It's the Christianity, Stupid.

Close readers of The Sideshow already know that I was raised on the Gospels and that, to a large extent, this is where my values come from, even though I've left all the churchifying behind. It's not something I normally think of as part of my core identity, but I was taught that certain things were right and certain things were wrong, and I've thought about those things a lot in my lifetime, and they still seem pretty solid to me, whether you believe in a Higher Being or not.

I think most Americans - whether today they call themselves Christians, or atheists, or something else - pretty much picked up the same values in the same way.

Consider the teachings of Jesus: He preached against public piety, against putting material wealth above the spiritual, against casting the first stone, against bigotry. He spoke up for the poor and told us to love our neighbors. He blessed the peacemakers and the merciful, and taught his followers to share. He preached love, hope, and charity. He was about forgiveness and redemption.

And so, as someone who, "was raised on the Good Book Jesus 'til I read between the lines," it's pretty much impossible for me to look at the modern GOP and the Christian right - and particularly at the Bush administration - and see any of Jesus' teachings there. I don't claim to know the mind of any god (which, after all, would be blasphemy), but it seems to me that Bush represents the kind of self-righteous, publicly pious, war-mongering rich men who Jesus warned us not to become.

We all want material comfort, but most of us would rather not see our neighbors starve. We can spare a bit if it prevents large sections of the populace from becoming miserable. And Jesus hung out with tax-collectors, and told us to render unto Ceaser what is Ceaser's. We can share.

We all have our prejudices, and many of us are uncomfortable with people who we see as too different from ourselves, but we don't want hateful discrimination written into our laws. And just as Jesus reminded us not to hate those of other religions just because they were of different tribes and faiths, we can learn to judge people by what they do, like the good Samaritan, rather than what they are - Muslims, gays, whatever.

Like most Americans, I do pick and choose which of the Ten Commandments I try to abide by, but some make sense to me not because they were decreed by a god, but because living by them just seems to make the world a better place. Killing and stealing seem like pretty bad ideas to me, for example, and bearing false witness makes things pretty nasty, too. So it's hard to put faith in leaders who steal our Social Security money, rob our treasury generally, and murder thousands of Iraqi civilians based on lies they made up about Saddam Hussein.

(They're not so good on the Seven Deadly Sins, either, now that I think of it.)

So there it is: We're liberals because no matter how far we've strayed from Sunday School, we still think like Christians - even those of us who never were.

And that's what it really means that America is a nation with Christian values. And by those values, we have to reject the leadership we are getting from Bush and the GOP.

[This article was originally published on 9 March 2004 at DailyNewsOnline.]

On the Radio

Last week I listened to the last broadcast of Mike Malloy's show on the union-supported I.E.America radio network. I say "broadcast" although, as far as I know, Malloy's show was available only on one or two local stations and on the Internet. Though Malloy has always been popular in whatever market he worked in, right-wing organizing to silence him has usually been effective enough to keep him from being heard anywhere for long. But in this case, the union just couldn't see trying to make a go of maintaining a liberal station on the Internet any longer, and that was the end of Malloy's current run.

Meanwhile, Clear Channel dropped Howard Stern's show from the six markets in which they carry it. They said it was because of indecency.

As Eric Boehlert points out in his recent Salon article on the subject, Clear Channel boss is shocked -- shocked -- to find indecency!, this appears to be another timely response by the network to Congressional interest in broadcast violations. FCC head Michael Powell, mysteriously uninterested in what otherwise serves the public interest, has had a sudden disturbance after the appearance of Janet Jackson's breast rippled the broadcast waters. Congress gets into the act, and next thing you know, Clear Channel notices that Howard Stern has not been squeaky clean for all these years.

Now, it's true that members of the public have complained of what they regard as Stern's vulgarity. But it's equally true that members of the public have complained about some far more serious breaches of the public trust on Clear Channel's part. For example, the continuous stream of falsehoods and hate-mongering by Rush Limbaugh, the neglect of local programming - including local news and vital information during emergencies - and the network's national lock-out of musical innovation and diversity. Many of us regard these things as far more obscene than any Howard Stern show.

