Way to Go, George!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.3 million last year, while the ranks of the uninsured swelled by 1.4 million, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.

• It was the third straight annual increase for both categories. While not unexpected, it was a double dose of bad economic news during a tight reelection campaign for resident Bush.
As his camp tells it, "Note the words "annual increase." An increase means more, and more is good! Let's not get pessimistic, like John Kerry wants you to be!"

• New federal rules will con around 6 million workers out of the overtime pay to which, until now, they have been entitled by law, according to AFL-CIO calculations.
Please, please, please, let this apply to our favorite postman, Barcodie!

• Father Knows Best?
WASHINGTON (AP): Not many people foresaw the difficulties President George W. Bush's administration has endured in postwar Iraq. Of the few who did, two stand out, both lions of the Republican Party.
One was President George H.W. Bush. The other was his secretary of state, James A. Baker.
"Incalculable human and political costs" would have been the result, the senior Bush has said, if his administration had pushed all the way to Baghdad and sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the US-led coalition ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait during the Gulf war in 1991.
"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq," Bush wrote. "The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome."
Senior Bush also cautioned Dubya not to drink and drive.

• "Let Freedom Reign!" (sic)
1. On Labor Day in 2002 Bush visited Pittsburgh. One of the people hoping to convey a message to Bush was Bill Neel, a retired steel worker. His sign said: "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us." The police wouldn't hear of it. They wanted Neel to retreat to an area one-third of a mile from the speech site. He refused to join holders of like minded signs and was arrested for disorderly conduct.
The judge threw out the charges against Mr. Neel saying: "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"

2. When Bush was speaking at the University of South Florida in 2003, a man holding up a sign saying: "War is good business. Invest your sons" was arrested because he refused to be cordoned off in an area far from where the president spoke. He was charged with "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct."

3. In a Bush visit to St. Louis in January 2003 protesters were cordoned off in an area so secure that the police wouldn't let the media in to interview the protesters and wouldn't let the protesters out to talk to the media.

4. Now the FBI and Secret Service are visiting activist folks in their homes to ask them about their protest plans. I have read many anecdotes from Americans who have has such visits, but to list them all would create a Blog 40 or 50 inches in depth.

Suffice it to say, four more years of Bush will train all if us to behave ourselves and obey the president. After all, when we criticize Bush, we are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists, and we don't want that, now do we?