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

To: Selectric II who wrote (462167)	9/20/2003 9:35:59 PM
From: Wayners	Respond to of 769670

Thats their plan, same way you cook frogs, start with warm water to put them to sleep next thing you know..it tastes just like chicken. I think the situation is going to be a bit different. At some point people realize they've had enough. The colonists put up with British Tyranny for about 50 to 75 years before they finally had enough and snapped. And when they did finally snap, it was with guns. The British number one goal was to seize firearms.

To: Selectric II who wrote (462167)	9/20/2003 10:24:04 PM
From: laura_bush	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush is Losing Support on Right Bob von Sternberg, Minneapolis Star Tribune Saturday 20 September 2003 The criticisms of President Bush aren't surprising: He's bungling the war in Iraq; his budget deficits are disastrous; he's trampling civil liberties; his spending plans are misguided. But the source of those criticisms is: They're increasingly coming from conservatives. Think tank studies, op-ed columns, talk radio callers and opinion polls show conservatives' disenchantment with Bush's policies and priorities has been climbing, although nowhere near as much as it has among liberals. And although those dismayed conservatives might rally round him in next year's presidential election, his campaign aides are keeping a close eye on the trend. "I hate to say they've got nowhere else to go, but I think most conservatives will stick with the president," said former Rep. Vin Weber, who is co-chair of Bush's reelection campaign in Minnesota and four other states. "Conservative voters across the country will conclude backing the president is imperative. Of course, it's impossible not to have a few dissident voices." One of those voices belongs to Daniel Cragg, a college student from Eagan who in June launched a Web site called conservativesagainstbush.com "to propound the conservative principals this administration has forsaken." The site has been averaging about 200 hits a day, Cragg said. "The idea is to get the word out about how far off track he's gotten," he said. "A lot of people are mad about what's going on." Evidence of grumbling on the right can be gleaned from recent polls. A Star Tribune Minnesota Poll this month found that 31 percent of self-described conservatives gave Bush a thumbs down for the way he's doing his job. That was up from 9 percent who disapproved in April, days after the fall of Baghdad. The current disapproval rate among conservatives is the highest the Minnesota Poll has recorded in Bush's presidency. Conservatives' displeasure has been growing nationally too. A recent ABC News poll found that 23 percent of conservatives nationwide disapprove of the job Bush is doing, up from 14 percent in April. Such sentiments (along with considerably higher disapproval ratings by moderates and liberals) shouldn't be surprising, Weber said. "We've come off a summer of difficult news, what with the economy and the post-war," he said. "If those things were to continue and deepen, you'd start to worry. But the opposite is true." Besides, no president satisfies every member of his political base all the time. Minnesota conservatives' disapproval of Bush's performance has seesawed, from as low as 3 percent immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to 18 percent 10 months later. (And it's a bipartisan phenomenon: Witness the fact that a month after Bill Clinton became president, 19 percent of liberal Minnesotans disapproved of his performance.) "Every successful Republican president, including Ronald Reagan, ends up criticized by a number of voices on the right who complain he's not pure enough," Weber said. "Any compromise is unacceptable to them, but it's impossible to govern the country with rigid ideological principles." A similar point was made by Mitch Pearlstein, who heads the Center for the American Experiment, a Minneapolis-based conservative think tank. "There are indeed conservatives out there who will complain about any officeholder who's not doing precisely what they want him to do," he said. "These are early seeds of disgruntlement, but they're still very faint." Fuming Conservatives universally praise Bush's relentless tax cutting but have little good to say about the growth in government programs, spending and budget deficits. Pointing to this year's projected $455 billion budget shortfall and proposals for a Medicare prescription drug benefit, Club for Growth president Stephen Moore wrote this month: "Imagine that Al Gore and a Democratic Congress were doing all this profligate spending. Would conservatives stand for it? . . . Fiscal sanity is in retreat, under a solidly Republican regime." Federal spending last year grew by 7.9 percent, the highest in a dozen years. Much of that is because of increased military and homeland security spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but a double-digit increase in Medicaid spending has contributed to the growth. Cato Institute president Edward Crane fumed to the New York Times this summer that Bush's "fiscal record is appalling -- spending is out of control. The fiscal record of the Bush administration makes Clinton look downright responsible." Research recently published by the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think-tank, showed that the true size of the federal workforce stood at 12.1 million in October 2002, up from 11 million in October 1999. Despite the Bush administration's claim that it has shrunk the federal workforce, reductions have been more than offset by "off-budget" jobs paid for with federal contracts and grants, the study found. An analysis last spring by the Cato Institute compared spending during the first terms of Bush and Reagan and found that spending grew in 11 categories under Bush and four under Reagan. While spending on education, training, employment and social services shrunk by 32.6 percent under Reagan's watch, it has grown by 26.8 percent under Bush's. Assessing Bush's record, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan recentlywrote: "The Bush administration is actually a big government liberal administration on fiscal policy. It likes spending money; it takes on big projects; it's quite content to borrow 'til the fiscal cows come home." Continues...... startribune.com