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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (213690)	1/1/2002 5:23:31 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 769670

Senator No's notions William Rusher Question on a political science exam: You are the majority leader of the United States Senate. The country is in a recession. The president (who is of the opposite party) proposes a "stimulus bill" — a series of measures designed to stimulate the economy and pull the country out of the recession. But next November, the entire House of Representatives (which is narrowly controlled by the president's party), and one-third of the Senate (where your majority currently hangs on a single vote), is coming up for election. All experience shows that much depends on the state of the economy on Election Day. If the recession is still on, voters will tend to vote against the incumbent president's party. If the recession is over, and the country is returning to prosperity, voters will tend to credit the president for the recovery and vote for his party. What would you do? (1) Pass the stimulus bill and help the country recover from the recession, even though this will be to your party's disadvantage next November. (2) Refuse to pass the stimulus bill, let the recession continue, and reap your reward next November, when the voters hand control of the House to your party and strengthen your majority in the Senate. If you chose answer No. 1, I have an attractive bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan that I would like to sell you. As Mr. Dooley observed, "Politics ain't beanbag," and it would take an extraordinarily high-minded politician to sacrifice his party's hopes of controlling Congress to help the president pull the country out of a recession if leaving us in it for a few more months would result in victory for his party next November. That is, of course, exactly the problem facing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, and he has predictably chosen option No. 2. Being not only hard-nosed, but also clever, however, he has gone to great pains to conceal what he is doing. It's not that he's against a stimulus bill — heavens, no. But he simply cannot accept the one President Bush is proposing and that the House has passed. So America is just going to have to do without a stimulus bill. Oddly enough, the ultimate sticking point was Mr. Daschle's opposition to a provision in Mr. Bush's bill that would give laid-off workers a tax credit with which to purchase medical insurance. That, Mr. Daschle declared, wouldn't do at all. Instead, he wanted to extend the time under which laid-off employees would remain covered by their former employer's health plan. It seems like a puny reason for depriving the whole American economy of the stimulus it needs to get back on its feet. And it is. For one thing, neither of the rival proposals has anything to do with stimulating the economy. But, of course, the particular excuse didn't matter. President Bush got the message, loud and clear: The Senate wouldn't pass a stimulus bill of any kind, and that was that. The average American can be forgiven for being reluctant to believe that a prominent politician could act in such a coldblooded, cynical fashion, but it happens all the time. I am not eager to take a partisan approach to this example. Let us assume the worst: that the Republicans would do the same thing if the tables were turned. But I do take it a little hard that Mr. Daschle, of all people — he of the engaging, almost simpering, smile, and those interminable appeals to "bipartisanship" — should be the one to pull off the trick. If America is still in a recession next November, I hope the voters will remember whom to thank. washtimes.com

To: gao seng who wrote (213690)	1/1/2002 5:36:10 PM
From: jimpit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Gao...Excellent article! Thanks for posting it. If you read this, please provide a link to the article, if you can. Thanks, Regards and Happy New Year! Jim

To: gao seng who wrote (213690)	1/1/2002 7:35:47 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

gao, I built a new machine. 700e p3 512 meg and an epox mb with via chipset. board was 40, mem 50 and cpu 90. used a maxtor 5 and a ibm15 gig drive and a cirrca 96 cdrom/dvd. win 2k cd no good, win xp did not like it. failed install. win nt.4 installed. The install of my nine rev 4 card and sgi flat panel went smoothly. but I had to use linux box to get sevpack6 as netscape 2 that installs could not download from borgville. After sp6 I uped ie to 5. fixed plain passwords so I could samba with my unix boxes. nt works fine with the built in sound on the mother board. System works OK. nt 4.0 only handles small partitions of 2 gig or so. sucky, I did not remember. This is system (half) I also downloaded iso files for the two install cd's of redhat 7.2. I burn cd's on a win98 machine. but the iso's were on a mandrake 8.0 linux box(angle) with exported nfs files . The exported files from (angle) were mounted on another mandrake 7.1 linux box( square). The nfs mounts on (square) were samba shared. So on win98 box (right) using iso's from (square) that were nfs mounted from (angle) I burned the redhat cd's. Now (right) is on a thin wire at 10 mb/s thru to 10 base-t uplinked to a 100 base-t router that connects to both (square) and (angle). I was wondering about using a network link to burn a cd. It worked fine. The redhat install seemed to go ok. the boot loader was confusing, but I created a boot floppy and can boot betwix nt4 and linux. But redhat still has a problem with install where it is not obvious on how to stop the system from insisting on starting in a graphical mode. So after install I could boot normally to a login. So using the linux boot rescue I hand edited the /etc/inittab file and changed the default init level from 5 to 3 and now I could log in. I then installed my commercial xig X server that understands the SW 1600 and the X was up and running fine. The gnome window manager is not bad. The sound also works fine. Well now back to playing tom watson tosiwmee

To: gao seng who wrote (213690)	1/8/2002 10:04:53 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Inching toward socialism Linda Bowles January 8, 2002 It is difficult to understand the long-range implications of current events. This is to say, it is difficult to know whether a current event is part of a historical sidetrack, a cultural fad or a mainstream trend. Smart people have called our attention to this reality. For example, the late Ayn Rand described the insidious process which takes a society, inch by unremarkable inch, to socialism: "The goal of the 'liberals' -- as it emerges from the record of the past decades -- was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot -- by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the 'conservative' was only to retard that process.)" When the federal government took over the task of inspecting luggage at airports and terminals, it added more than 30,000 new employees to its payroll. Most of them will become dues-paying members of government unions. They will become unremovable, overpaid wards of a government monopoly. They will become predictably dependent upon and grateful to the advocates of big government and higher taxes. They will become Democrats. Surely there can no longer be any doubt that America is well on its way down the slippery slope to socialism. The government continues to grow in size, power and arrogance as it asserts increasing sovereignty over the lives and behavior of its subjects. The noose tightens, and the rabble wear it like a badge of honor. Our progression on this path is so subtle that only in retrospect, when it is too late to resist, will we understand that our freedoms have been irretrievably forfeited and our Constitution irreversibly abandoned. In the words of Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." The idea of socialism is attractive. Its basic seductive premise is the same as that of modern liberalism: The government is responsible for implementing altruism throughout society. The government must control all available resources with a view toward equality and fairness. The government must fight the selfish impulse of people to keep the fruits of their own labor. Everyone, impelled by "compassion and caring," must sacrifice for the common good, so that all may share and share alike. This noble-sounding doctrine is often expressed this way: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." So what if it's the creed of communism! However, there are a few problems when one descends from the political pulpit and attempts to translate this ethereal concept into practice. Given a choice, people are disinclined to immolate themselves in service to others. The sacrifice of the fruit of one's hard labor for the achievement of a larger social goal is not natural behavior and cannot be maintained on a voluntary basis. Sooner or later, it requires force, which will not come openly, but like a thief in the night. What comes to mind is the observation of Lord Chesterfield that " ... arbitrary power ... must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were, step by step, lest the people should see it approach." The massively cruel and ruinous communistic experiment of the Soviet Empire would not have been necessary if philosophers and intellectuals had not ignored a basic truth about human nature: Human beings, as a derivative of the instinct to survive, are innately driven to act in their own self interest. Not withstanding propaganda, conditioning or brute force, any government or institution which runs head on against the grain of this basic human drive is doomed to fail. We seem not to have learned a basic lesson of history: Capitalism harnesses human self interest; socialism exhausts itself trying to kill it. The bureaucrats, who seize and dole out other people's assets, initially see themselves as humanitarians. Eventually, they conclude they are indeed superior to others, and treat themselves accordingly. They make laws to which they are not subject; they vote themselves and their wards privileges and benefits. They no longer serve; they rule a nation of the government, by the government and for the government. townhall.com