OT- Did the Prez lie about WMD?

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 01:10:14 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

Your so cute when you only look at Democrat spew when trying to make a case....

President Bush?s main economic policy ? the large tax cut of last year ? was not responsible for any of the current damage [to the economy]. Indeed, given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed.? (Editorial, ?Negative Al Gore,? The Washington Post, October 5, 2002)

ECONOMIC DATA CONFIRMS SLOWDOWN BEGAN UNDER CLINTON

Economic Statistics Confirm U.S. Economy Was Shrinking While Clinton Was In Office. ?America went into recession long before the terrorist attacks of September 11th. ? The new figures suggest ? that the economy grew more slowly in ? 2000 than was previously thought: GDP rose by 3.8% (compared with last year?s estimate of 4.1% and an initial figure of 5%).? (?Unwelcome Numbers,? The Economist, 8/3/02)

Market Indicators Confirm Recession Started On Clinton?s Watch. According to the Council of Economic Advisors, ?it was widely recognized that the economy was weak coming into 2001.?

ü The NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000; ü The S&P 500 peaked on March 24, 2000; ü The Dow Jones peaked on January 14, 2000; ü Manufacturing employment started falling in August 2000; ü Industrial production started falling in July 2000; and ü Manufacturing trade and sales started falling in April 2000.

(Council Of Economic Advisors, Talking Points, 9/20/02)

Congress? Joint Economic Committee Says Signs Of Economic Slowdown Were Apparent In Mid 2000. ?By mid-year 2000 ? signs of an economic slowdown began to proliferate; it became apparent that an economic slowdown was underway. A number of key economic and financial indicators provided evidence of such slower growth and suggested that future growth could weaken. A brief summary of important elements of this evidence, for example, would include the following:

ü Real GDP slowed from a robust 5.6 percent annualized growth rate in the second quarter of 2000 to 2.2 percent and 1.0 percent in the third and fourth quarters, respectively, before rebounding modestly to 1.2% in the first quarter of 2001. ********************************************* A slightly different take:

in tax receipts, corporate profits wipe out gains.

By Michael K. Evans Four questions about the return of the deficit: Whose fault is it? How much larger will it get? When will the U.S return to surplus? Does it matter? After posting a surplus of $236 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2000, the Federal budget deficit will rise to an estimated $165 billion in FY