Some form of liberal radio is now trying to emerge in the form of something that started off calling itself "Central Air" and is now calling itself Air America. (And, yes, having read the book, I'm a bit disturbed by that name.) There's been a rather high profile given to the fact that comedian Al Franken has been asked to do a show on the new network - they want a star. But if they are to succeed, they really need people with experience in radio. If they want to compete with the likes of Rush, they should pick up folks who know the business, as Malloy has said, and as Ed Schultz and others have proven can work.

One of them, I'm pleased to say, has indeed been tapped for the network - Randi Rhodes, popular South Florida radio personality, is slated to have her show syndicated on Air America. (Clear Channel apparently considered syndicating her show, but legend has it that Rush Limbaugh threatened to take his toys and go elsewhere if he had to share their national airwaves with her.) But one radio star - even a "ratings queen" like Rhodes - is not enough.

As I so often say, the airwaves belong to the people. One way or another, we need to take them back.

[This article was originally published on 2 March 2004 at DailyNewsOnline.]

Should Bush Be Shot for Desertion?

All right, I'm not really going to argue for a firing squad for Bush, but I'm getting annoyed with the question of why we should care whether he was AWOL from his required service with the Texas Air National Guard.

I have seen someone say that we shouldn't care because the Vietnam war was a mistake and many of us were actively against it, so why should we mind that Bush couldn't be bothered to fight in it or even put up a good imitation of ANG service?

Well, this isn't a question of how well he executed the defense of his country during the Vietnam war, it's a question of how well he stood up for his convictions and took responsibility for his promises. He said he supported the war - and he "supported it" by making sure he didn't have to risk anything to be in it. And then he broke the deal that kept him out of the war, without any repercussions.

So we have a guy who offers nothing more than lip-service to something he says he believes in. We have a guy who makes deals (to serve in the ANG), and then doesn't fulfill his obligations - that is, he even breaks deals with his own country. And then tries to pretend this military record makes him some sort of hot-shot flying war hero.

I've seen some people try to compare Bush with Clinton, saying that each of them evaded service in Vietnam. But there is a rather significant difference, in that Vietnam was Bush's war, not Clinton's. Clinton's war was against the war, and he actively protested it. So only one of these two men showed the courage of their alleged convictions.

Did Bush actually believe in the Vietnam war? Who knows? Bush claims a lot of beliefs that his actions appear to betray. And that's a significant part of the problem: Bush never seems to be able to back up what he says he believes in. That's a pretty important character flaw.

This one little story actually tells us quite a good deal about Bush, and could be taken as a predictor of what was to come. Bush's Vietnam "service" looks an awful lot like his "presidency" - lip-service and astonishing laziness, moral laxity at levels most of us can't even imagine, and what looks like an allergy to behaving honorably.

When light-hearted blogger Skippy refers to Bush consistently as "awol" he doesn't just mean his ANG record, but his entire performance in government. It's not just that Bush was AWOL, it's that he is AWOL, and has been since his first day in office.

Consider Bush's 2000 campaign, in which we were simultaneously told that his vast experience as governor of Texas made him eminently qualified to lead the nation, while the disastrous results of his administration of Texas were none of his doing since the governorship in Texas confers little power. Every criticism of Bush's tenure as governor was answered with the information that it's really the lieutenant governor who has the authority in Texas. So nothing is ever Bush's fault.

Bush's occupancy of the White House has been one example after another of broken promises. He arrived in Washington and, having been warned of the dangers of terrorism, promptly overturned every protection his predecessor had put in place, and then told our intelligence services they could not investigate our most likely attacker, Al Qaeda, at all.

Allied intelligence warned that an attack was imminent. Osama bin Laden himself went on the radio and said he had something big planned for the US.

And then Bush went on vacation.

It's almost as if he was daring us to realize we had been insulted. In a country where a remarkably high number of people are unemployed solely because those who still have jobs are being forced to do the work of more than one person, afraid to take what little dwindling vacation time they purportedly are still entitled to because that might put their jobs at risk, Bush was publicly sneering at the idea of diligence and service. By September 10th of 2001, his habitual shirking was already being discussed everywhere.

