"RepublicanSpeak"

Liberal talk radio going strong...
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0126Liberal-Radio-ON.html

abq... great topic...the repub motto is throw enough mud at a wall and some of it will eventually stick.

When troops are finally pulled out Bush will proclaim we won the war in Iraq whatever nebulous meaning that has. "We are winning the war in Iraq”

Ownership Society=Risk Taker Society should be our sound bite.

Maybe we can run clips of the DOW meltdown the days after 9/11. Anyway to run those video clips here on our site Dick?

Ira,
We can run videos here, the issues are always copyright.

Karen:

the reason I raise that question is that I hope that we can remind the media during the SS debate what a real DOW meltdown looks like. The fear of seeing your life savings disappear and the markets shut down are for real and it may take the actual videos to get that accross(Though many might not want to relive 9/11).

Discussions here are fine but I want us all to have a very real impact on the media and the discussions about SS, more than just typing in our opinions. This is the domestic battle of this century that we cannot lose.

But very artful mud-throwing, BB. I keep trying to figure out their end-game for starving the beast, beyond power for power's sake. Have they thought through to fallen empires? Will their's be the only surviving one? Some want the third home, and don't care long-term, at all, but what are they seeing to get all this complicity? Their's is not the rapture story, so what is it, beyond the keeping us undeducated to fight wars and scared? They are not unsophisticated, so there must be something beyond the decades-old dogma. Or maybe not. Bullies being bullies because they can.

Ira, how about images not tied to a successful Bush ad campaign, and everything justifiable because of 9/11. We can go back to pre New Deal and lack of regulations, maybe without copyright issues. History is repeating itself.

Marjorie:

I am not talking about reliving 9/11 and Bush. I am talking about clips from CNBC showing the panic on Wallstreet days afer 9/11 with comments by David Faver like Oh My God the DOW is now down 500 points with no end in site, the Markets are being closed, panic on the street, etc. This generation can't relate to the 1929 crash, heck they think that 2001 is ancient history.

So you are saying any reality at all, even recent, Ira. Agree that people have extremely short-term memories, even to 2001. They might even rethink their current panic association to 9/11.

The problem is you can't adjust your retirement scheduling to how the markets are doing. The funk can go for years and months, and the world may be unhappy with us for a long time. Do you trust the Chinese to keep propping up our paper? Don't think so.

problem is you can't adjust your retirement scheduling to how the markets are doing.

Precisely. This why it would be such a nightmare if for instance stock investments were made out of SS and just when new recipients started withdrawing that money we had a 9/11 type meltdown in the stock market. The more I think about it the more nightmarish the scenario. It could then lead to a 1929 type stock market crash, a panic on the markets we haven't seen for a generation. By then Bush might be 20 years out of office and all but forgotten as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century.

Exactly as I posted earlier today. Bush thinks he can divide the Democratic Party regarding SS reforms by trying to snooker black leaders.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush told black leaders Tuesday that his plan to add private accounts to Social Security would benefit blacks since they tend to have shorter lives than some other Americans and end up paying in more than they get out.

John Kerry's Kids Come First Act

In an email just sent out by John Kerry to his supporters, Kerry states his goal for his Kids Come First Act petition is "to top 500,000 before President Bush makes his State of the Union Address on February 2nd." The petition has already received wide spread support: "To date, nearly 300,000 Americans have signed our Kids Come First petition."

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=276

Forget about states rights. Bush is now puting the squeeze on state governments to withdraw funding to local hospitals that perform abortions.

"California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit Tuesday to stop the Bush administration from linking a federal spending package to the abortion policies of state and local governments.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, challenges the Hyde-Weldon Amendment signed by President Bush last month as part of a major appropriations bill. Written by Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., the amendment cuts off federal funding to agencies that practice "discrimination" against anti-abortion health care providers.

Lockyer was joined in the action by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. The two Democrats are charging that the Hyde-Weldon Amendment threatens the $49 billion in the 2005 health and human services appropriations bill destined for California, while at the same time potentially preventing women in emergency situations from getting abortions at some hospitals and by some providers who refuse to perform the procedure.
"Equality for women is illusory unless they can make their own health care decisions," Lockyer said. "With the Weldon amendment, President Bush and Congress are denying women that freedom."

