No more Mr. Nice Guy: IRS swoops in for audits By Sandra Block, USA TODAY Determined to stop a troubling rise in tax fraud, the IRS is scrutinizing more returns, shutting down tax shelters and frog marching scofflaws into court. So as you hustle to file your 1040 before midnight Friday, should you worry about an audit? If you're a middle-income wage earner with a straightforward tax return, probably not. But if you're wealthy, self-employed or have had your returns prepared by an unorthodox tax adviser, keep good records. The IRS may want to chat with you. (Related story: IRS plans to close 105 walk-in assistance centers) For the past year, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson has been barnstorming the country, telling journalists, politicians and tax professionals that the nation's tax cops are back on the beat. The number of audits rose nearly 19% last year. Audits of high-income taxpayers rose 40%. In February, the Justice Department and the IRS indicted telecommunications entrepreneur Walter Anderson for allegedly failing to pay $200 million in federal and local taxes, the largest criminal tax case against an individual. At a time of rising federal budget deficits, there are powerful incentives to toughen tax enforcement. An IRS study released last month estimates that the "tax gap" — the difference between the amount taxpayers owe and the amount they actually pay, is $312 billion to $353 billion a year. But the study also found that workers who have taxes withheld from their paychecks are the least likely to cheat. Less than 1.5% of wages and salaries subject to third-party reporting or withholding are incorrectly reported, the study found. Kathleen Pedersen, 46, of Anchorage says her father was a tax attorney and "always made us aware of the possibility of an audit." She waited until the last minute to file, and her tax returns are more complicated than usual this year because she and her husband sold two homes in 2004. But Pedersen, who uses TurboTax software to prepare her family's taxes, isn't worried about being audited by the IRS. "I'm confident that if we were, we've got the information" to answer the IRS' questions, she says. Among the likely candidates for an IRS audit: •Wealthy taxpayers with big losses on their returns. The IRS has launched a major assault on tax shelters marketed to wealthy taxpayers. It has collected more than $3.2 billion from the so-called "Son of Boss" shelter, which used currency options and other financial products to create fictitious losses. Participants used the losses to avoid paying taxes on sales of stock options or business assets. Amounts collected from individual taxpayers who bought into the shelters ranged from $1 million to more than $100 million, the IRS said. The shelters were created because tax professionals thought they could get away with it, says Scott Michel, partner with Caplin & Drysdale and former chairman of the American Bar Association's committee on civil and criminal tax penalties. Now, tax professionals will be much less likely to recommend aggressive tax-avoidance strategies, he predicts. More tax-shelter cases are probably in the works, tax experts say. "The people who should be most concerned are those who entered into transactions that sounded too good to be true," says David Sands, chairman of the New York State Society of CPAs' IRS tax committee. •Unscrupulous tax preparers and their clients. The IRS and the Justice Department have aggressively pursued tax preparers who use fictitious deductions and other scams to inflate their clients' refunds. The IRS obtained 117 criminal convictions of tax preparers in fiscal 2004, up from 67 in 2003. In January, the agency issued a press release that included names of preparers who had been convicted of filing false tax returns. "I don't recall seeing them do that before," says Mel Schwarz, federal tax director for accounting firm Grant Thornton. A tax preparer's conviction can have far-reaching consequences. Typically, the IRS goes back and reviews all returns filed by the preparer's clients. Those individuals are liable for interest and penalties on unpaid taxes, sometimes going back years. And unlike with tax shelters, the clients aren't always wealthy. A frequent source of tax-preparer fraud is the earned income tax credit, designed to help the working poor. Unscrupulous preparers urge taxpayers to hide income or invent fictitious dependents to inflate the size of their credits. More than 70% of taxpayers who claim the earned income credit use tax preparers, yet they're still audited at a much higher rate than others, says Janet Spragens, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. Spragens, who directs a free tax clinic for low-income taxpayers, says many non-English-speaking taxpayers seek out preparers who speak their language, without checking their credentials or training. "The advice they get from these preparers can range from excellent to incompetent to totally