Monday, July 12, 2004

The Last Straw

Y’know, I first started reading talk about this a few months ago. That if Bush started to fall significantly behind in the polls - and polls now show Kerry/Edwards 4 or 5 points ahead of Bush/Cheney in the last few days - there’d be an “October Surprise” or something else that would be manufactured to ensure Bush’s re-election. I thought it was just over-the-top, paranoid delusional doomsaying. I thought those who were saying they’d try to postpone or cancel the election if it looked like Bush was going to lose were raving loons, addicted to reading whacko political forums and upping the ante.

Now, I’m not so sure - I got up this morning and ths was the headline on CNN, “Officials discuss how to delay Election Day" - and I got the same feeling that I got 4 years ago and before the invasion of Iraq.

It seems that Bush is asking for a legal opinion and for Congress to give him the means to change or postpone the date of the election, which is written into the Constitution and election laws. This is just like their doing whatever it took - fudge, lie, and twist arms and laws to get the authorization to use military force against Iraq, and to get a legal opinion allowing the use of torture, and to ignore the Geneva Convention.

This administration has produced nothing but a steady stream of fear and war-mongering, of pointing the finger at bogeymen, of raising the specter of terrorism whenever it became expedient to.

Now, they want the ultimate blank check, permission to hold the nation’s democracy itself hostage. They should get no such thing.

If you can’t vote, you can’t vote them out.

Instead, they need a free bus ticket the hell out of Dodge, and back to Crawford, where Bush can be put out to pasture, as the country tries to recover from the massive damage he’s done to it - an economy hobbled by huge deficits as far as the eye can see, a foreign policy of scorn and arrogance that has cost us most of our allies and all of our goodwill and trust, and the disaster of a war that is breeding the very terrorists that it purportedly was to destroy.

- Bob Woods

Thursday, July 08, 2004

Ken Lay's best pal, and what it means for you

Here’s a shot of Bush walking out of a briefing with the media yesterday, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and the largest single fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of ‘Kenny Boy.’

Does it seem all too distant? How does this affect you and me?
Here’s a breakdown of what it cost us here in Oregon, after Enron bought out PGE, our local electric utility over the protests of many:

$665 million for “federal and state income taxes” that in fact neither PGE nor Enron actually paid to any government.
$366 million through illegal market manipulation during the “energy crisis” of 2000-01 (confirmed by Oregon AG)
$400 million in profits for its sole shareholder, Enron.
plus:
$400 million a year in rate hikes (42%!!) in effect for the last 3 years
Over $100 million lost by PGE employees in their 401k retirement plans
$82 million lost by PERS when Enron stock became worthless
$90 million in promised refunds to ratepayers, which were never made.
(figures from Utility Reform Project)

This has cost Oregon alone almost $3 billion, far more than it would have cost to balance state budgets, fund schools and health care and still lower taxes at the same time. Add this to the similar damage done in neighboring states. Washington has billions in public utility contracts to Enron, like Snohomish PUD’s $1.2 billion contract, signed under duress during the worst of the energy crunch that was engineered by Enron. And at least $10 billion in California. As much as $40 billion total across the states in the West and the South, where Enron had most of their power contracts.

All this during a recession, when we could least afford to pay for this, when Oregon and Washington had the highest unemployment in the country. But Lay and Enron just didn’t care. Like his best pal George W. Bush, who promised to run the U.S. government like a corporation.

Now we know which corporation he had in mind - Enron.

- Bob Woods

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

The Shell Game

Don’t you just love the press-management skills of the Bush administration? Seems every time something they don’t want you to pay attention to happens, they trot out something bogus. They’ll talk about some dire and imminent terrorist plot, raise the “terror alert” level or scream loudly about some issue that is just as quickly dropped afterwards. No matter, it has served its purpose.

This is a tactic they’ve used repeatedly in the last 3 years. Now that the election campaign is underway, expect it to be used even more often in the coming months. Note the recent predictions by Ashcroft of a terrorist attack before the elections. He’s just setting the stage for the next round. And then again this morning.

They use it because it works - here’s the unretouched front page of CNN this afternoon - not a single mention of Kerry and Edwards. The news was full of election stories yesterday. You’d never know there’s a campaign on today. It’s all terrorism, all the time…

I urge you to read this article that details an administration attempt to overshadow the upcoming Democratic convention. In it, the author talks with Pakistani officials who say that they have orders from Bush to produce Osama Bin Laden or one of his top deputies before the November election. The date suggested to do this is in late July, specifically the 26th, 27th or 28th of July, which are the first 3 days of the Democratic convention. They know that it’ll push all convention news off the front page, and deny Kerry the probable lift in the polls from the coverage. How desperate and cynical, but can you expect anything else from Bush these days?