Weldon said his amendment "in no way infringes" on a woman's right to an abortion. Instead, Weldon said in a statement, it says only that "you can't force the unwilling" to perform them.

"Mr. Lockyer seems anxious to preserve California's right to coerce such unwilling providers into performing abortions," Weldon said.

The White House deferred comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, where a spokesman said the case is being reviewed.

Nancy Keenan, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League Pro-Choice America, called Bush's signing of the amendment a "sneak attack on a woman's right to choose."

"I'm glad Attorney General Lockyer is taking action to make sure the nation's largest state can continue to ensure that women control their own private medical decisions," Keenan said in a prepared statement.

The one-paragraph amendment says that no money flowing out of Washington can be allocated to state or local agencies that discriminate in funding decisions against health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions.

Under current California law, anti-abortion hospitals and practitioners, in emergency situations, must "provide health care that is life-saving," Lockyer said, or refer the patient in a timely fashion to another medical facility with no abortion qualms.

"Either of those laws violates the congressional ban," Lockyer said.

Lockyer's suit says all $49 billion in health and human services funds coming into California could be cut off under the Hyde-Weldon Amendment if the state blocked funding to a hospital or health care practitioner who refused to perform an emergency abortion.

The suit, which is seeking to have the Hyde-Weldon Amendment declared unconstitutional, could raise the prominence of the abortion issue in Lockyer's expected campaign for governor next year.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who supports abortion rights, finds himself on the other side of the issue from the staunchly anti-abortion rights president.

Lockyer's spokesman denied that the attorney general was trying to politically maneuver the governor - who also has been fighting to increase federal funding for California.

"That's not our angle," said Nathan Barankin, the attorney general's spokesman. "Arnold is pro-choice."

The Governor's Office declined to comment.

Liberal talk radio going strong...
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0126Liberal-Radio-ON.html

Posted by: battlebob at January 26, 2005 11:41 AM

So, when does the progressive television network go live?

As soon as George Soros takes my calls and forks over the dough...we go National!!!

Pamela, might as well ask here, as well as on your site:

Same Health Care petition as signed before it had a name? Should we do it again?

Or was JK's for something else and I'm totally confused. So many petitions, so little time.

Commentary: America's Founding Principles in Peril

To “protect” our nation, George Bush wants to ignore the values of our Founding Fathers and abandon their vision of America.
By Michael Coblenz

And what profits a nation? The United States stands astride the world. We are far and away the richest nation on earth. Our ideas (political, cultural, economic, social) dominate the world. Our military, despite the strain of Iraq, is unsurpassed. And we are leading the worldwide fight against “terror.”

But in the fight against “terror,” have we lost our soul? Does the widespread abuse of prisoners indicate that we have abandoned our moral standing in the world? It would be one thing if the abuse were the work of “a few bad apples” as President Bush claimed when the pictures from Abu Ghraib first came to light. But subsequent reports show that the Administration purposefully changed the rules for torture not long after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, over the objections of both the State Department and the Pentagon. There are also reports that abuse has been ongoing since the first prisoners were captured, and have occurred in virtually every U.S. facility worldwide.

The Bush Administration justifies the harsh tactics as necessary to protect America. But in trying to protect the nation physically, is he destroying it morally? To answer this, we must first ask: What is the soul of America? What is America about?

--------------------------------------------SNIP--------------------------------------------------
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=983

Neo-Con Torture Rhetoric Alarmingly Mirrors Nazi Counterparts

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed… were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."

Can anyone name the person who said that?

Was it:

A) George W. Bush
B) John Ashcroft
C) Donald Rumsfeld
D) Someone else

If you answered “someone else", you’d be right. It was Rudolf Hoess, SS Kommandant of the infamous Auschwitz death camp where over 2.5 million people were murdered.

Conservatives, who love to call Liberals whiny, get whiny as hell when the Bush administration is compared to Nazi Germany, or to fascism in general. Guess what, though? The comparisons are beginning to come through more and more.

Scott Horton wrote in the LA Times:

Consider the memorandum written by Alberto Gonzales – then the president’s attorney, now his nominee for attorney general. He wrote that the Geneva Convention was “obsolete” when it came to the war on terror. Gonzales reasoned that our adversaries were not parties to the convention and that the Geneva concept was ill suited to anti-terrorist warfare.

