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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (229214)	4/14/2005 7:02:32 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572207

POPULIST BUSH LOVES PARIS HILTON, AND IS GOING TO PROSTITUTE HIMSELF TO PROVE IT! americanprogressaction.org TAXES Estate Tax Repeal Is So Not Hot [Hell, let's just call this the Paris Hilton Trust Fund Baby Act. Bankrupting America for the sake of spoiled brats is lovely and intelligent national policy, don't you agree?] The federal deficit exceeds $400 billion, critical government programs are on the chopping block and tens of thousands of U.S. troops are fighting abroad without adequate equipment. What's on the agenda of the House of Representatives today? More tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. The right-wing leadership in the House has scheduled a vote on the permanent repeal of the estate tax, which was paid last year by just 30,627 of the wealthiest Americans. (That's less than 1 percent of everyone who died.) Under current law, the first $1.5 million of all estates are tax free. Tell Congress to get its priorities straight and vote against the estate tax repeal. FISCAL SUICIDE: No one who is serious about fiscal responsibility can vote to repeal the estate tax. Although very few Americans pay the estate tax, repealing it would do serious damage to the federal deficit. The estate tax repeal would cost more than $1 trillion over the first ten years after the full repeal goes into effect. You can find out how much you would pay in estate taxes with this handy calculator. Unless you are reading this from your Lear Jet, however, it's probably zero. UNCHARITABLE IMPACT: Permanently repealing the estate tax would be a disaster for the nation's charities. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has "found that the estate tax encourages wealthy individuals to donate considerably more to charity, since estate tax liability is reduced through donations made both during life and at death." If there were no estate tax in 2000, for example, "charitable donations would have been between $13 billion to $25 billion lower than they actually were." MEND IT, DON'T END IT: There is bipartisan support to amend the estate tax to make sure it impacts even fewer people. The proposal on the House floor today would permanently repeal the estate tax beginning in 2011. If instead the tax exemption was raised to $3.5 million, only 8,500 estates would face the tax in 2011, just 0.3 percent of all people expected to die that year. Meanwhile, the revenue from a reformed estate tax could fill in between one-quarter and one-half of the expected Social Security shortfall over the next 75 years. E.J. Dionne asks: "Why should Congress be more concerned about protecting Paris Hilton's inheritance than grandma's Social Security check?" American Progress has its own plan to reform the estate tax. THE RURAL RUSE: President Bush claims that the estate tax is "bad for rural America." That's not true. The fact is just 440 estates with any significant farm or small business assets paid any estate tax last year. That amounts to "1 out of every 665,989 people in the U.S.," hardly a group you could define as "rural America." HOW IT HAPPENED: If repealing the estate tax is such a bad idea, how did it get this far? In their new book "Death by a Thousand Cuts," Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro explain. It was orchestrated over decades by a group of "anti-tax philosophers, activists, and legislators, who regard all progressive taxation as morally obnoxious and economically destructive." This group was successful at manipulating and distorting the debate. According to one poll, they convinced 77 percent of the population that the estate tax affects all Americans. LYING SONS-OF-BITCHES!

To: steve harris who wrote (229214)	4/14/2005 8:23:07 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572207

"EARLE'S LAST FORAY INTO politicized prosecution" Don't know anything about that case. What I do know is that Earle has prosecuted a lot more Democrats than Republicans. So if Earle is a partisan hack, what is his politics? Nope, Hot Tub Tom is trying to use this as a smokescreen...

To: steve harris who wrote (229214)	4/14/2005 10:55:18 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1572207

Objectively, Bush is one of the least popular presidents in modern American history. So why do you have to read a sentence like that in the Prospect? By Michael Tomasky Web Exclusive: 04.11.05 Did you notice this one? A Gallup-CNN-USA Today poll at the end of last week found that 50 percent of American adults now believe that the Bush administration “deliberately misled” them about why we had to go to war in Iraq. It seems fair to say that the average respondent will have understood that “deliberately misled” is a polite way of saying the word “lie”; so, in sum, every other American adult believes the president and his apparatchiks lied us into war. That’s an astonishing fact: The president of the United States has no credibility with half of the adult citizenry on a defining question of his tenure that happens to have sent more than 1,500 young Americans to their graves (and in another recent poll, 53 percent said the war wasn’t worth the costs). This was never remotely true of Bill Clinton or any modern president going back decades. George W. Bush defenders will invoke Harry Truman, but while it’s true that Truman was profoundly unpopular at the end of his second term over the Korean War, the American people at least didn’t blame him for lying us into it. Combine this finding with other recent polls putting Bush’s approval rating at 44 or 45 percent, which is the lowest of any sitting two-term president at this point in his tenure in decades. Bush is objectively and without question one of the most unpopular presidents of the last 80 years: Herbert Hoover after the Depression; Truman after Korea; Richard Nixon after Watergate; Jimmy Carter after Iran. Bush is right there with them. And yet: Why do I suspect that if you asked Washington’s top 100 agenda-setting journalists -- Tim Russert, George Will, Tom Friedman, etc. etc. -- whether Bush deliberately misled us into war, no more than about 15 or 20 of them would acknowledge what the half the American public sees clearly? Why do I still hear some of these bigfoots speak emphatically of a "popular wartime president"? In the spring of 2003, when I was a Shorenstein fellow up at Harvard, NPR’s Linda Wertheimer came to speak. The audience of people on the Shorenstein Center’s mailing list tilted -- I will not deny it -- heavily liberal. The guests peppered Wertheimer with questions about why the press wasn’t tougher on Bush. She instructed the audience to look at the polls; Bush’s approval rating was above 60 percent, and when a president’s that popular, it’s tough for the media to do its job and place itself so out of step with public opinion. Funny, I thought: Clinton’s approval rating was higher than 60 percent pretty much throughout 1998, the year of Monica, but somehow the press didn’t seem to mind being out of step with public opinion then. (In case you’re dubious about this assertion: May 1, 1998, Field Poll, 64 percent; August 23, 1998, Los Angeles Times, the week after Clinton ’fessed up about having “inappropriate” relations with Monica, 65 percent; December 20, 1998, CNN, just after the House voted the articles of impeachment, 73 percent; et cetera.) Of course, “Linda Wertheimer” and “Washington journalism” are not the same thing, but her comments about Bush struck me as awfully representative of the media as a whole after September 11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War. But what about today? Bush is tanking. The public thinks that his war wasn’t worth it and that he lied about it. His Social Security scheme is distrusted and detested by most Americans. His decision to fly back to Washington from Crawford to “err on the side of life” was opposed by a massive majority. He’s still liked personally, but he’s doing virtually nothing with which the people he was elected to serve agree. His Republican colleagues in Congress are even more unpopular. But with all this, the media are still reflexively deferential to this administration. There’s more reporting now that cuts against that narrative than there was a few months ago. But the underlying assumptions of coverage are still that Bush is a strong leader and that anything that doesn’t go his way is an aberration. Journalists love to say at awards dinners and such-like events that they are the people’s eyes and ears, the watchdogs of the public. But the people, in fact, are way ahead of them. Again: Bush is objectively one of the least popular presidents in modern American history. Let’s hope the day may come when you don’t have to visit the Prospect to read that sentence. Michael Tomasky is the Prospect’s executive editor. prospect.org