Even when he was supposedly doing his job, he was expressing resentment at having to do it at all, sniping at reporters when visiting other nations, and insulting foreign dignitaries - with the excuse that he was being kept up past his bedtime. He had no excuse for doing the same from the White House itself, but he did it anyway, destabilizing the situation in Korea and with China within the first months of his tenure.

The rest of his "work" has involved photo-ops in which he pretended to care about important issues like education, each of which seemed to precede the promotion of a new order or bill that would gut whatever program he claimed to be supporting.

We have been told that what Andy Card whispered into Bush's ear as he read to school children on the morning of September 11th was that the nation was under attack. And Bush just sat there and kept reading. Then he got on Airforce One and took a little tour of midwestern airspace for a few hours.

As a leader of his country, Bush has been AWOL from his very first day. He may have quit drinking (or maybe not), but he is still the same arrogant layabout he always was. It's a shame America wasn't shown that true picture of George W. Bush in 2000. After all, what is past is prologue.

[This article was originally published on 23 February 2004 at DailyNewsOnline.]

The Sour Taste of Iraq

I don't read Jane's. I am not an airfix kid. And yet I knew instantly that Tony Blair's claim that Saddam could deploy WMD to strike at British interests within 45 minutes was false.

How did I know? I used this simple test:

Do I recall ever having read a front-page headline announcing that Iraq had tested a nuclear bomb?

No.

So they can't be nuke-ready, because you can't hide that sort of thing; when it happens, everyone knows it.

And they had no delivery systems. And even if they'd never destroyed their stocks of biological and chemical weapons, they were past their sell-by date. And even if they hadn't been past their sell-by date, they had no way to use them against Britain or even Cyprus as a means of mass killing.

So it was obviously not true.

And here is my problem: How could Tony Blair not know this? He's the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, it's the sort of thing he really, really ought to know. Or he is way too stupid for the job.

On the other side of the water, opinion is divided on whether George W. Bush was out of the loop on this. No one really believes he has the sharps to put 1+1 together, and he says he doesn't read the papers, so maybe he actually didn't know.

But now even right-wing Fox personality Bill O'Reilly has admitted that there are no WMDs.

Two years ago I expressed bafflement at the sudden interest even sensible people seemed to have in "protecting" ourselves from Saddam Hussein. I was told Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to deploy against us - something that obviously wasn't true. I was told that we needed to liberate Iraqi women from a sexist society - a thought that sounds nice, but it seemed very odd given that women in Iraq were already a great deal more free than women in Saudi Arabia. I was told that Saddam was chummy with Osama bin Laden - an obvious lie, since the two of them hated each other. I was told it was part of our "war on terror" against Islamist extremists, even though Saddam was running a secular state (and Saudi Arabia is not).

And I warned that war could make life worse for the Iraqi people, that invasion risked their lives and their infrastructure, that tearing down the secular government actually endangered the rights of Iraqi women and made it more likely that strong-men, warlords, and religious extremists would take over the country.

I was right. Thousands of people are dead, women are afraid to go out and live their normal lives, and people are still having trouble getting water.

I want an apology from all of those people who called me a fruitcake. I want an apology from all of those people who think you need to "hate Bush" to have seen these things.

This was not a humanitarian war. It was insanity.

[This article was originally published on 18 February 2004 at DailyNewsOnline.]

LatinAmericazation of the USA

It's pretty basic stuff. You soak the populace in taxes paid for services which will, for the most part, not actually be provided by the government.

Those services will be sold off to private enterprise or devalued altogether - by a government that claims to be giving you even better service! at even lower prices! but in fact is putting them into the hands of people who have been promised they will not be held accountable.

The private companies aren't even going to try to keep up the standard of service, but will raise prices considerably. A lot is usually said about all the nifty jobs that will be created by this wonderful modernizing project, but in fact productive staff will be cut and the new bosses will say they have no choice and anyway they have their obligations to their shareholders to think of (and obligations to no one else to even consider).