2002, $265 billion in FY 2003 and $325 billion in FY 2004. That's a $561 billion swing in four years -- and if there had not been a recession and stock market collapse, the surplus would have risen another $200 billion over that period. So what accounts for the $761 billion shortfall? Regardless of what some Democratic politicians say, the Bush tax cuts account for only $150 billion of that gap. During the later years of the Clinton Administration, total Federal government spending rose about 4% per year, but so far under the Bush Administration it has increased 10% per year. About half of that represents automatic increases caused by the recession, and about half represents increased discretionary purchases, including a larger defense budget. I estimate that each of those factors accounts for about an extra $150 billion in spending, for a total of $300 billion. The shortfall in tax receipts due to the recession is estimated at slightly over $300 billion. The net result is that if there had been no Bush tax cut and no increase in discretionary expenditures, the surplus still would have disappeared because of the recession. The Bush programs then added about $300 billion more to the deficit. There is no secret about how the Clinton Administration turned the Federal budget position around from a $290 billion deficit in FY 1992 to a $236 billion surplus in FY 2000. Tax receipts rose an average of 8% per year, and expenditures rose an average of 3.2% per year. Excluding the cutbacks in defense, expenditures rose 4% per year. When Bush took over, most estimates -- including mine -- assumed that receipts would rise about 6.5% per year, and expenditures would rise about 5.5% per year, in which case the surplus would have increased about $50 billion per year indefinitely. Obviously no one is blaming the Bush Administration for the recession, which started more or less on the day he took office. Nonetheless, the collapse of the stock market and corporate profits have meant the reduction in tax receipts has been far greater than had previously been associated with a modest downturn. No one will ever be able to prove the case one way or another, but I think the recession would have been more severe without the tax cut in late 2001, although admittedly the deficit would have been somewhat smaller. Anyway, we are now facing a $325 billion deficit two years from now, with little chance of it turning around. I assume that sooner or later the economy will start to move ahead fast enough that the unemployment rate will decline, the one-time expenditures following the terrorist attacks will be phased down, and the Federal budget will get back on track, with revenues rising 6.5% per year and expenditures rising 5.5% per year. But with a deficit of $325 billion, the arithmetic works in the "wrong" direction, in the sense that expenditures in absolute terms will still be rising faster than receipts, even though they are rising more slowly in relative terms. Hence the deficit continues to widen with those percentage growth figures unless major cutbacks are made in current programs -- or tax rates are raised. What difference does it make? The higher deficit will have its major impact on the economy in two areas. First, it will crowd out private sector investment. Second, it will inhibit the stock market recovery, which means stock prices will probably rise less than their long-term average of 8% per year. The main result of the bigger deficit will be that paychecks will grow even less rapidly in nominal terms and will decline in real terms. Michael K. Evans is chief economist for American Economics Group, Washington, D.C., and president of the Evans Group, an economics consulting firm in Boca Raton, Fla. ü Key components of GDP such as real consumption expenditures slowed after mid-year as real income growth moderated, stock market values fell, employment gains lessened, and consumer confidence stalled and then deteriorated. Movements in retail sales generally corroborated these developments. ü Gross private investment also contributed significantly to this general slowdown with most key investment categories registering actual declines by the fourth quarter and advances of non-defense capital goods (ex-aircraft and parts) orders falling sharply after mid-year (on a year-over-year basis). ü The index of leading indicators trended down after January 2000. ü Employment advances slowed dramatically after mid-year. Gains in total non-farm payrolls, for example, averaged about 256,000 per month for the 2 1/2 years prior to mid-year 2000 and 44,000 per month after mid-year 2000. The average workweek also decreased after mid-year. ü The manufacturing sector also has weakened significantly since mid-year 2000. Industrial production, capacity utilization, the Natural Association of Purchasing Managers index, as well as manufacturing employment and workweek have all registered significant declines since mid-year 2000. ü Financial equity markets began to deteriorate about mid-year 2000 as well.

In short, there can be little doubt that a significant economic slowdown or retrenchment began about mid-year 2000 in the last quarters of the Clinton Administration.? (?Assessment Of The Current Economic Environment,? United States Congress Joint Economic Committee, 7/01)

Clinton?s Chairman Of Council Of Economic Advisors, Joseph Stiglitz, Said Recession Started During Clinton?s Tenure. ?It would be nice for us veterans of the Clinton Administration if we could simply blame mismanagement by President George W. Bush?s economic team for this seemingly sudden turnaround in the economy, which coincided so closely with its taking charge. But ? the economy was slipping into recession even before Bush took office, and the corporate scandals that are rocking America began much earlier.? (Joseph Stiglitz, ?The Roaring Nineties,? The Atlantic Monthly, 10/02)

Stiglitz Discredited Democrats? Claim That Bush Administration Is Responsible For Recession. Stiglitz noted that during the Clinton Administration ?the groundwork for some of the problems we are now experiencing was being laid. Accounting standards slipped; deregulation was taken further than it should have been; and corporate greed was pandered to ?.? (Joseph Stiglitz, ?The Roaring Nineties,? The Atlantic Monthly, 10/02)

Clinton Administration Grossly Overestimated Strength Of The Economy. ?Hidden in the morass of statistics, there is proof that the Clinton administration grossly overestimated the strength of the economy leading up to the 2000 election. Did the federal government join Enron and WorldCom in cooking the books? ? Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year, while in fact it was declining.? (Robert Novak, Op-Ed, ?Sunny Clinton Forecast Leaves Cloud Over Bush,? Chicago Sun-Times, 8/8/02)

Drop In Investments In First Half Of 2000 Contributed To Recession. ?A plunge in investment that began in the last half of 2000, along with the declines in equity markets, was an important force in the recession.? (Council Of Economic Advisers, ?Strengthening America?s Economy: The President?s Jobs And Growth Proposals,? 1/7/03)

