No

SUNDAY 2.01.04 / 7:33 AM / LINK

Top this for cynicism:

"The consequences for lower-income households are ominous. 'If someone inherits, say, $1 million and lives off the investment income, that won't be taxed. Yet someone who works hard and sweats it out and earns $1 million over a lifetime will pay a heavy tax burden.' Or, as a Congressional committee staffer close to the debate puts it, 'If only wages are taxed, that takes us back to a system where the poor are taxed and the rich escape taxation.' "

What are we talking about? This is a statement by Peter Orszag, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, about what the Bush administration is cooking up in the way of the restructuring the tax code itself. Forget about paltry billion dollar tax cuts for the rich, let's go for the jugular and get it over with. This is the gist of their next move.

The idea is to shield ever more saving programs from taxation, then go after the shortfall by taxing wages. Put another way, If you're making enough to sock it away, we won't tax you. But if you're just getting by on what you earn, we're going to squeeze you till you bleed.

Nice program. All you wage-earning Bush fans must be masochists. National security? Let's see how secure you feel when this takes effect.

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2.01.04 / 7:22 AM / LINK

Enjoy the benefits of moist winds in the oval office and get impeached. Take the nation to war on a huge, calculated truth-torturing "mistake" and become a hero...

The corollary to this is that line in a Dylan song, "Steal a little and they'll put you in jail; steal a lot and they'll make you king," ...or, something along those lines.

As Robert Sheer says at Alternet.org, "Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress."

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2.01.01 / 6:47 AM / LINKS

When our kids are paying the bill will they be vandalizing our gravestones?

Put simply, if you back the Bush administrations' tax cut policies and spending practices you are complicit in the administration's recklessness. It shows that you have little regard for the lives of your children and their futures. Or it shows that you are irresponsibly gullible in the extreme. Or just plain stupid. Numbers don't lie. Not even for George Bush.

In his commentary today Thomas Friedman (who's no flaming liberal) uncovers the administration's B.M.D. (Budget of mass destruction). Here's a sampling:

"It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues." "The latest report from the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit is expected to total some $2.4 trillion over the next decade — almost $1 trillion more than the prediction of just five months ago. That is a failure of intelligence and common sense that threatens to make us all insecure..." "Democrats should ...make this their campaign mantra: 'Is your future better off now than it was four years ago?' That's what's on people's minds. It should be coupled with the bumper sticker: 'Read My Lips: No New Services. Bush Gave All the Money Away... That is the only way to expose what the shameful coalition of Karl Rove-led cynics, who care only about winning the next election; voodoo economists preaching supply-side economics; and libertarian nuts who think that by cutting tax revenues you'll shrink the government — when all you do is balloon the deficit — is doing to our future." "This is so irresponsible and it will end in tears. Remember ...long-term tax cuts without long-term spending cuts are not tax cuts. They are "tax deferrals" — with the burden to be borne by your future or your kid's future.

Continue to support this team and you're as guilty as they are.

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SATURDAY 1.31.04 / 7:17 AM / LINK

Pre-emptive warriors with half-cocked intelligence in cahoots with Slim-Pickens-Type-Texas-bomb-riders

"It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment," Dr. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "And that is most disturbing."

In his testimony, Dr. Kay repeated his conclusions, made public in a series of interviews with news organizations over the past five days, that intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs had turned out to be, at a minimum, out of date.

It would be nice to think that the idea of pre-emptive war will be considered...ahem, "ill-advised" following the Kay report. But probably not with these Slim-Pickens-Type Texas-bomb-riders hootin' through the mid-east on bad intelligence.

But what about Kay's conclusions about Bush being mislead by the CIA?

According to Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo), that's not the way it was. Marshall examines the issue here.

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1.31.04 / 5:51 AM / LINK

Knowing what you don't know about your computer, are you willing to turn over your democracy to political hackers?

An editorial in today's NY Times reports, "Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails."

Now paid, virus-creating geeks funded by all the soft money being coughed-up into campaign coffers could well have the parties hacking up votes all over the place. And they will -- without safeguards. Guaranteed.

If the broad-daylight, Florida 2000 election debacle can be so readily glossed over and forgotten, how hard will it be to steal your vote with a mouse connected to a voting machine? Let's not be stupid again.

In a test run on 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines in the state of Maryland, hackers were paid to have their way with them. And, the editorial says, "They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location."

So it will now be possible for election officials with axes to grind, to sit in non-smoke-filled rooms (or, if they still have smoking sections in back rooms, then in smoke-filled rooms), and illegitimately disqualify voters as did Florida Republicans in the last election fiasco. Or, using the more covert possiblities of the Accuvote-TS, simply change their votes.

Impossible you say? Read on.

"Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in 'approximately 10 seconds.' "

Impossible? Didn't it once seem incredibly unlikely that someone with the credentials, military AWOL record, and clumsy tongue of George Bush could actually become president?

Diebold, the manufacturer of the AccuVote-TS, actually spun the bad report making it sound good. Ah, but, Diebold is run by a Republican.

Read the editorial here.

