ANOTHER GREAT MESSAGE FROM THE GOOD PEOPLE AT TRUEMAJORITY ... How to Put Our Moral Values to Work ... TrueMajority's Vision Versus Bush's

Wednesday night, President Bush said a lot of nice things, but one phrase that struck us as among the most true and important was this: he said that America should not let poor nations become "recruiting grounds for terror." We must act, he said, to address the poverty and political corruption that breed terrorism. We could not agree more.

If only his actions backed up his words. For example, if Bush were serious about fighting the conditions that spawn terrorism, he would present a budget to actually do something about it. But Bush's budget, which he will submit to Congress on Monday, is expected to allocate about $15 billion to humanitarian foreign aid-versus over $400 billion earmarked for the Pentagon, which won't even cover the $80 billion or more he'll need this year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By making an additional $15 billion available to help poor nations-which could easily be secured by eliminating idiot weapons systems such as Star Wars, our nation could save the lives of millions of kids who die of starvation each year. Then the president could begin to say, without lying, that our nation is trying to wipe out the desperation that provides such fertile soil for terrorist recruiters.

Bush's mixed-up budget priorities really show the gap between his professed moral values and his actions. So, one of our goals for the coming year is to spotlight how our country's values translate, or don't translate, into our national budget and the debate about issues in Congress. When Bush talks about how much he cares about kids, we will point out that millions of kids in America lack health insurance, Head Start, and other basics. And we will fight for more funding for those programs. When Bush talks about the Social Security "crisis," we will join others in pointing out that THERE IS NO CRISIS.

Any potential problems can be addressed quickly and easily by Congress and a president whose real agenda is to improve the lives of our nation's seniors, not to dismantle the federal government and line the pockets of Wall Street executives. And we will stand up for freedom, not just by asserting that we support it, but by, among other things, pressing forward with our campaign for honest elections at home and our efforts to end the war in Iraq. This is our plan for the coming year.