In stage magic, this technique is called “misdirection.” The magician will do something showy with one hand, which draws your eye, while the other subtly does the actual trick, which he doesn’t want you to notice. It reminds me of something my brother did when we were teenagers. At dinner, he’d see something on my plate he’d like to have. So, he’d stare intently at some spot on the wall behind me, and then say something ridiculous like, “Look, fish tracks.” Naturally, I’d start to look and he’d snake out with his fork and nab food off my plate. Only worked once or twice.

I don’t fall for that kind of trick anymore. You shouldn’t either.

As it was so eloquently put in that clip of Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11-
“Fool me once ... shame on ... shame on you ... uhh ... um ... uhh ... fooled me, can’t get fooled again!”

WTF??? How did this imbecile get into the White House in the first place?

One good thing, however - it looks like people are wising up to these tactics.
Here’s the poll from CNN’s front page today:

- Bob Woods

The lie that killed my son

Thursday July 8, 2004
The Guardian

Lila Lipscomb believed in Bush’s case for war in Iraq. But when her son died in action, her faith in the American way was shattered. Emma Brockes meets the Michigan mother at the heart of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

Two years ago, if you had asked Lila Lipscomb what she stood for, she would have referred you to the flag in her garden and her four grown-up children. Her priorities were, in descending order of importance, family, faith, country and a place where all three met, what she might have called “service”: two of her children were in the military and she worked in the public sector, at an employment agency designed to get people off welfare.

Read the rest of this article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1256558,00.html

Two Americas

VP candidate John Edwards
12/29/03

“Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life. One America—middle-class America - whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America - narrow-interest America - whose every wish is Washington’s command. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a President.”

“I’ve been fighting this fight my whole life. For 20 years, I have sat in courtrooms across from these people. I have been an advocate for families and their children against armies of lawyers. I’ve won most of those battles. In the Senate, I fought for the Patients’ Bill of Rights, against big HMOs, against big insurance companies. I fought to bring down prescription drug costs for every American, against big drug companies. I fought to do something about drug company advertising on TV when others weren’t willing to do it. I fought to create energy independence in this country.”

“I believe the backbone of the American economy is the hard work, determination, and ingenuity of the middle class, not the insiders. I believe the way to grow the economy is to grow and strengthen the middle class, not shrink its size and add to its burdens. I believe the way a rich nation gets richer is by giving all its citizens the chance to get richer, not by only helping those like me who’ve already succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. I believe the way to create new wealth is by rewarding work and responsibility, not coddling the privileged and going soft on executives, accountants, and analysts who squander other people’s money.”

“For every man and woman who is worried about paying their bills; for every child who needs health care and a strong school to go to, and for every American who waits for the 1st and the 15th of every month— together we will end this era of anxiety. We will replace the crass politics of greed and the current politics of rage with a new politics of opportunity.”

Monday, July 05, 2004

Expendable Women

NY Times Editorial
Published: July 5, 2004

One of the uglier aspects of the Bush administration’s assault on women’s reproductive rights is its concerted undermining of the United Nations Population Fund based on the false accusation that it supports coerced abortions in China.

The fund supports programs in some 141 countries to advance poor women’s reproductive health, reduce infant mortality, end the sexual trafficking of women and prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS. Yet under pressure from conservative religious groups, the administration is expected to withhold the $34 million that Congress appropriated this year for these vital efforts, much as President Bush blocked the $34 million Congress approved in 2002 and last year’s $25 million allocation.

The damage does not end there. The administration has lately stepped up its effort to isolate the Population Fund by quietly threatening the financing of other leading groups, including Unicef and the World Health Organization, if they continue to work with the fund. Take the chilling example of Marie Stopes International. Last year the State Department discontinued support for a small but well-regarded private AIDS program for African and Asian refugees run by Marie Stopes and other groups, citing Marie Stopes’s cooperating in China with the Population Fund.

Just last month, three federal agencies — the United States Agency for International Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — pulled their support from a major international conference on health issues, apparently owing to the inclusion of speakers from the Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

To justify these destructive machinations, the Bush administration has perpetuated a bogus accusation that the Population Fund has either stood by or helped with coerced abortions in China. This disregards America’s own relationship with China, never mind that none of the money approved by Congress would go to China, or that the State Department’s investigating team found no evidence that the Population Fund has supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. It also disregards the Population Fund’s crucial role in helping to drive down China’s abortion rate below the level of the United States and in encouraging China to devote new attention to combating H.I.V. and AIDS.

In truth, the administration’s targeting of the Population Fund is not really about abortion. It is an attack on comprehensive family planning and women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy, driven largely by right-wing ideologues unswervingly opposed to all forms of family planning and contraceptive use. As a result, the United States is helping to deny vulnerable women living in isolated rural areas essential information and services needed to avoid pregnancy and disease.