The State of the Union Speech, from Factcheck.org 1
Factcheck.org is an arm of the “Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state, and federal levels.”
Their analysis of what Mr. Bush left unsaid last Tuesday is most interesting:
The President left out a few things when surveying the State of the Union:
He proudly spoke of “writing a new chapter in the story of self-government” in Iraq and Afghanistan and said the number of democracies in the world is growing. He failed to mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan yet qualify as democracies according to the very group whose statistics he cited. Bush called for Congress to pass a line-item veto, failing to mention that the Supreme Court struck down a line-item veto as unconstitutional in 1998. Bills now in Congress would propose a Constitutional amendment, but none have shown signs of life. The President said the economy gained 4.6 million jobs in the past two-and-a-half years, failing to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office. The net gain since Bush took office is just a little more than 2 million. He talked of cutting spending, but only “non-security discretionary spending.” Actually, total federal spending has increased 42 percent since Bush took office. He spoke of being “on track” to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009. But the deficit is increasing this year, and according to the Congressional Budget Office it will decline by considerably less than half even if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to lapse. Bush spoke of a “goal” of cutting dependence on Middle Eastern oil, failing to mention that US dependence on imported oil and petroleum products increased substantially during his first five years in office, reaching 60 per cent of consumption last year.
Smoke and mirrors.
February 7, 2006 at 10:14 pm
I love FactCheck. I need to add that to my list of resources. They especially came in handy sometime back for me in regards to the WMD case, John Roberts, and a few other cases the Rethuglicans were very touchy about.
Oh yeah, now I remember the one I really liked that they did. The Social Security debate. They tore Bush a new one in regards to what he was claiming.
Nice to see you still checking in. I wish I had the time to put more into my blog right now. Trying, though. Put a couple posts up today. Also, I had a post up a few weeks ago about the class I’m taking that I thought you’d be interested in.
CIS-270 – Modern Systems Analysis and Design. God, what a class. Gantt charts, expected time, latest time, critical path, slack time, project construction. And that’s just the first 3 chapters. This is going to be one tough class, tell ya what!
Good to hear from you, btw. Thanks for staying in touch. Appreciated the comments on my landlord problem.