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

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (438178)	8/4/2003 6:00:41 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

DEMOCRAT You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. You vote people into office that put a tax on your cows, forcing you to sell one to raise money to pay the tax. The people you voted for then take the tax money, buy a cow and give it to your neighbor. You feel righteous. Barbara Streisand sings for you. SOCIALIST You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow. REPUBLICAN You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So? COMMUNIST You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour. CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows. DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government. BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain. TEAMSTERS You have two cows. Every other member has two cows. Leadership has 1,000 cows. You got a problem with that? AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one. You force the 2 cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up. FRENCH CORPORATION You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch. Life is good. JAPANESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school. GERMAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year. ITALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows but you don't know where they are. While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman. You break for lunch. Life is good. RUSSIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You have some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka. You produce your 10th, 5-year plan in the last 3 months. The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have. TALIBAN CORPORATION You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two. You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts. Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital. FLORIDA CORPORATION You have a black cow and a brown cow. Everyone votes for the best looking one. Some of the people who like the brown one best vote for the black one. Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best-looking one. NEW YORK CORPORATION You have fifteen million cows. You have to choose which one will be the leader of the herd, so you pick some cow from Arkansas.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (438178)	8/4/2003 11:35:53 PM
From: laura_bush	Respond to of 769670

Jon Stewart is the best reporter in the country. Luv his observation that the president says he'll work until everyone who wants a job finds one and heads off for a 29-day vacation at the faux ranch. Speaking of reporters who refuse to wear Bush-colored glasses: truthout.org Ivins: 9-11 Report Offers Findings That Were Obvious From the Get-Go By Molly Ivins Creators Syndicate Monday 04 August 2003 AUSTIN, Texas - The congressional report by the committees on intelligence about 9-11 partially made public last week reminds me of the recent investigation into the crash of the Columbia shuttle -- months of effort to reconfirm the obvious. In the case of the Columbia, we knew from the beginning a piece of insulation had come loose and struck the underside of one wing. So, after much study, it was determined the crash was caused by the piece of insulation that came loose and struck the underside of the wing. Likewise in the case of 9-11, all the stuff that has been blindingly obvious for months is now blamed for the fiasco. The joint inquiry focused on the intelligence services, concluding that the FBI especially had been asleep at the wheel. And that, in turn, can be blamed at least partly on the fact that the FBI, before 9-11, had only old green-screen computers with no Internet access. Agents wrote out their reports in longhand, in triplicate. Although the process is not complete, the agency is now upgrading its system: Many agents finally got e-mail this year. My particular bete noir in all this is the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), which distinguished itself by granting visas to 15 of the 19 hijackers, who never should have been given visas in the first place. Their applications were incomplete and incorrect. They were all young, single, unemployed males, with no apparent means of support -- the kind considered classic overstay candidates. Had the INS followed its own procedures, 15 of the 19 never would have been admitted. The incompetence of the INS was underlined when it issued a visa to Mohammad Atta, the lead hijacker, six months after 9-11. In the wake of the attacks, the Bush administration promised to increase funding for the INS, to get the agency fully computerized with modern computers and generally up to speed. All that has happened since is that INS funding has been cut. Much attention is being paid to the selective editing of the report, apparently to protect the Saudis. I think an equally important piece of the report is on the bureaucratic tangle that prevents anyone from being accountable for much of anything. The CIA controls only 15 percent to 20 percent of the annual intelligence budget. The rest is handled by the Pentagon, despite widespread agreement that it needs to be centralized. The Bush administration has ignored these calls, mostly because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn't want to give up any power. Time magazine reports, "It was striking that the Pentagon came under such heavy fire in last week's bipartisan report for resisting requests made by CIA director Tenet before 9-11, when the agency wanted to use satellites and other military hardware to spot and target terrorists in Afghanistan." But the most striking thing about this report is that none of its conclusions and none of its recommendations have anything to do with the contents of the PATRIOT Act, which was supposedly our government's response to 9-11. All the could-haves, would-haves and should-haves in the report are so far afield from the PATRIOT Act it might as well be on another subject entirely. Once again, as has often happened in our history, under the pressure of threat and fear, we have harmed our own liberties without any benefit for our safety. Insufficient powers of law enforcement or surveillance are nowhere mentioned in the joint inquiry report as a problem before 9-11. Yet Attorney General John Ashcroft now proposes to expand surveillance powers even further with the PATRIOT II Act. All over the country, local governments have passed resolutions opposing the PATRIOT Act and three states have done so, including the very Republican Alaska. The House of Representatives last week voted to prohibit the use of "sneak and peek" warrants authorized by the PATRIOT Act. The conservative House also voted against a measure to withhold federal funds from state and local law-enforcement agencies that refuse to comply with federal inquirers on citizenship or immigration status. All kinds of Americans are now waking up to the fact that the PATRIOT Act gives the government the right to put American citizens in prison indefinitely, without knowing the charges against them, without access to an attorney, without the right to confront their accusers, without trial. Indefinitely. The report was completed late last year, but its publication was delayed by endless wrangles with the administration over what could be declassified. Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who served on the committee, said the report's release was deliberately delayed by the White House until after the war in Iraq was over because it undercuts the rationale for the war. The report confirms there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. "The administration sold the connection to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war," Cleland said. "What you've seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends."