Biffster’s World

I am simply gonna steal this posting and Lyndon Johnson quote straight from The Rude Pundit:

Here’s Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 speech that laid this shit out: “There is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference…In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”

That still holds true. Its 41 years later, but we’re still seeing the same exact problems. Things get better for a while whenever we have a
Democrat in the White House. Then a Republican comes in and screws it all up again. This is not rocket science, people! The more people that we can help get out of poverty, the stronger a nation we become!

Okay, as if there wasn’t enough proof that Tom Tancredo is a friggin’ wacko, we now have more. From 9news.com: Tom Tancredo wants to change design of 9/11 memorial:

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., says the design, called “Crescent of Embrace,” could invite “controversy and criticism.” In a letter sent Tuesday to National Park Service Director Fran Mainella, Tancredo said many have questioned the shape “because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam — and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists.”

Okay, so crescents are out because the shape can be tied to Islam? The hell? Is Tancredo going to ask for clothes to be forbidden at the memorial, since the terrorists wore clothes on board the airplanes? Tancredo is out of his friggin’ mind!

The article is interesting enough, but the important information in Media Matters article about poverty rates is this bit: “the poverty rate declined every year Clinton was in office, from 15.1 percent when he took office in 1993 to a low of 11.3 percent in 2000; it has risen every year that Bush has been in office, from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.7 percent in 2004.”

So the next time that someone tells you that things are better under Bush than they were under Clinton, you can say, “Ah, but what about the poverty rate?” Of course, that’s assuming that a Bush supporter would care about the poor. Lord knows that W. himself doesn’t.