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Thursday, January 30, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind."
- - Napoleon Bonaparte
RHINO HERE:
My intention was to focus all week on human rights organizations but the State Of The Union address has waylaid me. In the near future I'll come back to The Prison Industrial Complex and the associated human rights abuses here in the U.S.
THE BOTTOM LINE today is a list of one paragraph summaries of responses to shrub's speech, each with a link to the complete article. It's a sampling of Wednesday's (the day after) "Democrats.com" one of the daily news services I rely on for what they call the "Aggressive Progressive" view.
If you didn't catch the speech, here's a link to the full text:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/politics/29BTEX.html
Democrats.com was initiated for the 2000 Democratic convention in L.A. & has published a daily list of article summaries with web links, every day since. They've also organized media campaigns pushing on a variety of issues including:
BuckStopsThere.com: A color-coded organizational chart showing who is responsible for the government's failure to protect America on 911, despite numerous warnings. (2002)
Enrongate: Bush's Biggest Scandal (2002)
RadioActivism.com: A campaign to fight the complete domination of the commercial talk radio industry by right wing zealots
UnfairandImbalanced.com: Our April Fool's spoof of a new Roger Ailes autobiography called "Of course Fox is Unfair and Imbalanced, Don't be an Idiot"
FairandBalancedBouquet.com: A campaign to send red, white and blue bouquets of flowers to the woman at CNN who is responsible for having hired Carville and Begala
PickUpAnnCoulter.com: A game that makes fun of the rhetorical excess of one of the right wing's most outrageous hit women
Justice In Florida: Fraud in Seminole County (2000)
The Smoking Jet: Bush was AWOL for 2 Years (2000)
Democrats.com is a free service. They rely on contributions. For more info go to:
https://www.democrats.com/elandslide/edonate.cfm?campaign=democrats
8:20:30 AM 
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__One by One, ElBaradei Refutes Bushit Charges
"ElBaradei stood by his inspectors' findings that aluminum tubes the Iraqis had tried to import were for rockets and not for a nuclear program, as [Bush insisted] Tuesday. 'We believe the tubes were destined for the conventional rocket program,' ElBaradei said. He said the tubes could be modified for uranium enrichment but that the process would be expensive, time-consuming and detectable. Bush [also] said: 'Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say, and intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.' ElBaradei said it was unlikely his inspectors 'could be fooled in the nuclear area on who is a scientist and who is not. We know all the scientists from the past and I think our people could easily detect if that person is a scientist or not.'"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62699-2003Jan29.html
__Bush's Downfall is What He DIDN'T Say
William Rivers Pitt writes, "Bush failed to mention how the American economy could handle the billions of dollars needed to support the war, the inevitable oil shock that would come as a result of the war, the billions more needed for his missile shield, the billions needed to push his new tax cut through, the billions needed to make his old tax cut permanent, and the billions needed to pay for the new programs he proposed. Bush failed to explain why so many Admirals and Generals, including Generals Zinni and Schwartzkopf, have spoken about the recklessness of this war plan. He failed to mention the inevitable blowback of terrorism that America would suffer should this war take place, especially if it takes place with a 'coalition of the willing' that does not include a UN sanction. At no time, and in no way, did George W. Bush mention the name Osama bin Laden... There was so much left unsaid during this speech. Those empty spaces may prove, in the end, to be his downfall."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/013003A.wrp.unsaid.htm
__Governor Gary Locke (D-WA) Denounces 'Upside-Down Economics'
"America under Bush has been left with fewer jobs and not enough money for security, education and health, Democrats said Tuesday in a combative response to Bush's State of the Union speech. 'In too many ways, our country is headed in the wrong direction,' Gov. Gary Locke of Washington state said... 'We need allies today, in 2003, just as much as we needed them in Desert Storm and just as we needed them on D-Day in 1944'... Locke's response was markedly more critical than the Democratic reaction to Bush's first State of the Union speech a year ago... Locke, whose state has been among the hardest-hit by the economic downturn, said that under Bush's policies 'states and cities now face our worst budget crises since World War II'... Locke said Bush's 10-year, $674 billion plan to rejuvenate the economy, mainly through tax cuts, was 'upside-down economics. It does too little to stimulate the economy now and does too much to weaken our economic future.'"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57496-2003Jan28.html
__Ted Kennedy Demands 'Convincing Evidence' Before War
"Sen. Edward Kennedy said he plans to introduce a resolution calling on Bush to present Congress with 'convincing evidence of an imminent threat before we send troops to war with Iraq... Bush cannot expect the international community to salute America and march with us to war when the administration has provided no convincing case for a war,' complained Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat... Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said he, too, wants to see 'hard evidence' and was disappointed that Bush said he would wait until next week to have Secretary of State Colin Powell present information and intelligence to the U.N... Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said, 'I am hopeful that the administration will continue to work with the United Nations and our allies to strengthen the inspection process by adding more inspectors and more time.'"