fraudulent," Spragens testified at a recent IRS oversight board hearing. •The self-employed. Nearly 9.5 million workers were self-employed in 2004, up 22% from a decade earlier. The number of self-employed workers and independent contractors is expected to keep growing as companies seek to reduce benefit costs associated with full-time employees. But unlike wage-earners, the self-employed are responsible for reporting their income to the IRS. The IRS study found that underreported income accounted for 80% of the tax gap. Taxpayers who file a Schedule C, the form used to report profits and losses from a business, should expect more scrutiny from the IRS. In 2005, the IRS expects to audit 207,000 Schedule C returns, up 50% since 2002, says Kevin Brown, commissioner of the IRS' small business/self-employed division. That prospect unnerves Michelle Wicks, 35, owner of Michelle's of New York, a plus-size women's boutique in Islip Terrace, N.Y. Wicks started her business last April and is a sole proprietor, which means she's required to file Schedule C. Wicks has done her own taxes since she was 22, but she found Schedule C so confusing that she called the IRS several times with questions. Some IRS employees were helpful, others weren't, and one hung up on her, she says. Wicks has kept meticulous records in case her return triggers an audit. "I'm excited about my store, but this part of it is very scary," she says. The IRS is also paying more attention to the status of independent contractors, says Jeff Phelps, chief operating officer of ABE Services, a Sonoma, Calif.-based consulting firm. The IRS uses a complicated test to determine whether an individual is a contractor or employee, Phelps says. If it determines an individual is misclassified, the employer could face steep penalties and back taxes, and the worker could lose valuable self-employment deductions, he says. Enforcement obstacles For all its talk about chasing down the bad guys, the IRS enforcement initiative faces obstacles. Among them: •Money. President Bush's 2006 budget requests an additional $500 million to strengthen the IRS enforcement program. Sounds impressive, but it's not enough, says Charles Rossotti, head of the IRS from 1997 to 2002 and author of Many Unhappy Returns: One Man's Quest to Turn Around the Most Unpopular Organization in America. This proposed increase, like past budget hikes, probably will be eaten up by congressionally mandated pay raises for federal employees, Rossotti says. The IRS has 15,000 fewer workers than it had 10 years ago, Rossotti says. During the same period, the economy has grown significantly and is much more complex. "There just aren't enough resources to even tackle the most serious abusers," he says. •Perplexity. Beefing up enforcement efforts will require the IRS to enforce tax laws that are increasingly difficult for law-abiding taxpayers to obey. Eric Delore of Alameda, Calif., owes the IRS more than $400,000. He didn't participate in a tax shelter or invent illegal deductions for a home-based business. Delore, a technology professional, is in debt because he received incentive stock options from his former employer. Those options pushed him into the nightmare world of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT originally was created to prevent wealthy individuals from using loopholes to avoid paying taxes, but it's increasingly affecting middle-income taxpayers. Taxpayers who live in high-tax states or receive incentive stock options are particularly vulnerable. In 2000, Delore exercised stock options worth $1.1 million and held on to them so he could get a better tax rate when he sold. But his employer's stock price imploded when the tech bubble burst. By the time Delore sold his shares, they were worth $5,000. But because the AMT values stock options at the time of exercise, Delore was hit with a $420,000 tax bill. In 2001, Delore's employer filed for bankruptcy, and he lost his job. He's now working for a software company, but his struggles with the IRS continue. His bank accounts have been cleaned out and his paycheck intercepted. There's a lien on his house. He's tried twice to negotiate a lower tax bill with the IRS but was rejected both times. If the IRS rejects his latest offer, Delore, who is married and has two small children, says he'll be forced to file for bankruptcy protection. At a speech in February before the National Press Club, Everson said tax complexity "compromises both the service and enforcement missions of the IRS." Bush has named a bipartisan tax panel to study tax simplification. In the meantime, the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT continues to grow. More than 3 million will pay it this year. Delore now believes he took a big risk when he told the IRS that he exercised his options. He says horror stories like his encourage taxpayers to break the law. The government "should make compliance easier," he says. "Then you'll get more people paying their taxes."

Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2005-04-13-irs-gets-tough_x.htm

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

A Succinct Summary of the 2004 Election

The Democrats' mistake was in thinking that a disastrous war,
national bankruptcy, erosion of civil liberties, corporate takeover
of government, environmental destruction, squandering our
economic and moral leadership in the world, and systematic
Administration lying would be of concern to the electorate.

The Republicans correctly saw that the chief concern of the
electorate was to keep gay couples from having an abortion.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

And on a different note Claudia write's this:

Dear Dr. Webster:

My, my. What our government will pay for while stumping on behalf of "the sanctity of all life" as Ms. Terri Schiavo lays dying in Pinellas, Florida.

Oh? Needless animal experiments such as the one you're conducting on tasing pigs is not a moral equivalent?

Then why not just come to a full stop and say to yourself: you know, tasing, whether done on a human or animal carries bad consequences.

Just how much do we need to know about how tasing will affect a pig?

Your conducting this project for our hypocritical Christian fascist government brings Sen. Bill Frist to mind. He's the "sanctity of life" heart transplant surgeon turned politico who used to adopt stray cats from animal shelters in Boston for dissection while in medical school. At least your experiment is out in the open. Frist lied to the animal shelters by passing himself off as this nice guy who just wanted an animal companion. Either way, it's another case of "the ends justifies the means. " In your case, the moral lapse is for a $500,000 grant.

Is this the America our founding fathers dreamed of?

Sincerely,

Claudia D. Dikinis,

_____________________________

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050329/D894ME480.html

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to study whether stun guns alone can kill pigs - or whether other medical factors must be at play - as part of an effort to understand why 70 people have died in North America since 2001 after being shocked by Tasers.

Led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, outraged animal rights activists are calling for an end to the two-year study by John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering.

Police hail stun guns as a nonlethal way to restrain unruly suspects. But critics blame the weapons for dozens of deaths, and police departments are reviewing how they use the devices, which shoot two small darts carrying about 50,000 volts of electricity to temporarily paralyze people.

Webster wants to test his hypothesis that Taser-related deaths were the result of heart failure fueled by drug use and other medical factors, not electrocution by the devices. To do so, researchers will begin in the next month studying how Taser electrical currents flow through 150-pound pigs.

Of three groups of pigs in the study, one will be given cocaine, one will be shocked with the devices, and one will be given both cocaine and electric blasts. Some will be subjected to Webster's "SuperTaser," up to 30 times as powerful as the model police use. All pigs will be on anesthesia so they won't feel pain.

"If the hypothesis is correct that Tasers do not electrocute the heart, then why are people dying in custody after they have been shot by Tasers? The people on our team have hypotheses why that's true and we intend to answer that question," Webster said. "Our goal is to save lives."

Animal rights activists say the study, funded by a $500,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant, is cruel and unnecessary. They plan protests on the UW-Madison campus starting this week.

"Shocking more pigs is only going to add their numbers to the Taser-related death statistics," Patti Gilman, whose brother died after being shot with a Taser in British Columbia in June 2004, wrote in a letter to the school. "Robert's death never should have happened. And neither should these experiments."

In a letter to PETA this month, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said the study could have a significant impact on the use of stun guns. He said researchers have no other alternative than to use pigs, whose hearts are more like humans than any other species.

In Wisconsin, the state Department of Justice convened an advisory committee to create guidelines for police training and use of Tasers. On Tuesday, the committee is scheduled to hold its first public hearing in Stevens Point, where Webster will be among four presenters.

Webster said his research could lead to advice for how police should use the devices, standards for how powerful stun guns can be, and instructions for emergency room physicians on how to treat those who have been shocked.

Webster suggested some of the Taser-related deaths were from a rare condition known as malignant hyperthermia, in which bodies essentially overheat. He will test that theory on swine that have been specially bred to have the condition.

Other suspects may have died if potassium that is released into the blood stream after muscle contractions caused by a Taser shock reached the heart, Webster said. Cocaine use might be another factor, he said.

Webster's research is the first independent look at how Tasers affect pigs' hearts. Research published in January sponsored by Taser International, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based maker of the devices, found that 15 times the charge from ordinary stun guns was needed to electrocute the heart of even the smallest pigs studied.

Taser said Webster is well-qualified to study the devices, which it says are safe. The company says Tasers are being used by more than 7,000 law enforcement, military and correctional agencies in the world.

"We welcome Professor Webster's research as it can provide continued independent research concerning the safety of our life-saving Taser technology," said company spokesman Steve Tuttle.

Taser research on animals dates to 1989, involving dogs, bulls and pigs, but Webster's study is the only known such research now under way, according to PETA.

While all the pigs will be filled with anesthesia, they will be euthanized after the experiments, said Webster, who predicted about 30 pigs would be used. The research could create a computer model that would eliminate the need for more animal testing, he said.

"I think this is an outstanding example of one of those questions that can only be answered using animals," said Eric Sandgren, a UW-Madison professor who heads a committee that oversees animal research. "Boy, there's been a lot of deaths from this. If the alternative is to go back to using bullets, let's find out how to make this safe."

