Bill Moyers' address to the "Take Back America" conference was tough on Bush. Really tough. Excerpts from the news article:
... Bill Moyers delivered a call to arms against "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."
... Moyers charged that "rightwing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government.
... Moyers warned, the result of [Bush's policies] will be the dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."
"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers ...
Moyers said "the social dislocations and the meanness of the 19th century " were being renewed by a new generation of politicians who, like their predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution "in the hard grip of the ruling class."
It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you: I simply don't understand it - or the malice in which it is steeped. Many people are nostalgic for a golden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded Age. That I can grasp. They measure America only by their place on the material spectrum and they bask in the company of the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis IV. What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every last brick of the social contract. At this advanced age I simply have to accept the fact that the tension between haves and have-nots is built into human psychology and society itself - it's ever with us. However, I'm just as puzzled as to why, with right wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being branded "class warriors" in a war the other side started and is determined to win. I don't get why conceding your opponent's premises and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire prescription for irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well that I don't know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into your ranks. And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into an age of soundbites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame.
The White House leaned on reluctant Republican leaders in the House on Monday to act quickly on a Senate-passed bill to make millions of low-income families eligible for the $400-per-child tax rebates already in the works for middle-income parents.
[...]
The Senate last week voted 94-2 to expand a $1,000 child tax credit to low-income families after a campaign by Democrats and others that started just after the president signed the $350 billion tax cut and state aid package in May. The Treasury Department will issue checks worth up to $400 per child to eligible families later this summer.
Who were the two Senators that voted against the bill? Checking the record, we find the NAYs were cast by:
Inhofe (R-OK) Nickles (R-OK)
ADDENDUM:
Q: What is the state song for Oklahoma?
A: "Oklahoma", from the Broadway musicalOklahoma!, written by Oscar Hammerstein II, with music by Richard Rodgers (1943)
Amazing. A "red state" embracing something that emerged from the decadent "blue states". Does that mean Harvey Fierstein has a good chance to be the next governor of the sooner state? (After all, he just got another Tony Award.)
Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2003 (Introduced in Senate) 108th CONGRESS 1st Session S. 146
To amend titles 10 and 18, United States Code, to protect unbornvictims of violence.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
January 13, 2003
Mr. DEWINE (for himself, Mr. GRAHAM of South Carolina, Mr.VOINOVICH, Mr. BROWNBACK, Mr. ENSIGN, Mr. ENZI, Mr. INHOFE, Mr.
NICKLES, Mr. SANTORUM, and Mr. FITZGERALD) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
A BILL
To amend titles 10 and 18, United States Code, to protect unborn victims of violence.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2003 '.
SEC. 2. PROTECTION OF UNBORN CHILDREN.
(a) IN GENERAL- Title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after CHAPTER 90A--PROTECTION OF UNBORN CHILDREN
`Sec.
`1841. Causing death of or bodily injury to unborn child.
`Sec. 1841. Causing death of or bodily injury to unborn child
`(a)(1) Any person who engages in conduct that violates any of the provisions of law listed in subsection (b) and thereby causes the death of, or bodily injury (as defined in section 1365) to, a child, who is in utero at the time the conduct takes place, is guilty of a separate offense under this section.
`(2)(A) Except as otherwise provided in this paragraph, the punishment for that separate offense is the same as the punishment provided for that conduct under Federal law had that injury or death occurred to the unborn child's mother. `(B) An offense under this section does not require proof that--
`(i) the person engaging in the conduct had knowledge or should have had knowledge that the victim of the underlying offense was pregnant; or `(ii) the defendant intended to cause the death of, or bodily injury to, the unborn child.
In other words, it's murder.
But that's not how things are considered in the Bible. From Exodus ch 21 v 22:
22 If some men are fighting and hurt a pregnant woman so that she loses her child, but she is not injured in any other way, the one who hurt her is to be fined whatever amount the woman's husband demands, subject to the approval of the judges.
On ABC's This Week, guest pundit Joe Klein said that the big question is that this country, and the administration, may have overreacted to 9/11. And that invading Iraq may have been an overreaction to 9/11.
This Week roundtable: 9 minutes on Hillary's book, 5 minutes on the New York Times, 2 minutes on interned terrorist suspects, 0 minutes on missing WMD's.
MR. RUSSERT: Weapons of mass destruction: The president and people throughout the administration said that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Here’s what the president said.
