A coalition of major conservative Christian groups is threatening to withhold support for President Bush's plans to remake Social Security unless Mr. Bush vigorously champions a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
As he pushes ahead with his proposal to remake Social Security by adding private investment accounts, President Bush has so far failed to attract any prominent Democratic supporters.
At least, no prominent Democrats who are still alive.
Instead, Mr. Bush is taking cover under the reputation of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who died nearly two years ago. Mr. Moynihan served as co-chairman of the commission Mr. Bush established in 2001 to recommend ways of establishing personal accounts, a fact the president and his aides mention almost every time they discuss the issue publicly.
New federal mental-health guidelines could lead to more schoolchildren taking branded drugs to treat depression, according to some critics of the program.
...It's a potentially big market for drug companies and one that grew strongly until recent warnings about the increased risk of suicide for children on antidepressants. The number of children taking behavioral medicines in the U.S. jumped 20% from 2000 to 2003, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc. data. Spending on hyperactivity drugs increased threefold for children under five over the period.
George Bush is a very simple, very violent person with very extreme views, as well as being very much an ignoramus. This is a very dangerous combination. Such people have caused many disasters in human history. Maximilian Robespierre, the French revolutionary who invented the reign of terror, has been called "the Great Simplifier" because of the terrible simplicity of his views, which he tried to impose with the guillotine.
Terror isn't just worrying about a plane hitting a skyscraper…terrorism is being caught in traffic and hearing the crack of an AK-47 a few meters away because the National Guard want to let an American humvee or Iraqi official through. Terror is watching your house being raided and knowing that the silliest thing might get you dragged away to Abu Ghraib where soldiers can torture, beat and kill. Terror is that first moment after a series of machine-gun shots, when you lift your head frantically to make sure your loved ones are still in one piece. Terror is trying to pick the shards of glass resulting from a nearby explosion out of the living-room couch and trying not to imagine what would have happened if a person had been sitting there.
On average, less than 0.6 cents of every dollar paid out in Social Security benefits goes to pay administrative costs. By comparison, systems with individual accounts, like the ones in England or Chile, waste 15 cents of every dollar paid out in benefits on administrative fees. President Bush's Social Security commission estimated that under their system of individual accounts 5 cents of every dollar would go to pay administrative costs.
In addition, under Social Security workers automatically get an annuity (a life-long monthly payment) when they retire. By contrast, financial firms typically take 10 to 20 percent of workers' savings to provide an annuity when they reach retirement.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Thursday filed a disclosure statement with the city of Chicago acknowledging that two of its predecessor banks had received thousands of slaves as collateral prior to the Civil War.
"...We apologize to the African-American community, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, and to the rest of the American public for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played," [bank chairman and president] Harrison and Dimon said in their statement. "The slavery era was a tragic time in U.S. history and in our company's history."
Workers at a second Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in Quebec have received union certification, the United Food and Commercial Workers said, making the two Canadian outlets the only Wal-Mart stores in North America to have unionized. Monday, the Quebec Labour Relations Commission accredited Local 501 of the UFCW to represent 200 workers at a Wal-Mart store in Saint-Hyacinthe, the union said. The union said it will send a letter to Wal-Mart to set dates for bargaining and expects to give contract proposals to the Bentonville, Ark., company within three weeks. A spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada said the retailer is considering all options to block the decision, including legal action against the Labour Commission.
What is the purpose of government in the American economy? To many people these days, it is axiomatic that less government is invariably better for the economy and the nation. In this way, tax cut after tax cut is justified despite a growing federal budget deficit. Such thinking also lies behind the efforts to privatize Social Security.
But it is hard to square this view that government is always an economic menace with the long history of capitalist development. Going back in time, every successful capitalist economy in the world has had an active partnership between government and business.
[Al-Jazeera] is the lone Arabic broadcast outlet to put truth and objectivity above even its survival. For its pains during the five years of its existence, it has been attacked by virtually every government in the Middle East.
The network’s bureaus around the region are periodically closed because of al-Jazeera’s insistence in airing stories about the corruption of government officials in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere. Israeli officials and journalists, all but banned from other Middle Eastern networks, are staples on al-Jazeera, whose motto is “We get both sides of the story.”
Vice President Dick Cheney took on critics of the Bush administration's Social Security overhaul plans Thursday, arguing that channeling part of workers' salaries into the stock market would yield bigger retirement nest eggs and help pull many Americans out of poverty.
