Severe Mistakes

There are four newsworthy items today out on the net, which I just have to write about.

Three are the combination of what could culminate into the "perfect storm" for the Bush Administration to sink on rough seas. The fourth (although written in as "Topic 3") is more about what could become of our nation should we see "Bush, The Second, Part the Second."

The first item is an article from Bloomberg about whether or not you're better off than four years ago. In terms of the administration's constant talk of how tax cuts have helped the American economy, consider the following:

Let's pose this as a personal economic question. Do you get most of your income from wages? If so, then it's likely that a bevy of increases in the cost of living from local taxes to health care negated the positive stimulus of the tax cuts passed during the last four years.

As the article continuously points out, unless you derive most of your income from dividends or stocks, you have kept abreast of inflation (which is currently at an annual rate of 3.6%) since your overall tax cut was 15%.

However, if you are like me, and most of your income is derived from wages, you have seen your paycheck actually diminish at an astonishing rate. First off, consider the question of when you received your last raise. My last raise in wages was in 2000. Where it was nice then, it's paltry now. I've seen my taxes barely go down. Yet, the cost of living in San Francisco continues to climb at a rate where wages are diminished, and to top that off, my medical insurance rates and copay continue to climb at a staggering rate. Cap off this with the fact that natural gas prices have shot up 16%, and you can see why most Americans are not better off.

Now comes the issue of trust, which is the most ridiculous line of argument I have heard from the Bush administration.

I'm to trust you? You who have run our economy into the ground by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans? You who thinks he has been hand picked by (a) god? I'm sorry, but there is no "trust" here. We are supposed to put our "trust" in a man who ignored the memo handed to him about al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into various buildings in the United States, whilst wittling wood on his ranch? I don't think so.

Item two: Missing explosives.

Again, rather than covering our butts in Iraq, we covered the oil industry, sending our troops to guard the Oil Ministry. So what does this mean? Irate Iraqis were going to throw filing cabinets at us?

No, the real threat was an insurgency that could have developed, but was entirely ignored by the administration during the planning for the war.

This ignorance was thoroughly outlined in several articles last week by the New York Times. When we should have been thinking about people who hate us, we were imagining people bringing us flowers circa D-Day in 1945.

So now we must worry about 300+ tonnes of explosives, now gone missing in Iraq. And rather than allow the U.N. to come and monitor the situation, we sent in our own team, who paid no mind to the possibility that insurgents could and would take these explosives to attack us and their countrymen.

This evidence shows that the current administration pays no mind to any possibility outside of the realm of what G.W. "knows in his gut." Perplexing, isn't it?

Topic 3: Supreme Cancer

Just to spotlight the issue of the possibility of our Supreme Court becoming a body for pushing the conservative agenda, Chief Justice William Rehnquist entered into hospital for cancer.

Although he is one of the conservatives on the court already, it highlights the fact that whoever is the next president will have a chance to either keep the court tidily split, where you have one swing vote in either direction (for instance, in Texas sodomy law) or one that could go completely conservative and overturn Roe v. Wade.

BONUS TOPIC! Didn't Osama say the same thing?

On Sunday, Rev. Jerry Falwell was on CNN's Late Edition where he was spouting off more non sequiters and slippery slope logic regarding President Bush and terror.

In his argument will Rev. Jesse Jackson, Falwell said (in reference to Rev. Pat Robertson's comments on "zero casualities" in Iraq):

Well, I don't know who to believe, but I know this, that it was certainly, I think, inappropriate for him here with two weeks to go in the election. He's my good friend, just like Jesse is, but he was wrong on that. He shouldn't have said that. And I want to take the president's word on this one. He says he didn't say it. I think there could have been a misunderstanding. I'm not calling anybody a liar. I'm simply saying that this president, talking about the terrorists and the -- how many we've lost, 1,100 soldiers, that's a terrible price.

But when you consider the barbaric act we just uncovered in the last 24 hours, the Iraqi soldiers murdered, they weren't insurgents. They were barbarians who did that. You don't shoot people in the back of the head and kill people, men, women and children.And the president's doing the right thing.

He's looking for them, he's searching them out. He's killing them when he finds them. And that's the only cure for barbarians.

He continues on in his Osama-esque diatribe:

I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.

What the hell is this?? It only proves that the religious right is a bad, if not WORSE than the jihadists that are declaring war on Americans since we are "infidels."

Once again, we are in the midst of a religious crusade, where each group points to their religion and appropriate book of faith to justify their atrocities.