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

To: calgal who wrote (543507)	2/21/2004 2:23:17 AM
From: denizen48	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

Hey Orc, Check this out. On TV news this story about a veteran claming he was "tortured" by North Vietnamese using tapes of Senator Kerry's speech to the house back in 71? That has to be a bald-faced lie! There weren't any VCR's back then. Where would they have got a TAPE! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!THERE IT IS AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!! What f'ing liars!!!!! Hey, people, LOOK AT THIS.

To: calgal who wrote (543507)	2/21/2004 3:25:25 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

To tell the truth Rich Tucker (archive) February 13, 2004 \| Print \| Send You’ve almost got to feel sorry for George W. Bush. Out on the campaign trail his Democratic opponents attack him for being dishonest. They say he lied to get us into war in Iraq. Yet, back in Washington he’s also being attacked -- and this time for telling the truth. According to the president’s annual economic report, sending some service industry jobs overseas can be a good idea. In fact, Greg Mankiw, the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, called offshoring “just a new way to do international trade.” That’s true. But it’s not politically expedient to say so. It’s much more popular to respond with overheated rhetoric, as politicians on both sides quickly did. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., warned, “outsourcing can be a problem for American workers and the American economy.” Democratic frontrunner John Kerry also jumped to the offensive. He claimed the Bush administration thinks “sending American jobs overseas is good for America and good for the economy … they want to export more of our jobs overseas.” Tough talk is, of course, predictable in an election year. But before we go off half cocked, let’s consider the truth of what Mankiw said. Offshoring is simply a part of free trade -- the process that’s creating a new economy, here and overseas. Sadly, with free trade, some American jobs are going to be lost. That’s painful, especially for those who do lose a job. But, overall, free trade produces far more jobs for Americans -- and better paying ones -- than it takes away. Consider NAFTA. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot memorably predicted that free trade with Mexico would create a “giant sucking sound” as American jobs moved south of the border. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service estimates some 200,000 workers have been displaced since 1994. But according to the U.S. trade representative, NAFTA exports now support 2.9 million American jobs. And those jobs pay 13 to 18 percent more than the average U.S. wage. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing wages have also increased dramatically. Real hourly compensation is up by 14 percent under NAFTA, more than double the 6.5 percent increase in the decade before NAFTA. And according to a University of Michigan study, the Uruguay Round and NAFTA resulted in income gains of $1300-$2000 for the average American family of four. So on the whole, it’s been a boon to the American economy. Again -- free trade will displace some workers. That’s a sad fact of life. There are always going to be people losing -- or, in other words, changing -- jobs. That’s because the job market never stands still. And even if it did, and we didn’t lose any existing jobs, we’d still fall behind. Our population is growing, so we need to constantly add jobs. That’s why we must follow the policy that will give the greatest number of people the best chance to find a good job: free trade. And it’s a two way street -- it’s not possible to get the benefits of free trade (more, better-paying American jobs) without the somewhat bitter medicine (losing some American jobs). Senate Democrats responded to the president’s economic report by introducing the “Jobs for America Act,” which would require American companies to warn their employees before sending any jobs overseas. That’s ironic, because more jobs are probably lost through congressional actions than through free trade. As columnist George Will wrote recently, the city of Chicago alone has lost more than 7,000 jobs in the candy-making industry. These jobs are going overseas -- but not because labor is cheaper there. They’re going overseas because sugar is cheaper there. Sugar is a heavily subsidized crop. That means American taxpayers chip in to pay farmers to grow sugar beets or sugar cane. Meanwhile, we maintain stiff quotas to keep the price of imported sugar artificially high. Thus, it’s far cheaper to make candy overseas and import it than it is to make it here. But don’t expect lawmakers, who get fat on campaign donations from the American sugar industry, to spend much time complaining about those job losses -- losses they could prevent by removing tariffs and quotas and promoting free trade. In real life, honesty is the best policy. That should be true in politics as well. Maybe we’ll find out. The president has proclaimed the good news about free trade. Now, we’ll see if that good news will play in Peoria. Rich Tucker is manager of professional training in the Center For Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, a Townhall.com member group. ©2003 The Heritage Foundation

