Tag: George W. Bush

I’m Rich (and My Mom Pays More for Drugs Than My Goldfish)

After watching Al Gore blast George W. Bush for giving everything to the richest 1 percent of Americans, I figured I would check for myself exactly how much I’d save under the plan at TaxClarity. I’d go from paying about $1,250 a year in taxes to $20.

They have an option to test how much you’d save under Gore’s plan, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand the bizarre mathematical formula behind Gore’s targeted tax credit for child care, so I just put in the maximum allowable deduction there, and under his plan I’d pay about $550 in federal taxes.

I guess Gore wants to make sure us wealthy folk pay our fair share.

RU-486 Becomes A Hot Political Issue

The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

Bush’s “Subliminable” Press Conferences

This Salon.Com article whines that ever since the press conference where George W. Bush’s mispronunciation of “subliminal” was widely reported, the presidential candidated seems to be avoiding the press. It’s a shame Salon doesn’t spend more time looking at just how unbalanced coverage of such gaffes is.

Last month while giving a speech on women’s health, for example, Al Gore drew a blank when trying to name the procedure used to screen women for breast cancer. He had to ask the audience to help him remember and somebody yelled out the correct answer — “mammogram.” Although there were plenty of members of the press with Gore that gaffe was reported in only a few places, usually by media critics pointing out the obvious: if Bush makes that gaffe it runs on the national news and Gore probably puts it in a commercial pointing out how out of touch Bush is with women’s health needs.

It’s this sort of unbalanced and unfair coverage that makes me laugh when I see people being concerned with how the line between editorial independence and commercial efforts is being blurred, especially thanks to the Internet. That might be a concern except for the fact that the news, especially television news, is already a heavily scripted entertainment package that rarely even comes close to trying to increase people’s understanding of complex issues.

In fact when I watch the news on the three major networks the closest analogue I can think of is to those wonderfully packaged but highly grotuesque wrestling shows. Just like the WWF, network news reduces stories down to heroes and heels, with revolving story lines that are largely made up beforehand — so a gaffe by Bush leads because the media angle is that Bush is stupid, while a Gore gaffe won’t cut it because Gore’s character is the over-intelligent policy wonk.

As far as I’m concerned network news is largely an entertainment program and should be labeled as such.

FDA Approves RU486 — With Restrictions

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today finally approved the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 after more than 12 years of battles between pro- and anti-abortion forces. Unfortunately while they approved it, the FDA attached ridiculous restrictions to the drug that will make obtaining the drug more of a hassle for women.

The drug, originally developed in France, blocks a hormone, progesterone, which in turn causes the lining of the uterine wall to thin resulting in a spontaneous abortion. The drug is more than 90 percent effect in causing an abortion if taken within 49 days of the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual period.

In a bizarre, though not unexpected, move, the FDA placed numerous restrictions on RU486 approving it only for distribution by doctors who, as the Associated Press described it, “can operate in case a surgical abortion is needed to finish the job or in cases of severe bleeding — or to doctors who have made advance arrangements for a surgeon to provide such care to their patients.”

This is ridiculous. This would be like saying that only surgeons able to preform back surgery should be able to dispense medication for back pain. Millions of people see non-surgeons for heart and other ailments which might later call for surgery without having to find a doctor who himself is a surgeon.

The Associated Press story on the approval speculates RU486 might become an issue of debate in upcoming presidential election, but oddly claimed that

Republican candidate George W. Bush opposes abortion; his father’s administration banned RU-486 from this country in 1989. The pro-choice Clinton-Gore administration worked for seven years to bring mifepristone here.

No, actually, Clinton-Gore did absolutely nothing for the past 7 years while the FDA stood around and dragged its feet on a drug approval that should have been extraordinarily routine, and apparently did nothing to try to dissuade the FDA of the ridiculous conditions they attached to the drug.

Source:

FDA approves abortion pill. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.

Bush Surges In Polls

Since I don’t plan to vote for either Al Gore or George Bush, it’s kind of fun to watch them duke it out. A couple weeks ago I thought Bush was done for. Here’s my basic rule of thumb to tell when Republicans are in serious trouble: your Republican friends start complaining about biased polls and how the national media is out to get them. Such complaints may or may not be accurate, but they’re usually a sure sign that the Republican candidate is in trouble (I knew people who in 1996 were convinced right up until the day before the election that Bob Dole was going to pull off a Truman-esque upset.)

So when my Republican friends started complaining about the polls and Bush got himself entangled with a New York Times, I figured he was done for. Now he’s surging in the polls and Gore is starting to look downright desperate. The Clinton-Gore response to the heating oil problem really makes Gore look like he is desperate and feeds into the image Republicans are trying to paint of him as willing to say or do anything to get elected (and isn’t it just the height of irony to see Gore calling for cheap gas prices after saying the American automobile culture was ruining the world in “Earth In The Balance”?)

A CNN story today on the two campaigns illustrates how Bush can beat Gore. Gore released a 72 page pamphlet on Medicare. Aside from the fact that his plan is a massive transfer of wealth from poor people to the middle class and wealthy, I wonder if people really react well to this level of detail. If I were Republicans I’d hit back with ads along the lines that destroyed any chance Clinton had of getting his horrendous health care reform bill through Congress.

On the other hand, the story reports Bush talking about how the country is experiencing an “education recession” — a catchy phrase and bringing attention to an issue that cuts across party lines. A conservative columnist I was reading the other day suggested that Bush should go after Gore for “Earth In the Balance.” While the book is nutty, I think a better strategy would be to go after Gore on education. Bush needs to ask Gore directly why he sends his kids to elite private schools, while denying poor urban residents the same options of high quality education for their kids.

Personally, I don’t care who wins. I really despise Gore, who I met briefly in 1992 and who came across as incredibly fake and shallow. On the other hand, policy wise there is really not that much difference between the two from my perspective.

Bush’s Major League Comment

Mark Steyn has the best piece I have seen so far on the controversy over George W. Bush accurate description of a New York Times reporter, Major-league what?.

In a rational world the really obscene comment would be that the reporter, Adam Clymer, once wrote a glowing biography of Edward M. Kennedy in which he not only extolled Kennedy as one of the great men of history, but actually had the gall to write that Kennedy’s “achievements as a Senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

Wow. Rumors that Bush might have done a few lines of coke in his youth had reporters going nuts last year, but Ted Kennedy’s reckless behavior that resulted in the drowning death of a young woman is redeemed by his good works.