*******************************************

11 July, 1999

SMOKE & MIRRORS

The Budget Surplus That Does Not Exist

By Janet Hook and Peter G. Gosselin TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON, DC-Politicians in Washington, acting as if Uncle Sam had just won the Powerball jackpot, are rapt in dreams of splurging on big tax cuts, extra Medicare benefits, shiny new airports and additional stretches of highway. But the bounteous federal budget surplus upon which their dreams rest could evaporate before lawmakers get their hands on it. Recent budget analyses that forecast the ever-mounting pot of gold rest on assumptions about politics and the economy that may prove as reliable as the profits from a Ponzi scheme. (Are you surprised that the Liar-in-Chief may be fibbing to make himself and his administration look good? WFI Editor)

One example: Budget analysts base their recent accounting of the surplus - a mind-boggling $5.9 trillion over the next 15 years, by one measure - on the dubious bet that Congress will stay within strict ceilings for spending on current federal programs. But if Congress instead allows spending to grow enough merely to keep pace with inflation, as it often has in the past, much of the surplus will disappear.

And another: White House analysts have taken the unusual step of making their surplus estimates over 15 years, rather than the more conventional five or ten. The longer time period magnifies the effects of good economic news - but it also compounds the effects of even tiny errors in forecasting. Indeed, the White House admits that if it has overestimated just one variable - productivity growth, or the increase in what one worker can produce in one hour - by a mere half a percentage point over the 15-year period, that would wipe out the surplus altogether.

"If current projections? turn out to be even slightly optimistic, the castles that political leaders are building in the sky will all come tumbling down," said an analysis by the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group based in Washington. What worries many independent budget experts is that, by the time Washington discovers any forecasting mistakes, it will already have spent the money. "The problem is not in doing projections, even ones for 15 years," said C. Eugene Steurle, a former senior Treasury official now at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group in Washington. "The problem is spending the revenues the projections suggest might become available. It takes all the slack out of the system."

The one undeniable truth about recent budget predictions is that they have been way wide of the mark. A recent review of congressional analysts' five-year deficit projections found errors averaging $250 billion a year over the last 10 years. But Washington's traditional caution in the face of uncertain projections seems to be melting in the sun of two recent reports that show surpluses mounting faster than anyone had imagined. First the White House found that the surplus would total $5.9 trillion over 15 years, half in the Social Security program and half in all the government's other operations. That was a tidy $1 trillion more than the administration had predicted as recently as February. Then the Congressional Budget Office issued a

10-year forecast that reflected a similar trend.

Those estimates set off a raucous debate about what to do with the windfall. Clinton wants a new drug benefit for Medicare. Republicans want a big tax cut. The House has passed bills vastly increasing highway and airport spending. And everyone wants to bail out Social Security. Largely overlooked in the frenzy is the fact that the surplus projections assume that Congress will make significant cuts in "discretionary" spending for programs whose budgets are set year by year in appropriation bills. Spending for these programs - from weapon procurement to education grants, they make up one-third of the budget

- has been limited by a series of caps set in the 1997 budget-balancing agreement between Clinton and Congress.

The ceilings, which did not hurt much in the first couple of years, are now growing painful. From $574 billion this year, discretionary spending is supposed to fall to $569 billion in 2002. And Republicans already have committed to spending increases for defense, education and transportation. That would mean deep offsetting cuts elsewhere. A bitter internal war is raging among Republicans, who control Congress, over whether to raise the spending caps. Conservatives insist they won't budge. "When hell freezes over," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). Moderates, by contrast, recoil at the political risks. House Appropriations Committee members say the necessary cuts are so deep as to be impossible.

