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Get the set! Then you decide. Who's the bigger scumball - Flynt or Falwell.






















Excellent history of how the founders intentionally left God out of the Constitution. A must read for anyone wishing to understand the debate on religion in politics.









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In the days of the Old West, he was the law. His name was Starr. Tinn Starr. See his story here .

This is your economy.

This is your economy on Bush.

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In a memo sent to Enron offering his help in deregulating the electricity industry, Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition and one of George W. Bush's senior advisors, speaks more strongly for the need for campaign finance reform than a lobby full of lobbyists. The Washington Post reported on February 17 that one line of the memo read

"In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."

In other words, its not what's best for the country that determines public policy, it is who gets heard. And how do you get heard in Washington?

Its just good to hear one of them finally admit it.

THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

Find out about dangerous religious extremists operating right in this country here.

As long as there are people that believe their brand of religion should be the basis for public policy, we will have religious based terrorism. Religion is personal. Politics is public. While personal religious viewpoints obviously carry over into the public, they cannot be the basis for public policy. The most brutal and vicious kind of war is a religious war because, as stated above, it is totally beyond reason and human life becomes secondary to the cause. The conflict between Jews and Arabs, the conflict between Ireland's Protestants and Catholics, even the battle over abortion here in the USA are based on religion.

A zealot can rationalize any action. True Christians used to go singing to the lions and forgave their tormenters. Today they bomb buildings and kill doctors because "life is sacred". The teachings of Islam say that suicide is a sin, but the zealots that attacked the WTC, and their supporters, can rationalize their actions and somehow believe that it was not suicide for the pilot to intentionally fly a plane into a building.

If you want to worship, go to a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. Do like Jesus said. Don't pray in public like the hypocrites, pray in a closet. Keep religion out of all public places - government, public schools, public buildings. If God gave us free will to choose our own paths, for good or bad, who are mere mortals to try to force any single religion on others?

Seeing how people loved to see Jimmy Carter help Habitat for Humanity build houses for the homeless, Dubya thought he could boost his popularity by doing the same August 8th. While Dubya was working on a house, one of the other builders watched him closely as he worked. He would take a nail out of his apron pocket, look at it closely, then hammer it in. Then he would take out another nail, look at it closely, and put into a separate pocket in his apron. This went on for quite a while until his co-worker could stand the curiosity no more. "Why are you hammering in some nails and putting some nails in your other pocket?", he asked. "Oh", said Dubya, "well, half these nails have the heads on the wrong end, so I'm saving them for the other side of the house."

So, is it George "Bailey" Bush, or more like George W. Potter? Let's see. Which character from the movie would be the Republican? Hmmm. That's going to be a tough one.

George Bailey is the clean-cut, all-American hero of the story. Mr. Potter is a businessman, "a warped frustrated old man", "a scurvy little spider", a money-grubbing liar, and a cheat.

While it is possible that George Bailey might vote Republican (and there is a big difference between voting Republican and being Republican - I know a lot of basically decent people that sometimes vote Republican), there is little chance that old man Potter would ever have considered being a Democrat. Although, of course, he would consider contributing to the Democrats if he could buy influence or spend a night in the Lincoln bedroom.

The theme of the movie is that you, as well as George, get to see what the world would have been like if George had never been born. George lives in Bedford Falls, a quiet, all-American small-town. George owns the local Saving and Loan. Like his father, he's always sacrificing what he wants for the good of the Savings and Loan and the community. All this sacrifice with no observable benefits makes him a little bitter, and when he misplaces $8000 (actually, his uncle accidentally gives it to Potter, who hides the fact), he wishes he was never born and tries to kill himself. Fortunately for George, his guardian angel gives him a chance to see what the world would be like if he had never been born. Potter owns the town after George's father dies, renames it Pottersville, and it turns into a real boomtown - unemployment, pawn shops, bars, and strip clubs. You know, a good Christian, traditional-values kind of town.

So, does the economy really go south every time a Republican gets in office? Just because the focus becomes short term profiting over long term growth, infrastructure, stability, and community? Where's the country headed under this George? Pottersville? Naahhh!!

How may times have you heard people say this? Even Ralph Nader tried to build on the idea that there is no difference between the two major parties. But a very quick look at the numbers might tell a different story. The following is a chart of annual unemployment rates for the last 50+ years. A trend line was calculated for each party's rule in the White House.

