NOW dubya climbs on the "end inequality" bandwagon

[boutons]

President Bush, acknowledging at a prayer service that some of the "greatest hardship" of Katrina fell upon the poor, renewed his call today for the nation to "clear away the legacy of inequality."

==============================

This motherfucker/Repubs has done fuck all for social/economic equality in 5 years, as the number of poor and uninsured has increased, while mind-boggling wealth is concentrated at the top through tax cuts and corporate subsidies/welfare, and the middle class is hollowed out by insane health costs, now by energy costs, and by static household earned income.

Under dubya,

INEQUALITY HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, JUST AS THE REPUBS INTENDED ALL ALONG.

NOW, ONLY because some blacks got hell visited on them on international TV, dubya opens his lying hole about "inequality". At least he says "the nation" is to do something, not him, not his administration.

What a hypocritical motherfucker. This transparent, lightweight motherfucker is beyond clueless if he thinks his shit is gonna fool anybody.

With no New Orleans, shrub would NEVER be talking about the poor and inequality. He's Rove-politiczing poor/equality on the back of the NO disaster to try to save his sorry ass.

Too late motherfucker, your sorry ass is exposed for it always has been, always will be, a dumbshit puppet and tool for the rich and corps.

[mookie2001]

well said

[Kori Ellis]

well said

:lmao

[whottt]

You know...I was going to say much the same thing about W's racial comments last night...that they were political expediency and IMO were more harmful than helpful...Not only that but throwing all that money at a corrupt welfare state is a huge mistake IMO...

But then I see this thread of libs ripping him for saying it and it just makes me realize that Democrats just want to bitch and there is nothing that will get them to shut their holes...


All bitching...no solution...just endless bitching and whining...God the Democratic Party is a fucking disgrace these days.


FWIW...I do agree that W was bowing to political pressure when he attributed it all to racism...

For one thing...Louisiana has been a primarily Democratically controlled state since forever...

For another thing...New Orleans is 70% African American and African Americans hold just about every top position in the city...

[mookie2001]

:lmao
if I am cut, do i not bleed?

[Kori Ellis]

if I am cut, do i not bleed?

You don't think it was funny that Boutons said "motherfucker" four times in one post and you gave him a "well said"? :lmao

[mookie2001]

that was great...
i feel the same frustrations when I speak of Bush

thats why i said "well said"

[CharlieMac]

INEQUALITY HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, JUST AS THE REPUBS INTENDED ALL ALONG.

Kanye?

LBJ's War on Poverty hasn't exactly been successful. That was pretty well-established way before Bush. That's a hell of long legacy of inequality.

Should everyone in the U.S. have jobs? In a perfect world, yes, but look how well that mentality worked for Russia. The U.S. is ALWAYS, ALWAYS goig to have a natural unemployment rate of 4-6%. For some people that won't ever sink in.

Of the developed nations, the U.S. still has the best economic growth, easily. Truly poor people don't have TV, cable, phones, etc. The distribution of wealth is always going to be inequal. It doesn't get any easier to understand than that.

[Marcus Bryant]

Ah yes, conservatives are out to make people poor. The propaganda septic tank is running out of new material.

[Crookshanks]

I'm so sick of hearing about the inequality and the poor people. I work part time at HEB and I'm getting so fed up with the unmarried young women on food stamps! If you're so damn poor that my tax dollars have to go towards feeding your bastard kids, then how come all of them have their ears plastered to cell phones and most of them have multiple piercings and tatoos? Who pays for all that?

If you want to have a good chance of living the middle class lifestyle instead of the poverty one - then stay in school, keep your legs together and quit having bastard kids!

[Hook Dem]

President Bush, acknowledging at a prayer service that some of the "greatest hardship" of Katrina fell upon the poor, renewed his call today for the nation to "clear away the legacy of inequality."

==============================

This motherfucker/Repubs has done fuck all for social/economic equality in 5 years, as the number of poor and uninsured has increased, while mind-boggling wealth is concentrated at the top through tax cuts and corporate subsidies/welfare, and the middle class is hollowed out by insane health costs, now by energy costs, and by static household earned income.

Under dubya,

INEQUALITY HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, JUST AS THE REPUBS INTENDED ALL ALONG.

NOW, ONLY because some blacks got hell visited on them on international TV, dubya opens his lying hole about "inequality". At least he says "the nation" is to do something, not him, not his administration.

What a hypocritical motherfucker. This transparent, lightweight motherfucker is beyond clueless if he thinks his shit is gonna fool anybody.

With no New Orleans, shrub would NEVER be talking about the poor and inequality. He's Rove-politiczing poor/equality on the back of the NO disaster to try to save his sorry ass.

Too late motherfucker, your sorry ass is exposed for it always has been, always will be, a dumbshit puppet and tool for the rich and corps.
This is an educated liberal speaking? Are you watching America?POOR BOUTONS!

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Under dubya,

INEQUALITY HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, JUST AS THE REPUBS INTENDED ALL ALONG.

Just for giggles, where's your proof?

[exstatic]

This motherfucker/Repubs has done fuck all for social/economic equality in 5 years...

