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

To: TimF who wrote (747128)	8/7/2006 12:19:31 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Re: "The liabilities are the real story, not the official deficit. The deficit and debt level would be quite manageable if we didn't have all the other liabilities. They are a bit different from GM's liabilities...." LOL! Yep! Quite different. For one thing, GM cannot 'run the printing presses' (to quote from the Fed Chair's famous phrase) and PRINT an infinite amount of sovereign currency. :-)

To: TimF who wrote (747128)	8/7/2006 12:39:21 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

What is Conservatism? Dear A-Letter Reader: Your editor has a confession. As a young man I was not only a political conservative, but also national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and, later, of the American Conservative Union (ACU). Bill Buckley was one of my mentors and, (shudder), I was a 1964 Goldwater for president delegate from my native Maryland at the Republican national convention in San Francisco. For you youngsters, YAF, founded in 1960, was the vanguard of the 1964 Goldwater for president movement, creating a vibrant cadre of young leaders who graced the Reagan administration. The ACU, founded in 1965, was the senior spin-off of YAF. (Some suggested Old Americans for Freedom, or 'OAF.') Forty years ago our 'conservatism' meant opposing big government, bureaucratic waste and pork barrel spending. As recently as 1992, a friend of mine, the first Pres. George Bush spoke for me in saying: 'Each month millions of American families sit down to balance their checkbooks. The federal government must now do the same.' We believed that lower taxes kept government small, that cutting taxes kept money out of the greedy hands of Washington big spenders. We opposed welfare for corporations and for non-needy individuals alike. Most of all, we believed in government staying out of our private lives, respecting the rule of law and abiding by the Bill of Rights. A few years ago we conservatives thought we were winning the battle. But no sane American conservative can make such a foolish claim now. Instead we have huge deficits, an unbalanced budget producing inevitable inflation and the dollar is dying. Billions for unneeded wars and billions in pork barrel spending are OKed by a "conservative" Congress. And what about our liberty, freedom and rights? The USA PATRIOT Act is the single greatest assault on the Constitution ever perpetrated in U.S. history. We suffer a growing police state with secret spying, searches, forfeiture, arrests and imprisonment. And NSA wiretapping is only one of many police programs that spy on American citizens, all in the false promise of combating "terrorism." The hero of my youth, the late Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, (1889-1953) was a true conservative. When in doubt, it was said he placed the Constitution along side a proposed bill and then formulated his vote accordingly. With one or two exceptions, that kind of true conservative is nowhere to be found in Washington today, and certainly not in the White House. That's the way that it looks from here. BOB BAUMAN, Editor THE SOVEREIGN SOCIETY OFFSHORE A-LETTER LINK: sovereignsociety.com