disconnect

I read some good news this morning regarding Kerry's chances in my current home state of Tennessee. Apparently after being down 18 points less than a month ago, he's now even with Bush here and in North Carolina.

A Bush-Cheney spokesman responds with a thoughtful comment, as always:

For the Kerry campaign, it's a little ambitious to think that voters there would identify with the first and fourth-most liberal members of the Senate.

Apparently things have gotten to the point where simply calling people "liberal" constitutes a slur. There are ads for local politicians running around here now where so-and-so stresses that he's a "conservative" and a "Republican". First off, I thought the little "R" next to your name in the ballot was sufficient to show off your Republicanness. Second, simply saying, "I'm conservative!" doesn't actually mean anything. But my point simply is that Bush's spokesman was saying that people in the South can't vote for anyone liberal, because they wouldn't identify with them. Why a lower or middle-class voter in Tennessee would instead automatically identify with a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School whose main economic plan has been to cut taxes for the rich is a question that'll have to go unanswered I guess.

When I saw the headline PNC Financial to Buy Embattled Riggs Bank for $779 Million this morning on nytimes.com, I was a bit surprised because I was thinking about posting something about Riggs Bank yesterday. Now it's actually relevant.

First, I should mention that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, was President and CEO of Riggs' Investment Management subsidiary.

Then I give one... no, two links to a story from this spring about Riggs Bank being fined $25 million for laundering money on behalf of Saudis possibly connected with terrorism. A quote from the Washington Post article:

According to one SAR, on Jan. 13, 2003, the Muslim World League, an Islamic charitable organization, wired $461,341.72 into an account at Riggs in the name of the "Ministry of Defense and Aviation-Riyadh, Saudi Arabia." The Muslim World League, which was founded by Osama bin Laden but was taken over by the Saudi government years ago, is largely funded by the Saudi royal family and by most accounts funds a variety of worthy causes around the world. But it is also the subject of scrutiny by congressional investigators and federal law enforcement agencies for possible terrorist connections in some countries, and some of its officials abroad have been linked to al Qaeda. Treasury agents seized files at the league's offices in Falls Church in March 2002.

Next, one... no, two links to what I read yesterday about Riggs Bank helping Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet hide some of his money. Some nice quotes from the NY Times:

"How do you basically live with yourself?" Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked Riggs executives who testified before the panel. "Somehow or other there's got to be a conscience in here."

. . .

In one case, a Riggs account manager brought a 60-pound suitcase full of dollar bills into the bank to make a deposit into an account of Equatorial Guinea's president, President Teodoro Obiang, who has ruled repressively for 25 years.

Somewhere out there, I know there's a member of the Bush family that doesn't have ties to Saudi terrorists or dictators. Maybe we'll get that one as President next time.

The Senate canned the anti-gay-marriage amendment. Good. Apparently the 50 senators who voted "in favor" of the amendment (though this was only a vote to keep it on the agenda, and more would have voted against it had it been a vote on the amendment itself) didn't think the founding fathers put enough discrimination into the charter that grants us all our basic rights. Among those voting to institutionalize more discrimination was Georgia "Democrat" Zell Miller, who really deserves his own post on here. He was actually a co-sponsor of the amendment. He expresses his support for the amendment, and for Roy Moore's ten commandments in the Alabama courthouse, in the following speech after the Super Bowl halftime show. But I like the speech for the following quote regarding the halftime performance:

I asked the question yesterday, how many of you have ever run over a skunk with your car? I have many times and I can tell you, the stink stays around for a long time. You can take the car through a car wash and it’s still there. So the scent of this event will long linger in the nostrils of America.

While I agree that no one in the country wanted to see the private parts of any member of the Jackson family, on my list of "things that stink from 2001-2004", the halftime show is not exactly on the top ten list. I hope I'll be able to devote more time to Zell in the future so we can all wrap our minds around his leadership of "Democrats For Bush" and the rock-solid principles that group rests on, but consider this a start for now.

You can read some memos that Fox News chief John Moody wrote over the past couple of years here. Probably the best is this sentence, written during the peak of the uprising that killed dozens of American soldiers in April of this year:

Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of US lives and asking out loud why are we there?

"I know it's easy to care about our fallen soldiers and question what they died for, but buck up folks, we've got a war to promote!"