In 1941, General-Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, mustered identical arguments against recognizing the Geneva rights of Soviet soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front. Keitel even called Geneva “obsolete,” a remark noted by U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg, who cited it as an aggravating circumstance in seeking, and obtaining, the death penalty. Keitel was executed in 1946.

Hitler was installed, then re-elected. Bush was installed, then re-elected. Hitler had Reichstag, Bush had 9/11. (I am not implying government collusion in 9/11, FYI) Both used their respective catastrophes to assume more power (Hitler with the Enabling Act, Bush with the USA PATRIOT Act), and to assume dictatorial powers.

Hitler used Christianity to give his words absolute authority and decried any who dissented as unpatriotic. Bush uses Christianity to give his words absolute authority and decries any who dissent as unpatriotic.

Hitler said:

“The German people are not a warlike nation. It is a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom”

Bush said:

We’re pursuing a strategy of freedom around the world, because I understand free nations will reject terror. Free nations will answer the hopes and aspirations of their people. Free nations will help us achieve the peace we all want.

I have rejected this type of comparison of Bush to Hitler for months, because Hitler was a genocidal maniac bent on ruling the world with his ideology. I submit this comparison now because I believe the same to be true of George W. Bush.

George W. Bush will have his empire, and he will kill any person, group, or country that stands in his way. I challenge any of you to tell me why that is not so, as he has already proved it.

Brother John, insightful blog. :-)
Two-part sound bites, isn't that the truth.

Let's see: Take two unrelated concepts, ie. 'war' and 'win' or 'Saddam' and '9/11' or 'Social Security' and 'Crisis' or 'Abu Ghraib' and 'low-level bad apples' or 'GWB' and 'Patriot,' tie them together, send to the corporate media and voila, an absolute fact is born.

Rick Santorum is behind this SS Reform Lunacy. I truly hope the Pa. Democratic Party is tracking and videotaping every word out of his mouth and uses Santorum's blind allegiance to the dismantling of SS as the hallmark of their campaign against him. I would hope they are already gearing up by circulating notices to all elderly facilities in Pa that says that Rick Santorum is no friend of the elderly or Social Security. I personally hope the campaign against him revs up early this year.

And we shall remember, Rick who you stood with, the Wallstreet Lobbyists or Main Street's Elderly.

"This is probably the most important issue I will deal with in my time in Congress," Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership, said. "We should take our time."

I wonder how the conservatives are going to react to the UN begging other countries to help the United States out of its economic mess? Talk about RepublicanSpeak...let's see them twist their way out of this. (I can't stomach O'Leilly or Insanity - but perhaps someone made of stronger stuff than me can watch and report back.)

I mean, how dare that commie organization that harbors terrorists and doesn't march to the Bush drumbeat suggest that Bush's economic and fiscal policies have resulted in anything other than apple pie, blue sky and just best economy ever? And don't forget...freedom is on the march!

U.N. Report Calls for Help to Ease U.S. Budget and Trade Deficits

By Elizabeth Becker
The New York Times

Wednesday 26 January 2005

WASHINGTON - The United Nations on Tuesday urged all the major industrial countries, especially Japan and the nations of Europe, to help the United States reduce its deficits by spurring their own economies to grow faster.

In a report, "World Economic Situation and Prospects 2005," the United Nations said that the budget and trade deficits of the United States were putting the global economy off balance.

It echoed warnings by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions in saying the United States cannot continue to carry its huge debts.

"What we really need is a major advancement in cooperation among the advanced economies to help the U.S. get out of this problem," said José Antonio Ocampo, the under secretary general for economic and social affairs at the United Nations, in an interview.

The United States deficit is a global problem in part because the country has the fastest-growing economy among industrial nations and, together with China, is largely responsible for helping to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. But whereas China has been an economic engine with its huge growth in manufacturing and exports, the United States has pushed growth by consuming far more goods than it exports.

The report said that the global recovery may have reached its zenith, with the world's economy growing by 4 percent in 2004, compared with 2.8 percent in 2003. The report estimated that the global economy will grow by 3.25 percent this year.

Over all, the developing economies, including China and India, are doing better than the industrialized nations, according to the United Nations report.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012705W.shtml

Bush Orders an End to Hiring Columnists

By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote their agendas after disclosure that a second writer was paid to tout an administration initiative.