That's a worthy goal, but researchers should instead study humans who have survived Taser shocks and autopsy reports of those who died, said Laura Yanne of PETA. She promised an "unprecedented" protest on Tuesday, but would not release details.

"Subjecting pigs to cruel experiments is not the way to go on this. It's so obvious," she said. "This is a half-million dollar boondoggle."

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

March 24, 2005 http://wwwnytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html OP-ED COLUMNIST DeLay, Deny and Demagogue By MAUREEN DOWD h my God, we really are in a theocracy. Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church? The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a person's relationship with God should remain a private matter. As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run. Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy. Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose." As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote." A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was all about politics. The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit. The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video. As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?' " Jeb, keeping up with the '08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state. Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and states' rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court, it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it's Bush v. Constitution. While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they couldn't win. The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they're trying to pack the federal bench with trustworthy conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case. Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court asking that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube be restored while the federal court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes. Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others." So it's not about her crisis at all. It's about his crisis. E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

I usually never post anything that sounds at all religious but this article is great!

Jammy


Welcome to Doomsday

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17852

By Bill Moyers

1.
There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News,

the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.
The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's newsletter, calls "political religion"—religion as an instrument of political combat. On gay marriage and abortion— the most conspicuous of the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's guide—no one should be surprised what this political religion portends. The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote, "there are landmines."

Welcome to the Rapture!


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There are millions of Christians who believe the Bible is literally true, word for word. Some of them—we'll come back to the question of how many— subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the nineteenth century by two immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them with their own hallucinations into a narrative foretelling the return of Jesus and the end of the world. Google the "Rapture Index" and you will see just how the notion has seized the imagination of many a good and sincere believer (you will also see just where we stand right now in the ticking of the clock toward the culmination of history in the apocalypse). It is the inspiration for the best-selling books in America today—the twelve novels in the Left Behind series by Christian fundamentalist and religious- right warrior Tim LaHaye, a co- founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority.

The plot of the Rapture—the word never appears in the Bible although some fantasists insist it is the hidden code to the Book of Revelation—is rather simple, if bizarre. (The British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for refreshing my own insights.) Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I read the literature, including The Rapture Exposed, a recent book by Barbara Rossing, who teaches the New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and America Right or Wrong, by Anatol Lieven, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On my weekly broadcast for PBS, we reported on these true believers, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. To this end they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers.

For them the invasion of Iraq was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation, where four angels "bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the Rapture Index stood at 144—approaching the critical threshold when the prophesy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the Son of God returns, and the righteous enter paradise while sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in Rossing's book as saying: "Mark it down, take it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is coming for the earth, for the nations, and for individuals, but those who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the dire time of tribulation." Rossing sums up the message in five words that she says are basic Rapture credo: "The world cannot be saved." It leads to "appalling ethics," she reasons, because the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the unsaved. All are destroyed.


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How many true believers are there? It's impossible to pin down. But there is a constituency for the End Times. A Newsweek poll found that 36 percent of respondents held the Book of Revelation to be "true prophesy." (A Time/ CNN poll reported that one quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.) Drive across the country with your radio tuned to some of the 1,600 Christian radio stations or turn to some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear the Gospel of the Apocalypse in sermon and song. Or go, as The Toronto Star's Tom Harpur did, to the Florida Panhandle where he came across an all-day conference "at one of the largest Protestant churches I have ever been in," the Village Baptist Church in Destin. The theme of the day was "Left Behind: A Conference on Biblical Prophecy about End Times" and among the speakers were none other than Tim LaHaye and two other leading voices in the religious right today, Gary Frazier and Ed Hindson. Here is what Harpur wrote for his newspaper:

I have never heard so much venom and dangerous ignorance spouted before an utterly unquestioning, otherwise normal-looking crowd in my life.... There were stunning statements about humans having been only 6,000 years on Earth and other denials of contemporary geology and biology. And we learned that the Rapture, which could happen any second now, but certainly within the next 40 years, will instantly sweep all the "saved" Americans (perhaps one-half the population) to heaven....
But these fantasies were harmless compared with the hatred against Islam that followed. Here are some direct quotes: "Islam is an intolerant religion—and it's clear whose side we should be on in the Middle East." Applause greeted these words: "Allah and Jehovah are not the same God.... Islam is a Satanic religion.... They're going to attack Israel for certain...." Gary Frazier shouted at the top of his lungs: "Wake Up! Wake Up!" And roughly eight hundred heads (at $25.00 per) nodded approval as he added that the left-wing, anti-Israel media—"for example, CNN"—will never tell the world the truth about Islam. According to these three, and the millions of Americans they lead, Muslims intend ultimately "to impose their religion on us all." It was clear, Harpur wrote: "A terrible, final war in the region is inevitable."


