A different state of the Union

A few looks at what's going on.
- Just last month, the GAO issued a report warning that the administration still had no plan in place for freezing terrorist cash assets. So, we'll listen to their phone messages but we won't stop their spending. Cute.
- Ford received $250 million in tax credits as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. They just eliminated hundreds of jobs. Cute.
- Vincente Fox estimates that there are 23 million Mexicans in the US illegally. They have been given maps to help them get here, and the Mexican Army has been known to provide them with fire support, "accidentally" of course. The government response: hire them to rebuild New Orleans.
- Saddam's WMD may have been shipped out of Iraq right under the government's noses. Pardon me, guys, but while you were raving about how Saddam could use these weapons on us at any moment, shouldn't you have been watching to make sure they weren't? I mean, getting them out of Iraq would have been the first step, right?
- The Abramoff scandal: Republicans respond to corruption charges by saying that the Democrats took money, too. As if that made it all right. Hey, guys - if the Democrats jumped off a cliff, would you jump too? Meanwhile, the president has just "promoted" the head investigator to a new job. As reported elsewhere, Abramoff got away from his last scandal, in Guam, when the president removed the US Attorney running the investigation.
- Exxon, which just posted record profits for the year, wants the money - $5 billion - it spent on the Exxon Valdez disaster . . . refunded.
- China, future enemy #1, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, while France, the neocon punching bag, is number 2. America's annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means all those America-First ultra-patriotic corporations, like Haliburton and Exxon, are either not selling too much, or are putting their profits into offshore banks. So much for their faith in America.
- Domestic spying, by both NSA and the Pentagon, defended with the statement "national security". In other words, we need to do this in order to know if anyone is planning to attack us. Meanwhile, bin Laden announces - on international TV - that he intends to attack us.

And so it goes.