In most cases, the sale of utilities or other projects to private enterprise won't even have the benefits of an actual sale, since the government will continue to pay out taxpayers' money to subsidize the same projects. Extra layers of administration are laid on (at increased costs to you, of course), and the real deal is that the work has in essence been outsourced to a more expensive and less responsible provider. The private company mines profits from the bills you pay directly into their own pockets, while costs are returned to you through the government to be covered by your now increased taxes.

Of course, the government has to at least go through some cost-cutting motions, but they won't cut them at source. Instead, they will tearfully explain that we're just going to have to tighten our belts and get rid of some projects which, mysteriously, have now become inefficient and just plain too expensive - luxuries like a properly-trained police force, say, or public defenders, or medical care for indigent children.

So one year you were paying about $160 annually for your gas heating, and then it's privatized, and next year you pay around $20 for each monthly bill that is sent to you by the new gas company, but the government (i.e., your tax money) still has to cover costs for the inefficiencies that have been introduced. The trains, which now have fewer routes, and schedules that are becoming increasingly incomprehensible (not to mention a lot more serious accidents), seem to raise their ticket rates exponentially every year, and yet the government is still having to pay running costs.

Gee, the money has to come from somewhere, so... ah, we'll add 2% to the sales tax (which hits those in the lower income brackets the hardest).

Eventually, the current Prime Minister or President and their respective cabinet members will retire from public service to go into the private sector. What will they do? Well, Norman Tebbit, who sold off British Telecom, went on to run the privatized telephone service in Britain. See how it works out? Baby, you're a rich man!

Wait, he gave the phone company to himself? Doesn't this sound kind of...corrupt? How do they get away with it?

British Telecom is a lovely case study. The government ran BT, so they could decide to fund and operate it any way they wanted to. It was a simple matter to simply run the service down while crying poor. It's not that the money wasn't actually there, you understand, it's just that they chose not to put it where it was needed. Upgrades were seriously required, but they just weren't funded, and the system was limping along in the 1980s with the same technology they'd had since the '50s. Engineering was grossly understaffed, so you waited weeks, even months, after you called for service.

People were increasingly aware that Britain had the worst telephone service in the industrialized world, except for France. The crowning moment was when the country had a chance to upgrade to a new system - of British design - that would have made it exceptional. The Thatcher government turned it down. The French bought it. And then the French had the best telephone system in the industrialized world. (Imagine the humiliation! The French!)

The drumbeat for privatization became intense. Rhetoric flew high that the system was now unmanagible in its present form and only private industry could save it. So the government arranged a sale. What they didn't trumpet too loudly was the fact that part of the deal included a pile of sweeteners fattened with funding the upgrade we somehow couldn't afford before. And only some of the responsibility for running the system would go to private hands - so we'd still be paying for it, we'd just be paying for it twice. The profits, of course, would not be returned to us. But at least the phones were working a lot better, and we could finally get modular systems like they had everywhere else already.

Making the phone company the first experiment in privatization was a smart move, because it was the one that held out the most potential for actually working profitably. That was the thing that made it most attractive for private interests to buy, of course. Other utilities don't necessarily work the same way. So in this instance, privatization appeared to have worked.

But then, curiously, the railways started to be inefficient. (Actually, they weren't all that inefficient, but Tories kept saying they were.) Mysteriously, rush-hour trains started to be less and less reliable. There were problems. The drums got louder. The rails were privatized. And cost more. And were less efficient. And had lots of accidents.

It is rather amazing, when you think about it, that people can so easily overlook the simple fact that no private company would have any interest in buying a public utility unless it was profitable. Think about that: Why would someone want to buy the phone company if it weren't profitable? They wouldn't. So either it is profitable, which means there is no advantage to the public in selling it off, or it's not going to be worth buying. If it can't be run without public subsidy, they aren't going to buy it - unless they can still get the public subsidy.

If a service cannot be provided efficiently to the public by the government at a profit, it can't be provided any more efficiently to the public at a profit by the private sector. And because the private sector must make a profit, you can be sure that privatization will be more expensive and still be less efficient. All over the world, this has been proven again and again. It's not in question; it can't work any other way.

