Bush's Successes
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| Mon, 07-19-2004 - 3:25pm |
Dear Reader,
I'm getting sick and tired of my fellow Americans
saying that the presidency of George W. Bush is a
failure. With the string of successes he's had,
nothing could be further from the truth. Let me list a
few:
1. He has successfully rid America of that troubling
budget surplus and turned it into a $500 billion
deficit.
2. He has successfully helped America's trading
partners have the highest trade surplus with us in
America's history.
3. He has successfully lowered the taxes for the
richest Americans and corporations at the expense of
99% of the American population.
4. He has successfully started another Viet Nam in
Iraq after lying to the whole world.
5. He has successfully pushed the price of gas up to
the highest level ever here in America.
6. He has successfully allowed American corporations
to dramatically increase their pollution.
7. He has successfully thrown about 10% of the
population out of work.
8. He has successfully allowed corporations to export
our best middle-class jobs.
9. He has successfully divided our country as never
before.
10. He has successfully driven our oldest allies away.
11. He has successfully united the terrorists as never
before (he said all along he was a uniter, not a
divider).
12. He has successfully broken his oath to uphold the
constitution of the United States of America.
13. He has successfully united Democrats (yay!) as
they haven't been for years (I told you he was a
uniter).
14. He has successfully driven me out of the
Republican party for the rest of my life.
You know, with a string of successes like that, it's a
wonder America is still standing.

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This to me signals that his tax increase on the people making $200,000 or more is not going to be minor as he has suggested. In order to pay for everything that he is looking to do, the increase will reach about 10%, which is too much.
I would agree, as I have said before to a small increase (3% or so) on those people making $500,000 or more a year.>
I'm sure that people making between $200,000 and $500,000 aren't so small-minded that they would reelect an unfit president to save themselvs a few bucks. I'm sure they understand that a president who has declared an unnecessary war and has increased terrorism because of his ill-thought out decisions (we now have several other Middle East countries in need of preemptive strikes according to Bush's criterea), is too dangerous to remain in the White House. They'd probably rather spend their tax dollars on healthcare in America than spend billons reconstructing another country because our president bombed it all to hell.
Oops, I just heard that not all rich people are bright.
BUT, I can tell you that personally from working in social services and from having kids in middle class schools, that Bush's cuts in this area have been devastating, and I saw the changes a few months after he took office. DHS started cutting transporters, then workers aides, then workers. Social workers case loads doubled or tripled in a lot of cases, and the number of workers in child protective services was severed so badly that I can only imagine how many kids are suffering due to that.
I know a lot of people think, well, those are kids who somebody should be taking care of and aren't, they are not my kids, I did not ask for them. But regardless, they are here, and just like none of us asked to be born, neither did they. Bla bla bla, I am on the soap box, but though our economic situation goes up and down, these kids can suffer needlessly in the name of a few dollars in some tax payers pocket.
SO, call me a Utopian, a Communist, or even a Smurf, but when I say the economy is bad, i am talking about our whole society, even the ones who some deem unfit to live. we are all here, and while no president can make me rich or poor, they can change things for these people by funding these programs more than the programs that make weapons.
Right now some kid is hiding in a closet near you, hungry and scared and alone.
too true.
I guess I could say.
"Golly, GWB never said much about his years as a cocain addict"
you said something about double standards in an earlier post.
the same political party that was adamant about Clinton not being elected because of his non- inhalation method of pot smoking was so laissez faire about Bush and his COCAIN addiction. I still can't believe that is not common knowledge. I tell people all the time, and they are like, "WHAT??? BUSH??? NO, HE WAS NOT!!!!"
and they say the media is liberal.
whatever.
Leaving them all of our financial woes, our environmental catastrophe, are we hoping that future generations are going to adapt and what, grow fins or shells to survive? We are not even giving them enough time, and we call the dinosaurs dumb when we have been around only a fraction of the time they were...
3 years after 9/11, the President is having to be told how (Officially, many of the recommendations were made and IGNORED in the past) to protect the country
And that's just the beginning.
They talk about Kerry because they have no record to run on, all they do run is their mouths.