Clinton and the Democrats are ready to pounce. The White House estimates, for example, that one spending bill would have to slash many labor, health and education programs as much as 18%. (It's ironic that the Democrats and the Republicans are willing to "play politics" with the most important issues effecting American nationals, without any sense of moral compunction, after all, the slashes in programs will be the result of an agreement the President entered into with Congress. The self-serving agendas of each party is little more than a source of national shame. WFI Editor) "I do not believe there is a consensus in this Congress or in this country to make the kind of draconian reductions that would be required," said Rep. David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

The government's giant health care programs have generated much the same kind of concerns as the smaller discretionary spending programs. In their forecasts of giant surpluses, for example, both White House and congressional analysts assumed the government would stick with a

1997 law to restrict Medicare coverage of home health care, nursing home care and health maintenance organizations. Congress is now under tremendous pressure from both the health care industry and the elderly to ease those restrictions. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is usually a budget hawk, a determined opponent of federal spending. But at a recent public hearing in Wichita, he promised to roll back some of the 1997 law's provisions when he was told that they had proved devastating to rural health care agencies.

Official Washington may find all manner of reasons to roll back some of the tough spending decisions of recent years. But it has voiced almost no objections to the White House decision to measure the surplus over 15 years. That's largely because administration budgeteers have used conservative economic assumptions in making their surplus estimates, in sharp contrast to predecessors who depended on projections of unrealistically robust economic growth to justify proposals to boost spending or cut taxes. But according to a broad spectrum of critics, the credibility the White House added to its estimates with conservative assumptions was effectively subtracted by the decision to extend the estimates 15 years into the future.

"Believe me, we were stretching it when we did five-year projections," said Leon E. Panetta, who was once Clinton's chief of staff, his budget director and chairman of the House Budget Committee. "Any time you get out beyond a few years, you're in never-never land." And from the Republican side, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, said: "I don't think [Clinton] should have done 15-year numbers. It created a distorted picture. It made the numbers look way too big." (Surprise, surprise! Bill Clinton did something that created a distorted picture! WFI Editor)

SOURCE: Excerpted from the 11 July, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, from an article entitled, "Heaping Surplus Built on Mountain of Assumptions." Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people. (WFI EDITOR: Anyone with half a wit would realize that the only way an institution as mammoth as the Federal Government could go from deficits to surpluses, was by employing dubious accounting methods. Along with the statistics that support the PR hype that we are in the middle of a "boom" because some people have made profits from the stock market bubble, it is conventional wisdom that the "wise" men running the country have inflation under control too. The reality that there is no boom, that there is no surplus, is as lost as the truth about Bill Clinton's honesty. His most recent travesty, the Cross Country Poverty Tour, is another example of his superficial means of addressing significant social issues. The president is a photo-op waiting to happen.)

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Now Ed..what was that again?

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Except for the voters.

It's one of those navy things. If it happens on your watch, you're screwed.

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

Gunner, you wouldn't know economic "spew" if you slipped and fell in it. What's funny here is that you have all of these quotes from sources I'm reasonably sure you don't read (The Economist is not on many peoples' reading lists, for example, and the Washington Post is the "rag" you've cited before as hopelessly liberal -- and now you're quoting from one of its editorials, of all things? Get real.)

I'm not going to glorify the bottom-dredgings you've yanked off of some neocon blog by answering each one, but your first one is a doozy, so we'll just tackle that one and let it stand for the rest:

I have a subscription to The Economist, so I just looked that article up. It's a story about how the economy declined in 2001, not in 2000. The quote you yanked from somewhere in cybersapce says that GDP rose by 3.8%. For God's sake, Gunner, that's around 0.3% higher than conservative economists thought was *healthy* just four or five years ago. 3.8% is an excellent rate of growth for an advanced economy, by any standards. All that the comment concerned was a revision in the Commerce Dept.'s earlier estimates.

In no way, shape or form did the article say, or even suggest, that the economy was "shrinking" when Clinton was in office. In fact, the graph that accompanies the article shows that GDP was growing at about 4.5% (the revised figure, which is what the article really is about) when Clinton left office. You could confirm this for yourself in about ten minutes by going to the DoC site and checking the figures.

If you want, I'll send you the HTML version of the article so you can see the whole thing, and the graph. If nothing else, it might give you pause next time you pull quotes from the blogs. They're mostly full of crap, and you'd do yourself a favor to lay off of them, anyway.

