GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





How Would Jesus Vote?

How Christian Values Are Reflected Within Political Parties
April 20, 2008   2:00 to 4:00 pm
University Christian Church
2007 University Avenue
Austin, Texas

Balanced Respectful Dialogue
Topic: How Would Jesus Vote? How Christian Values Are Reflected Within Political Parties
Moderators: Charles Kutz-Marks, Senior Minister
Gaye Lynn Scott, Dean, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Austin Comm. College
Democratic Party-Geronomino Rodrguez
Green Party-Dr. Charles Wukasch
Libertarian Party-Rev. Adam Groza
Republican Party-T. Getterman

This in no way reflects any endorsement or non endorsement of any religion. It is information.





As election nears; both parties should keep eyes on road

By Chris Bell
The Examiner
Wednesday, April 9, 2008

With last week’s runoff election complete, the Texas primaries have now ended. However, the bitter feelings have not.

Months ago, before everything really heated up, I wrote about how Texas Democrats were going to have to adapt to having competitive primaries once again and not allow it to be an embittering process. In other words, get over the primary and move toward November with a united front.

As the election season wore on, I came to realize just how wishful my thinking might have been. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the venom has flowed quite freely, and I don’t see a lot of these former adversaries holding hands and skipping down the road together any time soon.

I had forgotten just how ruthless Republicans could be with one another. Back when they were winning every race in sight, they did a great job of presenting a rosy facade. One would have thought they were holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” on a regular basis.

Now that the GOP wheels appear to be coming off, so is the facade. One only has to look at two local examples, races for Harris County District Attorney and Congress (District 22), to see that the knives were out with full force. In fact, just reading the newspaper coverage about the DA race, one could easily imagine Kelly Siegler wanting to re-enact her famous courtroom scene by tying Pat Lykos up in a bed and stabbing her repeatedly.

It wasn’t much better between Pete Olson and Shelley Sekula Gibbs as they battled to face Democratic Congressman Nick Lampson. Olson struck first with a radio ad that sounded like something from Radio Mystery Theatre, complete with the shocking, I mean shocking, revelation that Sekula Gibbs had once demonstrated a shred of sympathy for illegal immigrants and had taken a pro choice stand. Heresy!

Sekula Gibbs responded by correctly pointing out Olson’s carpetbagger bona fides. She also provided some comic relief with what has to be one of the greatest Freudian slips in the history of politics. While saying she lives by the medical creed of “do no harm,” she was going to impress the audience by first saying the phrase in Latin. However, she mistakenly said “caveat emptor,” which means “buyer beware.”

But the Democrats have had their fair share of family fighting as well, much of it produced by what’s happening on the national level. As the presidential race has dragged on, tempers have flared among supporters. There have been accusations of racism, sexism, lying, extreme body odor and just general unseemliness. Okay, maybe not the last two but you get the picture.

With the heightened level of attacks all the way around, it will be hard for both sides to simply mend fences and move on. But whichever party does the better job of it stands a much better chance of celebrating come fall.

Everyone would be wise to read chapter six of Chris Matthews’ “Hardball,” the best political guide book ever written. The chapter is titled “Don’t Get Mad; Don’t Get Even; Get Ahead,” and it wisely explains why the pursuit of vengeance is such a wasteful effort in politics.

Matthews quotes former Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel who said, “Don’t spend your life looking through a rearview mirror.”

Obviously, easier said than done. We'll soon see who can actually heed the good advice.





Economists Debate Link Between War, Credit Crisis

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A03

For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the connection between the Iraq conflict and the U.S. economic downturn is simple: "The president has taken us into a failed war," the California Democrat said recently. "He's taken us deeply into debt, and that debt is taking us into recession."

This assessment was put to powerful political effect in the latest congressional hearings on the war, when Democrats and Republicans alike told Army Gen. David H. Petraeus that the oil-rich Iraqi government should relieve the United States of the conflict's financial burdens. And Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) echoed the theme yesterday at a manufacturing forum in Pittsburgh.