To: calgal who wrote (543507)	2/21/2004 3:26:13 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

A kick where it’s needed John Leo (archive) February 16, 2004 \| Print \| Send When is the word “diversity” not tolerated on campus? When someone tries to put the word “intellectual” in front of it. The debate over David Horowitz’s campaign for intellectual diversity has been raging in Colorado for five months. By spring or fall, the debate may come to an intellectually not-very-diverse university near you. Horowitz, the veteran conservative activist, is promoting an “Academic Bill of Rights” to protect students and professors from the aggressive leftist mono-culture that dominates campuses today. Though clearly taking aim at the left, Horowitz scrupulously framed the bill in language that would protect everyone on campus, left and right. The text says, “All faculty should be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise,” never on the basis of political or religious beliefs. Stanley Fish, one the best-known professors on the left, says that it’s hard to see how anyone who believes in the distinctiveness of academic work “could find anything to disagree with here.” The fairness of the language hasn’t done much to mollify the left, partly because Horowitz unleashed a barrage of statistics to show how lopsided liberal universities are in hiring professors, picking outside speakers, and granting honorary degrees. He says there are 10 Democratic professors for every Republican one, with the disparity rising sharply at many elite universities. Students themselves now check the political affiliations of professors and complain about indoctrination that passes for teaching. (Check out www.noindoctrination.org for detailed student reports of unbelievable professorial drivel.) Members of the Republican Club at Wells College, an all-female institution in upstate New York, reported that 92 percent of their professors in the humanities and social sciences were registered either as Democrats or with splinter parties of the left. (A month later, the women’s application to be recognized as a campus club was rejected.) Last week conservative students at Duke announced that the university’s eight humanities departments contain 142 registered Democrats and only eight registered Republicans. The Duke Conservative Union also charged that a number of humanities departments “have become increasingly politicized over the past few decades” and that this politicization has had “a significant impact on the daily workings of faculty members.” Student challenges such as this are beginning to raise temperatures on campus. So are the spread of satirical bake sales opposing affirmative action and resistance to speech codes, speech zones, and the defunding of conservative political and religious groups. Republicans at the University of Colorado-Boulder now have a Web site for reports of bias based on political beliefs. In the current climate, sites like this are likely to spread. The one worrisome aspect of Horowitz’s bill of rights is that he took it to the Colorado legislature as a bill to be passed. The bill’s version of Horowitz’s text says the academic freedom of students “will not be infringed by instructors who create a hostile environment” toward their ideas. But “hostile environment” is a dubious and elastic legal construct. It can easily be stretched into restriction of stray remarks. Will professors run afoul of the state for offhand comments that offend the most sensitive person in class? Probably not, but why put the provision into law? Horowitz is right to say that “universities should not be indoctrination centers for the political left.” Once the student radicals of the 1960s became professors and took control of hiring committees, dissenters from the rising campus monoculture became rare. Words like “knowledge” and “excellence” faded, replaced by “transformation” and “social change” (i.e., politicization). But it’s doubtful that legislation is the way to go. It would be far better for Colorado to pass a “sense of the legislature” resolution backing the academic bill of rights in principle but making no attempt to legislate reform. Apologists for wayward campuses say these matters are best left to university administrators. Yes, but the administrators are the ones who created the current ideological mess. Pressure must be brought to bear to open up the humanities curriculums from their narrow postmodern and race-and-gender obsessions. But that pressure should come from protests and persuasion, not the involvement of politicians. Student governments at several universities have adopted a “Student Bill of Rights” modeled on Horowitz’s. Think of his bill as a model for more protests and a badly needed kick in the shins for university administrators. ©2003 Universal Press Syndicate