The president said he expects his agency heads will "make sure that that practice doesn't go forward."

"All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet," Bush said at a news conference.

Bush's remarks came a day after syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher apologized to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Department to help create materials promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage.

Bush also said the White House had been unaware that the Education Department paid commentator and columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to plug its policies. That contract came to light two weeks ago.

Bush said there "needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press."

And he noted that "we have new leadership going into the Department of Education (news - web sites)."

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050126/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_paid_columnists_4

Posted by: battlebob at January 26, 2005 11:41 AM

So, when does the progressive television network go live?

Posted by: oncall at January 26, 2005 02:04 PM

That is a must, or we are outranked every time.

Kangaroo

RNC seeks donations to push Bush agenda

By Sharon Theimer

Jan. 26, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party is following up record fund-raising for President Bush's re-election effort by asking donors to finance its efforts to get Bush's message ‘‘past the liberal media filter” to the public.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman sent a fund-raising e-mail Wednesday telling supporters donations are needed to help Bush advance his second-term agenda.

‘‘The president has great goals for our country: a growing economy, strong homeland and national defense, tort and Social Security reform and affordable health care. But we need your help to get the president's message past the liberal media filter and directly to the American people,” wrote Mehlman, Bush's 2004 campaign manager. Mehlman asked donors to give $25 or more.

The RNC raised a party record $385 million to help Bush win re-election. However, its fund raising finished second to the Democratic National Committee, which collected about $402 million in the 2003-04 election cycle.

Mehlman's fund-raising pitch came as Bush barred Cabinet secretaries from hiring columnists to promote administration policies. Bush's order came after disclosure that the Health and Human Services Department and Education Department each used taxpayer money to hire columnists to promote agency programs.

Bush said there ‘‘needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press.”

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2005/01/26/rnc/index.html

Here no evil see no evil: "Bush also said the White House had been "unaware" that the Education Department paid commentator".. Gag me please.

About the bought press. They get to keep their jobs as payment, a coercion in itself, all in the open.

Using race at all in an issue is bad, and not unlike faith-based initiatives and other mechanisms to peel off votes.

With SS is it specific and reported whether races who live longer will benefit with more or less money? Floating this with the possibility of making more, no matter how unlikely they'd keep to any promise, the GOP would get votes with a ray of that kind of manipulation and selfish motive when desperate.

I've created an Action on CapWiz to help people send letters to their Senators in support of JK's Kids Come First Act. I am asking on LUTD to join us in this effort... I hope DCP will consider and and I also hope that everyone here will utilize the CapWiz link to send a letter to their Senators!

We’ve Got Your Back John Kerry!

John Kerry’s new Kids Come First Act (S.114) deserves our support. We have created an action alert on Congress.org to make it easy for everyone to send a letter to their Senators urging them to Co-Sponsor the Kids Come First Act in the Senate.

We’re asking that other Blogs join in this effort as well, by posting a thread of support for the Kids Come First Act and linking to our Congress.org Action Alert. Post a link to your thread in support of the Kids Come First Act here in the comments and we will add you to our list of Bloggers who have “Got John Kerry’s Back”!

To send a letter to your local Senators Click Here. You can copy my letter below and use it to send to your Senators, or write your own:

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=277

Some points need emphasis in discussions about the Bush domestic agenda:

1) His ownership society discriminates against investments in education and research that is the engine behind America's lead in the world economy. Think of it this way: everybody owns their own human capital. The returns on investment in human capital are wages and salaries. In Bush's world, he has reduced and wants to eliminate taxes on the returns from investment in non-human capital, but leave in place taxes on wages and salaries. This creates a big incentive to individuals to reduce investment in human capital (education) as opposed to the stock market and real-estate. In the long run, America's workers suffer from a deterioration in their skills.

2) Social security is not a savings plan -- it is insurance against the loss of income due to a longer than expected life. It pays the same benefit for every year in retirement. A young worker may want to save for retirement, but doesn't know how much to save because he doesn't know how long he will live. The risk that he may live long (or was too frugal and died too soon to enjoy his savings) is spread among all participants in the social security system.

So two frames:

The ownership society works against the education engine generating our prosperity that is based on technological advancement.

Social Security is insurance against poverty in old age, not a savings plan.

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/wpnan/2005/wpnan050125.gif

very on topic