[3] I can speak to this one from personal experience as a small business owner. Any extra money scraped together will be allocated to skyrocketing medical insurance premiums, thanks to the total lack of a sensible medical care policy for American citizens — another GOP failure.
[4] Hire? Raises? Equipment? Advertising? I don't think so. See #3. Also, advertising is increasingly only for insiders, thanks to a media cabal controlled by a handful of boards of directors.
[5] Recent economic stimulus has been attributable to dramatic increases in defense spending, hardly the normal playing field for small businesses, except possibly one of Halliburton's Canadian suppliers called HEAT.
[6] It will be difficult for Republicans to renew their patriotic commitment to the sacrifices made by the Small Businesses of America since the party has outsourced its fundraising telemarketing efforts not to Indiana, but to India.
[7] None of this letter (including the edited portion) is about laborers — the point of Labor Day, which originally commemorated the effort, opposed by big business owners, to limit employment to the 8-hour work day at a time when 12 or 16 hours of work per day was the norm. For the party of ownership and big business, "shared Republican ideals" naturally refer to employers' opposition to the 8-hour work day — the celebration of a holiday weekend in an alternate GOP universe: an anti-Labor Day.
We're getting so used to the Republican party meaning the exact opposite of what it says that no one is even fazed any more. The propaganda is so chock full of nonsequiturs that criticism has nowhere to begin its work. What comes out of the mouths of leadership is uniformly expected to be utter self-serving nonsense.
In other words, America under Bush II has become the Soviet Union.
Happy Labor Day.
UPDATE: Looks like Matt Singer at Not Geniuses got the same letter.
"Black," or classified, programs requested in President Bush's 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The center concluded that classified spending next fiscal year will reach about $23.2 billion of the Pentagon's total request for procurement and research funding. When adjusted for inflation, that is the largest dollar figure since the peak reached during President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup 16 years ago. The amount in 1988 was $19.7 billion, or $26.7 billion if adjusted for inflation, according to the center.
"It's puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money's going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they're not telling anybody," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria that has been critical of the administration's defense priorities.
[...]
...[Pike] said it is a good bet that some of [the classified money] is going to programs that the administration is known to strongly favor, such as missile defense and the development of hypersonic planes that can fly beyond Earth's atmosphere.
"This is an administration that likes to play I've got a secret," he said. "The growth of the classified budget appears to be part of a larger pattern of this administration being secretive."
There's that old discredited but never-say-die 1980s standby, missile defense. Further proof that Dubya's real father is Ronald Reagan.
Faced with escalating costs and continued instability in Iraq, U.S. officials in Baghdad have decided to boost Bechtel Group Inc.'s postwar reconstruction contract by $350 million, or more than 50%.
The decision to steer additional funds to Bechtel is the latest sign that the Bush administration has seriously underestimated the cost and complexity of rebuilding Iraq. Although the U.S. plans a dramatic push for new reconstruction funds -- part of what one U.S. official said will be a $2.75 billion emergency budget request for Iraq next month -- the administration remains vague on what the overall project is likely to cost.
The new Bechtel money, which could be turned over within days, is part of at least $1 billion the U.S. hopes to pour into Iraqi power generation alone over the next year. U.S. officials and Bechtel assessment teams now estimate Iraqi reconstruction will cost at least $16 billion and likely much more. L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, has said that the costs of rebuilding Iraq and revitalizing its economy could top $100 billion.
San Francisco-based Bechtel was originally awarded an 18 month, $680 million contract for Iraqi reconstruction work on airports, water, power, schools, roads and government buildings. After business rivals and some legislators criticized the limited competition involved in that award, Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, promised that no additional taxpayer money would go into the Bechtel contract beyond the $680 million ceiling.
According to a funding document from the U.S.-led Iraqi provisional authority, however, U.S. officials recently decided that Bechtel requires the additional $350 million "to maintain momentum in high-priority infrastructure projects." Mr. Bremer approved the new projects on Aug. 20, according to the document.
Wednesday, an AID spokeswoman said that "security conditions" had evidently led Mr. Bremer to lift the limit and give more work to Bechtel. The additional $350 million will come from what's left of a $2.5 billion Iraq reconstruction fund Congress approved early this year.
All Bush administration promises are broken because all Bush administration promises are, essentially, lies.
US taxpayers will pay for Bechtel's reconstruction of Iraq's power grid, because the Bush administration insisted on the urgency of invading a country without WMDs. But US consumers will pay for the reconstruction of America's post-blackout power grid.
Since the US tax base is increasingly made up of the lower and middle classes, thanks to Bush administration tax relief for the most wealthy, working Americans will first pay Bechtel and Halliburton to rebuild Iraq and further enrich the Dick Cheneys and Riley Bechtels who have built a rhetoric-rich neocon smokescreen for their crass robber baron capitalism. Then, once taxes have paid for Republican enrichment, what remains of the lower classes' after-tax dollars will go toward higher utility prices to rebuild the American power grid for negligent power providers like FirstEnergy, the likely source of the blackout, a company led by a Bush Pioneer who had raised several hundred thousand dollars for his 2000 presidential campaign.