Source for annual rates - Economagic.com

The Truman/Eisenhower years saw a significant increase in unemployment. The Kennedy/Johnson years showed a steady, consistent reduction. "About face" for the Nixon/Ford years. The Carter years saw an initial steady decrease, but as his administration fell apart, so did the economy, wiping out the gains he had achieved and resulting in a flat trend line. The increase in unemployment that started under Carter increased sharply under Reagan, reaching nearly 10% in 1992, exceeding even the whopping 8.5% in 1975 under Ford.

Rates then steadily decreased under Reagan. There are those that say the numbers are skewed. Unemployment rates are based on numbers of people actively looking for work, and during the Reagan years job prospects were so bad many people simply gave up looking, causing the numbers to decline. Maybe voodoo economics really works. And maybe there should be a chart on the value of real wages from those jobs. Also, as soon as George Sr. took office, the numbers did another "about face". The change is so dramatic and so precisely aligned with the change of administration that I calculated a separate trend line for Reagan and Bush. Finally, the Clinton years saw a steady decrease in unemployment.

What about the deficit? When Ronald Reagan first took office in 1981 he had this to say about the deficit;

"But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals."

Here's a chart of US surplus/deficit from 1946 - 2002.

Source for annual rates - Economagic.com

Now, skeptics may see evil intent in these statistics. You see, they would say, a bad economy is actually good for the wealthy. High unemployment keeps wages down, and a declining economy gives more support to the never ending whining for tax cuts. Huge deficits may be a good way to force a stop to all social spending. But that would be the skeptics. I see absolutely no correlation in the charts between the party in the White House and the economy. It's all just natural economic cycles.

UPDATE, MAY 4, 2001:
CONGRATULATIONS DUBYA!!
Only 100 days in office and already the unemployment rates are up! Keep up the good work!

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JESUS GOP?
GEEZ-O-PETE!

What in the world could possibly be the connection between Jesus Christ and the Republican Party? Could there be any more polar opposites? Here's a rundown of some of Jesus' generally agreed upon traits:

He was a Jew
He was poor
He was a laborer
He was a pacifist
He was anti-materialistic
He was from the middle east
He had long hair
He was non-violent
He was the original bleeding heart

Starting to sound like any Republican you know? How about:

He told a rich man to sell everything and give the money to the poor
He said to forgive all transgressions
He threw the merchants out of the temple
He said it was extremely difficult for the rich to enter heaven
He hung out with social outcasts

Hey - this guy could be Newt's twin brother. And on taxes?
"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."

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While Bush was speaking to the congregation of a local fundamentalist church, hundreds watched in amazement as a lifesize painting of Jesus came to life. "He is truly touched by the Lord", said one congregant.

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ABOUT THIS PICTURE...

A little explanation here for those that don't quite get the gist of this statement. First and foremost, this is not intended to be a defamatory statement against Jesus. In fact, it is more in defense of Jesus and His teachings. Dubya here represents more than just himself. Here he represents the whole Republican Party and so called "Christian" conservatives in general. I believe that were Jesus to visit us today, he would indeed slap the hateful and meanspirited right upside the head for using His name to support their hateful and meanspirited agendas. If the Lord is our Father, how many fathers have smacked a kid upside the head for saying something mean or hateful? I could say it in words like this, or I could show it in picture form as above, they both mean the same thing.

One reader writes:

"That picture showing Jesus slaping Bush in the face is going to get you hurt man. If I knew where you lived I would come over there and kick your liberal ass. I bet you don't have anything to say negative about Clinton do you, even though he "was" the worst and most corrupt President we have ever had. Conservatism is currently over powering the Governerships and State legislators, and you can't stop us. Goodbye liberals, your days of scare tactics and rederick are over."

I guess threatening someone with physical violence is not a scare tactic. Enough said about hatefulness. As for the rest, I am not a liberal, not a Libertarian, not a Communist, and definitely not a conservative. As for Clinton - he was, is, and will ever be a jerk. Slick Willy is too good a name for him. He had everything in his hands and he threw it away over stupid things like sex. What a loser.

If enough reasonable people are truly offended by this image, it will be removed. Personally, I can't see Jesus coming over and kicking my ass for it, though. Maybe whup me upside the head a little.

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In order to differentiate Dubya from a real President, this site will always refer to his "high"-ness as President- select George W. Bush, since he was selected, not elected, by that notorious gang-of-five from SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States) known as SCROTUM (Supreme Court Republicans Of The Ultra-right Mobocracy).

The energy world is a small one. Isn't it odd that Bush has ties to both Enron and the Bin Laden family? Will we ever find out the truth? Not unless there is a full scale investigation. A President's extra-marital affairs deserve full scale, multi-million dollar investigations. Potential cover ups of unethical business dealings and second hand links to terrorists do not?

