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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (12790)	4/8/2005 10:48:12 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361836

Tough Talk Posted by jesselee Wednesday, April 6, 2005 at 5:29 PM Pelosi's press conference today... From her opening statement: This is the first time that a President of the United States has declared that we, the United States Government, will not put the full faith and credit of the federal government behind the Social Security trust fund. What this President is saying is, we have two kinds of debt. Let's see how we get the debt first. It is in deficit spending, so we have to go borrow in order to keep the government going. So where does he borrow? He borrows from the Chinese. He borrows from the Japanese. He borrows from the trust fund. And what he is saying now to the American worker: "We will honor our debt to the Chinese and the Japanese, but we are treating you differently. We are not honoring our debt to you." These are funds that workers and their employers put in the account to have a trust fund to cover any shortfall that would be there to cover their retirement benefits. And this President is openly declaring that he has no intention of paying the trust fund back what he has taken from it. Over the break, I was pleased with my House Democrats. They had more town meetings, well attended, very enthusiastic. They have inoculated the public against what the President is trying to do. With education and information, it has become clear to the American people that the private accounts will undermine Social Security and that they are not the way to go. The President says he is going to 60 cities in 60 days. I want him to make it 100 cities in 100 days, because he is getting zero progress on his tour. The relationship between deficit spending and the solvency of Social Security is becoming clearer to the American people. And the more they learn about it, the less they like about what President Bush is proposing. Some other excerpts: Q But the Democrats have complained about Mr. DeLay's ethics in the past. Are you shooting yourself in the foot, it is for a larger standard, but by holding up the Ethics Committee work? Ms. Pelosi. The fact is that there is no Ethics Committee. It has been completely gutted by the Republicans. And this should be a cause of great outrage in the country. What the Republicans are saying is: "We are above the law. Because we are above the law, we may decide on our own to take the law into our own hands when it comes to your personal decisions in your lives, but for us, we are above the law." So to depose the Chair of the Ethics Committee, to expel two members of the committee because they were thought to not be friendly to Mr. DeLay in the deliberations of last year, to fire the staff in a unilateral way, to change the rules, to gut them so that there effectively is no process, is a hoax, and I don't think the Democrats should participate in a hoax. That's why I have brought a privileged resolution to the floor to call on the Speaker to put together a bipartisan task force to review the rules. If they don't like the rules, to review the rules so that we would have bipartisan agreement on what they would be. That is the way the Ethics Committee has always worked. So I don't think we're shooting ourselves in the foot. I think we're upholding high ethical standards. Q Chairman Dreier this morning was talking about efforts by the GOP leadership to reach across the aisle to Democrats. He cited the vote on the class action bill and the bipartisan bankruptcy bill next week where there would be a strong vote. Do you see it that way? Do you think they are reaching across? How do you see the House running in terms of this major legislation? Ms. Pelosi. Let me say it in four words: Ha, ha, ha, ha. blog.dccc.org