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You can understand why people in the grip of such fantasies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. As Glenn Scherer writes in his report for the on-line environmental magazine Grist, why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? Why bother to convert to alternative sources of energy and reduce dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East? Anyway, until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.

Scherer came upon a high school history book, America's Providential History, which is used in fundamentalist circles. Students are told that "the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." The Christian, however, "knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth.... While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

While it is impossible to know how many people hold these views, we do know that fundamentalists constitute a large and powerful proportion of the Republican base, and, as Anatol Lieven writes, "fundamentalist religiosity has become an integral part of the radicalization of the right in the US and of the tendency to demonize political opponents as traitors and enemies of God and America"—including, one must note, environmentalists, who are routinely castigated as villains and worse by the right. No wonder Karl Rove wandered the White House whistling "Onward Christian Soldiers" as he prepared for the 2004 elections.

2.
I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists' fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God's master plan."

That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don't see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush's master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration's multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock on environmental policy extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election—231 legislators in all (more since the election)—are backed by the religious right, which includes several powerful fundamentalist leaders like LaHaye. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. Not one includes the environment as one of their celebrated "moral values."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I talk about this before a live audience I can see from the look on the faces before me just how hard it is for a journalist to report on such things with any credibility. So let me put on a personal level what sends the shiver down my spine.

I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. I confess to having always been an optimist. Now, however, I remember my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered, "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I believed that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe this—it's just that as a journalist I have been trained to read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

• that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the national Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources;
• that wants to relax pollution limits for ozone, eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport utility vehicles, and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment;
• that wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public;
• that wants to drop all its New-Source Review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies;
• that wants to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America;
• that is radically changing the management of our national forests to eliminate critical environmental reviews, open them to new roads, and give the timber companies a green light to slash and cut as they please.
I read the news and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency plotted to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the President's friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to continue the use of pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry concocted a scheme to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read that President Bush has more than one hundred high-level officials in his administration overseeing industries they once represented as lobbyists, lawyers, or corporate advocates—company insiders waved through the revolving door of government to assure that drug laws, food policies, land use, and the regulation of air pollu-tion are industry-friendly. Among the "advocates-turned-regulators" are a former meat industry lobbyist who helps decide how meat is labeled; a former drug company lobbyist who influences prescription drug policies; a former energy lobbyist who, while accepting payments for bringing clients into his old lobbying firm, helps to determine how much of our public lands those former clients can use for oil and gas drilling.

I read that civil penalties imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency against polluters in 2004 hit an fifteen-year low, in what amounts to an extended holiday for industry from effective compliance with environmental laws.

I read that the administration's allies at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon-Mobil and others of like mind and interest, have issued a report describing global warming as "a myth" at practically the same time the President, who earlier rejected the international treaty outlining limits on greenhouse gases, wants to prevent any "written or oral report" from being issued by any international meetings on the issue.

I read not only the news but the fine print of a recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with ob-scure amendments removing all endangered species protections from pesticides, prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon, waiving environmental review for grazing permits on public lands, and weakening protection against development for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer —pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age twelve; Thomas, ten; Nancy, eight; Jassie, three; SaraJane, one. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then the shiver runs down my spine and I am seized by the realization: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

Why don't we feel the world enough to save it—for our kin to come?

The news is not good these days. But as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. The will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. We must match the science of human health to what the ancient Israelites called hochma—the science of the heart, the capacity to see and feel and then to act as if the future depended on us.

Believe me, it does.



Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them." -- Adlai Stevenson

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110909138824507896

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becoming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.)

Oliver Willis writes,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort of accomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democratic senators in Washington who still refuse to vote their conscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civility in Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that their right-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for a give-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman as a terrorist sympathizer.

[. . .] Wake up, folks. We're in an ideological war with these folks and the sooner you realize that the better. The goal of the modern conservative movement, as embodied by George W. Bush, is not just a simple majority of conservative thought – rather, it is the elimination of everything but conservative thought.

