Thomas: I'm going to highlight Margie Burns for Women's History Month because she has spent the last years speaking truth to power and addressing the real issues when others wanted to hide and cower. She's been a strong voice and she's not gotten the recognition I think she deserves. When I was feeling like the whole country had gone Stepford Wives on me and no one would question Bully Boy Bush, a friend sent me a thing she wrote and I felt like, "Okay, good, I'm not crazy. Someone else sees it too."
She's got talent, common sense and she's unfraid to speak to her truth. This may qualify as a "voices who speak to us." If that's how this looks then I'm not getting my point through.
Yes, she speaks to me. But I don't know that I could have kept my head straight at times without her common sense and truth telling. I've got a job where I work around Bush cheerleaders or people who just want to spend all their time wondering who will get kicked off American Idol. My girlfriend's overseas (with an aid relief agency) and my family feels we shouldn't say anything bad about Bush because he's the president. (That rule didn't seem to apply when Bill Clinton held the title.)
I saw my best friend who thought Bully Boy was a jerk start buying into that nonsense. (He snapped out of it but for close to a year he couldn't shut up about how we needed to give Bully Boy Bush our undying gratitude -- for what? Not preventing an attack? Invading Iraq?)
So the last few years may not seem historical to some people but they were a really hard time for me and getting to read something new from Margie Burns meant the world to me.
Here's the latest thing she's written, it's on Alan Greenspan:
It is time for Mr. Greenspan to retire. Things were bad enough last week, when he appeared publicly to support, at least partly, the White House attack on Social Security.
Time out: yes, it is an attack on Social Security. Regardless of the choice of euphemisms, any proposal to "divert" or otherwise remove payroll taxes from the Social Security program, to send them elsewhere, is taking money out of Social Security.
Payroll taxes, you see, are what fund the Social Security program. So taking even part of the payroll taxes and sending them to Wall Street, or into some form of bundled private accounts that amounts to sending them to Wall Street, is taking money out of Social Security.
This is, on the face of it and self-evidently, the reverse of what Social Security needs. There is no "crisis" facing the Social Security program as yet, of course, and there is no "crisis" due for many years, indeed for decades. The program will not even end its break-even period for many years. The GWBush campaign to pretend that the program over-all needs urgent immediate assistance is so obviously smarmy and bogus that even the opinion polls reveal that less than half the public supports any part of the White House's thus-far-guarded hints at what it wants.