"If we can spend $10 billion a month rebuilding Iraq," the Democratic presidential contender declared, "we can spend $15 billion a year in our own country to put Americans back to work and strengthen the long-term competitiveness of our economy."

But this logic may have more political salience than economic validity, according to many economists, who say that the assertions linking the five-year-old conflict in Iraq to the domestic economic slide have been oversimplified.

"You should support the war or oppose the war, which I do and have done from the start, on the merits of the war itself," said Martin N. Baily, a former chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. But, he added, "the current problems the United States is facing have very little to do with the war in Iraq."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR2008041402639_pf.html





Crisis of Confidence

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 14, 2008

The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan has been tracking American economic perceptions since the 1950s. On Friday the center released its latest estimate of the consumer sentiment index — and it was a stunner. Americans are more pessimistic about their situation than they have been for more than a quarter century.

Meanwhile, a recent Pew report found that the percentage of Americans saying that they’re better off than they were five years ago is at its lowest level in 44 years of polling.

What’s striking about this bleak mood is that by the usual measures the economy isn’t doing that badly — at least not yet. In particular, the official unemployment rate of 5.1 percent, though rising, is still fairly low by historical standards. Yet economic attitudes are worse now than they were in 1992, when the average unemployment rate was 7.5 percent.

Why are we feeling so down?

Our bleakness partly reflects the fact that most Americans are doing considerably worse than the usual economic measures let on. The official unemployment rate may be relatively low — but the percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs, which isn’t the same thing, is historically high. Gross domestic product is up, but the inflation-adjusted income of the median family is probably lower than it was in 2000.

Beyond that, perceptions of the current economy are strongly influenced by the public’s sense of the larger pattern.

When Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” the correct answer was “Yes.” Median household income, adjusted for inflation, was higher in 1980 than it had been in 1976. But gas lines and double-digit inflation made people feel that things were falling apart.

Conversely, unemployment was still historically high when Reagan proclaimed “Morning in America.” But people were ready to hear an upbeat message, because the economic storm seemed to have passed.

More recently, economic confidence held up relatively well during the 2001 recession, maybe because people were willing to see it as no more than a temporary interruption of the great 1990s boom.

A major reason we’re feeling so down now is that for working Americans the boom never did come back. Job creation in the post- 2001 recovery was pathetic by Clinton-era standards; wages barely kept up with inflation. Instead, corporate profits and the incomes of a tiny elite surged — sucking up so much of the economy’s growth that only crumbs were left for everyone else.

Now the boom that wasn’t has gone bust — and Americans, understandably, have lost confidence in the prospects for a return to real prosperity.

They have also, I’d suggest, lost confidence in the integrity of our economic institutions.

Early this decade, when the great corporate scandals broke — Enron, WorldCom, and so on — I expected big-business corruption to become a major political issue. It didn’t, partly because the march to war had the effect of changing the subject, partly, perhaps, because Americans weren’t ready to take a broadly negative view of the system that brought them the previous decade’s boom.

But my impression is that the subprime crisis — with its revelation that titans of finance were dealing in funny money and its tales of failed executives receiving hundred-million-dollar going-away presents — has resurrected the sense that something is rotten in the state of our economy. And this sense is adding to the general gloom.

The question is, can the next administration end America’s malaise?

Some of the causes of poor economic performance since 2000 are probably beyond any administration’s control. Raw materials were cheap in the 1990s, but in the years ahead the rise of China and other emerging economies will place increasing pressure on world supplies of oil, copper and so on, no matter what the next president does.

But reinvigorated regulation could help restore confidence to the financial system. A return to pro-labor policies could help raise real wages. Pro-competitive policies — which are not the same thing as giving powerful businesses whatever they want — could help America regain its leadership in information technology. In other words, there’s a lot that could be done to perk up our sagging confidence.

That won’t happen, however, unless the next president is someone who understands what went wrong. And right now, that doesn’t look at all certain.





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America