BUSH: SCROOGING US ALL

W, in addition to being a huge liar, is also one of the meanest, sgroogiest creatures on the face of the earth.

Here's a clear report on how W has scrooged the American working person:


How to skin a rabbit

Sean Gonsalves - Cape Cod Times

04.21.04 - Little Tommy had just caught a rabbit. On his way home, walking down a dusty road carrying the furry, squirming little creature, he tried to console his captured carrot-eater.

"Mistah Rabbit," he said. "Pretty li'l rabbit, sweet li'l rabbit, why are you wiggling so much? I ain't gonna do nothin' but knock you upside your head an' skin an' cook ya."

Attention: my dear rabbit readers, analysts at United for a Fair Economy have just released a new report called "Shifty Tax Cuts: How They Move the Tax Burden off the Rich and onto Everyone Else."

Here are some of the key findings in the report. (Go here to see the full report).

# For fiscal years 2002-2004, state governments filled approximately $200 billion in budget gaps by raising state taxes and fees and by cutting services. During those same years, newly enacted federal tax cuts delivered about as much money -- $197.3 billion -- in new tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent of Americans (households making more than $337,000 a year).

"Had that money instead been directed to state fiscal aid, it could have prevented virtually all recent tax hikes and service cuts at the state level, which fall hardest on low- and middle-income Americans," write the report's authors.

# The choice to send nearly $200 billion to the top one percent rather than to state governments underscores just one way the federal tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are actually "tax shifts," not tax cuts, for the vast majority of Americans.

# Between 2000 and 2003, the United States saw a federal-to-state tax shift of historic magnitude: the share of the total tax burden borne at the state and local level jumped 15 percent.

"This is the largest such shift in the tax burden since the period 1947-1950. This shift is making the tax system more regressive."

Amazingly, in 2002, Americans in the bottom 20 percent of households paid 11.4 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those in the top 1 percent paid only 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes -- less than half the rate of the poorest fifth.

# Since 1962, the share of total federal receipts collected from the regressive payroll tax, which collects proportionately more from low-income workers than high-income workers, has risen from 17 percent of total receipts to 40 percent -- an increase of 135 percent.

Meanwhile, the total share supplied by progressive income and corporate taxes has dropped from 63 percent of total receipts to 52 percent, which is a decline of 17 percent.

# Between 1980 and now, the main tax on wage income -- the payroll tax -- has jumped 25 percent. In the same period, top tax rates on investment income and large inheritances have been cut between 31 percent and 79 percent. "Taxes on wealth are falling fast with shrinking taxes on capital gains, dividends and estate taxes." Oh, it gets better.

# Since 1962, the share of federal revenues contributed by corporations has declined by two-thirds, while the share contributed by individuals has risen 17 percent.

# Current tax policies are fueling the national debt, imposing an average $13,000 in additional debt on each man, woman and child in America between 2002 and 2007 -- or more than $52,000 in added debt per family of four.

# During the summer of 2003, millions of parents received $400-per-child checks from the IRS -- an advance payment for the expanded federal child tax credit. But, at the same time, many of those same parents saw their local and state taxes increase.


Some will consider this a propaganda piece encouraging class warfare. Call it what you want.

As billionaire Warren Buffet points out, "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."

Let them eat rabbit!

(c) 2004, Cape Cod Times

W and his handlers are just the same old conservative nasties: full of selfishness, fear, greed, and self-righteousness. The only thing different and new about them is their sheer chutzpah. The outrageous scale of their inhumanity is so flabbergasting that many decent people don't seem to be able to imagine that American "leaders" could be so utterly corrupt, ruthless, savage, heartless, mean, petty, and tyrannical.

Message for decent people: you had better get over your aversion to seeing the truth about this crew of tyrants, lest you find them still in power after the next election, when they will viciously cut down all opposition in order to overturn the Constitution and establish a completely fascist Amerika.

BUSH: PATHETIC SIMPLETON

W's pathetic "news conference" on Tuesday night just demonstrates once again why his handlers don't let him appear in public except under carefully controlled circumstances.

Even with the lickspittle deference of the inept and uncaring "press," who almost uniformly did not ask a single question of substance--the one exception that comes to mind being the question about why he couldn't visit the 9/11 commission without (de facto President) Cheney by his side, for which he did not even pretend to have an answer--W still couldn't do much more that reassemble bits and pieces of memorized monologue, wander off into pointless irrelevancies, make smirking faces at inappropriate moments, and throw lots of bovine excrement at America.

When our soldiers are dying for his policies, a president owes America more than that, and W just isn't up to it--never was, and never will be.

The pundits (who are also high-paid hacks for the most part) can spend all their time on style and appearance if they like: did he seem "resolute," or "firm," or "show leadership," or "stand up for himself"? But none of that makes any difference in reality. The questions they should be dealing with are: why did he lie and does he continue to lie, in public and on the record, repeatedly, pointedly, and without the slightest doubt, about everything from WMD in Iraq, to the contents of his Presidential Daily Briefing, to what he was actually doing before 9/11?

And if they wanted to get serious, they would be asking real questions about W's all-too-apparent deficiencies--deficiencies that should have made his an unacceptable candidate for President if anyone was paying attention at that time, and that make him utterly unsuited to be sitting in the Oval Office. Why can't he string a coherent paragraph together? Why doesn't he ever show the slightest signs of having deliberated over anything, even over life and death decisions? How can it be that his inability to articulate a cogent argument of any kind does not accurately reflect the underlying inability to THINK cogently about anything? Do we really want a President who admits in public, in front of the press corps and the whole American people, that he is so weak that he feels serious "pressure" from trying to come up with answers at a press conference? Can we really afford to have a chief executive who is so utterly clueless sending our soldiers off to die? Can we really afford to have such a moron making economic policy, security decisions, environmental decisions, or decisions about anything more serious than a baseball game?