Billionaire Riley Bechtel, like Cheney's employer Halliburton and a phalanx of shadowy cronies, is using his insider status within the Bush administration to place personal profit above the national interest.
$100 billion, the latest underestimate, is an extraordinary price to pay for imaginary Iraqi weapons. The lies of the Bush administration may be among the most profitable the world has ever seen, and among the most needlessly expensive that taxpayers will ever bear.
A federal judge today held two more closed hearings in the criminal case against Andrew Fastow and two other former Enron executives, and refused to unseal the transcript of a July 28 hearing he also held in secret.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt denied a motion by the Houston Chronicle to make public the record of the unusual closed hearings in July and the two on today. One conference was held in the morning with prosecutors and the lawyers for defendant Ben Glisan and a second in the afternoon with prosecutors and lawyers for Fastow, Glisan and Daniel Boyle.
All have pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud in connection with various deals at Enron. Fastow faces nearly 100 counts himself.
Hoyt denied a Chronicle request to be allowed to attend the two Tuesday hearings. The Chronicle's reporter and lawyer were told to leave the hallway outside by court security officers, who said Hoyt ordered them to do so. The officers said the two would be detained if they did not leave.
"There are matters that do not need to be discussed in public in ways that embarrasses or humiliates the government or the defense and particularly the court," Hoyt said from the bench.
The judge made clear that the defendants' lawyers had not asked for the multi-defendant closed hearings but that he had closed them himself. Hoyt said sessions with lawyers in a judge's chambers are common and his goal is a fair trial for the defendants and for the government.
He said some matters should not be public. He said it would be impossible to discuss publically such as questions about how much evidence has been obtained, when more evidence might be available or what the two sides recommend for a case schedule.
In other Enron cases and in most criminal cases such questions are routinely asked in open court.
Hoyt was appointed by George W. Bush's real father, Ronald Reagan.
"Embarrassment is not an exception to the First Amendment," Chronicle Editor Jeff Cohen said. "With all due respect to the judge, we will continue to press him to open these hearings until he provides a better explanation."
I'm not an attorney, so I can't comment on whether Hoyt's rhetoric of embarrassment and humiliation is commonplace or appropriate. But to a legal outsider, it sounds overly secretive, disingenuous, and just plain weird.
FRANKEN: Listen, he's going to be the first president since Hoover not to add any new jobs in his first term.
CARLSON: I know. I'm sorry. We're totally, completely out of time. I'm getting it in my ear. They're saying they're going to cut us off.
Notice the timing of Tucker Carlson's not-so-smooth segue to commercial break.
Then in Slate is "The Best of George W. Bush: Hooverville in New York The bravest thing he ever did," by William Saletan and Ben Jacobs:
As to keeping Americans constantly informed, Bush held only nine press conferences in the first two and half years of his presidency, the lowest rate since Herbert Hoover.
Similar Hoover lines are popping up in the speeches of Dean and Kerry. None of this is new, it's just nice to see such comparisons trotted out in a coordinated fashion to gain critical mass in the public imagination.
The coordination of the Hoover references, of course, doesn't make them any less true.
Given that it's rock and roll, there's also a risk that an artist-- in a Replacements-like case of career suicide-- could record comments against Clear Channel or one of its properties. [Clear Channel Executive Vice-President Steve] Simon [the project director for the Instant Live program], allows that "there are all sorts of conceivable ways that one might deal with that," but he didn't consider it likely: "If an artist goes through the paces of doing this with us, they're doing it because they want to sell discs. They're doing it because we have a relationship with them, or have created a relationship... By the time you've been through all that I don't think there's much of a concern that the band's going to then get up there and call you names."
You hear that, rock and roll rebels? No name-calling. Clear Channel said so. If you want concert promotion, nationwide airplay, or Instant Live souvenir bootlegs, get on your knees and kiss the hem of your relationship with Clear Channel.
*The thorny issue of compensation for cover songs — songs written by someone other than the artists performing them — is sidestepped by Clear Channel according to this report.
President Bush will nominate Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Gordon England to be Secretary of the Navy, the White House said on Friday.
The White House also said in a statement that Bush had signed the recess appointment of Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace, a controversial decision because Pipes has been accused of being anti-Muslim.
England, who has served previously as Navy secretary, replaces Bush's previous Navy nominee, oil executive Colin McMillan, who committed suicide in July.
He is a former executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation.
Pipe's pending appointment has generated controversy because some Muslim-Americans and Democrats in Congress accuse him of defending racial and religious profiling.
Pipes has also suggested that mosques in America should be targets of police surveillance.
Once again, the least beneficial and most inflammatory choices are brought to you by Preparation W.