Well, actually, it's been a lot longer than that. The last (R) Prez who addressed those areas seriously and directly was named Lincoln.

[Hook Dem]

Boutons was on the streets of New Orleans interviewing people and came upon an old man who was obviously homeless. Boutons asked, " If you were in charge, what would you do differently"? The old man replied, "that's easy! I would divide all of the money up equally!". To which Boutons replied, " okay, but don't you suppose that in a short period of time, that money would wind up in the same hands again?". The old man said, " No No you don't understand! I mean divide it up every saturday night!"

[boutons]

"realize that Democrats just want to bitch"

I'm not a liberal, and not a Democrat. I thought both Gore and Kerry sucked, but they were better than the suckier shit from Repubs.

given the horrendously unnecessary Iraq war and the Katrina fiasco, the bitchin if FULLY merited. These fuckers are fucking the country up.

WTF is the objection to people of any stripe bitching about shrub and Repugs? Do you really think people must go along as stupid sheep with "my country/president, right or wrong"

"shut holes"? Why should anybody anywhere shut their holes?

Try to read my post for what I said, not as a trigger to run your fucking mouth all over your fucking hot buttons. I was attacking his blatant hypocrisy and transparent,opportunism of being forced to even mention racism/inequaltiy ONLY because of the NO disaster.

I honestly don't think the $200B will change anything in lifting the poor out of poverty. It will rebuild physical assets, and enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams, allow the conservatives to "experiment" by gutting environmental requirements, paying manual workers shitty, under-the-market wages, etc, but it won't change black/loser/poverty culture. $$$ hasn't solved that problem for 40 years since The Great Society/War on Poverty (but it was worth trying), and it won't now.

shrub's "clear away the legacy of inequality" is absolutely over the top BS that nobody believes because it simply won't happen. black NO teen girls will still get pregnant in SA or Houston or Dallas, with the support and encouragement of all their friends and older women who fucked up the same way, black teen boys will continue to commit black-on-black crime, and the entire population will be rotten with drugs and crime and jail sentences, and no one will give a flying fuck about school and breaking the disastrous cycle they have been in for decades. Even the black leaders don't know how to fix it. In this context, bush is a totally ignorant dickhead with his "clear away" comment.

But even the $200B will be significantly wasted in general because of who dubya has put in charge: rove, a pure political operator with no management/disaster/corporate/logistics/contracting experience. Expect the same results that ill-qualified, lost and confused Bremer achieved in Iraq. Even after the Allbaugh/Brown fiasco, the Repubs continue putting unqualified political hacks into critical roles. "Yeah, we fucked you once, but, get ready, we're gonna fuck you again!"

"conservatives are out to make people poor"

BS. The poor are already poor, and Repubs are out to ignore them, while making themselves as rich as possible. but, oops, slight, limited detour due to the toilet of NO, but conservatives will revert to their standard game asap. I'm sure there are millions on the right who think that the USA would have been better off if the those NO blacks would have ALL drowned. The water rose too slow for the right.

[Hook Dem]

Pssssst! Boutons! Here is how to say it without vulgarity...............................'I'm not a liberal, and not a Democrat. I thought both Gore and Kerry delete, but they were better than the delete Republicans.

given the horrendously unnecessary Iraq war and the Katrina fiasco, the complaining is FULLY merited. These people are messing the country up.

WTF is the objection to people of any stripe bitching about Bush and Republicans? Do you really think people must go along as stupid sheep with "my country/president, right or wrong"

"shut mouths"? Why should anybody anywhere shut their mouths?

Try to read my post for what I said, not as a trigger to run your delete mouth all over your delete hot buttons. I was attacking his blatant hypocrisy and transparent,opportunism of being forced to even mention racism/inequaltiy ONLY because of the NO disaster.

I honestly don't think the $200B will change anything in lifting the poor out of poverty. It will rebuild physical assets, and enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams, allow the conservatives to "experiment" by gutting environmental requirements, paying manual workers delete, under-the-market wages, etc, but it won't change black/loser/poverty culture. $$$ hasn't solved that problem for 40 years since The Great Society/War on Poverty (but it was worth trying), and it won't now.

Bush's "clear away the legacy of inequality" is absolutely over the top nonsense that nobody believes because it simply won't happen. black NO teen girls will still get pregnant in SA or Houston or Dallas, with the support and encouragement of all their friends and older women who messed up the same way, black teen boys will continue to commit black-on-black crime, and the entire population will be rotten with drugs and crime and jail sentences, and no one will give a darn about school and breaking the disastrous cycle they have been in for decades. Even the black leaders don't know how to fix it. In this context, bush is totally ignorant delete with his "clear away" comment.

But even the $200B will be significantly wasted in general because of who dubya has put in charge: rove, a pure political operator with no management/disaster/corporate/logistics/contracting experience. Expect the same results that ill-qualified, lost and confused Bremer achieved in Iraq. Even after the Allbaugh/Brown fiasco, the Repubs continue putting unqualified political hacks into critical roles. "Yeah, we delete.