The Daily Misleader gives a small example of how stupid W really is when it cites just one of the self-contradictions he got tangled up in on Tuesday night. Here is the link"

Daily Misleader: Bush Contradicts Self

BUSH CONTRADICTS SELF AT HIS OWN PRESS CONFERENCE

During last night's prime time press conference, President Bush once again
claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't
think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into
buildings" (1). But just minutes later at the same press conference the
president proved he was not telling the truth.

Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence
briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going
to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that
conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him
and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings (2).

His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against
terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The
Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the
federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret
measures to protect special events from just such an attack" (3) after
receiving intelligence warnings (4).

At the press conference, Bush also claimed to have no "inkling whatsoever"
(5) about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post today reports that
newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive
one intelligence briefing about an imminent Al Qaeda attack, but "a stream"
of repeated warnings (6). In April and May 2001, for example, the
intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning
multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden
threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming
attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would
cause the world to be in turmoil."

Sources:
1. President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference,
04/13/2004,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1165583&l=28724.
2. "Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit", Los Angeles Times, 09/27/2001,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1165583&l=28725.
3. Wall Street Journal, 04/01/2004.
4. "Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings", CBS News, 05/10/2002,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1165583&l=28726.
5. President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference,
04/13/2004,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1165583&l=28724.
6. "Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings", Washington Post, 04/14/2004,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1165583&l=28727.

A great nation cannot have an arrogant, belligerent, extremist moron at its helm and remain great.

We must either get rid of W or go down with his ignorantly piloted ship.

BUSH LIES, MEDIA NOTICES!

The pass that W has been given for his non-stop lying in the conservative media may be coming to an end.

The following op-ed by Cynthia Tucker (an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has appeared in syndication in many major newspapers over the past two days. It finally points out in print what has been obvious to anyone who isn't infected with the virulent disease of rabid conservatism: that W is the most mendacious cretin ever to inhabit the White House--not even excepting Richard Nixon!

Here is the link:

Tucker: Bush's Lying House of Cards

And here is an excerpt:

"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." - Vice President Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003

ATLANTA - As a candidate, President Bush pledged to restore integrity to the White House. Against the backdrop of President Clinton's repeated lies about a sordid adulterous affair, Mr. Bush ran on his claims to be a man of strong character - a politician of plain speaking and straight talk. He wouldn't lie to us.

Yet this administration has produced more dissembling and distortion, more fabrications and pseudo-facts, than any White House in recent memory - Richard Nixon's included. They lie brazenly and repeatedly, refusing to back down even when caught in the web of their own contradictions.

The falsehoods aren't limited to Iraq. In domestic policy, Bush administration officials have shaded the truth, spread lies and even threatened underlings who believed in a moral obligation to honesty.

As just one example, the chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, has said his supervisor, Thomas A. Scully (who recently joined an Atlanta-based law firm that lobbies on behalf of hospitals and drug companies), threatened to fire him if Mr. Foster revealed to Congress the true costs of the proposed prescription drug benefit for Medicare. While the administration was ramming the costly benefit through Congress - promising that its price would be no more than $400 billion over 10 years - Mr. Foster had calculated the actual costs at between $500 billion and $600 billion, figures the White House disclosed after the bill passed.

But there is no area that better demonstrates the Orwellian quality of the Bush administration - its insistence that black is white, up is down, war is peace - than its deceptions about Iraq. Testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission and the Iraq uprising make increasingly clear that the central underpinning of the president's re-election campaign - that he has conducted a tough-minded war on terror - stands the truth on its head.

In fact, ousting Saddam Hussein has been a costly diversion from the war on terror. The Bushites came into office obsessed with Mr. Hussein, and when they could find no evidence that he represented an immediate threat, they simply manufactured it.

Now, our troops are trapped in a quagmire. Osama bin Laden is still at large. And the occupation of Iraq cannot help but breed a new generation of terrorists: Every time U.S. soldiers hit a mosque with mortars or strafe a carful of civilians mistaken for insurgents, another dozen teen-age boys in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Iran become America-hating jihadists.

Mr. Bush and his underlings lie when there is no reason to. In response to Richard A. Clarke's charge that his administration didn't view the al-Qaida threat as urgent, the president might simply have agreed and apologized. Few Americans would hold him responsible for failing to anticipate an attack as evil in its creation and brazen in its execution as 9/11.

Besides, Mr. Bush had already admitted his failure to forecast the immediacy of the al-Qaida menace. In Bush at War, published last year, Bob Woodward quoted the president as saying he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about bin Laden before the attacks.

Nevertheless, the administration greeted Mr. Clarke's charges with character assassination and fabrications. Vice President Dick Cheney went on Rush Limbaugh's radio show to dismiss Mr. Clarke as "out of the loop," a characterization National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was forced to refute, since Mr. Clarke was at the center of the administration's anti-terrorism efforts.

The entire premise of the Bush presidency - that he is a man of principle, of honor, of candor - is crumbling. The chaos engulfing Iraq is not just the result of guileless miscalculations. It is the inevitable outcome of a policy built on mendacity.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

When even the mainstream press is able to take notice of the truth, it can't be long until it can be said in public.

We hope that this 800-pound gorilla sitting in plain view will shortly become visible to the part of America that has been denying its existence merely because they can't admit they were wrong. Perhaps then we can dispose of this tyrannical, corrupt, and amoral "administration." Perhaps one day, once W and his handlers are only a bad memory, America will be able to hold its head up again.

But it will be a long time from now.