I think we are entering a new phase of American history. These are not normal times, the pendulum is not swinging back, and historical trends of American politics no longer apply. American democracy was built on a system of checks and balances, and mechanisms of oversight and accountability. But the checks and balances and oversight and accountability are being removed. There is no Congressional oversight of this administration, the Justice Department does not investigate its crimes, the Federalist Society judges block all attempts to enforce the laws and the new media is no longer functional. The military acts as an arm of The Party and The Party is firmly in control of the State. The system of controls and protections that was carefully built over the last two centuries was put in place for reasons, by people who learned the lessons of history. I can not think of a time in history when a society left itself so wide open to tyranny from its leadership without it occurring.

Posted at 8:00 AM by Dave Johnson

__________

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110908992077997065

Dangerous

Another example of the dangerous direction the Right is taking us, from Heritage's Town Hall (Heritage is the hub of the modern Republican Party), Dennis Prager: Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI. First, he goes after the enlightenment,

"Instead of being guided by God, the Bible and religion, great numbers -- in Western Europe, the great majority -- have looked elsewhere for moral and social guidelines. ... With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions."

Then he advocates war as the preferred solution to problems,

"Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war..."

Then vegetarians,

"The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same circumstances."

Then gays,

"The unprecedented support of liberals for radically redefining the basic institution of society, marriage and the family is another product of feelings -- sympathy for homosexuals. Thinking through the effects of such a radical redefinition on society and its children is not a liberal concern."

Then against self-esteem,

"The "self-esteem movement" -- now conceded to have been a great producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal invention based on feelings for kids."

Then against laws protecting women from sexual harassment,

"Sexual harassment laws have created a feelings-industrial complex. The entire concept of "hostile work environment" is feelings based. If one woman resents a swimsuit calendar on a co-worker's desk, laws have now been passed whose sole purpose is to protect her from having uncomfortable feelings."

Against non-Christians,

"Almost everything is affected by liberal feelings. For example, liberal opposition to calling a Christmas party by its rightful name is based on liberals' concern that non-Christians will feel bad. And for those liberals, nothing else matters -- not the legitimate desire of the vast majority of Americans to celebrate their holiday, let alone the narcissism of those non-Christians "offended" by a Christmas party."

And more of that kind of stuff. He concludes,

"And that, in a nutshell, is what our culture war is about -- Judeo-Christian values versus liberal/leftist feelings."

Remember, people like this are paid, and paid well to put out this kind of stuff. It is designed to reinforce a "narrative" - an overriding story in which specific things don't even have to be true, as long as they ride along with the larger script. Liberals hate God, aren't patriotic, etc.

Also at Town Hall today, Cal Thomas says it is time to close the mosques in the U.S.

Posted at 8:32 AM by Dave Johnson

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

Now Bush's Stalinesque KGB is in place. Negroponte, who has an "iffy" relationship with truth and human rights, might be the very one AG Gonzales and Bush had been waiting for: a man without conscience who wouldn't (perhaps) hesitate to make even Americans "disappear." Sen. Frist (GOP Senate Majority Leader) seemed to lay some ground work by advocating that conspiracy theory (actually dissenters) be labeled as "mentally ill." It boggles the mind to watch the president appoint some of the most sociopathic. criminal members of society to high ranking "security" posts. At the risk of disappearing into a Negroponte sanctioned gulag, I have to ask: was that the plan all along? -- Claudia

_______________________________________

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

John Negroponte: See No Evil

Death Squad Cover-up/February 17, 2005

By Eric Alterman

Back in January 1982, the Reagan administration was desperate to cover-up evidence of a horrific massacre undertaken by U.S. supported military forces in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote in the province of Morazan, whom the U.S. was funding and training. The massacre was reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post by Raymond Bonner, and Alma Guillermoprieto, respectively, along with Susan Meiselas. As the reports appeared on the eve of Congressional hearings on funding for the Salvadoran killers, administration officials, like Elliott Abrams, sought to discredit the reports with McCarthyite accusations, and were supported by their allies in the conservative punditocracy—which, was just a fraction of its current size and scope. They succeeded and the funding went through, in part due to the cooperation of then-Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte. The gruesome details of the massacre were later excavated, journalistically, by reporter Mark Danner. What follows is drawn from When Presidents Lie:

Bonner, Guillermoprieto, and Susan Meiselas returned and presented their evidence to readers, State Department officials received a confidential cable from U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte reporting on a visit by a U.S. embassy official and a House Foreign Affairs Committee staff member to a Colomoncagua refugee camp, where many of the survivors of Morazan had fled. The cable described the refugees’ account of “a military sweep in Morazan December 7 to 17 which they claim resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties and physical destruction, leading to their exodus.” Negroponte, himself noted that the “names of villages cited coincide with New York Times article of January 28 same subject.”

