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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (5756)	1/25/2004 11:08:01 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

CAMPAIGN 2004 Deficit Denial Think Bush is a big spender? Wait till you see what the Dems propose. BY PETE SEPP AND DREW JOHNSON Sunday, January 25, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004601 The seven remaining Democrat presidential challengers have decried the size of the mounting Bush budget deficits. However, a closer look at their own platforms reveals an inconvenient fact: the budget shortfalls they're complaining about on the road to the White House would only deepen under their own policies. Go Figure New federal spending proposed by the Democratic candidates for president, in billions. Sharpton $1,327.01 Kucinich $1,060.35 Gephardt $368.76 Kerry $265.11 Dean $222.90 Clark $220.66 Edwards $199.48 Lieberman $169.55 Source: NTUF calculations from BillTally and cost-accounting sources. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation has systematically examined the fiscal policy implications of the contenders' agendas, using our BillTally budget software and relying on third-party sources (such as the Congressional Budget Office) to assign a cost to every proposal they've offered. We found that each candidate (including Dick Gephardt, who dropped out of the race after we released the study) calls for spending increases which would substantially swell the deficit--on average, an additional $479.23 billion beyond the present projection, which is effectively a 21.5% increase in federal spending. Each of the Democrats has at one time called for full or partial repeal of the Bush tax cut, as if this were a panacea for federal budgetary woes and a license to introduce new proposals. Even by the most generous estimates, the projected federal revenue reduction in 2004 as a result of the 2003 tax cuts is $135 billion--yet, the thriftiest of the Democratic platforms calls for $170 billion in new spending. Howard Dean has labeled himself a "fiscal conservative," but his policies--including complete repeal of the Bush tax cuts--would increase the federal deficit by $88 billion in just the first year. Where would the candidates cut? Someone hid the knives. Out of well over 200 proposals with a budgetary impact offered by the candidates, just two would reduce federal spending. Nor do these alarming figures account for the fact that the temptation to spend even more money can be much greater after entering the White House. Consider President Bush, who, after campaigning as a fiscal conservative, has seen federal spending increase by 23.7% over the past three years. Even the most parsimonious of the candidates eclipses that total by over 15%. Pity the American taxpayer. Mr. Sepp is vice president for communications and Mr. Johnson is a policy analyst for the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. The entire study is available at www.ntu.org.

To: calgal who wrote (5756)	1/25/2004 11:11:16 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

