MESSAGE FROM THE 'WORKING FAMILIES NETWORK'
If there's any sign that proves we need to rebuild America with better priorities, here it is ... While working families struggle to survive the Gulf Coast hurricanes, shrinking paychecks, high gas and oil prices and lack of insurance, President George W. Bush and his congressional allies want to cut vital survival programs while giving $70 billion in new tax breaks to the rich. The House of Representatives will start voting on these attacks on working families THIS week. Let's post some signs of our own, telling the president and his friends we need some better priorities AND we need them now. By clicking on the link below, you can post a virtual sign protesting the misguided priorities of elected leaders who are fighting for the rich and well-connected rather than regular working families. President Bush and Congress will get your message. Click here: http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/G7akW641Qc5f/

President Bush's allies in Congress want to slash $50 billion from critical working family programs, including Medicaid, food stamps, child support and student loans. They claim they need the cuts to pay for rebuilding the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast--but in fact every penny of these cuts would get poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the form of still more tax breaks. Let the president and your members of Congress know what you think about these priorities now. Click this link to join the online protest: http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/G7akW641Qc5f/

Join the online march today to tell the Bush administration and Congress:

Get your priorities straight:

1] DON'T cut vital public programs that families need, such as Medicaid, food stamps, education and housing.
2] Rebuild our crumbling schools, hospitals and highways.
3] Support affordable health care for all.
4] And STOP giving tax breaks to the rich instead of investing in good jobs and a better future for our children.

Let your elected leaders know you expect them to put working families first--before the ultra-rich and politically connected.

YES, THEY LIED
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout Editorial
Find a defender of the White House on your television these days, and you are likely to hear them blame Bill Clinton for Iraq. Yes, you read that right. The talking point du jour lately has focused on comments made by Clinton from the mid-to-late 1990s to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat. The pretzel logic here, of course, is straightforward: this Democratic president thought the stuff was there, and that justifies the claims made by the Bush crew over the last few years about Iraqi weapons. Let's take a deeper look at the facts. Right off the bat, it is safe to say that Clinton and his crew had every reason to believe Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s. For one thing, they knew this because the previous two administrations - Reagan and Bush - actively assisted the Hussein regime in the development of these programs. In other words, we had the receipts.

After the first Gulf War, the United Nations implemented a series of weapons inspections under the banner of UNSCOM, and scoured Iraq for both weapons and weapons production facilities. They lifted bombed buildings off their foundations, they used a wide range of detection technologies, and after seven years of work, they disarmed Iraq. A good place to start any detailed discussion of this matter is with former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who spent seven years in Iraq searching out and destroying Iraq's weapons and weapons manufacturing capabilities. "After 1998," Ritter reports in a book I wrote in 2002 titled War on Iraq, "Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed. What this means is that 90%-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability, including all of their factories used to produce chemical, biological, nuclear long-range ballistic missiles, the associated equipment of these factories, and the vast majority of the product produced by these factories, had been verifiably eliminated." Read the whole article at ... http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/1108051.shtml