Stop running your mouths and start running the country!
I know I was not asked, but I feel that handing our garbage to our kids is the lowest possible thing we can do. Its deplorable. But we are doing it.
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Don't forget, they also want our children to pay the bill with their utter refusal to offer up a balanced budget. In almost 8 years of Bush rule, there's never been a balanced budget.
Hey why tax and spend when you can borrow and spend and leave the kids to pay the bill.
Fiscal years do NOT start federally until October 1 of any year. If you immediately noticed changes as you reported... for the worse... then it was due to underfunding by Clinton as the budget through the end of September 2001 was Clintons. Only starting as of October 1, 2001 could Bush have had effect on the federal budget.
Worse for your argument, Bush immediately doubled the federal funding available in his first fiscal year... and NCLB wasn't passed to be at all implemented until his 2nd fiscal year NCLB was passed in January of 2002... which means the first fiscal effects of NCLB wouldn't be felt until October 1, 2002. Thus the earliest we can expect NCLB to be affecting children financially is about a year and a half after Bush took office.
The following is a statement from U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige on the report and its findings as they pertain to NCLB:
"The General Accounting Office reviewed information on close to 500 different statutes and regulations enacted in 2001 and 2002, including Congressional Budget Office reports about No Child Left Behind. The non-partisan GAO found that No Child Left Behind was in fact not an 'unfunded mandate,' as those who are opposed to accountability and education reform have often portrayed it in the press. The chorus of the 'unfunded mandate' has now been exposed for exactly what it is -- a red herring -- trying to take focus off the true subject at hand: changing the way we do things so that every child in America is provided a quality education, regardless of her or his skin color, spoken accent or street address.
"According to the report, NCLB 'id not meet the definition of a mandate because the requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance' and 'any costs incurred by state, local or tribal governments would result from complying' with conditions for receiving the funds. As I have said many times before, NCLB is a radical departure from the old ways of doing things: gone are the days where taxpayers' hard-earned money was dispensed without any accountability for whether children were achieving.
"Perhaps we should think about what this law asks: getting all children in our great nation to be reading and doing math at grade level. I do not believe that is too much to ask, particularly given the $500 billion we spend every year at the state, local and national levels on K-12 education. That should be the 'mandate' of every school in the nation anyway. It's time to put aside the excuses, roll up our sleeves and get down to the business of providing the great education that a nation such as ours is worthy of delivering."
This argument confuses me. Are you suggesting that the President did nothing since 9/11 to increase the security in the US? Are you suggesting that nothing was done to increase communication between the FBI and CIA that was prevented b/c of the no sharing of information wall that had been set up in previous years? It seems to me that for many people this president is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. He raises terror alerts, it's political, he doens't 'connect the dotted lines' he's and idiot, and so forth. Did we not need this commission, should the president have just trumped them and acted unilaterally in making sweeping changes, or was this commission formed to scrutinize what and where the breakdowns where and suggest ways to fix them. Did the President have the man hours to spend going over all the documents that the commission did? And if he and his administration did that, wouldn't they most likely have been accused of acting "politcal"?
I am saying he hasn't done nearly enough.
Don't you agree, had the President not waited for the commissions report and acted unilaterally there would have been an outcry from the left that he was hiding something?
Even now, he is so often accused of 'being a cowboy' and 'shooting from the hip', but b/c he didn't jump on the report he is being accused of acting too slowly. Recently I was watching CCN or MSNBC and a guest was talking about this report and implementing changes, sorry, don't know her name, might have been from the Washington Post. Anyway, she stated that the President could make changes with executive order as Kerry was suggesting, but that those could be easily undone. That the proper way was to go through congress.
What did he not do that he should have done, immediately. And remember, these actions would have been before knowing what the chain of events where that lead to breakdown in communciatons and where our intelligence failed us. Could he have reversed some of those changes put in place during the Clinton administration like not using questionable people for obtaining information, or the increased reliance on getting information through the high tech world? I know I'm throwing a lot at you here, but these are questions in my mind, am I totally out of touch?
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