CAMPAIGN 2004 Once Were Warriors On foreign policy, are the Democrats again the party of Truman? BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD Sunday, January 25, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Are the Democrats coming back to their roots? It is still very early in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but with more than 80% of Iowa caucus-goers endorsing candidates who voted at least to authorize the U.S. strike against Iraq, it is beginning to look as if the Democrats are ready to put the antiwar temptation behind them in order to challenge George W. Bush for the White House. That would be good news for the Democrats. No antiwar candidate can win a national contest in 2004. It would also be good news for the country and for the world. The illusion that a Democratic administration would abandon the vigorous prosecution of the war on terror is one of the few hopes to which America's enemies can still cling. Historically, the Democrats have been America's war party. Bob Dole got into trouble during his 1976 vice presidential campaign when he denounced World War I and World War II, along with Vietnam and Korea, as "Democrat Wars," but most of America's foreign wars began with Democrats in the White House: add the Mexican War, the Cold War and the War of 1812 to the Democrats' count. Republicans, even including the Federalist and Whig predecessors to the GOP, could only claim the Spanish American War and the Gulf War before the War on Terror and George W. Bush. "Vote for a Republican," people used to say, "and you get a Depression. Vote for a Democrat, and you get a war." Most of the Democrats' wars were, to use what is becoming a popular phrase today, "wars of choice." The War of 1812 was, strictly speaking, unnecessary; unbeknownst to Congress, Britain had already revoked the Orders in Council before war was declared. In the Mexican War, James Knox Polk sent U.S. forces into disputed territory well before exhausting all diplomatic avenues. More recently, the Vietnamese and Korean conflicts were, if not quite wars of choice, wars whose primary purpose was not to safeguard either the territory or the citizens of the U.S., but its broad strategic interests. U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were also wars of choice; the United States faced no direct military threat as a result of Serbian madness and misrule. The Cold War was preventive; the Soviet Union did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. in 1947. Of all the wars of all the Democrats, only the two world wars were clearly wars of necessity--and some historians argue that a more evenhanded policy by President Wilson could have kept the U.S. out of World War I as well. In the 19th century, idealistic and pacifist war critics were found mostly among Federalists, Whigs and Republicans. Republican senators like George Norris and William Borah continued the tradition--as did the Republican Rep. Jeannette Rankin, who voted against both World War I and World War II. As progressives gradually moved into the Democratic Party through the New Deal period, the Democratic Party became the natural host for America's partisans of protest. Franklin Roosevelt's former secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace led his Progressive Party out of the Democrats to punish Harry Truman for initiating the Cold War. During the Vietnam War, Democratic senators like William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy led the opposition. Had a Democrat been president on Sept. 11, 2001, a combination of political calculation and personal conviction would have almost certainly pushed the administration toward a vigorous prosecution of the war--just as both the Truman and Carter administrations were caught up in confrontations with the Soviet Union. Many of the Democrats who served the Clinton administration were instinctive hawks. Madeleine Albright is one of the most passionate antitotalitarians in American life and has always called herself a child of Munich rather than a child of Vietnam. Richard Holbrooke has the talent and the toughness to play the role of a latter-day Dean Acheson. In any case, a strong Democratic president in the White House, backed by the kinds of public majorities that have backed the Bush administration's prosecution of the war, would have been able to tame and control the party's antiwar wing and--whatever the protest on the Kucinich-Nader fringe--put the Democrats solidly in the center of public opinion on the war. This is the strategy towards which both President and Sen. Clinton seem to be heaving the party, but until the Iowa voters spoke Monday night, it was not clear whether this push would succeed. With Iowa voters signaling that opposition to the war is not their main priority, the moderates seem firmly in the saddle. In fact, the mainstream Democratic candidates are mostly noticeable for the very small differences between their proposals and the foreign policies of the Bush administration. Looked at carefully, it is more style than substance: They would be nicer to the U.N. and to the Europeans than President Bush was, in the hope that this would bring more support for U.S. foreign policy. But what if, in office, they kiss the frog and it doesn't turn into a prince? What if Jacques Chirac, for example, continues to oppose American foreign policy even if President Kerry or President Edwards tries to be nicer to him? President Clinton kissed a lot of frogs and didn't get much help on issues like Iraq. And to some degree, a Democratic president's hands will be tied. The Senate is unlikely to ratify either the Kyoto Protocol or the treaty establishing an international criminal court no matter who is in the White House next year. If Old Europe and the U.N. refuse to help the U.S. in Iraq in a pragmatic and timely fashion, then the Democrats would be stuck with something that looks a great deal like the Bush foreign policy. Republicans faced a similar problem in the Truman years. As Truman and Acheson developed the strategy that became known as containment, Richard Nixon described the State Department that put together the Marshall Plan and NATO as "Dean Acheson's cowardly college of communist containment." Truman's policies in Korea--avoiding all-out war with China and settling for a stalemate--were unacceptably weak. We needed something more muscular: unleashing Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, and rolling back communism in Europe rather than merely containing it. And in the meantime, we needed a much more vigorous prosecution of security risks in the U.S. government. Once in power, the GOP was step by step forced into accepting most of Truman's foreign policy. Chiang remained on Taiwan; no U.S. tanks rushed into Hungary in 1956. The Eisenhower administration worked behind the scenes to crush Sen. Joseph McCarthy--and accepted a compromise peace in Korea. Republicans continued to blame Truman and Roosevelt for decisions (at Yalta, for example) that made these policies necessary, but at the level of policy they bowed to the inevitable and carried on with containment. The war on terror is still very young, and history rarely repeats itself exactly. Still, it is more likely than not that when the Democrats get back in office, they will fight the war on terror in ways that won't be completely unrecognizable to the Republicans fighting it now. Mr. Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Power Terror Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk," forthcoming from Knopf in April.

To: calgal who wrote (5756)	1/25/2004 11:17:06 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6358

