Wednesday, February 4, 2004

Beat The Bushes FEATURED ARTICLES - Censure Bush for Misleading Us, MoveOn.org - Iraq Probe Said to be Based on JFK Panel - Results unlikely before election, AP - Bush Misleads Public About Cause of Deficit, Daily Mislead, - The States of Iowa and the Union Agree: Bush Can Be Beaten, By Harvey Wasserman QUOTE OF THE DAY "Somebody very high up in the White House, probably Karl Rove and/or Dick Cheney, has committed a serious felony (and pissed off the CIA) by outing covert operative Valerie Plame. This cancer is eating away at the junta's core. If there is a single issue to push push push alongside the economy, that may be it. Think dagger to the Constitution. Think Dick Nixon, August 9, 1974, getting on that Plame...er, plane. " - - Harvey Wasserman  (from today's Rhino's Bottom Line) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - FEBRUARY 4th 1976 -- US Senate subcommittee reveals Lockheed Aircraft Corporation made payments abroad of $22 million in bribes to sell planes. Lockheed admits payments in Japan, Turkey, Italy & Holland. 1976 -- Guatemala: A violent 7.9 earthquake strikes Guatemala and Honduras, killing 24,000 people, mostly Mayan Indians, and injuring 50,000. The quake rendered as much as one-sixth of the country's population homeless. Thousands more killed by aftershocks in the following days. 1991 -- President George H.W. Bush sent Congress a $1.45 trillion budget for fiscal 1992 containing a deficit of $280.9 billion. Fiscally conservative Republican? NOT! 1992 -- President Bush defended his economic recovery plan before a National Grocers Association meeting in Orlando, Fla. During his visit, Bush appeared intrigued by an electronic checkout machine, leaving reporters wondering if he'd ever seen such a device before. RHINO HERE: Now that the truth is out, that the shrub gang blatantly lied about knowing without a doubt that Saddam had WMD's, and now that the pressure is building for an investigation into where the fault lies, george bush the lesser is attempting to create a commission to decide if there is blame to lay and upon who it should be laid. Word has it the gang is comparing the proposed commission to the Warren Commission which investigated the assassination of President John Kennedy and concluded that a lone gunman killed him with an apparently magic bullet. Sorry folks, the Rhino didn't buy that deducement & ain't about to believe any conclusion on Iraq-gate that any shrub appointed panel will come up with. Gratefully, the folks at MoveOn.org ain't buying it either and are launching a campaign to encourage the US Congress to censure  the shrub "to formally reprimand him for betraying the nation's trust." Below is a link to their effort. Rhino urges you to join them. Censure Bush for Misleading Us MoveOn.org - Democracy In Action In an attempt to evade responsibility for the misleading statements that pushed the nation into war, Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and delay any political damage until 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President wants to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for betraying the nation's trust. If ever there was a time for this, it's now. Join our call on Congress to censure President Bush - GO TO: http://www.moveon.org/censure More on shrub's proposed whitewash in Monday's AP article: Iraq Probe Said to be Based on JFK Panel - Results unlikely before election. By Deb Riechmann, The Associated Press, 2/2/04 http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/020304A.shtml Speaking of shrub lies, there's his new budget which will continue contributing to what is now a $500 billion deficit. As today's "Know Your History" entry on papa bush's unbalanced budgets of the early 1990's show, the shrub don't fall far from the bush. This both in terms of fiscally irresponsible economics as well as skillful lying. Bush Misleads Public About Cause of Deficit Daily Mislead, February 3, 2004 On the same day the White House unveiled its 2005 budget, President Bush calculatingly obscured the reason the nation now faces a record $500 billion deficit. He said, "The reason we are where we are, in terms of the deficit, is because we went through a recession, we were attacked, and we're fighting a war."1 But according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the single biggest cause of the deficit is the president's massive tax cuts for the wealthy -- which he conveniently did not mention. Specifically, 36% of the deficit comes from the tax cuts, while only 31% comes from defense/war-related spending increases, and the rest comes from the economic slowdown.2 In fact the president actually acknowledged in last year's budget that the deficit is primarily his fault. Table S-3 of Bush's 2004 budget "shows unambiguously that the administration's fiscal 2004 budget proposes a massive annual increase in the deficit" and that without those proposals the nation would return to surplus.3 In other words, the president is falsely invoking national security, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the war in Iraq to hide the fact that his tax cuts for the wealthy have created the largest deficit in American history. With 88% of Americans now believing that the deficit is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious problem," the president has also tried to blame government spending for the deficit.4 But again, as the CBO notes, spending is at "a lower level than in any year from 1975 through 1996."5 And as the president starves veterans health care6, low-income housing7, and health care programs8 of funding, he is pushing more than $1 trillion in new tax cuts9, primarily for the wealthy. ARTICLE & SOURCES POSTED AT: http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df02032004.html Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is by Columbus Free Press columnist, Harvey Wasserman, author of HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES and co-author (with Bob Fitrakis) of GEORGE W. BUSH VS. THE SUPERPOWER OF PEACE. In this article, Wasserman lays out 21 points on the hows & whys of beating back the bushes. A no holds barred insightful piece. 6:48:08 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Bush Can Be Beaten The States of Iowa and the Union Agree: Bush Can Be Beaten By Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press (Columbus, OH), 1/22/04 Is the tide turning? George W. Bush and his puppetmaster Karl Rove tried to upstage the Democrats with a State of the Union Address full of tricks and gimmicks, martian distractions and rattling sabers. It backfired. The stunning results from Iowa far overshadowed Bush's lame, malapropic stump speech. Space travel, gay marriage, steriods in baseball, these are the burning issues for a Republican Party smug enough to be certain they can steal any election. The week's signature GOP moment came from Tom DeLay's Texas, where a woman who sells vibrators was arrested for possessing more than two. In a state that's just been redistricted to prevent any Democrats from going to Congress, we see the GOP as the ultimate Luddites. Are Texas men that insecure? What will they ban next? Massage oil? Come November, we can expect Osama bin Laden to be miraculously "found" whenever Rove decides the timing is best.  A terrorist attack will explode here or there precisely as the Democrats gather steam.  Bush may dump Dick Cheney into a cardiac unit to grab headlines and expand his base.    Remember, please, that Karl Rove, who runs the Bush apparatus, cut his teeth as a "Dirty Trickster" for Richard Nixon.  Bush's father was elected in 1988 in the infamous "Willie Horton" campaign, the most racist in modern history.   These amoral assassins will fling the lowest available dirt on whoever got in their way, and nobody has mastered the craft better than Rove.  With unlimited money to spend, your worst ethical nightmare is their bottom line.   But we're seeing a pattern here.  Every time Bush jumps in the polls, he slumps back down.... ...They have unlimited money.  And they have control of the mainstream media, whose endless gush of right-wing bloviaters has just one mantra:  "Bush will win, Bush will win, Bush will win."   But they can be beaten.  Here are some of the things that must happen:... MORE AT: http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2004/819 "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:19:44 AM    comment

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