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” And the vice president: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
Was there truly an imminent threat and where are the weapons of mass destruction?
DR. RICE: There are two separable issues here. What did we have in terms of intelligence estimates before going in and what have we found? In terms of intelligence estimates going in, the October 2002 intelligence estimate, national intelligence estimate, which is the definitive estimate by the intelligence community, said in its key judgments, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, for instance, on chemical weapons, 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical agent in the country; a biological weapons program that was being rapidly reconstituted; evidence of efforts to reconstitute a nuclear program. And it was not just American intelligence. There was supporting intelligence from all over the world. There was, of course, the United Nations weapons inspectors talking about unaccounted for stockpiles of VX and anthrax and sarin gas. And this didn’t start in September of 2002 with the president’s speech to the United Nations. This goes back to 1991 where we know that he had weapons of mass destruction, 1994 to 1995 where more came out about his biological weapons program after he finally revealed that when a high-level defector left the country and spooked him into revealing. In 1996, a testimony by then CIA director John Deutch saying, “He has weapons of mass destruction.” In 1998, after weapons inspectors left the country, President Clinton addressing the country from the Oval Office and saying, “He has weapons that I am certain he will use. That’s why we’re using military force against Saddam Hussein.” There’s a bit of revisionist history going on here. The truth of the matter is that repeated directors of Central Intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by U.N. inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them.
BRIT HUME: He wouldn't come clean, would he? He wouldn't say "Look, this is what weapons we once had, these are the stocks we had that you know we have, and this is what we did with them." What he did was say "You can go anywhere you want." That is the behavior of a man confident that the weapons he had and the systems to develop them were very well hidden, as indeed they have now proved to be. You think about this, it all starts to make sense.
WILLIAM KRISTOL: Let me just follow up on that. He let them go pretty much where they wanted which suggests that he was confident they would not find large stocks of weapons. Either they were well hidden, they had degraded over time and he hadn't bothered to reconstitute them. What he didn't allow was the interrogation of the scientists, and that does suggest - there was a good report in the Los Angeles Times this morning - that what may have been going on is that he let some of the weapons degrade - these chemical weapons don't last forever - he got rid of some of them (hopefully he didn't ship some out of the country, but we're not sure about that) - but he did have an ongoing, very dispersed, weapons of mass destruction program. Research and development in little labs, ready to go the moment when sanctions came off. And his calculation may have been that with Blix failing to find weapons, with the U.N. Security Council failing to agree on a resolution authorizing the use of force - the second resolution, with France opposing it - that Bush wouldn't go to war, and that he'd be able to stall this out, keep these dispersed research programs going, sanctions come off, and he's back with weapons ...
[crosstalk]
WILLIAM KRISTOL: ... remains strong. But I think the urgency that we had to go to war right now ...
JUAN WILLIAMS: .. that Saddam Hussein did not want to appear impotent after the defeat in '91, and therefore kept up this fraud that he had some weapons. That he had the ability ...
BRIT HUME: Oh, please.
JUAN WILLIAMS: .. to defend himself. He did not have those weapons apparently, and what hurts American credibility then is you hear the President [and] others say "Well, we found these two mobile labs." Well, these two mobile labs have been taken apart. You know they have other functions ...
BRIT HUME: They're hot dog stands, Juan, that's what they were.
JUAN WILLIAMS: But they have, they can [be] used for other fermentation processes in addition to making germ warfare chemicals.
BRIT HUME: Making cider?
JUAN WILLIAMS: You know what? The point is we haven't found any evidence, no evidence at all that those mobile labs were being used to produce ...
BRIT HUME: Oh, wrong! Oh, wrong! There is all kinds of evidence.
JUAN WILLIAMS: No. There is nothing on either one of those mobile labs.
BRIT HUME: Well, no. That's absolutely incorrect. What we have found is an array of facilities on board those mobile labs that the analysts say could not possibly have been used for anything else.
JUAN WILLIAMS: That's not true. They could have been used for variable functions, in addition to making what you said.
BRIT HUME: Making what? Making what?
JUAN WILLIAMS: They could have been used for all kinds of things.
BRIT HUME: Name one.
JUAN WILLIAMS: Pharmaceutical use. Chemical use.
BRIT HUME: So, they're making stuff like Viagra?
MARA LIASSON: Weather balloons.
BRIT HUME: Juan, that's, that really - that's the tooth fairy stuff.
