President Bush smirks as he signs the so-called ”partial birth” abortion ban as all-male anti-choice friends look on.
prochoiceamerica.org : NARAL Pro-Choice America
Who decides? President Bush thinks he does, and has signed the first federal ban on safe abortion procedures to prove it. What do you think? Get mad. Get active.
Wow. Once again, Al Gore has delivered a scathing speech attacking the Bush administration clearly, thoroughly and emphatically. The media only picked up the ”Big Brother” line. Here is just part of Gore’s speech; the link leads to it all (and another link to hear the speech). mjh
Scoop: Freedom And Security – Speech By Al Gore Nov. 9th
I want to challenge the Bush Administration‘s implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists. Because it is simply not true.
In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.
In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.
In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.
In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.
In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.
In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.
Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. …
Almost eighty years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. . . . They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.” Those who won our independence, Brandeis asserted, understood that “courage [is] the secret of liberty” and “fear [only] breeds repression.”
Rather than defending our freedoms, this Administration has sought to abandon them. Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and accountability, this Administration has opted to rule by secrecy and unquestioned authority. Instead, its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure. …
This Administration simply does not seem to agree that the challenge of preserving democratic freedom cannot be met by surrendering core American values. Incredibly, this Administration has attempted to compromise the most precious rights that America has stood for all over the world for more than 200 years: due process, equal treatment under the law, the dignity of the individual, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from promiscuous government surveillance. And in the name of security, this Administration has attempted to relegate the Congress and the Courts to the sidelines and replace our democratic system of checks and balances with an unaccountable Executive. And all the while, it has constantly angled for new ways to exploit the sense of crisis for partisan gain and political dominance. How dare they! …
The Bush Administration’s treatment of American citizens it calls “enemy combatants” is nothing short of un-American.
See also:
08/13/2003: Gore takes Bush to task
The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me — not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right. …
This is a very interesting matter I’ve heard very little about. In the first Gulf War (Daddy’s War), Americans were caught and tortured. In the last 10 years, those victims won a court judgement granting them millions of Iraqi dollars for pain and suffering. Duhbya will make sure they get none of it. Just another example of his lip-service to the military or thoroughly consistent with a view that citizens should not be allow to use courts to collect high dollar damages? mjh
U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq
The Bush administration is seeking to block a group of American troops who were tortured in Iraqi prisons during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 from collecting any of the hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen Iraqi assets they won last summer in a federal court ruling against the government of Saddam Hussein.
In a court challenge that the administration is winning so far but is not eager to publicize, administration lawyers have argued that Iraqi assets frozen in bank accounts in the United States are needed for Iraqi reconstruction and that the judgment won by the 17 former American prisoners should be overturned. …
[A] former prisoner, David Eberly, a retired Air Force colonel whose F-15 fighter was shot down over northwest Iraq and who said his interrogators repeatedly pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, said he was surprised by the administration’s eagerness to overturn the judgment.
”The administration wants $87 billion for Iraq,” he said. ”The money in our case is just a drop of blood in the bucket.”
A Manufactured Crisis on Judges
Lost amid the grandstanding about a ”crisis” in judicial nominations are the facts: 168 Bush nominees have been confirmed and only four rejected, a far better percentage than for President Bill Clinton.
Bush administration nominees have been moving through the Senate at a rapid clip: in his first three years in office, President Bush has gotten more judges confirmed than President Ronald Reagan did in his first four. When Republicans controlled the Senate, more than 60 Clinton administration judicial candidates were blocked.
Don’t fret, Democrats: Bush policy still con job by Matthew Miller
Democrats need to make next year’s debate turn on rival visions for America, not near-term economic bumps. Democrats need to expose Bush’s ”compassion” hoax for what it is — a rhetorical trick to con independent voters into believing that Bush isn’t a Neanderthal like Newt.
But three years into his term, we can see President Bush’s domestic vision all too clearly. …
Bush will try to disguise this vision — who wouldn’t? — but Democrats must expose it, in all its unsavory detail.
Democrats have a different vision, and this clash has to be the central domestic choice put to voters in 2004. Richard Gephardt puts it nicely: “We’re all in this together,” he says, “whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not. What happens to some of us eventually affects all of us.”
It’s this conviction, this view of the world, that underlies deep commitments to student aid, to Social Security and more. For all his pretty speeches, Bush’s choices reveal his party thinks we’re more or less on our own.
This Bush ethic — that it’s every man for himself (championed ironically by the antithesis of the self-made man) — is reflected in the shocking greed and corruption that continues to be exposed at the highest levels of business. …
The Democratic notion that we’re in this together, and need to protect ordinary Americans against the rot at the top, resonates today because it’s so true.
[Bush administration] policies that broadly favor industry — including big campaign contributors — at the expense of the environment and public health.
That unfortunate bias was demonstrated anew this week when the Environmental Protection Agency decided to drop investigations into more than 140 power plants, refineries and other industrial sites suspected of violating the Clean Air Act. The winner is industry; the loser, the public. …
The administration swore to Congress months ago that this would not happen, that all the old investigations would be aggressively pursued under the old rules. So in addition to another rollback of environmental law, we have here another depressing example of official mendacity.
Remarks by the President at Bush-Cheney 2004 Reception
Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got. …
See, they know that the advance of freedom in Iraq would be a major defeat in the cause of terror. …
We will win this essential victory in the war on terror.
The Unibomber and the Oklahoma City Bombers are terrorists.
Terror is not a political movement or a philosophy. Terror is a tool or technique that can be used by anyone of any political view. We are at war with people who use terror; we need to think about why they use terror.
I cannot read about “The War On Terror” without remembering the “War on Poverty” and the “War on Drugs” — neither of which has been effective.
I would feel more comfortable with a President who is capable of understanding what we are fighting. Our cold-war military-industrial complex cannot defeat “terrorists”. mjh