Ed Huntress

It might be helpful if you read the full text, *carefully*. What it admits is that not even one liter of nerve gas has been found. It says not a milliliter of bioweaponry has been found. And it provides no evidence at all, zero, of any ongoing nuclear materials enrichment. This despite claims by Bush in the build up to invasion that Iraq had *stockpiles* of nerve gas, bioweapons, and was within months of producing nuclear weapons.

BTW, a nuclear material enrichment plant is basically impossible to hide. Ever been to Oak Ridge? It takes *huge* amounts of electricity to run an enrichment facility. That's why Oak Ridge was located next to TVA. You can't hide something like that for even a week from both aerial surveillance and ground truth inspections. Basically, all you have to do is follow the heaviest power lines to find it. Iraq doesn't have any facility with that sort of electrical power feeding it.

Even civilian satellites like SPOT (imagery available via Terraserver) are sufficient to spot something like that. We don't need to depend on what politicians or their toadys claim, we can look for ourselves.

Gary

Correct. Nothing has been found. But the report also mentions that they have paperwork up the ass on ongoing projects, scientists whom have worked on it, yada yada yada. And they have only visited a very small fraction of the 130 or so muntions dumps.

The evidence at hand still points to them having it, or having had WMD in some quantities, and the programs continued for long after the inspectors had gone, and there were very organized efforts to hide the stuff, compartmentalize like crazy, etc etc.

Shrug..so the jury is STILL out and is likely to be for some time. You will note again that fairly recently stockpiles of US NBC agents were found, locked securely away in US munitions dumps, some 300 tons of the stuff, during several intensive military self audits. If the stuff can remain hidden that long in our own basements....

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Your points are well taken.

The possiblility of smuggled-in NBC weapons is still real. For all we know there may have been solid intelligence that Iraq had one or more nuclear warheads from some other nuclear-capable power. Not the sort of stuff the gov would necessarily tell us about, given that they would still be unaccounted for.

On the other hand, maybe there's nothing. None of us can tell for sure.

Correction... change that reference to "voters" and change that to: Except for the Media and the Lefty Politicians whom are trying to make brownie points for the upcoming elections.

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

The figures that article gave were verbatim. And any figures sited by the DoC before the elections is subject to the spin put on it by the Clinton administration. Short term bonds, etc etc are all part of that spin. The growth of the economy was the result of the Dot Com bubble expansion in your figures, and shortly thereafter..It popped. Much of the "surplus" was projected income , primarily from Capital Gains taxes that never materialized due to the bubble busting. Which is one of the reasons that California is in so damned much trouble. They spent a "projected" surplus that failed to materialize, and when the time came to pay the bills..the money was not in the kiddy.

Do you consider Insight Magazine a Blog?

I do tend to browse around the net, on diverse subjects that catch my fancy. Hell..Ive got not much else to do, while waiting for the phone to ring.

Do you have any comments on the last cite, from 1999, warning of the impending trouble?

I noticed your failure to mention it.....

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Ral your and my lying govts told us they KNEW the Iraqis had WMD, They Knew whjere they were and that they were ready to use them, So where the f*ck are they??????........................ They dont exist do they?? Bush and Blair are lying scum.

Ah but Gunner your Prez and his minions , The Brit and US intel agencies assured us dozens of times thet they Knew Saddam had WMD and that they were ready for use in 45Minutes, They said they hasd real time intel, so how can they disappear so suddenly and not be found by the US UK or UN after six months??, but more importantly the finding of 300 tons of NBC munitions on US soil totally destroys the US's credability as the good guys ( again), Its a " Do as I say, not do as I do " scenario isnt it ?. Bush , Blair and cohave led us into an unjust and illegal war that for theUS is rapidly beoming another Nam, and damage to US prestige is terrible ( again). Further more if the big ole US can so easily misplace 300 tons on NBC stuff they they most certainly do not have the right to tell other nations on how or what to do with their weapons of mass destruction its shear hypocracy.

And the US's behaviour in Iraq does nothing to quell those beliefs, see below

Or how about the hypocracy below??

Same for the Umitilla Army Depot in Oregon. They built an incenerator but the environmentalists have stopped the project in favor of chemical neutralization that won't put as much crap in the air but is more dangerous to human beings and produces a whole lot more toxic chemical waste that has to be gotten rid of.