Here's a wrenching fact: If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year.
Anti-American activism caused by resentment of U.S. policy is open and pervasive in the Middle East. To improve the climate, Americans need to bypass the commercial media and become aware of the core grievances held against U.S. policy. First, the U.S. is held directly responsible for the imposition of oppressive regimes against the wishes of their people. It is unlikely that the Jordanian, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Tunisian, and Moroccan regimes would have survived until today if it was not for direct U.S. military, intelligence, and political support.
...When U.S. officials speak about "moderate" and "friendly" Arab governments, the American public needs to realize the people living under those governments do not find them moderate or friendly... Moderation and friendliness are defined purely in terms of subservience to U.S. interests, not the interests of the country's civil society.
The Bush administration should be honest with the American people and ask us if we want to do away with Social Security, without pretending that privatization will solve the problem of financing the trust fund without pain. I suspect that the American people would reject this effort to transform their "old-age insurance" into another opportunity to roll the dice in the investment casino.
We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.
Facing record deficits, the City Council voted December 14 to shut all three of Salinas' libraries, including the branches named after Steinbeck and labor leader Cesar Chavez. The blue-collar town of 150,000 could become the most populous U.S. city without a public library.
José Piñera, Augusto Pinochet's former labor minister, has spent recent years in self-imposed exile at the Cato Institute extolling the virtues of the privatization of Chile's Social Security system. Last week, the New York Times op-ed page allotted him abundant space for his now familiar rap about why the United States should follow Chile's model of pushing workers to depend primarily on personal investment accounts for their retirement income. But notably, he provided no facts or figures about what the upshot has been in Chile since it began privatization in 1981.
About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising. About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans...
The survey...showed a correlation between television news-viewing habits, a respondent's fear level and attitudes toward restrictions on civil liberties for all Americans. Respondents who paid a lot of attention to television news were more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties, such as greater power for the government to monitor the Internet. Respondents who paid less attention to television news were less likely to support such measures. "The more attention paid to television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties," says Nisbet.
...Here there's another scam that you should keep your eyes on. What's called 'trade' in economics is a very odd notion. So, for example, if Ford Motor Company moves parts from Indiana to Illinois for assembly and then moves them back to Indiana, that's not called trade. But if Ford Motor Company takes parts made in Indiana and moves them across the border to Mexico--where you can get much cheaper labor and you don't have to worry about pollution and so on--and they get reassembled in Mexico, and then get sent back to Illinois for valuation, that's called 'exports and imports.' It never had anything to do with the Mexican economy, or in fact any economy; it was all internal to the Ford Motor Company, but it's 'exports and imports.' So how big an element is all that? Well, about 50% of US trade. So about 50% of what's called 'US trade' is internal to individual corporations...
If agreements like GATT increase what's called 'trade,' what it actually does is increases investor rights. That is, it increases the power of transnational corporations. You have to look pretty closely to figure out what the effect is on trade in any meaningful sense. For example, it may increase cross-border operations, but decrease trade in a meaningful sense of trade--meaning something that's not under the control of a kind of corporate mercantilism.
The...posting brings up questions about the Iraqi brothers who run the IraqTheModel site. It points out that the views of the brothers are celebrated in the right-leaning weblogging world of the US, even though opinion polling shows that their views are far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion. It notes that their choice of internet service provider, in Abilene, Texas, is rather suspicious, and wonders whether they are getting some extra support from certain quarters.
Contrast all this to the young woman computer systems analyst in Baghdad, Riverbend, who is in her views closer to the Iraqi opinion polls, especially with regard to Sunni Arabs, but who is not being feted in Washington, DC.
As Chile's strongman from 1973, when he overthrew Salvador Allende, an elected civilian president, to 1990, General Pinochet presided over a purge of political opponents and the creation of a police state. But he also laid the foundations for what has become Latin America's most stable and promising economy - all, as the general's supporters have claimed, without ever stealing a dime.
There's nothing strange or mysterious about how Social Security works: it's just a government program supported by a dedicated tax on payroll earnings, just as highway maintenance is supported by a dedicated tax on gasoline...
But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.