He noted that the refugees’ “decision to flee at this time when in the past they had remained during the sweeps . . . lends credibility to reportedly greater magnitude and intensity of . . . military operations in Northern Morazan.” The State Department, however, decided to keep this information secret. By the time of the second certification report—which appeared six months later, in July 1982—the massacre reports were ancient history. Enders now bragged of “many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting than last,” a trend he attributed to the fact that “many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.” Like its predecessor, the second certification resulted in a noisy hearing, but a solid majority backed the Reagan administration’s aid to the regime. This time military aid was more than doubled, from $35 million to $82 million, and economic aid increased to more than twice that amount.83 In 1993, Enders finally admitted to a reporter, “I now know that the materials that we and the embassy passed on to Congress were wrong.” It took a decade’s passing and the Salvadorans themselves to determine, definitively, what took place in El Mozote.

In the fall of 1992, investigators for the postwar Salvadoran Truth Commission spent more than thirty-five days digging through the burial sites filled with decomposed bodies, bones, skulls, and bullet cartridges. They identified more than five hundred human remains in El Mozote and its surrounding villages.85 Of the 143 human remains discovered in the sacristy of the Mozote church, 136 were judged to be children or adolescents, of whom the average age was six. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy.86 When all the forensics had been uncovered, the commission revealed at least twentyfour people had participated in the shooting and that every cartridge but one had come from a U.S.-manufactured and -supplied M-16 rifle.Of these, “had discernible head-stamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri.”87 No one has ever been officially charged or tried for any crimes associated with the actions taken in El Mozote, which were deemed by Danner to be “the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.” {Negroponte never said a thing in public.]

MORE ON NEGROPONTE HERE: http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=263

The Unintelligent Choice
At 10AM this morning, President Bush will name John Negroponte as the new Director of Intelligence for the United States.

Who is John Negroponte?

You may remember him best as one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. John Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. While there, he was directed the secret arming of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to help them overthrow the Sandinista government.

At the time, he also was “cozy” with the chief of the Honduran national police force, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. Martinez ran the infamous Battalion 316 death squad. Battalion 316 “kidnapped, tortured and murdered” dozens of people while Negroponte was ambassador. Negroponte, however, turned a blind eye to the death squad and ignored the gross human rights abuses so Honduras would allow bases for U.S.-backed Contras.

Negroponte maintained he knew nothing about them, leading to his nickname, “the ostrich ambassador.” The abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.



Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

Spearing The Best

February 8, 2005



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/opinion/08krugman.html?oref=login

By PAUL KRUGMAN

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.

Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.

Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.

Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.

Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.

Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.
The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.

To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.

Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.

You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.

Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.

All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]

HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

The emperor of vulgarity

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Mike-Carlton/The-emperor-of-vulgarity/2005/01/21/1106110942667.html

By Mike Carlton
January 22, 2005

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.

The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by that time.

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.

But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923, Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.

Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this week that there had been some "not so good" decisions. But the more I see of her gleaming teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her perky confidence, the more I am convinced that back in the '60s she used to be Cindy Birdsong, up there beside Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown fame. I don't think it's a good idea to let her make a comeback as Secretary of State.

THE war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour Hersh, the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.

Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have been on the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed whenever Bush feels the time is ripe.

"The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear," he wrote, quoting reliable intelligence sources.

"But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership."

Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they did that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is no contest.

What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The CIA professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the Bushies.

The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has seized control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion collapse of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described by the former Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth".

The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, whose name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical, a three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full uniform, preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false idol, and that George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.

"He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.

