SNIPPETS

It was revealed earlier this week that war criminal and former Vice President DICK Cheney had suffered his fifth heart attack. Stress being a major contributor to heart attacks, I am not surprised that Cheney has had another one. One can only imagine the stress this man must be under every waking moment. After all, he and his cohort George W. Bush are indirectly responsible for the 3,000 deaths which occurred on 9/11, having been briefed on August 6, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden was planning some type of attack involving airplanes on our soil, and both having done nothing about this warning. And imagine the paranoia which has raised his blood pressure and terrorized him each day since! Consider, too, the stress and pangs of suppressed guilt that must be shooting through Cheney's veins knowing that he lied to get us into an unnecessary Iraq war which has now cost the lives of 4,000 of our soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. The aggravation he has undergone recently with a captured would-be underwear bomber singing like a canary with mounds of actionable intelligence as a result of normal interrogation methods rather than Cheney's preferred and now wholly discredited torture methods must be extreme, too. But the coup de grace in terms of stress must have happened when he heard former colleagues Colin Powell and Gen. David Petraeus shoot down his flimsy lie that President Obama is endangering the country by mishandling our "war on terror." Cheney's heart attack was described as "mild." But we all know once it finally dawns on him how badly he misjudged and misran our battle against Islamic fundamentalist extremism, how seriously his torture program damaged our Constitution and world standing, and how much innocent blood is really on his hands, Cheney's entire circulatory system will explode.



It will be interesting to see how congressional Republicans will conduct themselves in front of the C-SPAN cameras when they meet to discuss health care reform with President Obama tomorrow. Why? Because they don't want reform at all. They want to stall and eventually kill this legislation. Both that snide and mouthy House Minority "Leader" John Boehner and Senate Minority "Leader" Mitch McConnell are in no mood to compromise, and they instead want to rip up the existing, already-passed bills and start all over.But all they really want to do is attempt to weaken President Obama, the man they hate more than anything. First they're for transparency, then they're against having cameras present. First they're all for health care reform, then they're against it. These disgraceful saps, along with their conservative Republican buddies like Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, Pete Hoekstra, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Richard Shelby, and all the rest of them, are attempting to stonewall our government to a grinding halt, simply to make the President look weak and ineffective so as to defeat him in two years. They have held up numerous judicial appointments without good reason; 290 bills await action but are languishing in an unneeded procedural-delay limbo, and they lie about and distort everything the President says or does. They hate government involvement in anything, so they are trying to strangle it to death for their own political advantage. In the process, these self-proclaimed "fiscal conservatives" are wasting everybody's time and millions of taxpayer dollars. Here's an idea: if these Republicans are truly against government waste, why don't they all just resign en masse and get the hell out? For if ever there was a perfect example of exorbitant government waste, it is surely today's totally unproductive congressional Republican caucus!

I saw CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the tube this morning, explaining why hospital costs are so out rageously high. We all know the score here:$25 packets of Kleenex, $800 biopsy needles, etc. Well, Dr. Gupta said something I found to be utterly unbelievable: that hospitals only get 4% of the amount they actually invoice for a product or service! His claim was that insurance companies and government negotiate away the rest and pay only about 4% of the amount invoiced. I found this figure to be rather suspicious, and I would love for any of you out there who may know the truth to lay it on me. Assuming for a moment that it IS true, then hospitals, just like doctors and technicians, are NOT the ones responsible for our ungodly high health care costs! Nope---sure, medical malpractice suits enter into the equation, but so do medical equipment manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and - yep, you guessed it - INSURANCE COMPANIES! So, once again, they can point all the fingers they want, but insurance company greed is STILL one of the most major causes of our unnecessarily high health care costs!

MORE THAN 50 YEARS OF CONSERVATIVE /REPUBLICAN LIES

To all who may be attending their Congressperson's Town Hall meeting this month: Remember, as you encounter a packed room of people shouting out against health care reform, these people were most likely brought in from across the country by wealthy Republican conservatives to disrupt your meeting, and they most likely don't even reside in your district. They have been fired-up by conservative special interest group lies, and now they in turn will be repeating those lies, like President Obama's health care plan will force seniors into euthanasia, will provide taxpayer money for abortions, will end up killing people due to delays in getting medical treatments, will come between you and your doctor, and so on. ALL of these statements are LIES, and they fit a long, steady pattern of conservative, and especially conservative Republican, scare tactics and lies used for over more than 50 years to turn the public away from progressives, liberals, and progressive legislation. I present below a long, only partial, list of those lies.