Privatizers try to convince the public that the market is magic. They do this, largely, by lying. They tell you that a government-run service doesn't work, even when it has always worked. They make people paranoid about costs and convince them to allow legislators to tinker with the system until it starts to break. Then they claim they can fix it by privatizing it. The privatized system never runs as well or as cheaply as it did before, but by then it's too late - it's a lot harder to re-nationalize a service once it has been in the hands of the private sector.

Just look at American healthcare, among the worst and most expensive in the industrialized world. Oh, you hadn't heard? Isn't American healthcare - because it is a commercial system - the best there is?

Well, no. First of all, it's not an entirely commercial system. The government funds a great deal of it. Most of the significant research is performed by the National Institutes of Health and government-funded university programs. The commercial sector reaps the benefits, but it doesn't pay for them, because you already have. And a considerable part of the overall running cost of hospitals is also paid for by the government.

So first you pay for it in taxes, and then you pay your middleman in the insurance industry and then you pay for immediate treatment. You pay several different entities for healthcare, and most of them are profit-making entities, which means you don't just pay what is necessary, you also pay an additional premium that exists to make other people rich. That means that a huge proportion of your payout is never put toward maintaining your health; it goes directly toward maintaining someone else's wealth. (Then, of course, there are the drugs....)

In Britain - and here we are talking about fully "socialized" medicine, not single-payer - residents do not pay these additional wealth-maintenance costs. Britain spends less money to provide free-at-source healthcare to everyone in the country than America pays for healthcare you still have to pay for at source.

And, despite some meddling by "modernizers", Britain still gets pretty good healthcare. I know enough to make the comparison, because I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, at the time the wealthiest county in the wealthiest country in the world. And now I live in a working-class neighborhood in London.

You hear horror stories about the NHS, of course - waiting lists and such. But most of that didn't exist before the Thatcher government decided to "fix" the system. Even so, enough has been retained that it still compares favorably with American healthcare. Yes, we have access to the same equipment, the same medicines. We have at least as much control of what doctors we see as anyone in an American HMO does. We get immediate treatment when we need it, and we get non-vital treatment in reasonable time.

And we never have to ask ourselves if we can afford it. (And private care, and private insurance, are still available if you want the pricier standard in the style of the USA - which means the furniture is better, but not the medical care. We already have good medical care.)

Oh, you say, what about those high taxes? Well, my social security and other taxes on my paycheck come to 20% of income above the personal allowance. (Equivalent to a "standard deduction". I think about five grand - sterling - at the moment, though I haven't looked lately, and it could be more. That's, what, $8,000?) There are no additional state and local taxes taken out of my pay. One member of any married couple (by default, the husband - you have to hassle them if you want the wife to get it) gets to take another deduction, I think called "the married person's allowance".

Taxes actually got higher as "modernization" started to kick in. It's interesting, isn't it, that "cost-cutting" always seems to make things more expensive? It was, naturally, Conservatives who doubled the sales tax.

The "fiscally conservative" "free-market" program of modern "conservatives" is a scam, pure and simple. It isn't based on any serious economic analysis. It's piracy that takes your tax money and hands it over to privateers who don't care whether you are getting what you think you're paying for. And it's not just hurting the poor; it can destroy the middle-class, while a small handful of rich people learn that they can spend your money on...a lot of expensive shoes.

Meanwhile, your jobs become less and less secure, and lower-paid, with fewer benefits - and what benefits you do get (like healthcare) are so vital that you don't dare leave the company, no matter how badly you are treated. You're still paying taxes, but everything they are supposed to cover gets privatized and now you are having to pay for them again. Soon you can't pay for them because you just don't have the money, and your neighborhood starts to look like a slum, your streets fill up with crime, and if the police do come, they harass you and all your neighbors.

What separates you from all those teeming masses of Latin American laborors who struggle while their leaders live in luxury, sucking up the nation's wealth into their foreign bank accounts? Some people just assume that it can never happen in America, but that's magical thinking. It can happen. It has happened, everywhere, at one time or another, and that includes America. We are not so far from 1929.

[This article was orginally published on 12 February 2004 at DailyNewsOnline.]