"I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to 'back off' investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: 'There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.' "
- Greg Palast - Award-winning reporter for BBC Television’s Newsnight and The Observer of London

Well, thank you Mr. Bushie Claus. Everyone that pays taxes will get a check from Uncle Sam. It's just his way of saying "Just play ball with us, see, don't ask no questions, no one gets hurt, and we all make out pretty good, see?".

What will you do with your Bush bribe? Well, if you disagreed with the tax cut scam, now is the time to put your "refund" where your mouth is. You can donate it to charity. Donate it to your favorite candidate to beat Bush in the next election. Donate it to any anti-Bush activity. You could even get together with as many people in one place and have a massive check burning. Don't forget to call the papers and TV stations before you do. (Don't worry. You're not really burning money. It just means the government gets to keep the money, since you never cash the check. Hmmm... on second thought...)

But, whatever you do with your "refund" check, don't spend it on yourself!!! Remember, there is no surplus. The so called "surplus" is more than offset by our enormous national debt. It's a lie that you do not have to support.

Hello Mudduh, hello Fadduh,
From the White House, it's me, Dubya.
Your words of wisdom were entertaining
But its not easy now I'm done with the campaigning.

And I hate all the White House waiters,
The servants treat me like a stranger.
I have to make my PB and jelly.
And Colin Powell and Condoleezza won't serve coffee.

Now I don't want this should scare ya,
But Dick's got problems with his 'fribulator.
He grabbed his chest and started fumin'
When I said I wrote my own State of the Union.

I was talkin' with Vlad Putin
The guy who looks like a shaved Rasputin.
He had mentioned some old treaty.
I don't have time for homework after watching TV.

Help me, please, oh Fadduh, honest,
Help me, please, I hate the Congress.
They won't play
Along the way you said
They all just laugh at me instead.

Help me fast, I skipped my eco-
nomics class. Our greatest bull
Economy
Once soaring in the air
Has died and turned into a bear.

Dearest Fadduh, darling Mudduh,
Will you talk to little brudduh?
I know he helped me win the election
But now he's talkin' 'bout environment protection.

Wait a minute, there's people cheering.
Crowds with torches are appearing.
A rope? An oak tree? What are they sayin'?
Bet they're giving me a tire swing to play in!

Gotta go, Mom and Dad! Talk to you later!

Why is it that Dubya feels this need to redefine conservatism as "compasionate" conservatism? What's wrong with just plain "conservatism"? You don't add adjectives to words just to be redundant. You wouldn't call Michael Jordan an "athletic athlete". You wouldn't call the Beatles "musical musicians" (OK - I'm showing my age). Adding adjectives further defines a word, often to single out exceptions.

But sometimes adding an adjective just points out the flaw in the original word, making the phrase laughable, an oxymoron. Military intelligence, honest politician, rap music, corporate conscience. Compassionate conservatism.

I think the public is owed Dubya's explanation. Someone in the media needs to ask him to explain specifically what he believes is a lack of compassion in standard conservatism. He must believe somethings missing or he never would have added "compassionate" to it. Aren't conservatives offended by this? Isn't he saying that conservatives are generally not compassionate? Where in the world would he get such a notion ? I think he owes his fellow conservatives an apology.

I'm just glad Gore didn't try to one-up him by calling for "responsible liberalism".

"Will of the people". How many times did we have to hear that phrase thrown around this last election? It added such a moral flavor to the rationale of both sides. But any person from either side that claimed their candidate won did not give a rat's backside about "will of the people". They just wanted their guy to win. If they said they cared, they were either lying or have no concept of what the term "margin of error" means.

Everyone should now be familiar with the term "margin of error", as it is reported along with any exit poll result. It's the "fuzzy math" area around all those reported numbers. Since the pollsters cannot possibly ask every single person that voted whom they voted for, any number reported is an estimate, at best. And estimates are, by definition... estimates. They are not the "actual" values - they are best guesses.

Nevertheless, with statistics (that's the one right below "damn lies"), it can be determined how fuzzy those numbers are. If polling says George Bush received 48% of the vote, plus or minus (+/-) 4%, it means he could have actually received as low as 44% or as high as 52%. We have no way of knowing exactly what the real number is within that range, but it is almost certain it was not 40% or 60%, or even 43% or 53%. If one candidate gets 45% and another gets 50%, you do not know, you cannot know, who actually got more votes because their margins of error overlap.

