Bush - Ack! Ack! Hairball

Gosh, George Bush is deriding Democrats for playing politics with his nomination of John Bolton. I have to let out a hardy Ha! Ha! and cough up a hairball when I hear politicians of his ilk deriding other politicians for being political. As the late great Mayor Washington said, "Politics ain't bean bag." And he might have added, "You twit, get used to it." Bush is polling badly on Iraq, Social Security, his conservative judges, maybe people are even getting down on his squinty flinty smirks. Too little too late, but perhaps by the end of his second term he will be cemented into a leadership role in the Top Ten Worst Presidents list. He's already there in my book, but maybe the general public, confused and deluded in the 2004 election, sees the veil lifted.

Speaking of presidents, and good ones at that, Bush visited our great state of Illinois to dedicate to the new Lincoln library. Now there's a meeting of minds - perhaps the greatest president ever (some may argue for Jefferson, Washington, TR or FDR) being lauded by this mook.

Rude Pundit has a truly delightful blog on the topic, of which I excerpt just a bit:

First off, having George W. Bush dedicate a library to Abraham Lincoln is like having David Duke dedicate a civil rights museum. It's like having James Dobson dedicate a Kinsey collection. It's like having . . . well, shit, you get the idea. It just ain't right. But because you have to dedicate presidential libraries with the President you have, not the President you want, so it was that President Bush spoke at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library yesterday.

...

... Bush spoke about Lincoln's early days, his "humble beginnings," if you will: "Before history took notice, he earned money as a storekeeper, a surveyor and a post master. He taught himself the law." And perhaps the irony was not lost on the gathered crowd, that this son of privilege, who never suffered a day in his life, who had servants hired just to buff his balls after a bath, was allowed to even speak the name of Abraham Lincoln, who, faults and all, sought to keep together a nation that George Bush and the current Republicans are trying to desperately to tear apart.

Knowing the intelligence and keen eye for politics of my fellow Illinoisans, I can assure Rude Pundit that we got it. Yup. Irony, melting into tragedy. Or perhaps just plain sad.

Case in Point Why Our Country Is Screwed Up

I've been fomenting a rant on how incredibly ridiculous our country is that we cannot afford universal education and health care. I mean for gosh sakes Sweden? Norway? Denmark? Canada? Britain? Japan? Germany? France? South Korea? Singapore? They are not as wealthy as the U.S. GNP per capita, not even close. Yet they seem to manage covering many more social benefits for their population than the U.S. Yes, I could actually research this issue, talk about macroeconomics and states' rights and tax models and corporate welfare and deficits all that boring stuff.

I just want to know WHERE IS ALL THE MONEY GOING? Our economy is huge! Gazillions of dollars are changing hands! Why is this country so inefficient or unfair or just generally fucked up that we can't make sure that all schools have Internet and computer labs, and noone has to worry about getting hit by a bus and wracking up huge medical bills, and even poor kids can go to college without having to work 3 jobs? I ask you -- where is the money?

And then today I happened to notice a new site just opened up called Walmart Watch, which is dedicated to monitoring Wal-Mart's abuses and its drain on U.S. taxpayers. "The Wal-Mart Tax" is a brief entry that estimates Wal-Mart COSTS taxpayers at least $1.5 billion per year in assistance to employees who are undercovered by Wal-Mart. And that's just the Federal cost.

Maybe this is where the missing money is. How many tax breaks does Wal-Mart get? Federal? State? Local? And on top of that, Wal-Mart does not even sustain its own employees. So rather than boosting the local economy, it drains it.

Channeling Walt Whittman?

Do they contradict themselves? Indeed, they do. Josh Marshall lays it out here:

Today, however, House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to abolish the inheritance tax, a tax that, by definition, only impacts people who inherit money from extremely wealthy forebearers. If passed by the senate this new legislation, which would come into effect in 2012, will cost the Treasury $745 billion dollars during its first ten years. Figure in associated interest on the added debt and the number comes closer to a trillion dollars.

That is about a trillion fewer dollars in the US Treasury over the course of the same decade in which the Social Security Trustees say the SSA will begin (2017) to start drawing on the Treasury notes in the Trust fund to cover scheduled benefits (2020, if you go by CBO estimates.)

There's no hidden complexity here. It's a zero-sum game. They say Social Security is in trouble because we don't have enough dollars to make good on the Trust Fund (which today holds roughly $1.7 trillion in Treasury notes). And here they are voting to take a trillion more dollars off the table.

I haven't blogged all that much on Social Security (admittedly, I haven't blogged on much of anything of late) only because other people are doing it much better than I could.

My next blog...how stupid is it that this wealthy nation we live in can't afford public transit, education and health care for our citizens? Very stupid, I say.

The Pope Is Still Dead

Yup. Still dead. Having skipped all the TV coverage of the double-header of death of Terry Schiavo and JP2, I'm catching up on the critical reviews.

Frank Rich has this to say in "A Culture of Death, Not Life":

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

Moving on to the ever-caustic James Wolcott, who in Signs of the Crosstakes CNN to task for its inane worship at the shrine of Bob Novak. Hey, Novak's a Catholic now! Apparently one of the Opus Dei guys. At least I don't have to be ashamed to share the same religion as the Prince of Darkness.

And the astute Jeanne at Body and Soul gives a thorough round-up of the differences between many U.S. Catholics and the fundamentalist Protestant Chrisitans who claim the Pope as their own in "The fundie Pope and the whining bishops."

Happy Sunday!

Blog Round-Up

Round em up, raaaaaawhiiiiiiiide!

From Digsby at Hullabaloo, a wake-up call to right-wingers:

See, the right isn't like us. They think that the so called liberal media is irretrievably biased but believe what they see, read and hear on their own media. We on the left, on the other hand, have no faith in any mainstream media, really, or any alternative media either for that matter. We have developed the habit of culling from various sources and analyzing the information ourselves as best we can. Even then we are very skeptical. Nothing that the media could do would particularly shock or disappoint us. No so with the other side. A fair number of them are actually hurt and bewildered by what they saw in the Schiavo matter.

From Maxspeak, on the Pope:

Like scripture, there is something for almost everyone in the Pope's statements. Nobody except prix fixe Catholics -- as opposed to the cafeteria variety -- can really take ownership, though that is something ordinarily attempted with any renowned personage. Progressives could note his criticism of unregulated capitalism. Cultural conservatives point to his unreconstructed opposition to abortion and anything resembling euthanasia. Catholic traditionalists welcomed his opposition to the ordination of women and other possible modernist reforms within the Church. And democratic anti-communists of all stripes hail his role in liberating Poland and bringing down the Soviet Union.

More good stuff there. And, not to be outdone, Attaturk at rising hegemon has the scouting report for the next pontiff.

From our own backyard, Joshua Holland at Gadflyer reports on the crazy pharmacists of conscience who have been refusing to fill Rxs for birth control and morning after contraception. You get 'em Blago. It's been covered widely in the local press, and good to see national bloggers noting it.

And, from Bull Moose (and myself) a belated Happy April Fool's Day with a heartfelt apology from Tom DeLay for all the trouble he's been causing.