Yet another service interruption

Yes, the provider for The Sideshow is doing another upgrade, and as usual this seems to be messing me about with the FTP server. Service will resume...when it does.

Meanwhile, this week's DNO article is called Watching the Fabric Tear.

My latest DNO article: It's the Christianity, Stupid.

(Lately I can't seem to get a ping on The Sideshow half the time. Dunno why.)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program

The Sideshow's provider does seem to have things back together again. I hadn't realized that some things that appeared to have posted before the page went dark hadn't actually proliferated. But it's all there now, and that's the main thing....

The race/sex card

Nice catch by Hesiod at Counterspin Central:

GEORGE W BUSH IS A RACIST AND A SEXIST: Pretty strong allegations, I know. But I am just applying Republican criteria.

What do I mean?

Well, remember when the Republicans kept whining about how the Democrats in the Senate were "racists," and "sexists," because they refused to confirm Judge Priscilla Owen and Judge Miguel Estrada to the Federal Courts of Appeals?

I certainly do.

And applying that same standard makes George W. Bush a racist and a sexist. How do I come to this conclusion?

Because neither Judge Owen or Judge Estrada were given recess appointments to the bench. You'd think, based upon GOP whining and hand-wringing, that they would be the administration's top priorities.

But conservative, white males, Charles Pickering and William Pryor were the ones who got recess appointments instead.

Art & Politics

The Propaganda of William Safire, by David Corn.

Making Light on some astroturf, Ashcroft, her mother the terrorist, and Elmore Leonard?s ten rules for writers.

Sports and entertainment

Throw rocks at boys and watch a drawing take shape (via The Biomes Blog).

Stuff I wanted to post today

But I still can't FTP to The Sideshow, so here it is.

Tonight is apparently the last chance to hear The Mike Malloy Show on i.e.america. What a bummer.

Talk Left reports that a grand jury in Palm Beach has issued a "a scathing report" on the privatized girls prisons in Florida, and has this: How many times does this go on when and no one finds out? A high school principal has admitted planting marijuana on a student he suspected of using the drug.. Plus, a powerful reminder that children can and do sometimes make false accusations that can ruin lives. On a lighter note, a pointer to the Sex & the City quiz. (I am 40% Carrie. Well, no surprises there.)

Digby on Kerry's appeal to Democrats.

Barefoot And Naked explains that the Texas redistricting has two important goals. One is stated openly in analysis by congressional aide Joby Fortson, who said: "This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood." The other is an attempt to silence Rep. Martin Frost, the most important Democrat in Texas. He has a real chance to win his race, though, and maybe you can help.

As mentioned earlier at The Sideshow, George Bush has admitted that he ducked service in Vietnam. He also did so more recently on Meet the Press. But now, Marc Racicot, chairman of Bush's campaign, is claiming that Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam. Yeah, right. Josh Marshall has details and wonders if anyone is going to ask questions about this latest lie. (Also: Look, folks, the only thing about Nader's campaign that matters is how it diminishes what's left of his reputation. It's not an issue in the race. No one supports him. Hell, even Noam Chomsky is telling people to vote for the Democrat. And Michael Berube says we should file him away with LaRouche.)

Speaking of Berube, check out his posts responding to continuing right-wing claims that the presence of non-right-wing professors in academe represents...er, something-or-other.

Life happened: If you want someone to be a successful on radio, you don't get TV stars or politicians, you get radio guys. Ed Schultz was a successful conservative talk radio jock, and then life happened to him and he moved to the left. Then he became even more successful in his market - in North Dakota. Esquire has the story.

Service restored

BT wuz here and fixed the phones. God, what a relief!

Daily News Online

There's this other thing I'm doing called Daily News Online. Fortunately, I had e-mailed an article for it to someone else to post on the grounds that my computer kept crashing. My computer seems to be working now, but since I still can't get online, I still can't upload to The Sideshow but here's my article about LatinAmericanizing the US.

Live from an Internet cafe!

Yesterday I discovered that both of my phone lines were dead. BT admits it's a problem on the network and not me. I think it's those guys that were digging on the street just down the road.

BT promised they would send an engineer by....

Monday.