After having caused the stock market crash in 1929 through years of free market, anything-goes, unregulated capitalism, the Republicans and economic conservatives of that era were horrified by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs of active government involvement in the economy. They said fair, common-sense, and humane measures like legalizing labor unions, instituting welfare and Social Security, implementing jobs programs for the more than 20% of the work force that was unemployed, providing unemployment for those who were out of work, and regulating banks, the stock market, and big business was "socialistic", had "gone too far", and would "destroy capitalism." Oh, yes---they also said it "wouldn't work." Sounds suspiciously similar to the type of nonsense being pedaled today by conservative Republicans like Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, doesn't it? Well, these statements were wrong then, just as they are today. They were LIES told by fearful people without vision or heart who didn't understand the situation at hand and/or didn't care about those in need all around them. What Roosevelt's measures really did, of course, was to SAVE capitalism and plant the seeds for the growth of a huge and prosperous middle class.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, ever-fearful conservatives, led by the notorious Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, were seeing communists under every bed. Many innocent people were hurt by being blacklisted for trumped-up and supposed communist activities. This LIE about alleged communist infiltration throughout government and society unnecessarily and permanently ruined many people's lives.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the big conservative LIE concerned civil rights. Fearful conservative defenders of the status quo argued that granting civil rights to minorities through federal legislation, letting blacks eat at the same lunch counters as whites and use the same bathrooms and buses as whites, was a violation of states' rights and would destroy white American culture and civilization. This, too, was a flimsy conservative LIE. Our country is immensely better off today for having allowed people of all races, ethicities, and creeds equal access to education, employment, and social and cultural activities! Another conservative lie at this time was that, if we didn't fight in the civil war in Vietnam, that country and all the rest of Asia would go communist. This lie was even adopted, adapted, and expanded by liberal presidential cabinets during JFK's and LBJ's administrations. The rest of Asia did NOT go communist after we withdrew from that war, and all it accomplished was create huge profits for the military/industrial complex and kill more than 50,000 American soldiers and countless innocent Vietnamese civilians. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, darlings of conservative America back then, even lied about having a "secret plan to end the war." They had none, of course, and only used and manipulated the war to gain and maintain political power.

The 1980s brought us the Reagan administration, union-busting, and "trickle-down economics." This conservative lie held that, by cutting taxes for the very rich and big business, and cutting back on the power and number of labor unions, the added wealth created at the top of the income scale would trickle down to everyone else and all would prosper. That being a LIE, of course, the only ones who prospered from the policy were the very rich and big business. The "trickle down" evaporated long before it ever hit the middle class or poor.

"Free trade" was another lie foisted on us by conservatives in the 1980s-1990s, and its close cousin was deregulation. Conservative Republicans like Milton Friedman, George H.W. Bush, Phil Gramm, and Tom DeLay, as well as right-wing think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute began their incessant chant that any and all trade is good for everybody, and that eliminating regulations on business would result in an upswing in prosperity for all. They even succeeded in fooling President Bill Clinton and other "new" Democrats into going along with this nonsense. The fact that all this led to was an export of millions of high-paying American jobs and the freezing of workers' wages here, plus a rise in energy speculation which led to record high gasoline prices, plus ever-spiraling health care costs prove what LIES these conservative policies turned out to be!

After 9/11, hardcore neocon warmongers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld lied to us, telling us Iraq was actively involved with AlQaeda and was building an atomic weapons stockpile. These conservative LIES led us into an unnecessary, preemptive, and hugely costly war in Iraq which has weakened our economy. This George W. Bush administration insinuated that is was totally against abortion and would overturn Roe vs. Wade. But, with a solid Congressional majority, a conservative President, and a working conservative Supreme Court majority, the Republicans made no effort at all to eradicate abortion. Instead, they cynically USED the issue as a political tool against Democrats. This made them LIARS on that issue, too, and proved that they gave it only lip service to use the religious right for votes. The Bush crew also re-fed us the trickle-down economics and tax-cuts-for-the-rich LIES, and accelerated the rates of free trade and deregulation of business to the point where we slid into the worst, deepest recession since the great crash of 1929. Again, as so often before, these conservative and Republican LIES caused nothing but damage and have brought us down.

