Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Read 'em and weep

I just can’t do it.  Can’t write a single thing.  Not only am I up to my eyeballs at work, I’m also preparing for my APBA league draft this weekend.

But the real problem is that I’m drowning in blogs.  I’m surrounded on all sides by reports of the disastrous actions perpetrated by the Bushies, in everything from healthcare to diplomacy, from fiscal policy to the environment, from civil rights to scientific research.  And far too many more to mention.

So click on the blogs represented under “Elsewhere”, over there to the right side of this page.  Read the words of those insightful analysts.  Follow their links to still other blogs, revealing more of the rot that’s been spreading throughout the administration.  And follow those links to still more revelations.

Enjoyable it’s not.  You’ll be frustrated and angered.  You’ll be fascinated by the depth and breadth of the danger posed by the Bush team on so many fronts.  Perhaps you’ll be so angered by it all that you’ll rise up in righteous indignation, ready to take strong and focused action. 

If so, maybe you’ll be able to shake me and countless others like me out of our torpor.  We’re beaten down by the constant onslaught, overcome by the sheer magnitude of the perfidy on all sides of us, unable to move in any one direction because we see the horrors coming our way from another, and another, and another.

Monday, February 17, 2003

All in the family

Abraham Lincoln’s wartime taxes included a tax on dividend income.  Theodore Roosevelt sought a progressive tax on inherited fortunes.  Dwight Eisenhower supported taxing excess wartime profits.  Richard Nixon raised the upper end of the tax rate tables for unearned income.  In 1986, Ronald Reagan made certain that the top rate for stock market income was the same as that for earned income, eliminating the preference for capital gains. 

Only two Presidents have called for drastic cuts and/or elimination of taxes on investments—capital gains and dividends—for individual taxpayers.  Both of them are named Bush.

I learned this, and much more, in this Kevin Phillips commentary, seen in Sunday’s Seattle Times.  I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Phillips’s most recent book, Wealth and Democracy:  A Political History of the American Rich (almost put it in my basket yesterday during the couple of hours I spent yesterday at Powell’s City of Books in Portland), and this article may be the spur I needed to finally make the buy.  Phillips notes that the Bush family has made its money in the investments business for nigh onto a century.  Dubya’s great-grandfather, grandfather, at least three of his uncles, and two of his brothers have controlled and/or done their life’s work for investment firms.  Even Dubya’s and Poppy’s oil companies were much more about tax shelters and investment-based tax dodges than about producing petroleum.

Friday, February 14, 2003

Before turning in

I’ll be in Portland this weekend, so no more entries until Monday.  Who knows what the world situation will look like by then?

In the meantime, I recommend a close reading of Devra’s Fear & Anxiety entry.  She articulates a lot of what I’ve been trying to formulate as an entry for some time ... the virulent brand of Christian fundamentalism underlying everything Bush and undermining everything America.

More needs to be said, I think, about the Attorney General.  From the obvious glee with which he overrules federal prosecutors by forcing them to seek the death penalty, it’s crystal-clear that the scriptures of John Ashcroft’s brand of Pentecostal Christianity must omit Matthew 5:38-41.  There are numerous other examples of the odious (and patently unChristian) nature of Ashcroft’s actions, actions which he regularly insists are derived in their entirety from his faith.

Additional reports on Mr. Ashcroft will have to wait for another day.  My alarm clock is set for 5:30am (on Satuday!?!), so it’s way past bedtime.

Thursday, February 13, 2003

The next piece of spin

What are the odds that news stories like this will be cited by Ari Fleischer as proof that the Senate Dems are anti-American meddlers, filibustering poor l’il ole Miguel Estrada instead of making progress on helping out our guardians against terror?

Never mind that the severe underfunding was Dubya’s idea of “homeland security” or that Dubya’s big-Republican-donor-targeted tax cuts and related economic policies have contributed mightily to the nationwide collapse of state and local government revenue sources.

Just watch it get spun…

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Shout it from the rooftops

Robert C. Byrd, senior Senator from West Virginia, is no liberal.  Yet his voice has been one of the very few in the nation’s most esteemed legislative chamber to speak out forthrightly about the dangerously reckless course on which George W. Bush has sent this nation careening.

Thanks to someone called CTDem2 (I presume this person is a Democrat from Connecticut), posting a comment on the consistently-interesting Daily Kos site, I just read Byrd’s February 12 Senate floor speech, a movingly powerful indictment of two years of Bush administration depredations wreaked upon the world and the country.

So how is the New York Times covering Byrd’s challenge?  In the early morning of February 13 (just after midnight Pacific Time), there’s nothing whatsoever on their website.  Same with CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, FoxNews, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times.  Boy, those “liberal” media sure do jump to cover stories slanted “their” way, don’t they?

Well, at least the Charleston Gazette back home in West Virginia picked up the story…