The bottom of a laptop can reach temperatures of over 100 degrees. Put it near the scrotum? Dr. Sheynkin and his colleagues did. They found that simply holding the legs together in a laptop support position for an hour raised the scrotal temperature by almost four degrees. Adding the laptop for that hour raised the temperature by five to six degrees.
It makes sense, in any system of domination and control, to try to change it as far as possible within the limits that the system permits. If you run up against limits that are impassable barriers, then it may be that the only way to proceed is conflict, struggle and revolutionary change. But there is no need for revolutionary change to work for improving safety and health regulations in factories, for example, because you can bring about these changes through parliamentary means. So you try to push it as far as you can.
People often do not even recognize the existence of systems of oppression and domination. They have to try to struggle to gain their rights within the systems in which they live before they even perceive that there is repression. Take a look at the women’s movement. One of the first steps in the development of the women’s movement was so-called “consciousness raising efforts”. Try to get women to perceive that it is not the natural state of the world for them to be dominated and controlled. My grandmother couldn’t join the women’s movement, since she didn’t feel any oppression, in some sense. That’s just the way life was, like the sun rises in the morning. Until people can realize that it is not like the sun rising, that it can be changed, that you don’t have to follow orders, that you don’t have to be beaten, until people can perceive that there is something wrong with that, until that is overcome, you can’t go on.
What is the meaning of blue states vs. red states? As this article in Fortune indicates, there is a strong correlation between the red & blue electoral map and the fiscal map showing the federal gravy train. Citizens of some states pay more in taxes than they receive back from the federal government through grants, benefits, and subsidies. The imbalance for California, for example, reached $50 billion in 2003. New York and Illinois are other "donor" states. Alabama is the biggest "winning" state, reaping in a net of $100 billion between 1991 and 2001. The "winner" states during the same period received nearly $1 trillion more in federal benefits than they paid in taxes. "The huge gaps are driven by higher average incomes in the "donor" states, plus subsidies for farms, oil, mining --- "extractive" industries that skew red....The heist is more impressive considering that the winners have only a third of the U.S. population."
An open letter to diversity@cbs.comSign the petition.
Dear CBS,
The irony of juxtaposing your statement on diversity with your decision not to air the advertisement from the United Church of Christ is staggering. You seem to have no problem with giving hate-mongering Christians--those who misquote the Bible to condemn gays--plenty of airtime through inviting them to speak on your news programs, and selling their PACs advertising during the election season, but a simple advertisement that argues that perhaps Jesus wasn't a bigot is too controversial for you to air. How do you sleep at night?
I have wrestled with myself today as to the type of letter I should write to you. I wanted to make it respectful, to tactfully suggest to you that you reconsider your opinion, but I'm tired. I'm tired of hate being promoted as a moral value in this country while loving one's neighbor is depicted as a perversion. You have clearly cast your lot with the hateful bigots in this country. May you enjoy their company.
You can inform your other advertisers that there will be one less viewer for "CSI." My hope is that I'm not alone, and there will be economic consequences for you in refusing to run the ad.
You are cowards. Plain and simple. There is no diplomatic way to say it; there are no euphemisms. You are the Cowardly Broadcasting System. At least you don't need to change your call letters.
Sincerely,
Lorraine Berry
Letter will be sent to NBC later today. nbcshows@nbc.com
Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80% favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes – in reality, a national health care system would probably reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, and so on, some of the factors that render the US privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world.
Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted but dismissed as "politically impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (Oct. 31), the NY Times reported that "there is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not create a new government program" – what the majority want, so it appears. But it is "politically impossible" and has "[too] little political support," meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc. , are opposed.
In a move that has been unsuccessful elsewhere in the U.S., 17 workers at a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. automotive-service department have taken the first step to unionize at the world's largest retailer. The National Labor Relations Board planned a hearing tomorrow to consider the workers' request to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7. Union officials argue the workers in the Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express are separate from the store and eligible for independent union representation. Wal-Mart officials disagree. "With approximately 400 associates in that particular facility, we feel that more than 17 associates should have a say on such an important matter," said Christi Gallagher, a spokeswoman for the Bentonville, Ark., company. Efforts to unionize Wal-Mart stores in the U.S. have failed, while in Canada, a government agency this year certified workers at a Quebec store as a union and told the two sides to negotiate. Wal-Mart has said it may have to close that store.