So I can post here from the local Internet cafe, but I can't post to the Sideshow from here. *sigh*

Statistics Don't Support Bush's Claim that Tort Reform Will Minimize Costs

"Grassroots"

Hesiod Theogeny (of Counterspin Central) e-mails:

Check out what someon e-mailed me. It's from Marc Racicot.

Subject: Action Alert! President Bush's grassroots vs. liberal billionaires.

December 10, 2003

Dear XXXXXXX,

Our Campaign Manager, Ken Mehlman, recently wrote you about the vicious personal attacks Democrat Presidential candidates are making on President Bush.

Now comes news from a Wall Street Journal investigative report that wealthy liberals "have plotted ways around the campaign finance law" to funnel millions in illegal soft money donations "to finance get-out-the-vote efforts and ads slamming Mr. Bush and Republicans."

Of course, there is nothing illegal about what "wealthy liberals" are doing, and naturally this letter doesn't mention that wealthy conservatives have been doing it for decades.

Help us overcome the Democrats' liberal billionaire by making your contribution and emailing five friends today! [link]

One billionaire liberal, George Soros, has already pledged $25 million to get these efforts off the ground. Soros even said that President Bush reminds him of the Nazis.

Soros got another billionaire leftist, Peter Lewis, an ardent advocate of hard drugs, to promise $12 million as a down payment. Their goal is to raise over $400 million to defeat the President and they're halfway there.

To beat these billionaire liberals, we need your help today [Link]!

Please, will you send the Bush re-election campaign $25, $50, $75, $100 or whatever you can afford to give today? You can give by using the campaign's secure online donation form at: [Link]

Whatever way you can, please contribute today.

There's one more thing you can do to help the President overcome the smears and invective of the Democrats. We want to reach our goal of 450,000 grassroots contributors to the President's campaign by December 31st. Will you forward this email to five friends with your personal request to join you in supporting the President?

[Link]

Howard Dean compared President Bush to the Taliban and calls him "the enemy" and "despicable."

Dick Gephardt calls the President "a miserable failure" and the worst President he's ever worked with.

John Kerry compared President Bush to Saddam Hussein, called for "regime change" and accused him of fraud.

Joe Lieberman said President Bush is a "segregationist," compared him to "a felon" and called the Administration "nearly as dangerous" as Iraqi terrorists.

We have 11 months until the election and Democrats are just getting warmed up! They are making this one of the nastiest, vicious and negative campaigns in history.

That'd be hard to do. The 1988 Bush campaign was pretty appalling, but nothing beats the 2000 campaign by his son, unless you want to count the last four years, which have been one big nasty campaign.

Democrats are reduced to personal slams on our President and outright lies about his record because they lack a positive agenda and hate -- hate -- what he has done for America.

He has restored dignity and honor to the White House.

"Outright lies." Of course, there's not a single "lie" listed here, but that's okay, the RNC has already made plenty of lies up and have more to come, I'm sure. As to "personal slams", they generate them so quickly it's hard to keep up. And as to "dignity and honor", well, sorry, but you have to be really, really stupid to believe that.

But yes, we hate what George Bush has done to America. We hate the destruction of our economy, our Constitution, and our standing in the world. Because we're Americans and we love our country.

President Bush has led America with moral clarity and purpose and strength in the War against Terrorism.

With the simple black & white blindness of a 15-year-old, actually, and what he's done is make a complete mess of fighting terrorism. The world has become a much more dangerous place under George W. Bush.

The President provided the leadership necessary to cut taxes and restore economic growth.

President Bush's reforms are making America a more compassionate society where no child is left behind.

Former Governor Bush has provided the moral laxity of giving away the store to his wealthy friends and benefactors while gutting education and medical care for children.

But that positive record ... the President's strong values ... his character and integrity and vision ... that all may not matter.

[Link]

We can turn back this venomous assault from rage-filled Democrats and overcome the hateful efforts of multi-millionaire liberals to pervert the election process ...

But we need your support to do that. Please, will
you give $25, $50, $75, or what ever you can afford by using our secure online page [Link] or by mailing in our online form with your personal check. Whatever method you choose, please respond today.

