Silence is Consent

If you don't speak up you accept what is happening. This site was born out of the mainstream media's inability to cover the news. I am just an American cititzen trying to spread the word in the era of FCC consolidation, post 9/11 Patriot Act hysteria, hackable voting machines and war without end. I rant and post news items I perceive to be relevant to our current situation.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
- Thomas Jefferson

Social Security is not broken and therefore does not need to be fixed

So Called Social Security Crisis (SCSSC)

Comments, questions, corrections, rebuttals are always welcome.

Thursday, May 15, 2003
 
This has to be first: BushCo Reams Nation Good. Very funny but if this doesn't get you mad nothing will.

Stories of Liberation

Nine Iraqi Children Killed in Explosion


One womans' opinion. Worth the short registration.



William Rivers Pitt asks, "Does this sound familiar?" Blowback in Riyadh.

More on what isn't being investigated The Dead Want The Truth.


If you find yourself with some extra time on your hands read this article. It was written in February of 2001, just after Bush introduced his first tax cut. It makes paralells between his and the Reagan tax cut. I thought these two paragraphs were particularly enlightening if you don't want to read the whole thing.

Naturally, Republicans always try to disguise the fact that it is the ultrawealthy who are the main beneficiaries of their tax cuts. In 1981, after the passage of Ronald Reagan's first tax-slashing federal budget, Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, shocked Washington by admitting that the administration's tax reductions for middle-class Americans were "a Trojan horse" to disguise massive cuts for the rich. The statement wasn't a shock; Stockman's honesty was.

What Office of Management and Budget director Stockman didn't admit, at least in his famous series of conversations with the Atlantic Monthly's William Greider, was a far more crucial way the Reagan tax cuts served as a Trojan horse, masking their most dramatic, and intentional, long-term impact -- beggaring the U.S. Treasury in order to force program cuts and spending freezes the Republicans didn't have the political clout to achieve directly. By 1984, the Reagan tax cuts had created a $200 billion budget deficit (Reagan and Stockman had promised the budget would be balanced by then); in total, Reagan and Bush quadrupled the deficit between 1980 and 1992. They screwed the economy, but they triumphed politically by ruling out new government spending and depriving the Democrats of their traditional means of appealing to their core constituencies -- problem-solving new social programs -- turning them instead into the party of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility.



It's hard to believe we would fall for this twice, much less twice in three years.

I feel some need to say a few things about this Texas thing. We need to go back a few years to remember how this all got started. In 2000, members of the House and Senate went around the state taking testimony on the subject of redistricting. During this process, there were rumblings that the Republicans simply did not care to get anything done during the upcoming session when it came to redistricting. The reason was that at that time, the Democrats still had a majority in the house and to get a plan out, the Republicans would have had to coompromise. If nothing happened during the session, the state plans (House and Senate) would go to the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB). The LRB consists of the Speaker of the House, Lieutenant Governor, Comptroller, Land Commissioner, and Attorney General. The Republicans held a 4-to-1 majority on the LRB, and there they could pass anything they wanted. Now we come to the Congressional plan. Interestingly, there was little apparent concern at the time over the fate of the Congressional plan. Perhaps the Republicans felt that the courts were in their favor, or perhaps that anything drawn by a court would be better than what might come out of the legislature. The House and the Senate each had their version of a Congressional plan. The House plan made it out of committee, but not to the floor; the Senate plan died in committee. Go figure. It went to a Republican-appointed federal three-judge panel who drew the current plan. It was later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. This brings us to the current predicament. Now with a Republican majority in both houses, brought into being by the plans drawn by the uncompromising LRB, they want to revisit the Congressional plan becuase it is "unfair." Now I'm no conspiracy theorist, but could this have been the plan all along, since back in 2000? This is not to say the Democrats are any better becuase they redrew Congressional districts in the '90's using this same ploy. I am just trying to put a little perspective on the whole issue.

Some interesting info on how the 53 Democrats were found. See if you can pick out the lies in this one. If you haven't seen it yet, Molly Ivins on the Texas 53. It's more than just redistricting.

0 comments <

0 Comments:

Post a Comment


Powered by Blogger