"I vote Christian. And I believe that he is pro-life, pro-family, pro-Israel, strong national defense, faith-based initiatives for the poor, et cetera. And George Bush fits the criteria for all of them. John Kerry met little or none of those criteria." -- Jerry Falwell
Temporary workers will no longer be able to bargain for job benefits as part of a unit with permanent employees, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled, reversing a Clinton-era precedent.
The School of the Americas (SOA) - renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001 - is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers located at Fort Benning, Georgia. During its 56 years of existence, the SOA has used U.S. tax dollars to train more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage war against their own countries' civilians. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into exile by those trained at this "School of Assassins."
Please support HR 1258, a bill to close, investigate, and prevent another cosmetic remake of the SOA.
If there's no pain, there's no gain. To fix Social Security without raising taxes, benefits promised for the future must be cut. The president's Commission on Strengthening Social Security found a clever way of doing that. It proposed adjusting the initial benefit given to new recipients each year by the rate of price inflation, instead of by the rate of wage inflation. That enabled the commission to claim correctly that future recipients would receive exactly the same benefit, adjusted for inflation, that today's recipients receive.
Dispensing with legislative niceties like holding hearings or full and open debate, President Bush and the Republican Congress have used the cover of a must-pass spending bill to mount a disgraceful sneak attack on women's health and freedom.
America is the greatest damned mass of foolish, ignorant peasantry the world has ever produced. Not once before in the human race's mutable existence has there been a nation of such monumental idiocy; and what's more astounding is that history has given these dopes self-determination. In the exercise of this self-determination, America (if we are not so skeptical but as to actually believe the tally) has chosen to let George W. Bush lead it for another four critical years, and we are at once given a demonstration of our extraordinary mass moronism, and of the stunning depth of our ancestors' genius.
Every viewpoint is a view from a point, and that includes the viewpoint from the side of George Bush, from the side of Michael Moore, and I would like to propose a third: the viewpoint from the side of the poor and excluded in any system. If we are to be people transformed by the Biblical text, it is always from this deliberate bias that we must read reality...
From the very beginning and throughout the Bible, God’s privileged one is consistently the enslaved instead of the supposed free, the outsider instead of the insider, the sinner instead of the righteous, the wounded instead of the healthy, the lay instead of the clergy, the poor instead of the rich. I dare you to try to disprove that. It is the “theme of themes,” so consistent and so demanding, that it has been ignored and avoided throughout most of Christian and Jewish history.
The true Biblical text will always be a subtext in history.
The Right seems largely incapable of any self criticism, as we see personified in Rush Limbaugh, or George Bush who cannot think of any mistakes he made his first two years in office. That, of itself, puts their ideology totally outside the prophetic and Jesus tradition. The Right is usually the glorification of self interest, while frequently hiding behind the language of religion and patriotism.
Abortion is a serious moral issue, but the prospect of making abortion illegal is also a serious moral issue, and I think it's important to have no illusion about its effects. It's not going to stop abortions. What it will do is increase health risks to poor women who cannot afford to have the procedure done safely. Having said that, women will continue to do with their bodies what they want; they are their bodies after all.
For any woman to face unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy no matter what way we want to look at it. There is no obvious solution besides trying to avoid the situation in the first place. But it happens, and has always happened. And women have always pursued abortion in response, legally or not. Roe Vs. Wade is important in guaranteeing that no woman has to lose more than she already is in pursuing an abortion--namely, her own life. I think a moral perspective on abortion dictates that we look not only at the objectionable acts we oppose but also at the practical effects of how we oppose them. I don't think any moral person would argue that losing both the mother and the child is an acceptable risk for trying to save the child.
I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
[The Pope] said, if you read the text later, he said to the President, "Thank you very much for the medal, but you know that you and I disagree on this Iraq thing. I have told you three times." That's in the text.
The religion threw Galileo into house arrest for two or three years. Why? Not because of his science, that's silliness. Because of his theology. The theology taught that we were the center of the universe. We were God's rational and best creatures. When the little telescope, when he handed the Pope a telescope and said, "Look, we're not the center," they wouldn't even pick up the telescope. That's dogmatism. And that's what we have to be very careful of.
What is uniquely alarming in the United States today, among all the democracies and in our own history, is that a president of the United States is explicitly on the side of antimodernism. Never before has an American chief executive worked deliberately to foment a fundamentalist absolutism that is ultimately tribal, theocratic, antiscientific, and incompatible with pluralist democracy.