Now we are faced with another big conservative Republican LIE: that health care does not need reform, and that doing so will make it "socialist", dangerous, and actually harmful to us all. Much like their arguments in the 1930s and steadily onward, this LIE, too, should be dismissed as nonsense designed to protect only the wealthy and hurt everyone else. Remember this steady stream of conservative Republican LIES when you meet with your Congresspersons and vote in the midterm elections next year, folks. The only fear you need to have going forward is in following today's conservative Republican talking points, which are all LIES!

FAR BIGGER THAN CHENEY'S BIGGEST LIE!

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it..."
- Joseph Goebbels -

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
- Adolf Hitler -


Dick Cheney must have studied his history of tyrants well. For he has been a massive liar who used the massive lie as a political tool for many years and continues that practice to this day. He is apparently delusional as well, or wishes we all were, so that we would accept all he says as gospel truth. Cheney is also a very paranoid man who is now apparently worrying that his misdeeds from 2001-3009 will forever tarnish his legacy or land him in prison. He has, of late, been behaving like a terrified animal running from a pursuing predator. For he has been out publicly lambasting President Obama's end-to-torture policy on a daily basis for weeks now. A day doesn't pass where he fails to make an appearance on a news show, or make a public speech defending the war in Iraq or the Bush administration's use of torture. He has even had his wife and daughter out on the attack to back up his absurd and discredited claim that torture of suspected terrorists was legal and yielded useful information which saved American lives, is beneficial, and should be continued or the country will be in grave peril. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: the guy is also insane.

The gargantuan lies we have been fed over the past 7 or 8 years by Cheney, his boss, George W. Bush, and his collaborator, Donald Rumsfeld, are so plentiful and so heinous it is difficult to limit them to only the few you will see here. Rest assured, there are thousands more.

The lie that Saddam Hussein had direct contact and was working with Al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks has been proven totally false, but Cheney was repeating it even as recently as this past January. We know now, of course, that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Wolfowitz, and a number of other far-right ideologues had all formed and been members of the crazy conservative "think tank" called "Project for a New American Century" since the mid 1990s. This group advocated, among other things, a pre-emptive military strike against and occupation of Iraq, Syria, and Iran. I find it highly suspicious that, as late as August 6, 2001, the Bush administration had been warned specifically about an Osama Bin Laden plot to use American planes in a terrorist attack on American soil, but Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all ignored it. I also find it highly suspicious that the outgoing Clinton administration had provided warnings about Al Qaeda which were also ignored. But what I find most suspicious is how, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Bush suspended all airline flights throughout the country, save for those by the FBI to round up Bin Laden's visiting Saudi relatives within our borders to fly them safely back home. It is clear in hindsight that 9/11 was used successfully to fulfill the dream of mounting an invasion of Iraq. To further "justify" this action, Cheney and the boys fed us the lie about Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons (WMD in Cheney/Bush spin-speak). Along with it came the hefty benefits of having our hands directly on Iraqi oil, plus being able to award billions and billions of federal dollars in non-bid military contracts to Cheney's former company, Halliburton, and its subsidiary, KBR.

