Free Republic

We’ve been had. By a Bush. Again. The tax cut is a joke. After all the blather about how the surplus belongs to us, not the government, the resulting tax-cut bill is minuscule, ultra-gradual, and now scheduled to expire in 10 years! Republican and Democrat members of Congress, most of whom never saw a dollar they didn’t think was theirs, took advantage of President Bush’s desperation to sign a tax-cut bill — any tax-cut bill — and handed us this fiasco. The promise to cut the 15-percent bracket to 10 percent was abandoned. Instead, there is a new 10-percent bracket ...

Much has been made of convicted mass murderer McVeigh’s indifference to the fact that 19 children were among the 168 deaths in the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh has referred to the children’s deaths as “collateral damage.” But it’s important that we not forget that McVeigh is not the only one who has little or no concern for the innocent children he kills. After all, how much did U.S. government officials care when they killed Randy Weaver’s teenage boy at Ruby Ridge? How much did they care when they put a bullet through the head of Weaver’s wife as she held ...

In the early American Republic, there were two distinct visions of how best to govern the country. On one hand you had the Federalists, consisting of the first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams as well as figures like Alexander Hamilton. They were the party of business, of the national banking system and of a strong centralized government. On the other side of the fence was the Jeffersonian Democrats (who would later become the Democrats under Andrew Jackson.) This group consisted of coarse of Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and over time Andrew Jackson. Their vision was that of an ...

Poor Ralph Nader. One of the most earnestly principled men who ever sought public office will be the black sheep of Liberal/Progressive circles for the foreseeable future. True-believer Dems, who can't fathom why Nader didn't step aside and release his supporters to Gore, are seething. But it's liberal journalists who have led the charge, making Nader an object of brutal invective. "Nader's candidacy should make those of us on the left hang our heads in shame," wrote Charles Taylor in a Salon piece entitled The World According to St. Ralph. The New Republic ran several Hate-Nader pieces, including one writer's ...

Executive Summary One of our most important industries is in transition from comfortably entrenched monopoly to largely uncharted territory, which clearly will feature much more competitive deliveries of a much wider range of services. Structures of regulation and management that dominated electric utilities for the better part of a century are giving way, and the debate over their replacements is critical from both economic and environmental perspectives. This is not a debate over the relative merits of emerging competition and entrenched monopoly. The issue is how best to structure a more competitive future at both wholesale and retail levels. ...

It seemed like a normal factory closing. U.S. Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150 workers unemployed. Everyone figured they were moving the plant to Mexico, where they would employ workers at half the cost. But six weeks later, the electronics plant reopened in Austin in a nearby prison. At the same time, the United States blasts China for the the use of prison slave labor, engaging in the same practice itself. Prison labor is a pot of gold. No strikes, union organizing, health benefits, unemployment insurance or workers' compensation to pay. As if exploiting the ...

The people of California chartered Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation, Edison International Corporation and their subsidiary corporations to provide for the state's energy needs. Not to define energy policy. Not to write the law. Not to buy public officials, publishers, editors, reporters and civic leaders. Not to pipe billions of rate payer and taxpayer dollars out of state. Not to roam the world buying up other corporations, poisoning other people's communities and vacuuming up other people's money. Not to prevent appropriate, efficient, renewable, reliable and public energy systems from replacing wasteful, complex, expensive, and deadly corporate systems. And not to ...

Just how easy can computers get before they turn into a ‘‘one trick pony’‘ I’m writing this article using Microsoft Word. While I’m doing this, I’m listening to music, the Chant channel at www.netradio.com, tracking my time using Excel, monitoring my e-mail on the Internet, and all the while Microsoft Access is performing a search of almost a million records and extracting uniques. This is only a small part of what my rather mundane computer can do. On other occasions, I’ll compose music, edit videos, create animations, explore dungeons, simulate flying a 747 to Hawaii, and take a continuing ...

Conservatives are unwilling to give up the war on drugs. They are convinced that there is a war of drug lords on innocent victims, beginning with teenage children, and they are uninterested in arguments for de-criminalization. Conservatives want the State to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on prisons to house convicted drug pushers – after the fact. Liberals want the State to spend at least an equal amount on treatment and rehabilitation – after the fact. I’m interested in shutting down the market for illegal drugs. I say that it takes two to tango – buyers and sellers ...

I have just previewed a videotape of a new movie, which will be released on February 2: "Left Behind." The best I can say for it is this: "Two thumbs off!" (See Judges 1:6.) "Left Behind" is based on an astoundingly successful fundamentalist publishing venture, a series of novels known collectively as Left Behind. At last count, there were eight volumes in this series. This series has generated sales totaling approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in just five years. Big money. Big audience. Big hopes for a very small movie producer. The series is co-authored by Rev. Tim ...