"The smell, the sight, it's something you never forget," Sarra told a packed lecture hall Tuesday night at the University of Notre Dame. "If people want to support this war and think it's a good thing, they need to take a second look."
For Sarra, 32, one look was enough.
After he shot an innocent Iraqi woman because he thought the package she was hiding was an explosive, he "freaked out." He began to question the war and wondered why U.S. soldiers, his buddies, were getting killed in Iraq.
“Donna Frye is a populist, grassroots candidate, and she’s completely upset the race between the old male Republican guys,” Roger Hedgecock, a San Diego radio talk show host and a former Republican mayor, told USA Today. “No matter what happens, it looks like this thing is going to a lawsuit.”Donna Frye still faces lawsuits; visit her webpage to help.
Republican legal challenges have failed: US District Judge Irma Gonzalez refused to stop the city from certifying the election results on the ground that “write-in” candidates — those, such as Mrs Frye, whose names have to be written on the ballot by voters — were not legitimate.
Contrary to election night reporting, the youth vote was a real phenomenon, though the data indicates a reason the right wants you to think otherwise: "Under-30 voters came through in big numbers this year, with more than 20 million casting a ballot for president...[t]he turnout bested their 2000 showing by more than nine percentage points...[t]he AP's exit polls found that under-30s favored Kerry over Bush, 55 percent to 44 percent."
Bring ‘em on: Air strikes, artillery fire, ground fighting continue in Fallujah.
Bring ‘em on: Heavy fighting breaks out in Baquba.
Bring ‘em on: Insurgents attack police stations, ING base near Suwayrah, seven ING soldiers and police killed.
Bring ‘em on: Heavy fighting continues in Ramadi.
Bring ‘em on: Six ING soldiers killed as insurgents storm two police stations in Mosul.
Bring ‘em on: Insurgents seize and destroy governor’s mansion in Mosul.
Bring ‘em on: US air strikes reported near Baquba.
Bring ‘em on: Oil wells ablaze near Kirkuk.
Bring ‘em on: Insurgents destroy main highway bridge near Beiji.
Bring ‘em on: Insurgents attack Polish embassy in Baghdad.
Bring ‘em on: Central Baghdad hotels under rocket fire.
Speaking of the world seeing the strength, grace & decency of our country, I can’t help noticing that we haven’t heard a word from Rummy on the subject of the prisoner execution in Fallujah. Or from Bush. Or from anyone with a familiar name. That incident badly needs a name, to help ensure it doesn’t get swept under the rug. Pending somebody offering a better name, I suggest the alliterative Murder in the Mosque, with apologies to T.S. Eliot. Also, we still haven’t heard from any US member of Congress willing to go on record against the summary execution of wounded prisoners. There was a time when such a shooting bothered people just a little.
Before the assault on Fallujah...
"If they do not turn in al-Zarqawi and his group, we will carry out operations in Fallujah," [US-selected Iraqi "interim" Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi told the interim National Council on Wednesday. "We will not be lenient."
After the assault on Fallujah
"We never expected them to be there. We're not after Zarqawi. We're after insurgents in general," [Marine Major General Richard] Natonski[, who designed the ground attack,] said.
The reports are that Margaret Hassan may have been murdered. Watch the very politicians that spent their lives killing the people she tried desperately to save weep crocodile tears for her, as they read eulogies from teleprompters.
I believe this picture of her that's been making the rounds dates from the sanctions era... [She] opposed those sanctions vociferously -- don't expect either Bush nor Blair, who supported those sanctions to mention that fact.
This is urgent: Please urge your members of Congress to restore overtime pay.
They have a chance to save overtime pay this week as they vote on 2005 spending bills. Some of those budget measures have amendments that would restore overtime pay for the 6 million workers who stand to lose it under President George W. Bush's overtime pay take-away.
Your continued action to restore overtime pay is extremely important now. Help us make sure President Bush and his allies in Congress know the president's re-election doesn't mean he can cut our paychecks. We're going to keep fighting this overtime pay cut until we win.
Responsible Wealth (responsiblewealth.org) says, "Everyone on the Forbes 400 owes their wealth partly to a taxpayer-financed inheritance of public research and contracts; public schools and universities; communications, transportation and other critical infrastructure; and myriad government institutions from the Federal Reserve and the courts to the Treasury, Defense and Commerce Departments."