Trade Secrets and a Nation of Proctologists

Of, course, in the tradition of Big Business, voting machine manufactures don't want to reveal what's going on in the bowels of their creations. It's a trade secret. But this is not a good answer for lovers of democracy. It may be unpleasant, but we're going to have to plumb those depths if we want to keep hope alive. Given the way this administration works we might have to become a nation of proctologists.

More here.


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1.31.04 / 5:38 AM / LINK

Not that you'd expect anything better from them, but...

"Bush administration officials had indications for months that the new Medicare prescription drug law might cost considerably more than the $400 billion advertised by the White House and Congress, according to internal documents and sources familiar with the issue," according to this Washington Post story.

It's only going to cost $153 billion more now than it was going to before Bush signed the bill into law. Imagine that.

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FRIDAY 1.30.04 / 5:22 / LINK

Tying the knot ...or not

For once George Bush and I agree. Marriage can be a good thing (if you don't count losing arguments with your wife). But, if it's so good why shouldn't it be more widespread? A good thing should be broadcast. The more wide-ranging a good thing is the better it will be for everybody. And why should an elite enclave hoard the wealth? Should heterosexuals be the only ones allowed to enjoy the good things of life? Isn't that being just a little stingy?

It seems like common sense that if something is good, denying it to others is just a profound bit of meanness. So the idea of confirming, as a constitutional right, that only couples consisting of a man and woman may experience the joys of marriage might sound like a heap of presumption garnished with fresh sprigs of nastiness, don't you think?

But, regardless of how we might view marriage outside a religious context, we're stuck with our fundamentalists. Fundamentalists these days permeate the political atmosphere. They rule from Washington on down. They form the confines of a mind-set ghetto. They stand for the belittling of our God-given intellect. They hold up a static belief against the vitality of God. Personally, I don't buy it, God will not be overcome.

In the argument for homosexuals being granted the legitimacy of marriage, what's so counter-intuitive in this? All things change, even marriage, despite the claims that marriage (as we know it) is grounded in the fabric of nature and the will of God. There was a time it was argued that slavery was the will of God. Why should marriage be exempt from the normal workings of things? Everything else changes. Haven't you noticed?

The simple fact that marriage is a basic right has even been brought into law. In 1978, the United States Supreme Court declared marriage to be "of fundamental importance to all individuals". The court described marriage as "one of the 'basic civil rights of man'" and "the most important relation in life." The court also noted that "the right to marry is part of the fundamental 'right to privacy'" in the U.S. Constitution.

So, if all this is true, the move by certain groups to limit the benefits of marriage to only male-female couples can be seen for what it is: a tyranny of the presumptuous. Who but the mean-spirited would presume to hoard those benefits to themselves? But maybe it's not mean-spiritedness. It could be just a failure of perspective. For those who say marriage was established at the dawn of time and has never changed, maybe it's time for a little review.

The Biblical model of marriage, for instance, is based on the incest prohibitions listed in the 18th chapter of Leviticus, which are noteworthy for their absence of bans on cousin marriage. This model found it's way into the Church of England canon law that was applied in most of the original American colonies. But the Anglican regulations, and those of many Protestant churches, excluded any restrictions on cousin marriage, which were critically perceived as a Catholic misinterpretation of scripture. But, we now frown upon the marrying of cousins because something changed. In fact, the Catholics won on this one.

Another notable marriage variation from the days of Leviticus is that we are not morally bound to marry our sisters-in-law should our brother die without children. Yes, no matter how off-the-wall your sister-in-law might have been, under Leviticus you were duty-bound to marry her so that your brother might have off-spring (don't even bother trying to figure that one out). Many men will be relieved to know there is no constitutional amendment forcing them to marry their sister-in-law; and it's certain there are also many sisters-in-law with beer-gut brothers-in-law who are breathing sighs of relief with this news. So, even in marriage law, change is not necessarily a bad thing.

And here's one more happy (unless you're a skin-head) marriage-law mutation. There was a time that in 40 states in this country the marriage of a white person to a person of color was forbidden. The reason was that marriages between whites and persons of color were decried as "immoral" and "unnatural". And
overwhelming numbers of Americans agreed. Does that situation sound familiar, or what?

To most of us this idea seems, a best, a little quaint. But in the dark ages one Virginia judge offered what was the prevailing opinion of his day. He said, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." Change a few words and this could be Pat Robertson or Tom Delay going off about same-sex marriage.

The president, of course, has been playing it coy on this one. As one editorial in the Washington Post (1/26/04) said, "Perhaps the most carefully worded section of President Bush's State of the Union speech this year was his...dodge on the subject of gay marriage. 'Activist judges . . . have begun redefining marriage by court order...' he lamented, thus seeming to set up a presidential
endorsement of the noxious proposal to amend the federal Constitution to ban same-sex unions."

But Mr. Bush expressed only conditional support. He used the "if" word. He said, "IF judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process" (emphasis added). Mr. Bush then muddied the waters further by adding his usual plea for tolerance of gays, insisting that "each individual has dignity and value in God's sight," ...except when it comes to marriage.

But this is an election year. In the unhappy, but likely, event that he's re-elected George Bush may change his tune about constitutional amendments. But, as I said before, everything in God's universe changes... especially after elections.

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