Typical environmentalists agin, Don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

The Independent

Dale Scrogg>

No, verbatim means "in the exact words." See those little dots in your original quote? They should be three dots each, ellipses, which is where they took words *out*.

In fact, the article in The Economist makes a very different point from the one that your quote tries to squeeze out of it. It says the economy slid in

2001, not 2000, and the revised growth figures for 2000 are almost an aside. Once again, the growth rate at the beginning of Bush's term was 4.5% -- an excellent rate of growth, one that conservative economists would have considered "overheated" as late at 1995, before they realized how to have that much growth without inflation. (Hint: it's in the money supply, which is what made Greenspan look like a genius for so long.)

Gunner, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't learn economics from incidental reading online.

California is not the US (thank God). Your theory about the "bubble" is a bunch of hogwash. Explain for us, please, why manufacturing employment increased during the bubble, and why capital investment in manufacturing was going like a house afire. For starters, remember that the investment in manufacturing was being financed by debt, not by equity, so don't try to put a stock-market spin on it.

What the hell does that have to do with the article from The Economist? The article your URL points to is a polemic that most legitimate economists would take with a fat grain of salt. Capital for dot-coms dried up, in the analysis of most economists, because they weren't showing a profit and it was becoming increasingly obvious that they weren't going to.

If you want to get serious about economics, read books, not the Internet.

I didn't even read it. As has happened before, I started checking your "cites" and found that the very first one was an out-and-out lie, so I didn't waste my time with the rest. That's become an unpleasant pattern with your extensive quotations...from sources you never read.

You just cut and paste somebody else's collection of polemic and bullshit, and then challenge everyone to refute it. Well, I just did. I went back and read the original article. Your very first quote was bullshit, and you probably had no way of knowing that one way or the other. That's not the way to become informed.

Ed Huntress

Ah, so *that's* a 'recession.'

I'm just learning so much here.

:^)

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

It is a bit ironic that Bush supporters apparently claim that more time is required to locate the proof of the facts asserted by Bush about WMDs, but Bush himself was unwilling to allow the UN inspectors more time to do the very same thing.

Jeff

Its not particularly hard to carry off or bury a large quantity of NBC devices by truck in a couple months..which is the time frame we gave them. How long does it take to load NBC devices onto an aircrafts hardpoints, or into the barrel of a mortor? Those dispensers are easily portable and may likely have been in that long line of vehicles heading into Syria in the weeks leading up to the war.

Not at all. The US has had a long history of having BC in its inventory and made no bones about it. Unlike Iraq though we never intentionally used it on our enemies, or our countrymen. The various treaties called for the destruction of our stockpiles, which we did, for years. We had LOTS of the stuff..thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff. The 300 tons that were found were misplaced within the system, no differently than if a couple tanks had gotten mislaid. We found it ourselves, admitted the fuckup publicly and it was added to the material to be destroyed. Shug, Happens in every army. 300 tons of binary artillery shells is not a particularly big pile as Im sure you are well aware. Its quite common to "lose" quantities of ordnance, trucks etc etc, even though its still under lock and key. Have you ever seen a US continental munitions storage depot? They cover dozens of square miles. The one at Tonapah Nev takes an hour to pass, at freeway speeds. Its been said that there are munitions stored there from the Spanish American war. The American west is studded with such depots. Literally thousands of such sites.

Gunner

Bush , Blair and

Sure we have the right. We have destroyed ours, even the stuff that was misplaced. And we have no history of using it on our enemies or friends, and quite frankly we have the might to make it so. Its a much smaller world today..and we cannot afford to have an enemy use the stuff on us or our allies. If we hadnt taken the moral high road, we would never have destroyed the massive stockpiles we had built up in response to the USSRs doing exactly the same thing. A couple of countries as resourceful as the US and the USSR can make a unthinkable amount of war spit in 60 yrs.