Be very afraid.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]


HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)


"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes


"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

No time for euphoria
If Bush believes what he said Wednesday night -- that we must stand with our allies to prevent tyranny -- he should stop his incoherent saber rattling over Iran's nuclear plans and join Europe in real negotiations.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/02/03/euphoria/index.html

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal

Feb. 3, 2005 President Bush's State of the Union address adds the element of euphoria to the utopianism of his inaugural address. Coming between the two speeches, the Iraqi election gave him a “landmark event in the history of liberty” over which to drape his universal abstractions. Who would not want it to be true that the courageous people of Iraq as one body have defied bloodthirsty fanatics in order to establish a thriving democracy that will be a beacon to the rest of the Middle East, and that the glow from that fire will truly light the world?

The Iraqi election, in fact, went more or less as anticipated. The Kurds voted in overwhelming numbers (though an exit poll reported that they also overwhelmingly endorsed independence). The Shiites, the majority suppressed throughout the entire history of Iraq, turned out in large numbers to celebrate their inevitable empowerment. And the Sunnis, who have always ruled, for whom the election would ratify their minority status, and who as yet have been allotted no part in a new government, hardly voted at all. Most of the Sunnis, according to one poll, are sympathetic to the insurgency. Yet all the parties campaigned on ending "the occupation," as even members of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Cabinet call the coalition forces. Integrating the Sunnis, beginning with the writing of a constitution, has been made more difficult by a centrifugal election process.

The morning after, the Iraqi state received the nod of legitimacy from other governments, but it is no more capable than before of providing security or basic public services. It remains utterly dependent on "the occupation" for the indeterminate future. Nor is this democracy any more protective of liberal values. Just days before the election, Human Rights Watch reported that the Iraqi government engages in systematic torture of detainees, including children.

The Shiite victory was also a quiet victory for Iran, whose leaders, unlike Bush, did not claim credit. The Iranian Shiite government has invested more than $1 billion in Iraqi Shiite political parties, organizations and media. The Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has trained Shiite militias, and its intelligence agents have honeycombed the Iraqi government and Shiite parties.

Before the election, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shiite crescent" dominated by Iran, stretching through Iraq to southern Lebanon. Though Abdullah subsequently praised the balloting in Iraq, his anxiety about Iranian influence in Iraq is shared by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The Iraqi election is the culmination of the long Iran-Iraq war -- which Iran has now won without lifting a finger. Its deadly neighbor has been replaced by a Shiite ascendancy atop a weak state that cannot threaten it but is subject to its influence in a thousand and one ways. When the mist of elation lifts, the shadow of Iran looms.

The Bush policy consists of paralysis interrupted by fits of saber rattling. The responsibility for reining in Iran's development of nuclear weapons has been assumed by the United Nations and the European Union. Led by Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the EU negotiated Iran's agreement to allow inspection of its facilities and to freeze its production of fissible material. For his good deed and for declaring before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has attempted to oust ElBaradei.

Despite their promise, these negotiations are unlikely to succeed unless the United States enters into them; for only it can offer the big carrots: a lifting of sanctions, then recognition and perhaps eventual entry into the World Trade Organization. Iran has not been intimidated by the presence of some 150,000 U.S. troops next door; that has not prevented it from suppressing its reform movement. Opening Iran to liberalization while containing its nuclear ambition would appear to be an obvious win-win for the West. But some within the administration actively wish for the negotiations to fail.

Vice President Dick Cheney openly fantasizes about an Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reports that there are clandestine Special Operations teams inside Iran trying to identify hidden facilities that might be targets of U.S. bombing. Two Republican senators, Rick Santorum and John Cornyn, have introduced a bill that would authorize the funding of Iranian exile groups and stipulate "regime change" as official U.S. policy.

Yet the United States is already overstretched militarily. And, in any case, there is no way of knowing conclusively that all Iranian nuclear facilities would be eliminated by an Osirak-like strike. If attacked, Iran could create untold mischief within Iraq. But the dream world of ideology trumps the national interest. Thus, toward the Europeans' greatest diplomatic initiative, on the country whose fate is most closely linked with Iraq, Bush's policy, on the eve of his trip to Europe, is a vacuum.

In his State of the Union address, Bush boldly stated: “We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing and end its support for terror.” But Bush is playing no part whatsoever in the Europeans' negotiations. His declaration, a shameless falsehood, suggests that he cannot defend his actual refusal to do what he says he is doing.

Blinding bursts of triumphalism are characteristic of a march of folly and quicken its pace. True, just as paranoids have real enemies, so the euphoric can experience a high from genuine events. But the insistence on euphoria, as those who grapple with sober reality know, is symptomatic of a disorder that can dangerously swing in mood.

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About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

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Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]

HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson