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ust be balanced without one additional dollar in revenues being collected heaven forbid you add a dollar to the tax bill of someone who has a home food and clothing maybe a nice car a swimming pool lots of electronic equipment maybe even i phone and a plasma tv you must protect these people at all costs and not give a damn about people who are trying to live on less than 900 a month with a barebones system of healthcare if they are eligible at all when i came home from this meeting feeling if my values had taken a beating i turned on msnbc and there was rachel maddow interviewing jared bernstein vice president biden s chief economist and economic policy adviser where every other phrase out of the man s mouth was about protecting the middle class of course the president had just reviewed the work of the middle class task force there was also the little okay not so little bomb shell to freeze non security discretionary spending translation from government ese of non security discretionary spending freeze means freezing many support programs that help poor people disabled people those that need a helping hand or else they may fall into the abyss there is a war being waged on the poor in this country is it because we ve had an economic disaster and being poor is too close to the surface and we must at all cost tamp it down and pretend the poor don t exist actually that is too kind and gives too much credit to the america s ability to self delude although we are pretty good at it the poor have no voice they have no money to give to political campaigns they have no wealthy lobbyists advocating on their behalf they do have a handful of progressive advocates who make little money who are smart dedicated advocates from organizations like the southern poverty law center families usa and a smattering of others making their case but there isn t much money behind those dedicated advocates the poor as much as we try have no voice this nation has become increasingly callous and increasingly selfish we have a nation of people whining about taxes while people starve and go without healthcare brick by brick we are dismantling the safety net for the most vulnerable in our society democrats and republicans are both going down this road republicans because of the myopic view on taxes democrats because they are too scared to take a principled stand and follow the money this will only get worse now that corporations have been freed to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns in the name of free speech to me that is an insult to the first amendment money is speech that gives exxon more of a right of free speech than a single mother of two struggling to keep her family fed and sheltered is free speech a commodity are those that have money inherently more deserving of free speech than those without according to the roberts court yup there is a war on the poor being waged in this country and the poor are losing andre bauer s remarks about stray animals sound mainstream now don t they 2 comments posted in civil liberties culture domestic issues general healthcare liberal blogs news news and politics policy and law policy and research political political analysis politics republican social and political commentary social and politics tags andre bauer california california budget economy jared bernstein middle class obama people with disabilities poverty rachel maddow schwarzenegger spending freeze taxes posted by randy allgaier january 1 2010 a reflection on a decade of deception and fear and the signs for a new decade of hope call them the zeroes call them the uh ohs call them the aughts call it the first decade of the century or the first decade of the millennium but whatever moniker you decide to use the years from 2000 2009 have been an odd decade that has defied many a pundit to label it with a catchy pithy adjective i have been reflecting on the last ten years and i began to write a piece describing the decade as the decade of fear but it just didn t feel right there was something more insidious than fear and fear mongering it was the deception used in that fear mongering it was the lies of the bush administration and the havoc that was wrecked on this nation over the past ten years it started with an election that was questionable and installed a president who lost the popular vote and who s winning the presidency hinged on the electoral votes in a state governed by his brother with some pretty questionable ballots and it ended with the election of a man who has been accused of being hitler a socialist and foreign born since we view the world through the lens of our own experiences one cannot truly observe the themes of the decade without putting them into personal context so i will interweave some personal milestones throughout this commentary it is curious ironic and a sick cosmic joke that we began the decade with the election of a new president who lost the popular vote and was considered illegitimate for tangible reasons by reasonable people and we ended the decade with a new president that was duly elected by a substantial majority but who has been riddled with attempts to delegitimize his presidency for absurd and unfounded reasons by very unreasonable that is putting it kindly people it all began in 2000 a new millennium when i was a kid i wondered what the year 2000 would be like would it be the jetsons would it be mad max what would the world be like as the calendar passed from 1999 to 2000 when i thought about 2000 in my youth i knew i would be 42 years old but i saw myself celebrating the new millennium in some penthouse drinking vintage champagne surrounded by erudite witty café society types my childhood fantasy of my adult life had a cole porter soundtrack the reality of the celebration of the new millennium was much better it was spent in the quiet beauty of mendocino in the arms of my partner of 11 years and with my 1 ½ year old puppy as a fire crackled in the fireplace of our cozy room at the stanford inn and the only sound was of a bell from a nearby church tolling it could not have been more perfect but 2000 was personally a challenging year i had been diagnosed with aids in march of 1999 after living with hiv for more than a dozen years in early 2000 i made the most difficult decision of my life i recognized that my illness was taking its toll and if i continued to work i would die i loved my work and it was an excruciating decision and it has been an overriding element of this decade for me of course nationally 2000 was dominated by a presidential election an election where a son of privilege and the establishment who went to andover yale and harvard a legacy student in all cases and clearly not admitted to these schools due to intellectual prowess reinvented himself as a cowboy everyman a candidate who made being disengaged a zen like art form a candidate who eviscerated his opponent in the republican primary with ugly racism remember the allegations by the bush operatives that senator mccain s adopted daughter was the result of an affair mccain had with a black woman the democratic ticket was headlined by vice president al gore and he chose as his running mate senator joe lieberman no one thought that the choice was inspired but no one thought it was crazy either only in retrospect and only after watching senator lieberman s antics during the 2008 election and beyond have