We indeed did ALLOW Iraqi scientists to receive those samples. They were scientists alleged to be working on immunology for their versions of infectious disease medical eradication programs. We have allowed other nations to receive such samples. Many many of them in fact, and most all of them were used by those nations in developing vaccines and anti-toxins. Iraq used them in their version of the CDC as well. Unfortunately its likely some was siphoned off for BC warfare research. The US also let Germany and France sell them chemical factories that could be used to make benificial insecticides or commercial chemical compounds...or war spit. Im sure the UK has traded samples with other nations as well, or are your scientists not working on cancer research, vaccines against AIDs and ebola, just to name a few?

Its a common fact that the UK has had a very long history of BC warfare research, and in fact has had a few accidents along the way...there being a few islands in your fair nation that are still totally off limits due to massive contamination of anthrax etc etc.

So climb down off your high horse. No one was perfect, the right hands didnt know what the left hands were doing etc etc, and thats pretty darned typical of any nation. But like the UK, we have destroyed our BC stockpiles and have determined that its a good thing if all other nations did the same. Most have. Not all.

Note the agents provided:

"1 vial Botulinum toxin (non-infections)."

"Most of the materials were non- infectious diagnostic reagents for detecting evidence of infections to mosquito-borne viruses. Only two of the materials are on the Commodity Control List, i.e., Yersinin Pestis (the agent of plague) and dengue virus. (the strain of plague bacillus was non-virulent,"

One should note..that those strains are rather common in the Iraq area, and Dengue fever is very common in the southern areas along with most of the Nile River basins. Mosquito born infections are rather a big problem in portions of Iraq.

I suggest you read this list carefully.

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Read that as "I didnt agree with it, so it must be a lie"

Shug, we are going to have to agree to disagree.

Respects

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

No, it was a lie. I still remember what "lie" means, which probably makes me a throwback. Do you remember?

Here's the lie, from your quote:

The lie(s) is (are), the economic data you quoted from "confirm" no such thing. In fact, the article cited doesn't even imply such a thing.

Maybe it's best if I spell it out. Clinton wasn't President in 2000, so "slower growth" then confirms nothing about the previous period. It isn't even mentioned or suggested in the article. The article is about the "unwelcome numbers" from 2001 - 2002, not about what happened during the Clinton administration. Even the mention of "slower growth" during 2000 cite a figure that is rip-roaring growth [4.5% at the time Clinton left office] by any established standards for an economy like that of the US.

By selecting and arranging words, your citation suggests that The Economist was saying that the recession began during Clinton's administration. Not so. It didn't even say it started in 2000, after Bush was in office. It says it started in 2001.

Here's the actual quote, from which your citation selected a sentence:

"According to the Commerce Department's new figures, released on July 31st [2002], the economy was actually shrinking for the first nine months of

2001. America went into recession long before the terrorist attacks of September 11th."

In fact, it's now accepted that it began in March 2001, more than a year after Bush took office. That was when the recession, which has a specific meaning in economics, began. The rest is bullshit prognostication, and there isn't a hint of support in the article from The Economist that they were saying it started under Clinton.

So, where are these statistics that "confirm" the slowdown began under Clinton? Nowhere in the article from which you drew your quote. I have the whole article here.

Does anyone remember what a "lie" means? For a refresher, your citation is a lie. It's not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of the statement they made being untrue, demonstrably so (hell, it's just words in an article that they lied about, so it doesn't take any analysis) and they know it.

Ed Huntress

Yeah, silly old me. I believed the definition that a recession is 3 or more consecutive quarters where the "growth" figure has a *minus* sign in front of it (in other words where the GDP is in actual decline). Now Gunner is telling us that an expanding economy is a recession. Must be that New Math stuff they're teaching the kids.

Gary

Ah, you're dead right, Mike. I always mix up years of election and years of inauguration.

However, the absurd part of that quote was that a growth rate of 3.8% for the year 2000 "confirms" that the recession was due to Clinton policies. The recession didn't even begin until Bush's term.

None of which says that the recession was Bush's fault *or* Clinton's fault. Presidents don't have a lot to do with recessions. As I said earlier, this last recession was a normal downswing of the business cycle. The silliness started when someone said five or six years ago that business cycles were a thing of the past. Obviously, they're not.

Ed Huntress