While polling is obviously only a guess, it is also impossible to get a 100% accurate count in the actual counting of ballots. If you were to count 6,000,000 ballots ten times you would get ten different results, no matter how careful you were. There are too many avenues for error - human error, computer glitch, mechanical failure, not to mention all out fraud and manipulation.

So, the actual ballot count is still just an estimate. A very, very good estimate, but an estimate nonetheless. But how good? What's good enough? 98%? 97%? 99.99%? When it's as close as the last election, even 99.7% accuracy is not good enough. Oh...that is, if you want the "will of the people" to prevail.

What's to be done? Flip a coin. Scissors, paper, rock. See which one can hold their breath under water the longest. (A couple bags of cement might help here).

Or we could take an intelligent approach that many countries use. We have a runoff. The two candidates with the most votes are voted for again. This eliminates third party "spoilers" and will more than likely give us a winner with more than a 50% majority of votes cast. The "will of the people" would prevail.

Or, to save time, you can have Instant Runoff Voting. This is where voters rank their choices on the ballot - choice 1, choice 2, choice 3. If no candidate gets 50+% of the votes for choice 1, the choice 2 votes are added, and so on until one candidate gets 50+% of the vote.

No, this doesn't improve our choices, but it does give us a way to avoid this nonsense of haggling over two votes here, a couple over there, recount, recount, recount.

So, what happens if the runoff ends in a 50/50 tie (within those margins of error that would need to be so carefully calculated)?

“We think it’s important to take a part of that surplus that was created by the American worker and give it back to the people who earned it. If we don’t, it’ll stay in Washington and it will be spent.’’ - Vice President Dick Cheney

"You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high, and government is charging more than it needs. The people of America have been overcharged, and, on their behalf, I'm here asking for a refund." - President-select George Bush

Well, there they go again. Whining about taxes. We should take this huge "surplus" and give it back. But the term surplus is misleading, and Bush/Cheney use it intentionally so. Surplus merely means that you are spending less than you are taking in. But what if you owe money? If you put all of your debt on a credit card or take a bank loan, you can stretch out the payments, making your monthly "spending" less, but your overall debt can continue to grow. Speaking of debt, have you seen the national VISA bill, lately? Here's a chart of US national debt from 1934 - 2002.

Source for debt figures - Economagic.com

(Again, absolutely no correlation between the debt and those wonderful Reagan/Bush-I years). Hey, Dick. Don't have a heart attack, but I've got bad news. The money's already spent! People have not been overcharged. The government has just not been paying its bills. PAY DOWN THE DEBT!

AND JUST HOW "OVERTAXED" ARE WE?

Well, let's take a look at comparative tax rates of different countries.

Federal tax burden as a % of GDP (as of 1999)

Country	% of GDP	Country	% of GDP
Sweden	52.4	Greece	36.9
Denmark	49.4	Poland	36.4
Finland	46.3	Slovak Republic	36.0
Belgium	45.9	Iceland	35.9
France	45.5	New Zealand	35.8
Austria	43.8	Switzerland	35.0
Italy	42.7	Spain	34.8
Norway	41.8	Portugal	34.2
Luxembourg	41.7	Ireland	31.9
Netherlands	41.6	Turkey	30.8
Czech Republic	39.3	Australia	30.2
Hungary	38.9	Japan	26.7
Canada	38.0	United States	26.0
Germany	37.5	Korea	24.3
United Kingdom	37.0	Mexico	17.2

Source: Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation

Oh my God! We pay a higher rate than Mexico and Korea?! Its time for rebellion! I say we cut our social services to the level of Mexico and Korea! Then we can be the lowest taxed country on Earth!

So where does this notion of being so "overtaxed" come from? Sure, no one likes to give away their money to the goverment, or to anyone else for that matter. But where does this reactionary zeal against taxes come from? The nation, as a whole is obviously not "overtaxed" compared to most of the world, but since the poor can't pay taxs, and the rich have ways around it, the middle class gets hit with an unfair burden. This makes it easy for the rich to stir up discontent among the middle class, lowering their taxes even further but in the long run raising the taxes of the middle class further still.

The concept of "burden" is critical. Even with a flat tax, 17% is a much greater burden on an individual making $50,000 than an individual making $200,000,000. Even the flat taxers recognize this and have a lower rate for the poor. Its time to call for a "flat burden" tax. Everyone pays taxes according to their ability to pay.

There is a new prostitution bill before Congress and it looks like it will be a heated debate. I think they should stop the squabbling and just pay it!