we realized that the choice wasn t much better than senator mccain s choice of sarah palin it wasn t the campaign that was the big story it was figuring out who won the election that was the story vice president al gore clearly won the popular vote but the election boiled down to florida and its electoral votes most americans didn t have much understanding of the arcane electoral college which actually elects the president but they got a crash course in 2000 in most states the presidential candidate with the majority of votes wins all of the electoral votes even if the candidate wins with only one more vote than the other candidate a vestige of colonial america that was written into our constitution that is as absurd in the 21st century as a state with a low population having two senators but only one member of the house of representatives giving immense power to senators who represent more wildlife than humans while i am a lover of our constitution and i think it is the most amazing document written to establish a government it was written in a decidedly 18th century world while the balance of powers the bill of rights and 99 of the constitution is a masterpiece in crafting a government that acknowledges the failings of power and those who have it there are flaws like writing slavery into the document and outmoded ideas like the electoral college of course the possibility of winning the presidential election without winning the popular vote has happened before and was the least of the issues of the 2000 election it was bush v gore and the decision made by the supreme court that essentially handed the election to george w bush thus setting the stage for the question of whether or not bush was elected or anointed lee and i were in london when gore conceded the election to bush in december there were a number of americans at our hotel having breakfast and we were all talking about the thought of a president george w bush and many of us talked about staying in london and becoming expatriates we knew he was unqualified and would not be a great president little did we know what an unmitigated disaster he would be and the hell our nation would endure under his watch that sense of unease carried through to the summer of 2001 president bush was on one of his many vacations at his ranch in crawford tx engaging in his favorite pastime clearing brush when he was given the now famous presidential daily briefing on august 6 2001 entitled bin laden determined to strike in us which stated in part fbi information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks including recent surveillance of federal buildings in new york 36 days later we endured the attacks of september 11th while president bush read my pet goat to a group of florida school students the 9 11 attacks defined the decade and the united states will never again be the same could the bush administration have been more attuned to the threat after the august pdb maybe but who knows but what i do know is that as the decade comes to a close and a nigerian terrorist attempted to blow up an airplane en route to detroit the very people who ignored the warnings in the august 8th pdb such as dick cheney are criticizing president obama hypocrisy is an understatement for these guys but i am getting ahead of myself here 9 11 was pivotal and was defining for a generation the nation was numb and in shock after 9 11 even pacifists like me were fantasizing about turning afghanistan into a glow in the dark parking lot the nation was unified in our resolve and we were one america who could forget the members of congress from both parties singing god bless america at the capitol we were united in a way i hadn t seen before in my lifetime we also had the world behind us and we had the support of virtually every nation on earth on september 20 2001 just 9 days after the 9 11 attacks lee and i went to italy for a few weeks many friends were shocked that we would fly just a little over a week after the attacks my response was that doing anything else would have been allowing the terrorists to win everywhere we went people told us they supported the united states and they were horrified by the attacks many of the people we talked to italians and people of other nations had been touched by the attacks knowing someone who was in the world trade center or having friends who knew someone who was at the trade center on the fateful morning unfortunately that national unity and that international good will were squandered the president didn t call on our inner angels to rally for this country he called on our greed and told us go shopping on october 7 2001 the us began its action in afghanistan operation enduring freedom we were supported by the international community in that conflict a conflict that continues today it is a disaster that president obama inherited because the bush administration abadoned its commitment and the support has waned in both this country and throughout the world bush cheney rumsfeld co were unsuccessful in their efforts in afghanistan because they really didn t care we pushed back the taliban temporarily we installed a puppet government albeit one that would end up rife with corruption but the president and his gang did not care about stabilizing afghanistan they had their eyes in a different prize infamously president bush and the neo cons took their eye off of afghanistan we didn t smoke out bi laden as the president said articulating his notorious cowboy diplomacy the neo cons had looked towards invading iraq well before 9 11 the most disturbing part of this was because they felt that having an american form of democracy in the mid east was a way to help the usa s energy needs and the petroleum industry s profits it was economic self interest not national security while we now know that there were plans for an invasion of iraq well before 9 11 the road to the invasion of iraq began to be articulated publicly with speeches in late 2001 and 2002 in a series of speeches in late 2001 and 2002 president bush expanded on his view of american foreign policy and global intervention declaring that the united states should actively support democratic governments around the world especially in the middle east as a strategy for combating the threat of terrorism and that the united states had the right to act unilaterally in its own security interests without the approval of international bodies such as the united nations this represented a departure from the cold war policies of deterrence and containment under the truman doctrine and post cold war philosophies such as the powell doctrine and the clinton doctrine there were a few seminal moments as the bush doctrine came into clearer view this is a doctrine of foreign policy that dominated the last decade and boldly articulated the rationale of a preëmptive strike a policy that is antithetical to all of us policy before bush and was a striking departure from two centuries of a moral compass about war that drove the united states military engagement president bush addressed the cadets at the u s military academy west point on june 1 2002 and made clear the role preemptive war would play in the future of american foreign policy and national defense we cannot defend america and our friends by hoping for the best we cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign non proliferation treaties and then systemically break them if we wait for t...