S.O.T.U.: Bush "not interested in bipartisan support for anything"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

50 Plus One

Bush is not a president interested in winning bipartisan support for anything. What that means for his State of the Union Message

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11062650/site/newsweek/

Jan. 27, 2006 - Get ready for the divider, not the uniter, when President Bush delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday to a packed House chamber. It will be a ceremonial evening, with Chief Justice John Roberts likely to be joined by newly confirmed Associate Justice Samuel Alito in the front row to look up admiringly at the man who made their careers. After half the Senate Democrats voted to confirm Roberts, Bush figured he could lose a couple dozen votes and still get a conservative justice confirmed. Alito will be lucky to get three of the 45 Senate Democrats voting for him. To Bush’s way of thinking, that’s a bigger victory than the 22 Democratic votes Roberts received. Bush is a 50-plus-1 president; he’s not interested in winning bipartisan support for anything.

Building on that attitude in the State of the Union Message, Bush will mount a strong and passionate defense of his foreign policy and surveillance program, going directly at the Democrats and daring them to defy him. He’ll embrace new rules on lobbying and chastise Congress, donning the mantle of “reformer with results” that worked during the 2000 campaign, getting ahead of the scandal, just like he did with Enron when he abandoned his good friend Ken Lay and championed corporate reform.

But this is a more cynical time, and the fancy footwork may not work. The media are pressing for a fuller disclosure of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s contacts at the White House, and that grip-and-grin photo of Abramoff with Bush is bound to be published soon. Republicans along with Democrats are uneasy about the government’s unauthorized eavesdropping of American citizens. And the electoral victory in this week’s Palestinian election of Hamas, a terrorist organization that advocates the destruction of Israel, is a timely reminder of the downside of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

Bush’s SOTU speech is his swan song to rally support for an unpopular war and a pallid domestic agenda. Still, the evening will be his. The Democrats can’t compete with the pageantry that surrounds a SOTU address, but there are welcome signs that the Democratic Party is coming to life. “I’m the designated driver of these guys riding their power trips and getting intoxicated,” says Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, explaining that because he’s not running for president, his role as a member of the Senate tax-writing committee is to provide solid policy advice to his fellow Democrats. His big idea is the Fair Flat Tax of 2005, which would tax all income from whatever source at the same rate, close thousands of loopholes, and simplify everybody’s tax return into a one-page form.

[caledesi]

1. Democrats should walk out. 'nuff said nt

[wildwww2]

7. They sure as hell need to make a statement somehow. Appeasing

this traitor (Bu$h) makes them look like accomplices in his freaking crime spree. Real Americans should not be able to be bought off by these fascists who have taken over our country. Fighting back when it is too late makes no sense. Americans as a whole should be smarter than that. Shouldn`t we?
Peace
Wildman
Al Gore is My President

[blm]

2. WOW - great frame - Dems have to take the Designated Driver role as Repubs

are drunk with power and shirk their responsibility to the budget, working people, the environment and the Constitution.

[Cha]

11. That is an Excellent

Frame because they are soooooo Drunk! We need those designated drivers.

[dchill]

3. Credit to Eleanor Clift...

for this excellent article. Bush - the Great Divider.

[Warpy]

4. "Simplify everybody's tax return into a one page form"

Gee, where have we heard THAT before? Remember a guy named Reagan? He promised his "flatter, fairer tax" could be sent in on a postcard!

The problem is Congress. They will never pass any sort of a tax bill that hits their fat cat contributors, even one that drastically drops taxes on the holy rich. They will keep adding riders to unrelated bills to chisel a carefully worded tax break that will go to one corporation or individual, and one only. That is how we got the gargantuan tax code mess we have NOW.

Let's hope the little bastard has run out of time, and this horseshit is delayed until we manage to boot the GOP and the pink tutu Dems the hell out of Congress. People are hopping mad, and I'm not sure a 4% vote flip built into the damned video machines is gonna do it this time.

Just when you hear some empty headed right wing Rushbot trying to talk up this idiocy, remind him of Reagan's plan and what the GOP congressmen did to it.

(Yeah, I know corporatist Dems hands aren't perfectly clean, but they had to fight to get theirs tacked on as riders, usually by promising to vote for the anti American legislation they tacked it onto to get it.)

[wildwww2]

5. The media are pressing for fuller disclosure? When? On what planet?

What a crock of shit. If Bill Clinton had done one one thousandth of the treasonous crap Bu$h has pulled. He would have been impeached ten thousand times. The media hasn`t pressed anything except their collective lips tighter to Bu$h`s anus.
Peace
Wildman
Al Gore is My President

[newswolf56]

6. A flat tax -- an all-time fascist favorite -- is inherently regressive:

it disproportionately shifts the tax burden onto the poor in exactly the same way a sales tax does.

That's why the Republicans -- and the bourgeois-elitist Democrats-in-name-only -- all love it: it would repeal the graduated tax -- the last remaining vestige of the New Deal redistribution of wealth that forces the rich and super-rich to pay their fair share.

Think about it: a 10 percent flat tax, no exemptions, takes away $1000 from somebody making $10,000 per year, leaves them only $9,000 and thereby utterly devastates their already-impossible budget, while the same flat tax takes a mere $100,000 from somebody earning $1,000,000 and leaves them $900,000 -- plenty of money to squander on Swiss vacations, Bermuda cruises and winters in the south of France. This would be an obscenity: an even bigger tax cut for the rich than even Bush granted them.

[msongs]

9. you should read the last part of the newsweek article...

it is not a flat tax really, as in 10% for everybody in the country.

the flat tax label is misleading.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/liberaltshirts.htm

[newswolf56]

12. Where's the link? I'll read it, but I oppose ANY effort to replace...

the graduated income tax as a reactionary (i.e., capitalist/fascist) blow since the fat-cat plutocrats have been trying to get rid of the graduated tax since day one. Bottom line, the only way to force the rich to pay their fair share (and to redistribute at least some of their stolen wealth) is a graduated tax: the more you make, the more you pay.

[leesa]

8. Of course not. He's a dictator.

[Cha]

10. I hear there are going

to be People all over the country participating in State of the Union Protests..it might not be his night after all.

"If not now, when? If not us, who?
DEMAND: BUSH STEP DOWN,
and take your program with you!"


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