After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Bush the stargazer
George W. has come up with a bold idea that I enthusiastically support.
Bush says he wants to go to the moon and Mars, and I, for one, see no reason not to send him there! Who are we to stand in the way of progress?
Unfortunately, it turns out that he didn't mean that he'd go, but that America should launch a new mission into space—along with launching multibillions of our tax dollars out there, too. Actually, he's already taken us to the moon in terms of deficit spending: In only three short years, he's turned America's $240 billion federal surplus into a $530 billion budget deficit.
His aides say that Bush's proposal is about "presidential vision." Yeah, and you don't need the Hubbell telescope to see where he's looking. This fuzzy-minded, big-budget Mars scheme hauls space shuttles full of our tax dollars into the vaults of some of his biggest campaign contributors. For decades into the future, corporate contractors will be fattening themselves at this trough. It will also empty our public treasury of any remaining possibility to finance the things we really need—such as good health-care for everyone, the best education for every child, and a crash program to give America energy independence by developing our country's vast alternative-energy sources.