Finally, marking my 100th reference to things in Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore lists some of the incestuous links between Bush cronies in the movie, but let's add another to the list. James E. Sharp, the lawyer representing Bush in the investigation into who leaked Valerie Plame's CIA agent status to the press, is also representing Ken Lay. You know, the Enron CEO, the guy Bush amicably called "Kenny-Boy" but really has no relationship whatsoever to the President at all and anything you hear to the contrary is a sack of lies perpetuated by the evil liberal America-hating scum that wants the terrorists to win! But I digress.

Kerry and Edwards have been talking a lot about "values" lately, and in the spirit of trying to say something good about Kerry/Edwards instead of simply pointing out the numerous bad things about Bush/Cheney, I thought I'd give my take on "values".

To a large extent, values are subjective. Of course we all have some common values, and I'll get back to that, but what I mean is that different people give different weights to different values. Normally this would be somewhat obvious but I wanted to put it out in the open given how some Republicans insist on viewing things in black-and-white.

The Republican party has done a good job of associating Bush with "values". What this really means is that if you highly value not killing fetuses, Bush shares that belief. If you value not letting two gay people enjoy the legal benefits of marriage, Bush is with you there too. But clearly Bush doesn't hold a monopoly on values. If you value a candidate that is religious, Bush has gone out of his way to show you that he and Jesus are best buds, but Kerry, growing up Catholic, used to take a taxi to Mass when he attended an episcopalian boarding school, and he regularly attends Mass to this day. Of course, if your values include pursuing a policy in the Middle East which accomodates rapture Christians who want to usher in the apocalypse, you would prefer Bush in that regard while if your values lean towards politicians who don't drop in evangelical codewords in their speeches, Kerry's your man. Likewise, if "pro-life" to you means outlawing abortion and that's important to you, Bush would be happy to help you. If "pro-life" to you means aggressively pursuing medical treatments using stem cells that could save people's lives, Bush is less helpful.

One value which is very universal, however, is fairness. I feel comfortable in saying that it's universal because studies in both people and animals (chimpanzees, etc) have shown that individuals will turn down rewards in order to prevent someone else from getting them too, if they know that that another individual is getting an unfair share compared to them. I would submit to you that this is one value in which Bush (and the Republican party) is soundly trumped by Kerry (and the Democratic party). As usual, Krugman has beaten me to the punch a bit here, though he talks about Tom DeLay. The same ideas though of fairness apply to Bush as well. To some extent, you can't really blame him - I mean, if you had a lackluster business career and were helped to the highest office in the world by friends of your dad and other corporate interests, you'd probably want to help them out too, fairness be damned.

Fundamentally though, undermining fairness is not only immoral, but undermines the capitalist system we depend on as well. Capitalism is based on fair competition in the marketplace - if you give large subsidies to certain corporations which supported you in the last election, you put competitors of that corporation at a disadvantage, suppressing competition and giving the consumer lower quality at higher prices. If you invest in the stock market and certain executives are engaging in manipulating accounting, inside trading, funky market timing or any number of scams which have been uncovered recently, you make less money. However, the modus operandi of this administration has basically been, "If you can do it, do it." If you can invade Iraq, do it, and who cares about giving them a fair chance to prove they don't have any WMDs. If Halliburton can get some contracts in post-war Iraq, give it to them, who cares about putting them up for bidding?

To be perfectly fair (since I've been talking "fairness" about it so much), it's difficult coming up with concrete examples of where Bush himself has twisted the rules of fairness to benefit himself. Most I can think of off the top of my head involve other executives (who happen to be Republican supporters, like Ken Lay) or examples like Krugman gives of Tom DeLay. Any more examples people want to list in the comments would be appreciated. And the Democratic party is not totally immune from this either. My point is that Kerry/Edwards and the party they represent would be more dedicated to the basic concepts of fairness than the Bush/Cheney ticket. To give one example of this, I'll simply bring up Edwards's history as a trial lawyer, something that Republicans are pummeling him about on a daily basis, but I have yet to hear a single example of a case he took that didn't seek to right wrongs or promote fairness. This article from 2001, linked to in a blog I linked to a few days ago, has some examples of some of his trials. Do a find on "Sta-Rite" in that document, and do some searches on Dick Cheney and Halliburton or on Bush's business history and tell me which ticket values fairness more.