Random, occasionally rambling thoughts with links to interesting, scandalous, or partisan news of the day.

Fair and Balanced

Dead Heroes
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Benjamin Franklin
  

Living Heroes
We owe the liberty and freedom we take for granted to the enlisted men and women in the armed forces. They sacrifice family, ease, and even life laboring in service to all of us. The least we can do for them is honor their devotion with dignified pay scales, decent education for themselves and their children, and reasonable compensation for service away from their families and death on the battlefield. Flag waving politicians who praise the troops on one hand and cut their pay and benefits with the other should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Blogs I Read Often
• Talking Points Memo
• Atrios
• FireDogLake
• Brad DeLong
• The Daily Howler
• Daily Kos
• Glenn Greenwald
• MyDD
• The News Blog
• Oliver Willis
• Political Wire
• The Volokh Conspiracy
  

No link. Just a little ranting. The SOTU was a competent effort tonight. Nothing fancy or extraordinary, but not a disaster. The two LIES that bothered me the most are ones Bush and his team have been trotting out for at least a month, and both have been roundly and widely discredited. I was astonished he used them at all. The first was the claim that 93 million Americans would get an average tax cut of nearly $1,100. The raw number is correct but so misleading that even Republicans have been shamed into not repeating it. Non-administration Republicans, that is. The reality is that half of all taxpayers would get a tax cut of less than $250. Many parents who pay heavily into payroll taxes but not income tax, would get nothing and that includes the promised $1,000 child tax credit. On the flip side, millionaires would average more than $80,000. The Democrats plan of a flat $300 for everybody is a whole lot simpler and at least gets the money into circulation now. I wish some ball-toting journalist would nail the administration on this massive distortion of reality.

The second, and more shameful, lie was a repeat of the charge that aluminum tubes destined for Iraq were meant for uranium-purifying centrifuges. This has been shot down be everyone from the IAEA to the NY Times to anybody with the common sense that God gave sergeants. They're damn missile tubes for the 81 mm rockets. Perfect fit, right alloy, and they fit a consistent pattern of orders. They're the wrong alloy, the wrong size, and the wrong shape for centrifuges. Bush knows these arent't MWD evidence, but he says it anyway. If he wonders why people are hesitant to believe him, he's only got to look at what he said to understand our skepticism.
posted by Dave on 10:52 PM | 0 comments link

--------------------