This is worth reading in full. It is Congressman John Conyers Jr.’s statement to Congress on the objections to allowing the Ohio electors. Clear and to the point, it outlines just why the Ohio vote was problematic.
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This is exactly right
Josh Marshall quotes a reader on Social Security.
There are $1.8 trilliion in U.S. Treasury securities in the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund. It is imperative that the Democrats ask Bush whether he intends to honor that obligations and force him to make a public proclamation of his steadfast commitment to do so. The Democrats must take the lead in committing themselves to honor those obligations.
Democrats should seize this opportunity at once, and every one of them stand forth and guarantee they will honor those financial commitments, and will not vote for any bill that puts those commitments at risk. That’s the least they owe those of us who paid for the damn things, and it would be a smart political move to boot.
Republicans flip flop on ethics, again
In the end, they decided to lower ethical standards anyway. Just not in the way they first proposed.
You can’t wash the sleaze out of the sleazy, it seems.
How to help our wounded vets
Since Walter Reed is, for the moment, full up on phone cards, and didn’t specify where else we can send donations, I’ve been asking around for some possibilities. Here’s what I’ve found.
Fisher House is an organization that provides local housing and other support to family members of the wounded while they visit with and tend their loved ones. They offer several ways of helping with either specific families or general needs.
Army Emergency Relief is a private non-profit organization that has been helping vets since 1942. They offer emergency funds for rent, food, housing and other essentials, give scholarships to the children of veterans, and help with medical and dental care for vets and their families. They primarily need cash, and all donations are tax-deductible.
Support Our Troops is a page put together by the Department of Defense which lists many other organizations which give support in dozens of ways to our troops and their families. If you want to search around for an organization that can use your money or your talents, this is a great place to start.
Our young men and women are being killed and wounded daily while following orders to the best of their ability. We owe them every kind of help and support we can provide, whatever we think of the politicians who have sent them off to fight.
A bad combination
Oliver Willis had the best post of the day yesterday, when he showed us the very bad combination of these two stories:
Bush Rejects Bad News
There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear
Krugman on Social Security and the trust fund
In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman describes exactly what I’m talking about in the post below.
There are only two things that could endanger Social Security’s ability to pay benefits before the trust fund runs out. One would be a fiscal crisis that led the U.S. to default on all its debts. The other would be legislation specifically repudiating the general fund’s debts to retirees.
That is, we can’t have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis – unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don’t count.
He promises to write more specifically about privatization in the coming weeks.
Bush plans to cut social security benefits
At last details of Bush’s plan for social security are out, and they are grim details indeed for older people like myself. A story in today’s Washington Post reports that Bush’s plan would cut SS benefits by one-third, primarily by changing the formula used to calculate them. The plan assumes that younger people might eventually make up some of the lost benefits through savings accounts, but of course nothing about that is guaranteed, and in fact the theory behind private accounts is very unsound. Max has more on the privatization issue here and here.
Bush and his cronies have worked hard to convince people that Social Security is in grave danger, when in fact it is not in grave danger at all. While it may eventually need some tweaking (and that need may be 40 or 50 years off), the primary danger facing Social Security is that our lawmakers will break their word, and use the SS surplus to help pay down the criminal levels of general fund debt created by the Bush tax cuts and the red-ink Republicans’ inability to hold their wild spending in line.
The SS surplus was painstakingly built up as a hedge against the baby boomers’ retirement needs. That money has come from the wages of working people like you and me, and those of us now reaching our 50s must fight to keep the red-ink Republicans from stealing what we so carefully tucked away. I’m surely not the only person who will need SS to stave off poverty once I retire. If we let the red-ink Republicans start whittling away at our retirement funds, life will only get that much harder for us later on
Republicans embrace ethics?
What fun! Suddenly they decide that DeLay needs a spanking after all!
WASHINGTON – House Republicans suddenly reversed course Monday, deciding to retain a tough standard for lawmaker discipline and reinstate a rule that would force Majority Leader Tom DeLay to step aside if indicted by a Texas grand jury.
Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall inside the Republican caucus?
UPDATE: Apparently DeLay himself requested they rescind the change, since the Republicans’ lack of ethics was turning into a strong political issue for Democrats (duh!).
Those attending the Republican meeting, which was held on the day before the opening of the 109th Congress on Tuesday, said Republicans unanimously agreed to restore the old rule after Mr. DeLay told them that the move would clear the air and deny Democrats a potent political issue….
Some Republicans who originally opposed the rules change enthusiastically greeted the decision not to go through with it.
“It allows the Republicans to focus on the issues, the agenda that is before us and not to have Tom DeLay be the issue,” Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said. “I feel like we have just taken a shower.”
Hold the phone cards!
Walter Reed is reporting that they have received so many gifts for wounded veterans, including stacks of phone cards, that they are asking everyone to hold off sending anything more for at least a couple of months. They’ve simply run out of space to store things.
They suggest instead sending money or gifts to other organizations which help wounded soldiers and their families. But they don’t name any, and I don’t know which organizations might need help. Any ideas?
