Hey, Hannah! Where can curious friends get more pictures of Haley, hmm? I, for one, would vote for more baby pictures. :) I've got some factual problems with the piece you forwarded, and given how important I feel like this election is, I've gotta speak up and say something. (I'm sorry for spamming all the rest of you, but I think it's important to set the record straight on this. It's way too easy for people to forward things that smear a candidate and not take the time to find out whether they're true or not.) Kate can tell you what a huge political junkie I am; I try, when I've got time, to research things. This morning I sat down with Google and looked at the thing you sent. I'm putting a lot of links to reference material at the bottom of this email; I'm gonna write my own points up here at the top. Please, please, read them, and tell me what you think. 1) About Bill Clinton cutting the military. Clinton inherited a military that Reagan had spent 8 years inflating for the express purpose of winning the Cold War. We had won the Cold War by the time Clinton took office. (The first President Bush had already cut the military budget as well.) The Cold War was over, Russia's economy and military was falling apart -- there was no need for us to keep spending the same amount on our military. (Indeed, we'd have trashed our economy further if we'd done it.) Intriguingly, when George W. Bush took office in early 2001, he submitted basically the exact same military budget Clinton did, pissing off a lot of people who he'd promised otherwise. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight? Maybe he cut the military too much, maybe not. If you take Russia, China, and the seven "rogue" states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria) and combine all their military budgets ... we spend 4 times as much on our military as all of them put together. We're spending a *lot*, and have for years. Somehow I don't think the point of the smear piece was Clinton, though, so let's move on to ... 2) About Kerry voting against all these weapons systems. This, with all due respect, is a complete load of hooey. There were certainly weapons systems that Kerry opposed, as far back as 20 years ago, but they were either non-working pie-in-the-sky systems like Star Wars, systems which were becoming obsolete, or nuclear weapons which were nearly useless once the Cold War ended. The specific weapons listed in the piece you forwarded were teeny parts of several giant defense spending bills that Kerry (and a lot of other senators, both Republican and Democrat) voted against for budgetary reasons or as part of the normal Senate process of getting edited bills passed. The same bills had all the money for military salaries, base expenses, etc, in them, too -- you might just as well say that every Senator who voted against them was voting to literally end the US military entirely, which is completely ridiculous. Either those bills passed as was, or they had some of the pork taken out of them and passed later on. The Republicans are trying to make it sound like Kerry voted specifically against some very useful weapons systems, which is just not true. Read the links I found below for the details. Amusingly, a lot of the systems listed there were ones that Dick Cheney, when he was Secretary of Defense, had tried to get rid of. Here's a quote from Cheney in 1989: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward. AH-64 ... forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years. (Note that this testimony took place over six years before Senator Kerry supposedly voted to "kill" the AH-64.) The first President Bush also wanted to get rid of a lot of useless, overly expensive programs, too, but I won't include them here. Check out the link to snopes.com below, for details. 3) Budgeting. Let's look around here at home. Are you guys planning to send Haley to public school? Let's hope that there's a little more money in the budget for education once she turns 5, because as it stands now, US public schools are struggling for money. (And towns are raising property taxes to compensate for getting less money from the feds -- how's that tax cut helping us, again?) Let's also hope that she's ready to take care of you and Dwayne when you get older and retire, because if Bush's spending patterns continue, the money that gets taken out of every one of your paychecks for Social Security isn't coming back to you. Bush is spending your and my tax money at a frightening rate. (Way, way faster than Clinton did.) He's cutting taxes on hugely wealthy people who don't need their taxes cut, and he's throwing nickels to you, me, and other people who work for a living. He's spending money that the government doesn't have, and in taking on this giant national debt, he's saddling Haley, Luke and Lindy's wee sprout, and every other kid out there with the interest payments. This is not responsible governing. This isn't even _conservative_ governing. *Republicans* can't stand this spending. (Those Republicans who are more interested in small government, lower taxes, reduced interference in people's lives, and other traditional conservative values, that is.) These are the spending habits of some kid who's got his own credit card and doesn't realize that someone's going to have to pay the bill someday. Funny how the balanced budgets recently seem to come about under Democratic presidents, huh? Funny how Bush doesn't seem worried about China and Japan owning all these loans of ours. 4) How much US taxpayer money went into paying for the first Gulf War? Between 5 and 7 billion dollars. The other 55 billion dollars came from