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Daily Archives: June 9, 2006
Was Bush showing his dad who’s boss?
June 9, 200612:46 p.m.
The elder Bush led a behind-the-scenes campaign to remove Donald Rumsfeld earlier this year, even going so far as recruiting his replacement, Sidney Blumenthal suggested in an article in salon.com. So when President Bush said, “I’m the decider and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain,” he may have been talking to his father as much as the nation.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
AIDS, 25 years later
June 9, 200612:11 a.m.
The Eagle published a commentary Thursday by Michael Gottlieb (in photo), the UCLA physician who first identified AIDS and published his findings 25 years ago this week. He wrote: “I find this week’s anniversary one of intense emotions: despair about the lives lost to the disease; frustration with the Bush administration’s promotion of abstinence over condoms for HIV prevention; anger at the denial, stigma and prejudice that still fuel the spread of HIV around the globe. But mixed in with those feelings is also pride in the remarkable medical progress we’ve made in HIV treatment.”
What’s needed during the next 25 years? Gottlieb wrote: “Minimizing the effect of another quarter-century of this plague hinges on our collective will to prevent new infections, find a vaccine and cure, and get lifesaving medicines to all who need them.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Praise for Bush on AIDS
June 9, 200612:07 a.m.
On the same subject, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had praise for President Bush’s work on AIDS, saying he “has taken AIDS more seriously than any of his predecessors or almost any other world leader. His huge increases for AIDS funding (quadruple the spending by President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress at the time) are expected to save about nine million lives.” Kristof does argue that the administration’s promotion of abstinence is fine, but that “condoms must be part of the message,” in part because “often what kills African women isn’t flings but marriage” — to men who infect them.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Why make the rich richer and the country poorer?
June 9, 200612:05 a.m.
Repealing the estate tax, columnist Sebastian Mallaby argues, would be the worst possible response to the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the nation’s growing debt. He writes:
“The nation faces the prospect that inequality will damage meritocracy. When the distance between top and bottom widens, it becomes harder to traverse the gap; people of low birth are stuck at the bottom, and human talent is wasted. What is the dumbest possible response to this? Take the tax that limits what the super-rich pass on to their children and get rid of it. Send a message to hereditary elites: Go ahead, entrench yourselves! . . .
“Repealing the estate tax is like erecting protectionist barriers around the hereditary elite. It is anti-meritocratic and unfair — and antithetical to this nation’s best traditions.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Parkinson free as a bird now?
June 9, 200612:01 a.m.
Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks noted that the music blaring as Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and her new running mate, former Kansas GOP chairman Mark Parkinson, waded into the crowd at the Overland Park announcement event last week was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Hendricks wondered why: “Might it be that, in becoming a Dem to run as Sebelius’ No. 2, Parkinson was now free of the increasingly right-leaning state party he once led?”
The lyrics, after all, are:
“If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
There’s too many places I haven’t seen
And if I stayed here with you, now
Things just wouldn’t be the same
Well I’m as free as a bird now,
And a bird you cannot change.
And a bird you cannot change.
And a bird you cannot change.
Lord knows I can’t change.
“Bye, bye, it’s been a sweet love.
And though this feeling I can’t change.
Please don’t take it badly,
The Lord knows I’m to blame.
And if I stayed here with you now
Things just wouldn’t be the same.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