"conservatives are out to make people poor"

BS. The poor are already poor, and Repubs are out to ignore them, while making themselves as rich as possible. but, oops, slight, limited detour due to the toilet of NO, but conservatives will revert to their standard game asap. I'm sure there are millions on the right who think that the USA would have been better off if the those NO blacks would have ALL drowned. The water rose too slow for the right.'

[smeagol]

It's so evident the response to Katrina had nothing to do with race, it's not even worth discussing it.

[Nbadan]

It's so evident the response to Katrina had nothing to do with race, it's not even worth discussing it.

I believe that Howard Dean was right when he wrote that there was a economic inequality in NO, not a racially inequality. The Rich and not-so-rich loaded up their Tahoes, Hummers and Civics with their luggage and personal belongings, instead of the poor, and headed for the hills. The city and FEMA plan all along was to pack as many of the city's poor into the Superdome and tell everyone else to get the hell out of town, even if they have to commandeer a vehicle to do so. City buses suitable for traveling were used by the city to drive people without transportation, the elderly and frail, to the Superdome. When the city requested 700 buses from FEMA to evacuate as many people as possible before the storm they received only 100.

[Hook Dem]

I believe that Howard Dean was right when he wrote that there was a economic inequality in NO, not a racially inequality. The Rich and not-so-rich loaded up their Tahoes, Hummers and Civics with their luggage and personal belongings, instead of the poor, and headed for the hills. The city and FEMA plan all along was to pack as many of the city's poor into the Superdome and tell everyone else to get the hell out of town, even if they have to commandeer a vehicle to do so. City buses suitable for traveling were used by the city to drive people without transportation, the elderly and frail, to the Superdome. When the city requested 700 buses from FEMA to evacuate as many people as possible before the storm they received only 100.
You still choose to ignore the fact that Nagin had 500 busses at his disposal and let them go under water. And don't tell me they were not suited for long distance travel because "they were not air conditioned and did not have bathrooms". If your life is in the balance, are you gonna argue that they were not suitable? "The rich and not so rich loaded their Tahoes, Hummers, and Civics? How do you know that? Please elaborate Dan. Just some more crap you're spewing!!!! Ted Kennedy couldn't have said it better! But of course, let's blame FEMA for not providing what Nagin already had!!!!

[boutons]

I think the following sums up much better than my original posting.

The New York Times
September 18, 2005
Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH

ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.

This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.

But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.

The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.

WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.

It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[gameFACE]

I wonder how many "black" evacuees are gonna show up at next years State of the Union speech. Bush loves to pander and Americans love to soak it up. I can see it now "Mr and Mrs Black Evacuee are survivors of inequalities in this country and succesfull in the program I started........."

[boutons]

Kristoff gives dubya credit where it was due, but overall, another case where dubya showed his total lack of leadership and conceren for poor, non-whites, the Darfur genocide another casualty of his bogus Iraq war.


======================================

September 18, 2005


A Wimp on Genocide

By <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?inline=nyt-per>NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.

It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.

Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

I can't understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration "has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Incredibly, the Bush administration has even emerged as Sudan's little helper, threatening an antigenocide campaigner in an effort to keep him quiet. Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, served in Darfur as a military adviser - and grew heartsick at seeing corpses of children who'd been bludgeoned to death.

In March, I wrote a column about Mr. Steidle and separately published photos that he had taken of men, women and children hacked to death. Other photos were too wrenching to publish: one showed a pupil at the Suleia Girls School; she appeared to have been burned alive, probably after being raped, and her charred arms were still in handcuffs.

Mr. Steidle is an American hero for blowing the whistle on the genocide. But, according to Mr. Steidle, the State Department has ordered him on three occasions to stop showing the photos, for fear of complicating our relations with Sudan. Mr. Steidle has also been told that he has been blacklisted from all U.S. government jobs.

The State Department should be publicizing photos of atrocities to galvanize the international community against the genocide - not conspiring with Sudan to cover them up.

I'm a broken record on Darfur because I can't get out of my head the people I've met there. On my very first visit, 18 months ago, I met families who were hiding in the desert from the militias and soldiers. But the only place to get water was at the occasional well - where soldiers would wait to shoot the men who showed up, and rape the women. So anguished families sent their youngest children, 6 or 7 years old, to the wells with donkeys to fetch water - because they were least likely to be killed or raped. The parents hated themselves for doing this, but they had no choice - they had been abandoned by the world.

That's the cost of our passivity. Perhaps it's unfair to focus so much on Mr. Bush, for there are no neat solutions and he has done more than most leaders. He at least dispatched Condi Rice to Darfur this summer - which is more interest in genocide than the TV anchors have shown.

One group, <http://www.beawitness.org>www.beawitness.org, prepared a television commercial scolding the networks for neglecting the genocide - and affiliates of NBC, CBS and ABC all refused to run it.

Still, the failures of others do not excuse Mr. Bush's own unwillingness to speak out, to impose a no-fly zone, to appoint a presidential envoy or to build an international coalition to pressure Sudan. So, Mr. Bush, let me ask you just one question: Since you portray yourself as a bold leader, since you pride yourself on your willingness to use blunt terms like "evil" - then why is it that you're so wimpish on genocide?

E-mail: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]