Even Cheney's beloved "war on terror" seems to have been a big lie. The original stated aim was to capture Bin Laden and destroy his Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan. But once we had our hands on the coveted jewel of Iraq, this was pushed way back on the back burner. Meanwhile, our ports and borders remained wide open with lax border patrol enforcement. Surely, if Al Qaeda was the highly organized, well financed organization with numerous cells operating worldwide that Cheney and Bush told us it was,we would certainly have made a strong effort beginning on 9/12 to tighten up security on our borders and ports! Yet this was never done. Our southern border, in particular, was allowed to leak like a sieve ever after. Had we REALLY been serious about homeland security, this would not have occurred. My theory is that Bush and Cheney, union haters both and friends of big business, didn't wish to impede the flow of very cheap illegal immigrant labor coming in. That way, wages would be kept in check and unions all but destroyed. Not only that, but the administration's lax border policy surely seems to indicate they had little real concern that Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group would enter this country! And that exposes another big Cheney myth and lie, that their pro-active approach to terrorism prevented another attack on our soil. Pro-active? Hardly. Not only were Cheney and Bush directly responsible for 9/11, being asleep at the wheel as they were, but they did virtually NOTHING to shore up port or border security ever afterward. Other than start an illegal war overseas, they were not pro-active against terror in the least.

Perhaps the biggest and most aggravating lie of all concerns torture. First, the claim was made by Bush and Cheney that we do not torture, when in fact, we already had done so. Then came the devious attempt by Justice Department underlings John Yoo and Jay Bybee to rewrite the definition of torture to make it exclude torturous techniques we were using. Bush and Cheney again denied our use of torture. Then the claim was made that our "enhanced interrogation" techniques (aka TORTURE) yielded tremendously useful information. That, too, was a lie. Those directly involved in the actual interrogations of the three tortured terrorists have stated that all useful information had been gathered by traditional, legal interrogation methods practiced first by the FBI. Once the CIA took over interrogation, and torture began, the prisoners stopped yielding information. If torture had been so effective, why was one prisoner waterboarded 183 times in one month, and another more than 80 times in a month? Surely, had torture been as effective as Cheney claims, there would have been no need to repeat the process that often. Not only that, but had torture been so effective and so necessary for our security, when then was it discontinued in 2005 or 2006? Why hadn't it been used right up until Inauguration Day? The evidence strongly suggests that torture DIDN'T produce the results Cheney and Rumsfeld were really after, namely, a confession that Saddam Hussein really did have ties to Al Qaeda.

No amount of continued lying or alibying on Cheney's part will absolve him from the fact that his administration began an illegal war and broke domestic and international law with its practices of rendition and torture. He and his cronies must be made to stand trial and pay the penalties for such crimes. For the actions his administration took were rash, foolhardy, corrupt, immoral, and in direct contradiction of all other methods which had been used throughout our entire history. Rather than defeat Islamic terrorism, they actually provided it with a powerful recruitment tool. This did not make us safer. It has instead make a terrorist retaliation in the future all but a certainty. So Cheney can continue to practice Goebbels' and Hitler's theories on telling lies, but it won't do him any good. Unlike in the days of Hitler, we now have 24/7/366 satellite news and the internet. The truth from numerous sources now available will correctly portray his dark, deceitful, and murderous legacy. And the mounting evidence against him is a truth far bigger than even Cheney's biggest lie!

GRIEVOUS GOP MISTAKES: A CHRONOLOGY

"Four fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still."
- Calvin Coolidge -

"The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests."
- Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles -

"The press is the enemy."
- Richard M. Nixon -

With the exception of its very earliest days, just before and during Abraham Lincoln's administration, and for a brief time at the turn of the 20th Century during Teddy Roosevelt's terms in office, the Republican Party has acted mainly in the interests of big business and social conservatives. It has advocated a minimal role for government, preferring to let business and industry (particularly their owners) determine much of the course of the nation's affairs. As such, the party has not generally supported the needs of the majority of the country who were workers and small farmers. This minimalist approach to government and the support for a small minority of the wealthier, upper elites has led to an undeniable pattern of the Republican Party being consistently on the wrong sides of many, many issues and/or mismanaging the country's affairs. Below, in chronological order, is a listing of numerous grievous mistakes the Grand Old Party has made since the end of the Civil War in 1865.

1867 - Radical Republicans take over the party. They immediately turn their backs on assassinated President Lincoln's desire to mercifully reassimilate the Old South back into the Union. They enact harsh policies against ex-Confederates (many of whom had been southern Democrats before the war). These penalties included stripping them of voting rights and the ability to hold public office. They instead set up unqualified newly-freed blacks and corrupt northern businessmen to govern the South under the banner of the Republican Party. While they did free poor blacks from slavery, they provided no education or training for them to enable a seamless merge into white cultural society. Now free, buth with their former masters bankrupt and powerless, most blacks migrated to urban centers and settled into slums, barely being able to eke out a substandard living doing unskilled and often backbreaking labor at very low wages.

