Thursday, March 10, 2005
Try the Lame Duck...With a Side of Crow
The Village Voice has a nice little buffet of news stories every week in a single-page, easy to digest format, but one of the most consistently tasty morsels is The Bush Beat by Ward Harkavy. He makes an interesting comparison between the passage of the Barriers to Bankruptcy Bill with its heartless squeeze on the little people, and the ease with which Dick Cheney's Halliburton made use of the more corporate-friendly bankruptcy laws to divest itself of billions of dollars of asbestos lawsuits, even as it sat flush with billions more in government contracts.
Over at the front page of the NYTimes (yes, I'm lazy) we find Bush's Dirty Lies initiative, which proposed to clean up pollution by shifting it to the skies of more unfortunate states via "emissions credits", appears to be mired in "partisan intransigence", and destined to die an early, well-deserved death.
Next to the above good news we find more: Senate Republicans are putting the reins to Bush's planned $100 billion tax cuts. Democrats are still hung up on that boring old issue of cutting entitlements and programs for the poor, of course. It goes on:
And on the government watchdog front, the GAO told Congress yesterday that privatizing Social Security will not make it more fiscally sound, and could even kill it, and the GOP's own polls show a decided lack of entusiam for the whole idea.
No matter how you try to skew it, things are not looking as rosy as they once did for the old Lame Duck. Here's hoping this thought starts your day off better. Keep all those chins up.
Over at the front page of the NYTimes (yes, I'm lazy) we find Bush's Dirty Lies initiative, which proposed to clean up pollution by shifting it to the skies of more unfortunate states via "emissions credits", appears to be mired in "partisan intransigence", and destined to die an early, well-deserved death.
Next to the above good news we find more: Senate Republicans are putting the reins to Bush's planned $100 billion tax cuts. Democrats are still hung up on that boring old issue of cutting entitlements and programs for the poor, of course. It goes on:
"Yet Congress has failed to adopt a budget for two of the last three years; at a time when Mr. Bush is emphasizing fiscal responsibility, failure to do so this year would be an embarrassment for both the White House and the Republican leadership."Is it possible for this administration to feel embarassment?
And on the government watchdog front, the GAO told Congress yesterday that privatizing Social Security will not make it more fiscally sound, and could even kill it, and the GOP's own polls show a decided lack of entusiam for the whole idea.
No matter how you try to skew it, things are not looking as rosy as they once did for the old Lame Duck. Here's hoping this thought starts your day off better. Keep all those chins up.