[Link]

The angry, bitter Democrats smearing our President ... the billionaire liberals who will bend the rules to win ... the Democrat soft money groups .. all hope you say "no" or let this important request pass without your taking action.

I love the way they make it sound like no rich person has ever given money to the Republicans - or, for that matter - like "angry, bitter" right-wingers have not been poisoning the landscape for decades now. Rhetoric like this is, of course, intended to convey the idea that the Democratic Party is the party of wealthy, sleazy, corrupt donors, while the Republicans are pure. And they are doing this on behalf of a candidate whose principle virtue is and has always been that he can depend on enormous support from the wealthiest people and largest corporations in the world - and he can depend on them because they know he will cut their taxes and line their pockets with our tax money in return.

But you understand how important it is to America that we keep this President, his leadership, his values, his character, on the job, working for us for another term. Please make your contribution of what ever you can afford today and email five friends and ask them to join this important effort. It is vital to our country, our President. I know he will be grateful.

Sincerely,

Marc Racicot
Chairman
Bush-Cheney '04

I'm sure Marc Racicot knows that Bush will barely know those people exist, and if he thinks of them at all, he laughs at how gullible they are.

PS: The Wall Street Journal reported that George
Soros views "America as the gravest threat to world freedom." Help us overcome this liberal billionaire that is clearly out of touch with real America. Please make your contribution to the President's campaign today and ask five friends to join you in this important effort. With your help, I know we will reach our goal.

[Link]

Absolutely shameless.

En Banc - a law-oriented group weblog.

The real reason Arnold is running for governor (via Ungodly Politics).

Story Time: How Margaret Thatcher Accidentally Triggered Regime Change at the American School in London, 1971

Editing the New York Times

David Horsey works it out.

Here's a radical statement-- I hate non-politicians. I don't trust them, because where were they when the politicians were fighting for my rights? - Nathan Newman discussing Wesley Clark.

Eeyew, gross!

George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!

The Sideshow's ftp server has been out of it since yesterday afternoon. Here's the post I've been trying to put up since then:

Informed on the Superhighway

(I just felt like having a graphic there, so I borrowed one from Lois, who remembered to wish Bruce a happy birthday, unlike some people you could name.)

Jeanne D'Arc and CalPundit find out that "No Child Left Behind" really stands for "No Public Schools Left At All."

Sara Paretsky: 'For those who wish to dissent: Speech, silence and patriotism' (Via Holzman, who is also talking about illegal aliens.)

Everybody is on Safire's case. Check Josh Marshall out for the longer version, but for the lazy, there's Elton Beard doing the Shorter William Safire: My transcendent hatred of the Clintons having imbued me with preternatural mind-reading powers, I can discern in their support of Wesley Clark's candidacy a Machiavellian scheme to install Hillary in the White House. But even Elton couldn't get it down to just one sentence, so there are bonus points added. (The last Shorter Tom Friedman, on the other hand, is entertainingly succinct.)

Jeff Cooper has a few words to say about these 36 words in Bush's speech to the UN: The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder and refused to account for them when confronted by the world. What Jeff doesn't say is that the regime of Saddam Hussein simultaneously cultivated ties to the US, who cultivated ties right back, while they were also cultivating ties to the Mujahadeen, and while they did not seem to have any problem with Saddam committing mass murder, which they certainly knew about. If these are good reasons to bomb Iraq, aren't they equally good reasons to bomb his co-conspirators who at present occupy the White House?

"I'm eating cookies. In Republican-world, that means I'm protecting the soldiers." That's from the nice little post at Pandagon on how Republicans Are Great On Defense. (Be sure to catch his 22 Attacks post, as well. And he gives a fine example of his new word, "ridiculosity. Ah, hell, it's all good, read from top to bottom.)

Skippy. Hm, I can't paraphrase this and there's really not a single quote to sum it up, and anyway it's one of those things that makes me wanna spit. Bush. History. "napoleonic." Grrrr. (But read the rest of the page, because Skippy makes ya feel better. And has a short but sweet review of Big Lies.)

TBTM Flash movie on black box voting: Voterevolution.
15:44 BST