1869 - Republicans begin to become increasingly allied with and dominated by big business and banks. Bribes and extortion run rampant, culminating in the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872.

1870s-present - Republicans and conservatives begin to side with big business against the formation of labor unions, and, once unions are established in 1935, actively try to suppress them.

1880s - Huge corrupt trusts are set up by big banks, big business and industry, and are supported and aided by Republicans.

1919 - GOP Senators play a heavy hand in preventing the US from joining the League of Nations, leaving that body weak and ineffective. Its eventual failure helps lead to World War II. Social conservatives in the party push through Prohibition, one of the worst and most impractical laws ever passed in the history of the human race.

1920s - Republican pro business, laissez-faire, anti regulatory policies (especially concerning the stock market) lead to terrible rural poverty and lay the seeds for 1929's Great Depression.

1935-1937 - Republicans oppose the adoption of government programs like Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Welfare, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the National Recovery Act (NRA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) - basically, any government-sponsored program designed to provide federal aid or employment to needy individual citizens. The GOP took the standpoint that government had no jurisdiction in those areas and that only private enterprise did. The problem was, of course, that businesses were too broke to provide those opportunities and SOMETHING had to be done for millions of hungry citizens. Thank God the GOP's numbers in Congress were too weak to prevent passage of all this beneficial legislation!

1947 - The GOP passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which weakened and restricted labor unions.

1950 - Republicans strongly support Sen. Joe McCarthy's infamous anti-communist witvh hunts, painting many Americans (especially Democrats) as soft on combatting communism. They use these accusations as a political tool to unseat Democrats and get themselves elected. These witch hunts wrongly accused many innocent people, ruining their lives and destroying their careers.

1953 - Ultra-conservative Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directs the CIA to help overthrow the democratically-elected pro-Islamic Mossadegh government in Iran, replacing it with the brutally repressive, pro-western Shah of Iran. This turns many Iranians against the US, the negative effects of which will become repeatedly evident years later.

1954 - John Foster Dulles again engineers the overthrow of a democratically-elected government, this time a leftist government in Guatemala, replacing it with a right-wing government more to his liking. Coincidentally (?), his brother, Allen Dulles, just happens to be on the board of directors of American Fruit Company, which had large holings in Guatemala and felt threatened by the leftist government. Dulles also prevents Vietnam from holding a national election, fearing that leftist nationalist Ho Chi Minh would win. So Dulles maneuvers to get Vietnam split into two countries, with Ho Chi Minh ruling the north and US-installed pro-western playboy Bao Di controlling the south. This lays the seeds for America's future bloody 15 year involvement in Vietnam.

1954-1965 - Many Republicans ally themselves with conservative southern Democrats to oppose and filibuster against major civil rights legislation.

1965 - Republicans oppose LBJ's Medicare and Medicaid programs and the entire War on Poverty program in general. These programs have benifitted millions of needy citizens since their inception.

1970- present - Republican Presidents, beginning with Richard Nixon and his Supreme Cort appointments Warren Burger and then William Rehnquist, begin their long attempt to pack the Supreme Court with conservative, pro-Republican justices. The Republicans call these types of justices "strict constructionists", who interpret the law strictly on precedent and Constitutional principle. But what justices like these have really done is strengthened the Executive Branch of Congress, effectively weakening the power of both the Legislative Branch (Congress) and the Judicial Branch. This has resulted in an erosion of civil liberties. It has also enabled corporations and special interest groups to exert more control over government and the population as well. The Nixon-Kissinger CIA overthrows the neutral Cambodian government of Norodom Sihanouk in favor of a pro-US military junta headed by Gen. Lon Nol. The US also begins illegal bombing and military incursions in Cambodia in an effort to choke off North Vietnam's military supply lines to the south.

1971 - Nixon orders a break-in at the Brookings Institute and attempts to steal files of anti-war critic Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon also approves illegal secret wiretapping of political opponents.