Interesting: My favorite Democrat Paul Jacob (archive) January 25, 2004 As the New Hampshire Primary looms, and her husband’s campaign continues to slip, ordinary Americans are quietly hoping she will pick up the torch and enter the fray. If a Democrat ends up being the next president of the United States, please let it be Judy Dean. Of course, Judy Dean--married to former Vermont governor and former front-running Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean--is not running for President. She is, nonetheless, being splashed across network television and the pages of People magazine. Howard wants to be president. Judy doesn’t. Instead, she wants to doctor her patients and mother her son, a senior in high school, and her daughter, away at Yale. Which is why I’m all for her. In not being a candidate, she already demonstrates a level-headedness and sense of responsibility far beyond the others. "[T]he truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed," Socrates explains in Plato’s Republic, "and the State in which they are most eager, the worst." Clearly, the Ancient Greeks would have supported Judy for President, too. But she still won’t run. She’s sane. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose earliest statements to the press were to disparage cookie-baking, Judy Dean told People magazine, "I actually do make chocolate chip cookies; they're easy to make....I actually made them for the campaign office. One of my very few contributions. They're definitely not fussy about what they eat." Baking cookies is not a crime. But Judy Dean has committed an incredible crime. A political and media felony punishable by endless droning on throughout the modern 24-hour drive-by-shooting news cycle. In addition to not running for president, Judy Dean is not campaigning for her husband, either. Sure, after the shocking truth of her non-campaigning was revealed, she made one trip to Iowa to stand by her man. But it sounded like fun, an "adventure weekend" for her. She still never pledged to usher in a new Camelot or become a political prop for her country, should her husband become king--er, president. Now, truth be told, almost everyone who isn’t running for president refuses--like Judy Dean--to campaign for the office. After all, where’s the motivation? But Judy is stuck, because her old man is running for president. Remember? Myra Gutin teaches a course in First Ladies at Rider University in New Jersey. (Ah, the rigors of college life!) "The whole thing has just struck me as a little odd," she told the New York Times. "There may be some voters out there who say, ‘well, why isn’t she here? Why isn’t she supporting him?’ It’s the most outward manifestation of support." Yeah, "manifestation of support" and all, but did Professor Gutin not get the memo? About Judy having a son in high school? About her being a real doctor and having patients to see? "The other candidates will come around with their wives and say ‘here we are,’" warns Lewis Gould, historian emeritus at the University of Texas and an expert on First Ladies, "and then there will be these questions….So, where are you?" Some "tough" questions are easy to answer. Judy Dean will be back in Vermont seeing patients and parenting, thank you very much. Not doing television interviews and not advising her husband. Sorry, but her number is probably (wisely) unlisted. Judy Dean says, "I’m very happy doing what I do. He’s happy doing what he does. I think that he’s doing a great job and I think he thinks what I do is a great job." Only in America would we spend $1.5 billion promoting healthy marriages and then fail to notice the real McCoy right in front of us. True, maybe I’m sympathetic because years ago a friend suggested, within earshot of my wife, that I should run for public office. Unarmed, my wife simply replied, "He’d make a good candidate, but who would his wife be?" My wife--like Judy Dean and unlike far too many in this Jerry Springer culture--has no desire to ever see herself on television. Or to see me…on television, that is. Oh, sure, I was a little hurt later when I thought about it, that she wouldn’t throw herself mindlessly into my dream, had that been my dream. And even with all my debonair charm? Apparently, I married someone with more on the ball than to be waiting for me to give her the world. If Dr. Phil asks, it definitely works for us. I would not trade my wife for a better First Lady. Would you? Would you want a president who would? Dean defended his wife against the serious charge of non-campaigning to Diane Sawyer and a national audience on ABC. Sawyer actually compared the interview to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s "60 Minutes" interview in 1992 after his alleged infidelity with Gennifer Flowers hit the press. Is Sawyer, like other pundits, blinded by fantasies of Kennedy’s Camelot? (A reality that more resembled Caligua’s Rome.) How could she fail to distinguish between Howard Dean’s campaign problems, which certainly haven’t spilled over into his and Judy’s marriage, and the Clintons’ marriage-related problems that indeed did spill over into their 1992 campaign. Apparently, speaking too boisterously or having one’s spouse refuse to forsake home and career for political power can topple a campaign. But adultery can wreck something more important: a marriage. Dean explained to the seemingly baffled Sawyer, that, "My marriage and my family is the most important thing to me. It’s more important than being president." I can think of lots of reasons not to vote for Howard Dean for president, which I’ve inerrantly espoused to readers of my free Common Sense e-letter. My cup runneth over with reasons --none having to do with the media obsession over his fired-up rant to campaign volunteers in Iowa. But, his choice of Judy Dean for his wife and his treatment of his wife and family show remarkably good judgment, marking the best reason yet to vote _for_ Howard Dean. If I was a Democrat. And if Judy still won’t run. Paul Jacob is Senior Fellow at U.S. Term Limits, a Townhall.com member group. ©2003 Paul Jacob Contact Paul Jacob \| Read Jacob's biography Everybody's buying one! Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure Amuse your conservative friends and annoy your liberal neighbors with the brand new Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure. This incredibly lifelike action figure looks just like the beautiful Ann Coulter, and best of all . . . it sounds like Ann, too! This highly collectible doll comes in a display box with information highlighting Ann's unique contributions to America's political discourse. If you can't get enough Ann Coulter, you'll want to order the Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure today! Want to take action about what you have just read? Then write a letter to your Members of Congress or your local newspapers, who you can find by entering your ZIP code in the boxes below. Also make sure to tell your newspaper editors that they should carry your favorite conservative columnists! NOTE: Columns will not be automatically attached to the emails you send through this tool. Copyright 1991-2003 URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/pj20040125.shtml