It's official. TVT Records, one of the largest U.S. independent record labels, this week became the first record label to drop its copyright infringement lawsuit against Napster. TVT upstages Bertelsmann AG, which has strategically remained party to litigation against the song-swapping outfit while promising to forego action once Napster transformed itself into a fee-based membership service.The TVT and Napster duo will offer Napster's 45 million-plus users the opportunity to exchange copyrighted music files online under a business model that will compensate recording artists and record companies.Edel music, too, has hopped on board. The remaining anti-Napster lawsuits may also disappear, as ...

The liberal public interest outfits have rushed to the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the theme that John Ashcroft, Bush's nominee to run the Justice Department, is athwart the national consensus, "too extreme" to be confirmed as US Attorney General, as Ralph Neas of People for The American Way put it. This alleged athwartness is attributed to Ashcroft's Christian fundamentalism, support for the Second Amendment and imputed racism. Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority has taken the same tack:"Women's organizations are justifiably outraged over Bush's appointment of right, wing, anti-women's rights extremists. Both Ashcroft and [Wisconsin governor Tommy]Thompson ...

Of late, things have been interesting over at LewRockwell.com, a paleo-conservative and, until recently, libertarian organ. Rockwell reported that "Third parties are dead". He didn't support this bold assertion but he's sure it's true and he's terrible unhappy about it. Then he put up an article lambasting Libertarian Party members as "Useful idiots" and the Libertarian Party as a slightly more dangerous version of a "Dungeons and Dragons club meeting in the basement of the student union." The author ridicules the Libertarian Party as irrelevant. He then accuses it of stealing the Senate from the Republicans and making Gore's challenge ...

It's been front-page news for months now: rolling blackouts, impending utility bankruptcy, and electricity rate hikes – and we're told it's all inevitable. A publicly funded bailout of the debt-racked utilities, we are told, is the only way to keep the lights on and the economy afloat. Everyone from President George W. Bush and Gov. Gray Davis on down concedes deregulation's failure, but so far the state has merely offered a corporate bailout. It's a solution that critics say is short-term and skirts the real issue: the need for a community-based approach to energy policy. But you won't hear any ...

Set aside for a moment the strutting hypocrisy revealed by Jesse Jackson's confession last week that in 1998, at the very moment he was providing pastoral counseling to the White House's resident adulterer, he was carrying on an extramarital affair of his own, with a subordinate who later gave birth to his child. Focus instead on his stupidity: How could the nation's premier civil rights leader have been so reckless? Of course, that's the same question everybody was asking about Bill Clinton in 1998. But at least Clinton isn't a minister. Judging from the way in which his fellow civil ...

oxymoron (ok´se-môr?on´, noun plural oxymora (-môr??, -mor??) or oxymorons A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist. Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language "If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,-then you yourself ...

Here is real time news analysis of a Big Media Clue that you will see George W. Bush ordering America into war in the near future. It may be as late as mid 2002 --- but I’m betting it will be later this year, maybe in a few months. Tonight at 10 PM CNN ran a program entitled “Unfinished War: A Decade Since Desert Storm.” Do you get it? Unfinished War. U-N-F-I-N-I-S-H-E-D. Get it. Somebody has to finish it. (At the same hour, Paula Zahn pushed the exact same line on FOX cable news network’s “The Edge” program.) This is ...

ARMITAGE SNEAKS IN SEVENTEEN PARAGRAPHS into a story on Bush's retention of CIA director George Tenet, the NY Times quietly drops a bombshell, Meanwhile, Gen. Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush's choice to be secretary of state, has selected Richard Armitage, his close friend and a former Pentagon official, to be the deputy secretary, two Republicans close to the Bush transition team said. Mr. Armitage was initially a front-runner for deputy at the Defense Department, and resisted entreaties to work for General Powell, fearing it might interfere with their friendship. But the general has prevailed upon Mr. Armitage to join ...

The pomp and ceremony surrounding George W. Bush’s nomination of new department heads is now complete. The discussion and debate now center around the qualifications of each of the new nominees. But who is asking the crucial question: Rather than appointing the best-qualified people to run the various departments, why not simply abolish the departments themselves? After all, wasn’t this what the much-vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994 was all about? Having won control over both houses of Congress, didn’t Republicans tell us that they intended to abolish the departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and a host of other nonessential departments ...

DENVER, Jan. 14 — Frustrated by their low profile around the state, Colorado's four minor political parties have agreed to combine their efforts and pool some of their limited resources to raise their visibility and get more of their candidates elected. During a meeting at the Denver Press Club on Saturday, representatives from the Green, Libertarian, Natural Law and Reform Parties, about two dozen people in all, approved plans for a coalition of party leaders that would focus on mutually beneficial activities like trying to gain access to debates, sharing mailing lists and publishing a newsletter. Although third parties in ...