "free" press) in democratic process. It is clear the "free" press is not a "player" in the Bush worldview. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,Amos Date: 17 Feb 05 - 12:51 PM Maureen Dowd, no lover of Bush, discusses the jaw-dropping antics of the above mentioned fake reporter: Bush's Barberini FaunBy MAUREEN DOWD Published: February 17, 2005 I am very impressed with James Guckert, a k a Jeff Gannon. How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States? Advertisement Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief? It's hard to believe the White House could hit rock bottom on credibility again, but it has, in a bizarre maelstrom that plays like a dark comedy. How does it credential a man with a double life and a secret past? "Jeff Gannon" was waved into the press room nearly every day for two years as the conservative correspondent for two political Web sites operated by a wealthy Texas Republican. Scott McClellan often called on the pseudoreporter for softball questions. Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post yesterday that although Mr. Guckert had denied launching the provocative Web sites - one described him as " 'military, muscular, masculine and discrete' (sic)" - a Web designer in California said "that he had designed a gay escort site for Gannon and had posted naked pictures of Gannon at the client's request." And The Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware reported that Mr. Guckert was delinquent in $20,700 in personal income tax from 1991 to 1994. I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values? At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months. In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon. (...) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,Amos Date: 17 Feb 05 - 01:55 PM Another article on the corrosive chilling of free press in the United States by its own leadership: The Need for a Federal Shield Published: February 17, 2005 As a matter of self-interest, Americans need to appreciate the rising threat to the news media's ability to provide a free flow of information about their government. Close to a dozen reporters around the nation face legal pressure to reveal sources, and some face the threat of jail terms. A federal appeals panel in the District of Columbia declined this week to spare Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times the prospect of being jailed for up to 18 months. They are refusing to testify about confidential sources to a grand jury investigating how the name of a covert intelligence officer was leaked to a conservative columnist. The leaking is a potential crime, and while the reporters did not reveal the officer's name, their digging after the leak is being construed by the courts as making them essential to the investigation. Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the issue. Mr. Cooper wrote about the administration's rumored political motives for unmasking the officer to the columnist Robert Novak. It remains a mystery whether prosecutors have tried to compel Mr. Novak's testimony; he will not say. The chilling possibilities for journalism at large are obvious as the case moves further along the appeals chain. Government officials with valuable information on matters of public interest may have second thoughts about trying to reach the public through trusted reporters. Journalists will more than ever have to weigh the risk of jail against the need to protect worthy sources, a practice with a long history of redounding to the citizenry's benefit. (...) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: DougR Date: 18 Feb 05 - 01:41 PM Teresa: The Los Angeles Times moderate? The Lord help my soul. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 19 Feb 05 - 01:12 PM From today's New York Times Editorial Section (2-19-05) In the Midst of Budget Decadence, a Leader Will Arise By DAVID BROOKS Published: February 19, 2005 There's going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he's going to be younger. There's going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control. He's going to be set off by some event like what is happening right now with the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He's going to look at an event like that one, and he's not only going to be worried about the country's economic future - he's also going to be morally offended. He's going to sense that something fundamentally decadent is going on. And he's going to be right. In the past months we have learned that the prescription drug benefit passed last year is not going to cost $400 billion over 10 years. The projections now, over a slightly different period, are that it's going to cost over $700 billion. And these cost estimates are coming before the program is even operating. They are only going to go up. That means we're going to be spending the next few months bleeding over budget restraints that might produce savings in the millions, while the new prescription drug benefit will produce spending in the billions. That means that as we spend the next year trying to get a grip on one entitlement, Social Security, we'll be launching a new one that is also unsustainable. Over the next few months we will be watching a government that may be millions-wise, but trillions-foolish. We will be watching a government that sometimes seems to have lost all perspective - like a lunatic who tries to