1972 - The Watergate era begins when Nixon operatives are caught breaking into Democratic Party national headquarters during this election year. Nixon is implicated in a massive deliberate cover-up, but is strongly supported by a hardcore group of conservatives and Republicans all the way up to his resignation in 1974.

1981 - Republicans, led by Ronald Reagan, break the power of labor unions by firing all striking air traffic controllers and by engaging in numerous union-busting activities. They also begin passing tax cuts for the rich.

Early 1990s-present - Republicans launch support for various unrestricred "free trade" initiatives, resulting in millions of high-paying American jobs being shipped to Mexico and Asia. This lowers our wage levels, increases pollution levels in foreign countries, and produces massive and record trade deficits. In effect, we become slowly poorer and the other countries become richer.

1993-1994 - Republicans spread disinformation about the Clinton national health care plan, effectively killing it.

1995 - A new breed of radical Republicans, the ultra-conservative neo-conservative (Neocon) faction, gains control of the Republican Party and both houses of Congress.

Late 1990s-2005 - Republicans begin a push to privatize Social Security and force through rollbacks on regulation of banks, mortgage companies, energy speculators, and many other businesses.

2001-2009 - Republican President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney unconstitutionally expand the powers of their respective offices in a deliberate effort to make them barely accountable to Congress. Congressional Republicans act as their rubber stamp and do little to stop them. They appoint business leaders as the heads of agencies designed to regulate their businesses, ensuring that government regulation will be for the benefit of businesses rather than for the public as a whole. Bush awards unqualified Texas loyalists and old buddies important administrative jobs. Cheney meets secretly with energy industry representatives and fuel prices skyrocket. Bush politicizes the Justice Department by stocking it with right-wing ideologues. Both Bush and Cheney refuse to comply with legal Congressional attempts at oversight. Republican congresspersons do nothing.

2002-2005 - Bush and Congressional Republicans pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations (including oil companies), and very little for the rest of the country. Torture, and rendition (kidnapping and transferring to secret locations in other countries) of Afghan and other prisoners of war begins. US military outpost in Guantanamo, Cuba, is set up as a holding and torture center for captured enemy combatants, in clear violation of the 1954 Geneva Convention. Republicans pass the so-called Patriot Act, enabling the government to illegally wiretap and obtain personal information on private citizens. Habeas Corpus rights are suspended. Opponents are branded as unpatriotic or aiding terrorism.

2003-2005 - Bush, Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld push for pre-emptive war with Iraq, wildly supported by congressional Republicans as well as a number of coerced Democrats. They greatly increase the number of private contractors supplying military services, awarding non-bid contracts to friendly contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, who have previously been large campaign donors. Bush, again with overwhelming congressional Republican support, begins intercepting cheaper Canadian pharmaceutical drugs at the border, a move which hurts the elderly on fixed incomes but benefits giant US pharmaceutical companies selling their goods at a price double that of foreign countries.

2004 - Republicans, courtesy of political strategist Karl Rove, utilize a wide variety of divisive wedge issues to isolate and defeat their opponents in the general election. They also employ the use of deliberate disinformation about their opponents, deliberate LIES, a process repeated with less success in 2006 and 2008.

2008 - In the final months of his presidency, Bush grants leases to permit drilling for oil in previously protected wildlife areas and weakens government regulations over a number of industries, resulting in relaxed pollution standards. He also implants a number of right-wing key employees in regulatory agencies, making it difficult for future Presidents to gain effective control over rechanneling of these agencies once he leaves office. At their convention, Republicans jubilantly chant "Drill, baby, drill!", in support of more oil consumption rather than endorsing conservation, higher gas mileage requirements, and development of alternate energy sources.

From nearly day one, the history of Republican rule has meant favoritism for concentrated capital and less-than-desirable results for many ordinary citizens. This chronic favoritism and pattern of devastating mistakes and mismanaged governance have not spoken well for the Republican Party. They have demonstrated a repeated pattern of inability to effectively govern. They should therefore never again gain power without first undergoing a massive transformation in their philosophy and method of governing!