To: calgal who wrote (5756)	1/25/2004 11:17:26 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

No left turn George Will (archive) URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20040125.shtml January 25, 2004 SAN FRANCISCO -- Gavin Newsom, 36, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who has just become this city's youngest mayor in a century, is, of course, a Democrat. He also is tall, dark and handsome and a self-made millionaire from restaurant and wine businesses, whose wife is described as a prosecutor, television legal analyst and "former lingerie model." Newsom barely won, even though he was endorsed by Democratic luminaries Bill Clinton, Al Gore and most of the presidential aspirants. But he was not endorsed by Howard Dean, which may say something about the limits of impulsive liberalism. Newsom and his opponent, Matt Gonzalez, were on the 11-member Board of Supervisors, only two of whom supported Newsom. Gonzalez, the Green Party candidate, ran an Internet-driven campaign and spent one-tenth as much as Newsom but got 47 percent of the vote. Gonzalez received 10,000 more votes than Newsom on Election Day but lost when the absentee ballots were counted. San Franciscans had endured three elections in 64 days -- the gubernatorial recall (the city voted 80 percent against recalling Gray Davis), the first mayoral election, then the Newsom-Gonzalez runoff -- which may have dampened the enthusiasm of all but political enthusiasts, who in this city are to the left of the salad fork. Gonzalez, who once played in a punk rock band, portrayed Newsom as a protege of outgoing -- in several senses -- Mayor Willie Brown, which is true. And as a child of privilege, which is nonsense. Newsom was raised by a single mother who worked two jobs. Although Gonzalez wants it known that he sleeps on a futon in an apartment he shares with three other ascetics, he refused to release his tax returns. This city has, well, distinctive demographics. Reversing the national average, there are twice as many renters (65 percent) as homeowners. Renters, responding to the severe housing shortage that is predictably exacerbated by rent control, predictably demand more controls. They say rent control is a "diversity" measure, preventing the city from being swamped by people willing to pay the market price of housing. Seventy percent of adults here are single. The city evidently has more dogs than children, and Newsom says the endorsement of a dog -- well, dog owners -- political action committee is much coveted. But strike the word "owners." Gonzalez was the author of the ordinance stipulating that pets will also have "guardians." Can you be arrested for saying just "owner"? Newsom languidly says, "You don't get arrested for much else out here." The city has about as many camels as Republicans, so Newsom is called a "conservative." This smear gained currency even though Newsom supports "transgender rights," meaning the city pays for its employees' sex change operations, including -- this may be more than you want to know -- expensive hormone treatments. Newsom courted the large LGBTQI constituency, an acronym he can almost explain. It stands for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, questioners and "intersex." What is that last group? He is not sure. Newsom does say inflammatory (to "progressives") things like: "You can't redistribute wealth you don't have." And he does not share progressives' enthusiasm for shuffling students around to fine-tune each school's "diversity index." Fewer than 60,000 public school pupils are left, half of whom speak a language other than English at home. Newsom says the high school dropout rate is high, and the average Latino grade is only slightly higher than the African American average of D or D-plus. San Francisco spends more than any other city on the homeless, so naturally it has more homeless people per capita than any other city. Newsom drafted the "Care Not Cash" bill to provide treatment and housing rather than cash, which attracts the homeless, who use cash injudiciously. Voters loved Newsom's idea, but progressives like Gonzalez and their allies in the judiciary have blocked it. Newsom says "no one knows" how many homeless people there are, partly because progressives have blocked the gathering of data. He guesses between 5,000 and 15,000, with a chronic street population of 3,500. Arrest someone for aggressive panhandling, and, Newsom says, a pro bono attorney appears to fight a $50 fine that cannot be collected anyway. Gonzalez did what Dean has done: He told the left that its hour had come around at last. The Iowa result suggests that Democrats understand the warning that radiates from San Francisco, America's most hospitable habitat for Deanism. That impulse, or something very like it, crested short of victory. If it can't make it here, it can't make it anywhere. ©2003 Washington Post Writers Group