Volume 2 Issue 77
May 22, 2003
Why is this man running?
Is George Bush paying Joe Lieberman to run, making school standards irrelevant, and the Hillbillies take on CBS
As the Presidential campaign goes on (and on, and on...) the scuttlebutt has been to figure out who will be the first of the Ballclub to drop out, and when. The good money is on Carol Mosley-Braun, who has raised less than $100,000, and who even admitted that her campaign was disintegrating. One of the reasons for that is she seems to really not have gotten the answer to a simple question down. Why is she running? (Well, she's running b/c Donna Brazile was worried Al Sharpton will win some primaries with the African-American vote, and she wanted to split it, but that's another story...)
The Mosley-Braun sideshow aside, nationwide polls still have the front runner being Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman (though he trails in Iowa and New Hampshire). While Lieberman may be able to explain why he is running in a debate, he seems to not be able to figure it out when he introduces policies. Most of Lieberman's plans and speeches sound like a George W. Bush fundraiser rather than a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Being a centrist Democrat is OK, and even supposedly "liberal" candidates like Howard Dean are actually more centrist than you'd think. But Lieberman is more of the camp that seems to want to continue to lead the party on the road to oblivion by providing "GOP Lite" as the theme. Stupid irresponsible tax cuts? Well, how about only a $350 billion instead of $500 billion. (Note: Lieberman did vote against this to his credit). A badly managed peace after a questionable war? Well, it's wrong to critique the President, it's not like that's one of the foundations of our freedom or anything.
The latest Lieberman effort to destroy the Democratic party is his "health care" proposal. As you probably know, the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not provide some sort of basic health benefit to it's citizens. As a result, as the economy goes deeper and deeper into the crapper, the number of uninsured has risen. Bill Clinton blew his chance at fixing this in 1993, when Hillary's nationalized medicine plan bombed. But, this is an important issue, and one on which the Democrats can truly distinguish themselves from Republicans. This year the plans have ranged from Clinton-redux in Dennis Kucinich's plan, to market-based reasonable suggestions on how to insure everyone in our current system, offered in differing forms by Gephardt, Dean, and Kerry. But Joe Lieberman wants to be a Republican. His universal health care plan? Don't have it. In fact, and this is really amazing, ignore the uninsured problem entirely. Instead, Lieberman would spend $150 billion on what he calls an "American Center for Cures" to help cure diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and others. Medical research that helps cure these debilitating disease is a great goal, and increased funding would definitely help. But two things. First, the National Institutes of Health already does this research, and creating a new bureaucracy that would fight over research dollars doesn't really seem to make much sense (Lieberman also conveniently left out how he would pay for this, which is interesting considering he supports tax cuts...). Second, IT'S NOT A FUCKING HEALTH CARE PLAN! Even if these diseases were cured tomorrow, people without health care would still be screwed, because they couldn't afford to go to the doctor, and the cost of the medication would likely be astronomical.
It's really amazing that Lieberman can even propose this with a straight face. His campaign spokesman, Jano Cabrera, said "What we're doing is absolutely highlighting how we're different." That at least is true, because the rest of the people in the race are Democrats, unlike Republican Joe. I wonder how much Bush is paying him.
Oh, here's an excellent quote from one of the real candidates - "The President is not popular because of his policies, because most Americans don't agree with his policies...The reason people like George Bush is they think he's a leader. They think that he says what he means in unambiguous terms. And the way to beat him is not to try to be like him [on the issues]. The way to beat him is to unambiguously state our Democratic Party agenda, because if you put a Democratic agenda next to a Republican agenda, the Democratic agenda's going to win every time." - Howard Dean, Sunday, May 18, Des Moines, Iowa.
Another reason for regulation: Bayer Pharmaceuticals apparently sold two versions of a blood clotting drug. One, sold in the first world, met stringent new safety standards designed to prevent HIV infections among users. The version sold in the third world did not. - http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/22BLOO.html?pagew anted=all&position
Terror Scare: A bomb exploded in a classroom at Yale University's law school yesterday. No one was injured -
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/nyregion/22YALE.html
Leaving every child behind: First, there was the focus on tests in the the ESEA law. Then, there was the hoards of problems with the reporting requirements. Then, the federal government decided not to provide states with compliance funding. Then, kids stopped taking the tests, since they realized they don't count for their grades. Now...with states facing large numbers of "failing" schools, they're trying to figure out how to reduce their failure rate...by lowering standards. So instead of aiming for the top, what No Child Left Behind will give us is the lowest common denominator -
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/education/22EDUC.html?page wanted=all&position
Totalitarian Republican Government: Fury has erupted over the destruction of Texas State records on the use of federal resources to search for the Texas Democrats -
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/national/22TEXA.html
Rick Santorum's recent anti-gay comments have not hurt his popularity in Pennsylvania much -
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030522_678.html
Look Who's Running for President: Bill Saletan notes that Howard Dean is sounding more and more reasonable, even to people like him who previously thought Dean too liberal -
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083390/
Look Who's Running for President 2: George W. Bush started his fundraising machine last night with a dinner at the new Washington Convention Center -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23080-2003May21.html
But Trent Lott was pissed that he was demoted from Table 1 to Table 742, and hinted he may not campaign for Bush next year -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24112-2003May22.html
Look Who's Running for President 3: Are the Democrats just re-enacting the doomed campaign of 1984?
http://www.dmregister.com/opinion/stories/c5917686/21312694. html
Look Who's Running for President 4: Here's Lieberman's stupid "health" plan -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22909-2003May21.html
Space Shuttle Columbia: After the poor thinkers at NASA first said there would have been no way to save Columbia, the review board is now taking a closer look at what could have been done -
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/US/spacesuits_columbi a030522.html
The new reviewers: The people who write reviews on sites like amazon.com, once considered just random comments, are now being considered as serious reviewers by some publishers -
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/140/living/Amazon_man+.sht ml
Hopefully a sign of reality TV's impending doom: Miners mounted a protest against the planned CBS reality show "the Beverly Hillbillies", where a poor Appalachian family is transplanted to Beverly Hills. Though, that suggestion at the end about sending CEO's to work in a coal mine sounds like a good show -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23620-2003May21.html?nav=hptop_tb
And was American Idol fixed?
http://www.drudgereport.com/idol1.htm
Have a great day!
