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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (21345)	7/1/2003 1:00:32 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

Scott I live in Oregon, where this is happening...children are starving...it's as bad as Iraq the country Bush said he'd liberate except people had a better quality of life before the bushistas arrived...anyway...fyi...the horrors of living in America with no food ala Irish potato famine. Oblivious in D.C. By BOB HERBERT 06/30/03 (New York Times) Of all the challenges we face, none is more troubling than the fact that thousands of Oregonians — many of them children — don't have enough to eat. Oregon has the highest hunger rate in the nation." Gov. Ted Kulongoski, in his State of the State address. Those who still believe that the policies of the Bush administration will set in motion some kind of renaissance in Iraq should take a look at what's happening to the quality of life for ordinary Americans here at home. The president, buoyed by the bountiful patronage of the upper classes, seems indifferent to the increasingly harsh struggles of the working classes and the poor. As Mr. Bush moves from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, building the mother of all campaign stockpiles, states from coast to coast are reaching depths of budget desperation unseen since the Great Depression. The disconnect here is becoming surreal. On Thursday the National Governors Association let it be known that the fiscal crisis that has crippled one state after another is worsening, not getting better. Taxes have been raised. Services have been cut. And the rainy day funds accumulated in the 1990's have been consumed. If help does not materialize soon — in the form of assistance from the federal government or a sharp turnaround in the economy — some states will fall into a fiscal abyss. That already seems to be happening in places like California, which has been driven to its knees by a two-year $38.8 billion budget gap, and Oregon, which has seen drastic cuts in public school services and the withholding of potentially life-saving medicine from seriously ill patients. Most states have been unable to protect even the most fundamental services from damaging budget cuts. "Few states have succeeded in exempting high-priority programs such as K-12 education, Medicaid, higher education, public safety or aid to cities and towns," according to the compilers of the Fiscal Survey of States, a report produced jointly by the governors' association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. Scott Pattison, director of the budget officers' group, said, "If economic conditions remain stagnant or worsen, and if budget shortfalls continue next year, the states will have exhausted many of their options for countering a weak economy." The budget crisis in California, where an unpopular Democratic governor is politically paralyzed and the Republicans in the State Legislature refuse to consider raising taxes, is potentially catastrophic. Jack Kyser, a public policy economist in Los Angeles told The Associated Press: "People are nervous. There's a real chance for a meltdown that could have rippling effects throughout the nation. This is something of a different magnitude than we've seen before." The governors' association called the fiscal survey the most accurate gauge of the health of state budgets. Its discouraging findings were released as the president was preparing a fund-raising swing that added millions more to his campaign stockpile, and as the Internal Revenue Service was reporting that the nation's richest taxpayers were accumulating an even greater share of the nation's wealth. Some Americans are missing meals and going without their medicine, while others are enjoying a surge in already breathtaking levels of wealth. So what are we doing? We're cutting aid to the former while showering government largess on the latter. There's a reason those campaign millions keep coming and coming and coming. A Times article last week noted that the wealthiest 400 taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000, "more than double their share just eight years earlier." The influence of the wealthy has always been great, but it hasn't always been so cruel. Especially in the past six or seven decades there were many powerful political and civic leaders who looked out for the interests of the less fortunate and pressed their claims for treatment that was reasonably fair. That's changed. The Bush juggernaut, at least for the time being, is rolling over everything that dares to get in its way. And fairness is not something it is concerned about. © Copyright 2003 New York Times

To: stockman_scott who wrote (21345)	7/1/2003 7:40:32 AM
From: Kip518	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

'I Never Promised You A Ruse Garden' ____________________________________________________________ By Michael Moore A Letter From Michael Moore To George W. Bush 6-27-3 Dear Lt. George W. Bush, I hope you don't mind me referring to you by the only true military rank you ever achieved, that being the one from your on-again, off-again "days" in the, um, Texas Air National Guard. Ever since I saw you in that flyboy outfit, landing on that ship, I assumed you now wanted to be addressed by your military title, as opposed to the civilian rank imposed on you by your dad's friends. So, Lieutenant, I was wondering, would you do me a favor? Could you PLEASE do better than a ROSE BUSH? I saw the guy on TV yesterday that your boys found, the Iraqi who said he had "planted" some nuclear plans in his "back yard" in Baghdad -- 12 years ago -- "under a rose bush." Woo boy. That's a good one. Do you really think we are as dumb as we look? I know our fascination with "American Idol" and Scott Peterson may make us Americans look a little light in the head, but when it comes to lying to us to lead us into war, we really do demand a bit more of an EFFORT and a FOLLOW-THROUGH. You see, George, it's not the lying and the doctoring of intelligence that has me all upset. It's that you've had control of Iraq for over two months now -- and you couldn't even find the time to plant just a few nukes or vats of nerve gas and at least make it LOOK like you weren't lying to us. You see, by not faking some evidence of weapons of mass destruction, it shows that you thought no one would mind if it turned out you made everything up. A different kind of president, who believes that the American public would be outraged if they ever found out the truth, would go to great lengths to cover up his subterfuge. Johnson did it with the Gulf of Tonkin. He said our ships were "attacked" by the North Vietnamese. They weren't, but he knew he had to at least make it LOOK like it happened. Nixon said he wasn't "a crook," but he knew that wasn't enough, so he paid hush money to the burglars and somehow had 18 1/2 minutes erased from a tape in the Oval Office. Why did he do this? Because he knew the American people would be pissed if they found out the truth. Your blatant refusal to NOT back up your verbal deception with the kind of fake evidence we have become used to is a slap in our collective American face. It's as if you are saying,"These Americans are so damn apathetic and lazy, we won't have to produce any weapons to back up our claims!" If you had just dug a few silo holes in the last month outside Tikrit, or spread some anthrax around those Winnebagos near Basra, or "discovered" some plutonium with that stash of home movies of Uday Hussein feeding his tigers, then it would have said to us that you thought we might revolt if you were caught in a lie. It would have shown us some respect. We honestly wouldn't have cared if it later came out that you planted all the WMD -- sure, we'd be properly peeved, but at least we would have been proud to know that you knew you HAD to back up your phony claims with the real deal! I guess you finally figured that out this week. It started to appear that millions of us were calling you on your bluff -- those "fictitious reasons for the fictitious war." So you quickly produced this man and his rose bush and some 12-year old piece of paper and some metal parts. CNN broke in at 5:15pm and screamed they had the exclusive! "IRAQI NUCLEAR PLANS FOUND!" But a few good reporters started asking some hard questions -- and, barely 3 hours later, your own administration was forced to admit the plans were "not the smoking gun proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Oops. Never a good idea to rely on a bush, Lieutenant. Yours, Michael Moore Contact for this article. MMFlint@aol.com PS. Sorry, I still can't get that padded flyboy suit out of my head. I know, I need help. But when you landed on that carrier, and that banner read, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," just what mission was that that was accomplished? 'Cause by my count, more than 50 of our young soldiers have died since you said the mission was accomplished. Anarchy still reigns, the Brits are losing kids, too, and wacko fundamentalists now seem to ready to rule the land. Women are already being told to cover their face and shut their mouths, store owners who sell liquor have been executed, and movie theaters showing "immoral" Hollywood movies have been forced to shut down. And hey, this isn't even west Texas! Maybe you could get back into that jumpsuit, fly over to Baghdad and land at the former Saddam International Airport, jump out and give one of those big happy waves -- under a sign that reads, "MISSION IMPOSSIBLE."