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Saturday, May 31, 2003
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Salon Blogs Shocker!
Well, Not Really.
I'm MuchBetter Now
Tucson… Attorney General John Ashcroft has announced that a person tentatively identified as the notorious leftist blogger known as "El Ojo Caliente" was apprehended outside the Pima County, Arizona Republican Party headquarters today. According to a Justice Department spokesman the suspect had just registered as a Republican and would probably be granted immunity from prosecution.
Although unavailable himself for questioning by the press his personal physician did agree to make a statement. Because of doctor-patient confidentiality Dr. Wolfgang Schmidt-Ganderhassen said only:
"My patient was suffering from extreme stress and anxiety over political issues such as inequities in the government tax proposals, distribution of the wealth from the poor to the rich, a major war initiated on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction, and the threat of economic collapse due to immense but unacknowledged national debt, and general fiscal irresponsibility. Lesser issues were the attack on public education, the breakdown of the wall that separates church and state, the attack on traditional civil liberties, and the complete absence of significant opposition in Congress.
"My only therapeutic strategy lay in convincing him that he was a member of the one class that was unworried by any of that. Today he registered as a Republican."
12:49:22 PM 
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It Can’t Happen Here? Sure it Can !
(Warning: This post has an Anxiety Alert Level of Orange)
In an Alternet.org article Rachel Neumann reminds us of the continuing threat to our civil liberties.The reference is to the Patriot Act.
Under current legislation, if you are "suspected" of terrorist activity, you can be picked up and held indefinitely, without charges and without access to a lawyer. If your loved ones call to find out where you are or if you are okay, they will be told nothing. After all, to disclose your whereabouts would infringe on your right to privacy. Don't bother clutching your passport to your chest; this law applies to all U.S. citizens.
Kiss your ass..er..habeus corpus goodbye. But wait, things could get even worse under Patriot II:
If currently proposed legislation – PATRIOT Act II – passes, you may no longer even be a citizen. Under PATRIOT II, if you attend a legal protest sponsored by an organization the government has listed as "terrorist," you may be deported and your citizenship revoked. This is true even if you are only suspected of terrorist activity and nothing has been proven.
And in a little noted feature: Patriot II provides immunity from liability for businesses and employees that report "suspected terrorists" to the federal government, no matter how unfounded, racist, or malicious the tip may be.
Rachel Neumann’s story can be read at Alternet.Org
10:09:40 AM
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Don’t Get Mad…Get Even!
.......Vote: Regime Change 2004
The Bush regime’s tax cuts do a reverse Robin Hood. Bill Moyers, in an Alternet.Org article, reminds us that the tax benefits given to the rich were made possible by denying them to the poor. Moyers writes:
Where's that money coming from to make the rich richer? Some of it's coming from the working poor. Remember that $400 per child tax credit that was in the tax bill? We have now learned that at the very last minute, behind closed doors, the Republican leaders in Congress pulled a bait-and-switch. They eliminated from the bill that $400 child credit for families who make just above the minimum wage. They will use that money to pay for the cut on dividend taxes. Eleven million children in families with incomes roughly between ten thousand and twenty six thousand dollars a year won't be getting the check that was supposed to be in the mail this summer. Eleven million children punished for being poor , even as the rich are rewarded for being rich.
Then, to add injury to insult, the administration revealed its WMED…weapons of mass economic destruction. Again, Bill Moyers:
Nothing was said about cutting out the working poor from this tax credit as Mr. Bush signed his tax bill.Nor was anything said when the President closed the door to his office and quietly put his signature on another bill, this one raising the debt ceiling to its highest level in history
No sooner had this happened than it was revealed by the Financial Times – a British newspaper by the way – that the White House withheld a Treasury department study showing that the country faces chronic deficits totaling over $44 trillion dollars. They kept it secret lest it throw the fear of God into Congress and the financial markets and cost them the tax cut for the rich.
For an extremely detailed, but non-technical, discussion of tax-cut consequences read this article by Isaac Shapiro and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
9:29:47 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Arthur Jacobson.
Last update: 6/4/03; 2:01:47 PM.
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