France, Germany, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of our allies. How much US taxpayer money is going into this Gulf War? About 200 billion dollars. Haley is going to have to pay for that. It's a side effect of rushing to war alone, without the U.N., with a bare handful of allies, for reasons we knew at the time were bogus. We rushed in without enough troop strength, and were so convinced that the Iraqis would love us that the people who said we needed to guard against looting, to bring more troops to keep the peace, to hang onto the Iraqi police force -- they were ignored or fired. Those decisions, all of them, are going to affect the US economy and safety -- Haley's future -- for years and years to come. There was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and there were no weapons of mass destruction to find. The 9/11 commission said so, our own weapons inspectors said so, the UN weapons inspectors said so, and the troops over there on the ground now say so. 5) Kerry is a thoughtful, reasonable man. He is clearly and passionately committed to our country, and has been for years. Yeah, I've got some quibbles with him, too -- I wish he paid less attention to polls and came across less stiffly, and I'm still furious with him for voting along with the rest of Congress to give Bush war-authority too quickly -- but considering the amount of actual harm that Bush is doing to our economy, to our place in the world, to our safety here at home, I am doing everything in my power to get Kerry into office. It's not just me (a bleeding-heart liberal if there ever was one) saying this, either. There are lots and lots of very prominent Republicans saying so, too. This is from Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's son, John: >> The Republican Party I used to know placed heavy emphasis on fiscal >> responsibility, which included balancing the budget whenever the state of >> the economy allowed it to do so. The Eisenhower administration >> accomplished that difficult task three times during its eight years in >> office. It did not attain that remarkable achievement by cutting taxes >> for the rich. Republicans disliked taxes, of course, but the party >> accepted them as a necessary means of keep the nation's financial >> structure sound. >> >> The Republicans used to be deeply concerned for the middle class and small >> business. Today's Republican leadership, while not solely accountable for >> the loss of American jobs, encourages it with its tax code and heads us in >> the direction of a society of very rich and very poor. >> >> Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that >> he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the >> dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I >> will vote for him enthusiastically. and this is a former Republican Senator from Kentucky: >> I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration's style in the >> campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John >> Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have >> done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all. >> >> I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George >> Bush. I fear a secret government. [...] The wonderful thing about this >> country is its gift of citizenship, then its freedom to register as one >> sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a >> dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an >> undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by >> the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our >> country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction. >> >> I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right >> path. 6) Even though it was a war he disagreed with, Kerry _volunteered_ to go to Vietnam. Bush _specifically_ requested _not_ to go to Vietnam. That's the _only_ thing from 30 years ago that matters to me. The rest of the crap that's been slung around is ugly and irrelevant. Sorry to be so long winded. Probably nobody has read down this far, but if you have -- let me know what you think. I'll be down in Bucks County on Election Day, driving people to the polls. Maybe there could be a Pickering visit somewhere in there? best, Adam ===== Reference Links http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/weapons.asp This one is about the specific message you forwarded on, and explains exactly what Kerry did and didn't vote for, as well as including quotes from then-Secretary-of-Defense Dick Cheney and then-President George H. W. Bush about the weapons systems (many of them from the list you forwarded!) that they wanted to cut, for reasons of fiscal responsibility. http://www.factcheck.org/article147.html This one contains a lot of the same information, and is from the specifically non-partisan Annenberg center (in Pennsylvania!). This is the factcheck site that Cheney himself referred people to in the VP debate. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp This is a handy reference about how much the US spends on military spending, comparing it to the rest of the world. http://www.newamericancentury.org/defense-20010207.htm This piece, from February of 2001, talks about defense spending under G. W. Bush and Clinton, and specifically about how Bush was failing on his campaign promises to boost spending. http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=44657 John Eisenhower, (Pres. Dwight Eisenhower's son) talks about why he's voting for Kerry. http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/editorials/2004/10/20/oped-marlow1020-8060.html Marlow Cook, former Republican Senator from Kentucky, talks about the same.