Good Info
A relative sent me an email with the subject line “Good Info.” Turns out it’s anything but. Here’s the content — and no, don’t read all of it. Just sniff around it so you can get the gist, then note my response at the bottom.
This email comes in three parts:
Part 1
Remember the election in 2006? Thought you might like to read the
following:
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummet
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase)
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate
(stock and mutual fund losses)
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars
6) 1% of American home s are in foreclosure
America voted for change in 2006, and we got it! Remember it’s Congress
that mak es law not the President. He has to work with what’s handed to
him.Quote of the Day……..’My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the
history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.
— Barack ObamaPart 2:
Taxes…Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics
enlightening and amazing.
www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.htmlTaxes under Clinton-1999 Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K – tax $8,400 Single making 30K – tax $4,500
Single making 50K – tax $14,000 Single making 50K – tax $12,500
Single making 75K – tax $23,250 Single making 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 60K – tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K – tax $21,000 Married m aking 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 125K – tax $38,750 Married making 125K – tax $31,250The democratic candidate will return to the higher tax rates.
It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think
Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If
Obama is elected, he will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of
the people that fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to
happen. This is like the movie The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam
somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened.Part 3
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:
I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the
war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.
I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until
they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I
have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each
year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob772. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such
as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school
education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of
English!
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the
American-bor n children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare &
social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by
the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two
and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. ;In particular, their
children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens
that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens
from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth,
heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht12. The National Policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass
deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an averagecost of
between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf ant13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to
their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm14. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes
committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtmlThe total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.
Are we that stupid? If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the
message. If, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope
youforward it to every legal resident in the country including every
representative in Washington , D.C. – five times a week for as long as it
takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and
enforcement thereof.
My relative, someone I love deeply and think highly of, asked, “what do you think about this???????????????”
Here’s what I thought, and I figured I’d share it with you now just a day and a half prior to the election, not because I think there’s anyone left to sway, but because I just need to write it one more time and this seems like my last chance.
I looked everywhere for the “Good Info” promised in the subject line, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found a tissue of innuendo and bad argument, the main thrust of which is to conflate two separate dynamics: the Democrats winning control of Congress in 2006, and, well, the seeming apocalypse since. One benefit of having studied logic is to understand that whether or not these things happened concurrently, it doesn’t follow that one led to the other. Otherwise, if a two-headed calf were born in early 2007, one could blame the Democrats.
On the other hand, significant failures can be directly traced to the Bush disintegration (er, administration):
1. Poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina, a situation for which the initial federal response was, “Get out of town” to tens of thousands of people who had no mode of transport out of town
2. Invading a foreign nation that never attacked us, thus embroiling us in a fantastically ill-conceived and costly war that has killed about 5,000 of our own troops, maimed or wounded tens of thousands more, and killed perhaps 100,000 or more innocent civilians while serving to decimate our own economy
3. Pursuing a fiscal policy that has resulted in a debt so staggering it is difficult to envision ever climbing out of it, and therefore
4. Hobbling the eventual forthcoming economic upswing by hampering investment opportunity
5. Stripping Americans of countless civil liberties under the guise of protecting us from terrorism
6. So completely enhancing the power of the presidency so as to create for all intents and purposes a near-dictatorship where people can be stripped of habeas corpus and thrown into the gulag without access to fair defense
7. Lying to the Congress, the media, the voters, and themselves without regard for the consequences.
If that sounds alarmist, it isn’t, no matter how alarmed most of us might be. The lies and the perfidy are so great they defy convention, and therefore seem science fictional. But they’re all too true. And the list of offenses is only partial.
It’s not just the vast majority of Americans who are (finally) alarmed. I just came back from the Netherlands, where plenty of other people are astonished and dismayed as well. I realize that the GOP fringe circus likes to mock the crowds that Barack Obama was able to summon during his European tour this summer, but I ask you to look at those crowds another way: They represent people similar to us who are terrified by the collision of our overwhelming power with our errant behavior. Filled with fear — of us — these people have hope that positive change is coming to our nation and, by extension, to theirs and the rest of the world. I have that same hope, because at this point I desperately need that hope.
So, with regard to the “Good Info” sent below, I ask this: Don’t fall for it. Read it closely and ask yourself if the litany of fiasco derives from people who have been in power for 18 months, or whether it results from a malicious course plotted from September 12th, 2001 on that has led us here, to the most critical juncture in this nation’s history since 1860 when the nation was riven in two. We survived that. I hope we survive this. I believe we can. But doing so requires a clear recognition of the catastrophically failed course we have been on, and a determination to set a new course with a new administration grounded in a simple proposition: improving the lives of the people it serves.
Lee
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I don’t know about anyone else thinks, but I will be very happy when this election cycle is over. Being in New Jersey I and many others have been subjected to the junk from the fight for Pennsylvania. If election slime was a physical thing the country would be covered in two feet of the stuff.
I know this is an important election, possible the most important in many, many years. I intend to vote early Tuesday and then go to work and try to avoid the election news for awhile. I don’t want to be sent into a stupor from hours of talking heads babbling on about what they think the election will mean.