A couple of news items crossed my screen today that I thought I might comment on.
This year, MoveOn sponsored a contest for someone to make a commercial that could "engage and enlighten viewers and help them understand the truth about George Bush." I suggest you check out the site, since the winners are up and they are very nice pieces of amateur work.
If you have no idea what Bush has been doing wrong, you're pretty much in the dark now aren't you? I could get myself in a lot of trouble defending my anti-Bush sentiment, but I'll just posit that I really, truly believe that the US would be in a better state if Bush and co. had not been at the helm for the past 3 years. But I digress...
This is just the background for the actual news. The winners of the contest have been selected, and the end result is that the ultimate winner will have his piece aired as a commercial in front of the State of the Union Address and during the Super Bowl. Yes, this is the penultimate commercial playtime, when ad prices are at their highest all year. Of course, they have to get past the censors of standards and practices on CBS to get their spot on.
As an aside from the real issue (which I'll ge to eventually), I'm not really worried about this. The commercial that they've chosen is really pretty sedate, considering some other options that were available. It basically protrays kids doing blue-collar work. For example, one kid is working the back of a garbage truck. At the end, it asks, "Guess who's going to pay of Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" It's a pretty straight-forward message, even if it misses, like, every other problem that Bush has propagated. But it's not offensive or particularly inflamatory. It's just the truth.
At the end of the article I linked above, there is a quote from the Republican National Committee press secretary:
"They should have called the contest 'Twenty seconds of fear and loathing of George Bush.' It proves what we have said all along: The Democratic presidential candidates have a message of protest and pessimism but bring no positive ideas to the debate."
Huh? I think that the point has clearly been lost here. There are no Democratic candidates involved. And this isn't a debate, it's record. If you don't account for inflation, the projected deficit is the highest it has ever been. (Here's an idea of our current national debt. Read this page for how this relates to our deficit, and a nice graph that adjusts the debt by inflation.)
So when the Republican National Committee asks, "Where are the Democrat's ideas for reducing the debt?" as they have in the quote above, are they asking how to do it because they just don't know? Reducing the deficit does not reduce the debt.
There has to not be a deficit to reduce the debt. There must be a surplus. And remember what happened to the surplus we did have? Bush gave it to us! So instead of using the money that the government had to pay off the national debt, he said, "Screw it! Everybody go out and buy yourself a VCR!" And when 9/11 rolled around, we were all standing around wondering how to pay for more security (even though I haven't heard anything saying that it's any more effective than what we had before). It all leads to more debt.
I think all of this leaves me wanting to scream, "Do something!" at all of these politicos that posture around on TV. On Good Morning America the other day, I heard Democratic presidential hopeful Kerry talk about making pancakes. Who cares? How about some ideas for making some of that debt go away?
I really want to vote Democrat this year so I can rid our country of Bush, but I don't want to but yet another moron in office. Show that you've got some spine. Show that you know the issues. Show that you've got some way to start to cure some of the problems this nation is currently facing. I'm willing to put up with 4 years of Democrats in office if they show more common sense than the shrub in office has demonstrated.
I'll have you know that I'm a big fan of the space program. As a kid I always wanted to be an astronaut. And today I think that there are few things in this world that can inspire Man to greatness like the space program can. I'm all for a manned mision to the moon and Mars. But I'm not going to book a vacation to Hawaii when I can't afford to pay my home loan. That's what Bush is planning to do with our money and the space program. We're talking billions of dollars, here.
And with all of these allegations in O'Neill's book concerning Bush's Iraq agenda prior to 9/11, what reason do people have to vote for Bush. I'm curious. If you're going to vote for Bush next year, I want to know why. What do you know Bush will do for you or your country when reelected? I don't want to be caught off guard when he announces he's going to burn the constitution, if that's what y'all are conspiring after.
In other Bush news, this is just silly. Why did he have to show up when the people there didn't seem to really want him there. It's weird that he feels he needs to make this kind of gesture, probably to inspire his people, when his people are already there doing exactly that. Just like they do every year. It just seems like a foolish charade.
The other news item that I wanted to mention is this one about AMD. Apparently, the new AMD 64 and Opteron chips have hardware protection from buffer overflow. So all of those Windows patches you're always getting about such-and-such program being vulnerable to overflow attacks will be redundant to the security built into your CPU. Very nice. AMD once again kicks Intel's butt. (And my computer rocks!)
I apologize if this article doesn't contain the high quantity of commentable content that you're looking for. Nothing has really ignited my anti-politics passions lately. Although I did hear a statistic the other day that more US soldiers were killed in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than the four weeks before. If anyone thought that the occupation of Iraq was going to last a few months, they weren't considering million dollar oil construction contracts, were they? Oh, to be a friend of the oil industry. Good thing I work where I do, eh? Maybe we'll get some contract work in Iraq. That would be an interesting business trip.
