Uncle Horn Head

On July 12, 2004 the Bush administration repealed the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, despite promising to uphold it. Now, 58.5 million acres of our national forests are at risk to destructive road-building, logging and drilling.

The Heritage Forests Campaign and our partners throughout the country are working feverishly to stop this shortsighted proposal, but we need your help! A public comment period started last week with this announcement and we need to let the administration know that the public wants our national forests protected not given away to corporate special interests.

We have set an ambitious goal of 1 million comments to send a clear and powerful message that we will not tolerate the administration giving our national forests away. Please send the letter below and if you have a few extra minutes please edit the letter with some personal comments.

Thank you for your continued support and please remember to comment today, to protect our national forests for tomorrow.

...Citizens of the United States are a decent, fair-minded people. The only reason we tolerate what is being done in our name in Iraq is that, for us, this war exists only in the realm of metaphor. The words "war on terrorism" fall on our ears much in the way that "war on poverty" or "war on drugs" did.

War is an abstraction in the American imagination. It lives there, cloaked in glory, as an emblem of patriotism. We show our love for our country by sending our troops abroad and then "supporting" them, no matter what. When images appear that contradict the high-flown rhetoric of war -- whether of young GIs disgracefully humiliating Iraqi prisoners or of a devastated holy city where vast fields of American-created rubble surround a shrine -- we simply do not take them in as real. Thinking of ourselves as only motivated by good intentions, we cannot fathom the possibility that we have demonized an innocent people, that what we are doing is murder on a vast scale...

1. George Bush had 3.4 million votes fewer than his challengers in 2000, this in a year when there was little interest in the election and the candidates were portrayed as the flip side of the same coin.

2. The only reason Nader is getting on state ballots is because Republicans are putting him there. Not Democrats, not Nader supporters, Republicans. Unless the Republicans who got him on the ballot actually go ahead and vote for him in November (and we have questioned the intelligence of Republicans on this site before), Nader will get far fewer votes than he got in 2000 (or at the very least he'll pull off the aforementioned unclear-on-the-concept Republicans).

3. Democrats are virtually united (at least for Democrats) in their desire to boot Bush. There is little likelihood that Democrats will jump ship in large numbers in November. Democrats have rarely shown such unanimity in any election.

4. Independents appear to be leaning Kerry in large numbers. You have to figure a Republican is going to proudly register as a Republican, no matter what. Independents appear to be disaffected Democrats more than anything else. Independents have overtaken Republicans in voter registration in a Harris poll I read recently (33% D, 29% R, 31% I)

5. Voter registration continues to defy expectations. After a slight increase in Republican registration after 9/11, Democrats are back to their historic advantage in registration numbers. I read on a diary this morning that registration in Durham, North Carolina alone favors Democrats by 6:1 or more.

6. Voter turnout for the primaries was phenomenal. Turnout in some states was 3 times normal. 5000 Republicans in New Hampshire alone wrote in a Democrats' name on their Republican primary ballots.

7. Three open House seats, 2 in very conservative districts, were taken by Democrats so far this year.

8. Polls run by the SCLM (So Called Liberal Media) consistently oversample Republicans and insist Kerry is in trouble. Fox, oddly enough, sees Kerry ahead or close to even. I'm just throwing out a possibility but you have to wonder, does Fox show the race close in order to scare Republicans to polls? Does ABC hope to spur Democrats with the same sort of reverse psychology? Just wondering.....

9. Bush has lost significant support among gays, Arab Americans, younger Cuban Americans, moderate Republicans, military families (if not military personnel themselves) and the elderly. Bush has gained support among......who? Name one large group of voters who can close the 3.4 million vote gap plus those Bush has lost since. Who are these people? Evangelicals alone won't cut it.

A member of the audience pulls a demonstrator's hair as he forces her out of an auditorium where President Bush was addressing a crowd of supporters at Byers Choice in Colmar, Pa. Thursday Sept. 9, 2004.

A CBS affiliate in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania stopped broadcasting around the time ‘60 Minutes’ was supposed to be broadcast, leading thousands to question whether the network dropped the show because its content was critical of President Bush.

A news director confirmed that the program was not carried, saying, “Our transmitted busted.”

“I can tell you that it was not part of a vast right wing conspiracy,” he added.

One viewer, who asked not to be named, wrote to RAW STORY outraged that WYOU would pull the program.

“When the CBS affiliate goes off air at 8:00 PM, and promptly resumes coverage at 9:00 PM, and no other stations had technical problems – it’s a clear case of censorship,” the viewer wrote. Folks have been calling WYOU non-stop about this since last night, and station officials are extremely
defensive and hostile.”

“They refuse to re-broadcast the 60 Minutes episode,” the letter continued, “telling callers to “get a life” and “take it up with CBS” if they’ve got a problem.”

The reader also noted that because CBS and NBC are part of the same duopoly, both stations likely would have been affected, but NBC carried programming as usual...

...In an overwhelmingly Republican state, Cheney now had a safe seat in Congress for as long as he wanted. On Capitol Hill, he combined a moderate demeanor with a radical agenda. People who find Cheney's extremism as vice president surprising have not looked at his congressional voting record. In 1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act. He fought efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the release of Nelson Mandelafrom jail in South Africa. He even voted for cop-killer bullets...

President Bush offered an unexpected reason on Monday for cracking down on frivolous medical lawsuits: "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country..."

...Since his inauguration, the president has delivered more than 1,000 major addresses, news conferences and short public remarks. Yet he has uttered the phrase "middle class" in only 34 of them. On Thursday night at the convention, he kept the pattern going — the phrase never passed his lips.

Maybe it's just an oversight, but in such a highly scripted White House, is anything left to chance? Omitting references to America's most critical demographic is surely no accident — it's evidence of a tectonic shift in philosophy. No longer part of a bipartisan consensus that government should work to expand opportunity for ordinary Americans, conservatives are instead eliminating those opportunities. Bush's words — or lack thereof — simply punctuate the effort.

Consider, for example, decent wages. The gateway to the middle class is considered to be a salary of about $35,000 a year. Yet the Bush administration has refused to support a serious increase in the minimum wage, which at $5.15 an hour provides a salary of less than $12,000 a year — well below the poverty line. At the same time, the White House has worked to strip workers of federal overtime pay protections, and in budget after budget it has tried to cut billions out of job training programs...