The Weekly Rewind

It's the end of the week! What does that mean? Football? sure... drinking to an excess? ok for some of you perhaps.... However for us at The "Bush"-Whacked Administration it means a look back at some of the things that you may have missed this past week, both good and bad. Hence the Applauds (good) and Heckles (bad). Ok, let's get to it.....

Applaud: to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for a soundbite from this past week’s democratic debate. The bit isn’t nearly getting the amount of airtime it should, but it is a classic. Biden described gop candidate Rudy Giuliani thusly; “There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” (Nicely said Mr. Biden, well done)

Heckle: to poor campaign practices. Waking potential voters up at 2 in the morning to ask them to vote for you is probably gonna have an opposite effect. Just ask Westchester (NY) County Legislature hopeful Domenic Volpe. A firm his campaign hired, and I would imagine later fired, to dispatch recorded calls asking for their support accidentally was programmed to call voters at 2 a.m. instead of 2 p.m… oops

Applaud: to Dennis Kucinich (did I really just write that?) for saying what many others are surely thinking, that Bush may need his racket restrung.

Heckle: to Vice President Dick “President” Cheney and his Dan Quayle impression this morning. During a speech in Dallas, a reporter asked Cheney about his views on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Cheney responded that the people of Peru “deserve better” leadership than Chavez… um, okay. Last time I looked, Chavez was the president of Venezuela and the president of Peru was Alan Garcia… but I could be wrong.

Heckle: to avoiding the US like we have a plague. The number of foreign visitors to the United States has plummeted since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington because foreigners don’t feel welcome,” according to tourism professionals. The decline has cost America “94 billion dollars in lost visitor spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and 16 billion dollars in lost tax revenue.” Ok, just for the record, we like visitors, we don’t like illegal immigrants.

Heckle: to knowing that almost everyone saw this coming. While there are pockets of security where life in Baghdad is starting to get back to normal, it’s not normal by most standards. Across the city Sunnis and Shiites live in sectarian enclaves, many walled off. Sunnis fear visiting Shiite areas and vice versa, even if it is just a few blocks away. Trust has broken down so much that a stranger in a neighborhood can arouse enough suspicion to warrant an attack. Nice, someone walking to the market takes a wrong turn and ends up getting killed because they are wearing the wrong scarf…sounds like what….. that’s right, major gang areas in the US. We can’t control them here, so what makes us think we could do it in Iraq?

Heckle: to proving that he needed to go. As Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld wrote 20 to 60 “snowflakes” — his trademark missives for developing policy — each day. In a sampling of them obtained by the Washington Post, Rumsfeld “argued that Muslims avoid ‘physical labor’ and wrote of the need to ‘keep elevating the threat,’ ‘link Iraq to Iran’ and develop ‘bumper sticker statements’ to rally public support. As if we didn’t already know that the administration was burning to expand our real estate holdings in the region…oh and by the way Don, no one takes anything on a bumper sticker seriously.

Heckle: to a sad reality. The number of Americans without health insurance “rose by nearly 8.6 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006, with children and workers from every income level losing coverage,” according to the Economic Policy Institute. The increase was “driven primarily by the continued erosion in employer-provided health insurance.” I wonder how many of those 47 million voted republican in the last 2 elections. And you hope they will be smart enough to vote democrat next year. Remember the only values that the republicans care about are the values that their corporate handlers tell them to care about.

Applaud: to 67 percent: Which is the number of Americans who “support giving contraceptives to students”, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many - 62 percent - said they believe providing birth control “reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.” Thank you for exhibiting common sense.

Heckle: to One in eight: Which is the number of veterans under the age of 65 who are uninsured, a finding that contradicts the assumption many have that all vets qualify for free health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Approximately 1.8 million veterans overall lack health coverage, a jump of 290,000 since 2000. This is unacceptable. These men and women risked life and limb for this nation and this nation owes them a debt of gratitude, which includes the health care promised to them.

Heckle: to being just so damned hippocritical. Lawmakers have increasingly steered federal funds to overtly religious organizations — many of which claim proselytizing or religious conversions as their primary function — using earmarks. For instance, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) tried to earmark $100,000 for a creationist organization. Since when do we get to pick and choose when church and state are separate.

Heckle: to Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Who, according to a new book on Blair’s tenure, “turned down a last-minute offer from President George Bush for Britain to stay out of the Iraq war because he thought it would look ‘pathetic,’. Well Tony, now your position looks as pathetic as ours. Nicely played.

And finally-

Applaud: to a financial wizardseeing the light. Warren Buffett this week told CNBC that he believes there is a “fairly significant” chance that the United States is headed toward a recession. Maybe Warren should take over for Bernake for a while.

Ok, all these heckles have left me tired and depressed. That’s it for this week.

Be good, stay informed….later.