...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Wednesday, February 25, 2004
      ( 1:46 PM )
 
News You Can Use

Maru gives us a wealth of news about our esteemed leader's wavering grasp on reality.

Start here with Fact vs. Claim - a run down of facts as opposed to what Bush claimed in his speech to the governors this week.

And, while the president, his supporters and the media are screaming "Gay Marriage! Aaaaah!", two more US solders were killed in Iraq today.

And in the scary column: Republican legislators are introducing a bill to change the presidential succession rules:

Cornyn and other lawmakers, along with a number
of scholars and researchers, think the law is outdated
and may be unconstitutional.

The bill he introduced with Republican Sen. Trent Lott
of Mississippi would remove members of Congress
from the line of succession. Instead, Cabinet members,
beginning with the secretary of state and followed by
the treasury secretary, defense secretary, attorney
general and the homeland security director, would
form the line behind the president and vice president.

Part of the argument against the current law is that
the country could be left with a president who holds
views far different from those of the person elected
by the American people.

So in other words, if the President and Vice President die, then wholly non-elected people would take over the government and appoint even more non-elected people into power.

In other news, Body and Soul has a link to an article that explains a story my husband heard on NPR last week and couldn't believe: The Bush is CREATING MANUFACTURING JOBS! But wait...

In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday,
N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's
Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly
classifying such workers was "an important
consideration" in setting economic policy.

Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and
other fast-food enterprises alongside those at
industrial companies like General Motors and
Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin
to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a
vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981
federal regulatory proposal.

[...]

David Huether, chief economist for the National
Association of Manufacturers, said he had heard
that some economists wanted to count hamburger
flipping as manufacturing, which he noted would
produce statistics showing more jobs in what
has been a declining sector of the economy.

See? There's always a way around the rules! So if you see manufacturing jobs increase later this year, you can be confident that while more middle class income families are falling into poverty, more teenagers than ever are working happily part time at McDonalds.

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