dry himself with a hand towel while standing in a torrential downpour. And much of this new spending will go to people who have insurance to pay for their drugs. In Congress, some are taking a look at these new cost projections and figuring that maybe it's time to readjust the program. In the House there are Republicans like Mike Pence and Jeff Flake (whose predictions of this program's actual cost have been entirely vindicated by events). In the Senate there are people like Judd Gregg and Lindsey Graham. These fiscal conservatives want to make the program sustainable. Perhaps the benefits should be limited to those earning up to 200 percent of the level at the poverty line. Perhaps the costs should be capped at $400 billion through other benefit adjustments. These ideas are akin to what the candidate George Bush proposed in 2000. But the White House is threatening to veto anything they do! President Bush, who hasn't vetoed a single thing during his presidency, now threatens to veto something - and it's something that might actually restrain the growth of government. He threatens to use his first veto against an idea he himself originally proposed! Have we entered another world, where up is down and rationality is irrational? Every family and business in America has to scale back when the cost of something skyrockets. Does this rule not apply to us as a nation? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: Amos Date: 19 Feb 05 - 01:16 PM I resent the president's low opinion of me that because I'm over 55 (way over, in fact) I need not care about how he wants to change Social Security because it won't affect me. Even though it will affect my 6 children and 12 grandchildren. It does, however, tell us a lot about how the president thinks: "As long as you get yours, don't worry about others." We expect higher values than that from our elected officials. Paul Smith Livingston, Tex., Feb. 17, 2005 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST Date: 20 Feb 05 - 01:41 PM Two major pieces of evidence in the last few days point to serious problems with the lack of intelligence supporting or dwelling in the current administration. One can be found here, describing scientific analyses which show up the institutional and individual fat-headedness of Bush and his Merry Band in ignoring global warming and refusing to support the Kyoto accord. The other ugly issue du jour is why the poster boy for ho"Hot Military Stud Muffin.com" was privileged to get a press pass into the White Hous epress corps and wehy he seemed to get scoops ahead of other corps members when he was applying under a flase name and was actually an active soliciting homosexual. Big Q of the week: what would have been said if there had been such a scandal in the Clinton years. Would there have been anything said? The sun and moon would have stood stock still in shock and awe and disappropbation. This so-=called leader should be tarred. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration From: GUEST,Amos Date: 20 Feb 05 - 03:17 PM From an interesting little site called "The Truth Seeker", alleging to be from inside the White House: Now onto all this fuss about the Gays in the White House….If the Family Values idiots who elected Bush realized how morally corrupt this administration actually was, they would march on Washington with farm implements and torches. The President is a cocaine-snorting, impotent drunk who was made fun of as a spoiled child and hates everyone. His top aide, Fat Karl the Eunuch, was a pathetic, bloated nerd with inch-thick glasses and loathed by everyone in his high school. His own private life is so bad that if these Family Values people or the local Child Protective Services ever heard about it, Fat Karl would be toast. In fact, the inner circles of the White House contain some of the most corrupt people I have ever met and I would under no circumstances allow any of my grandchildren anywhere near them, ever. They are, most of them, polymorph and perverse and those, like Cheney, who are not, are greedy crooks out to loot the Treasury by any means short of physical armed robbery. As I said before, you get what you pay for and the boobs who voted this gang of thieves and perverts into power deserve exactly what they get. The problem is, Bush and his fanatics have done terrible damage to the economy, have created divisions in the American social structure beyond belief, utterly ruined America's world image and instead of practicing intelligent diplomacy to solve international problems, have threatened, bullied and harassed any individual or government abroad that has dared to object to codified torture, mass killing of civilians, hostile foreign reporters and enemies of Israel, practiced by this Administration on a daily basis. Putting the despicable Gonzales into the Attorney General's office is an obscene farce that attempts to legitimatize sycophancy and torture at the same time. And when the deluded Right, both religious and political, discover that Curious George has played them for the trusting fools that they are, great will be the lamentations heard in the land. And George will go right on getting richer at out expense and we do not need to comment of Fat Karl's pleasures." www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1391.htm#001 See our Inside the White House archive: www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/category.asp?id=41 |