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=2129385
__By 11-4, UN Security Council Ignores Bush's SOTU to Give Inspectors More Time
WashPost reports, "Key members on the U.N. Security Council said Wednesday that [Bush] had so far failed to convince them that time had run out for a peaceful resolution to the crisis with Iraq. At a crucial council meeting a day after Bush's State of the Union speech, 11 of the 15 members supported giving more time to weapons inspectors to pursue Iraq's peaceful disarmament - France, Russia and China who all have veto power as well as Germany, Mexico, Chile, Guinea, Cameroon, Syria, Angola and Pakistan. Only Bulgaria and Spain backed the United States and Britain in focusing on Iraq's failures rather than continued inspections... Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said reports that President Vladimir Putin was shifting to a more pro-American stance were misinterpretations. 'We believe that inspections must continue.'"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62699-2003Jan29.html
__Bush's Credibility Gap Grows with His LIE About Future Generations
Dan DeLisio writes, "Among the plethora of sugar coated falsehoods contained in Mr. Bush's SOTU (Bad and Getting Worse) Speech was his bald statement that 'we will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, other presidents, and other generations.' Come again? Does he ever bother to really try and understand the import of the words that Karl and his minions write for him? If he did maybe he would realize how the vast gulf between his prepared text and cold reality, his credibility gap, grows wider each time he utters such a blatant untruth. The exploding Federal budget deficits that Mr. Bush's regressive tax cuts have played a heavy part in causing, and the even greater deficits that his new grievously ill-conceived dividend tax elimination proposals will cause, are a huge problem that will be passed on to future generations in the form of a runaway explosion in the national debt" - perhaps $2.15 TRILLION.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/01/29_SOTU3.html
__Even Maureen Dowd Realizes It's About Imperialism
Maureen Dowd writes, "At a moment when Americans were hungry for reassurance that the monomaniacal focus on Iraq makes sense when the economy is sputtering, Mr. Bush offered a rousing closing argument for war, but no convincing bill of particulars. Republican senators tried to back up the president. While admitting that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction yet, John Warner told reporters that an attack was justified 'if you put together all the bits and pieces that are out there right now.' Americans will never understand the Bush rationale for war if they simply look at the bits and pieces of physical evidence. They will understand the Bush rationale for war only if they look at the metaphysical evidence, the perfect storm of imperial schemes and ideological stratagems driving the desire to topple Saddam... Their reasons for war predate 9/11. The conservatives have wanted Saddam's head for a dozen years."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/opinion/29DOWD.html
__SOTU is Payback Time for Bush's Biggest Donors
Public Campaign writes, "Just as our new poster 'State of the Union: Congress Meets Wall Street' shows, last night Bush addressed many of his proposals directly to satisfying the needs of big corporate campaign contributors. There was Social Security silver for the stock market, wealth for the well-off, paybacks for polluters, and manna for managed care." Impeach Bush Now!
http://www.publicampaign.org/press_releases/pr01_29_03.htm
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7:57:24 AM
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