I've been trying to get information on Carl Rove, however, every article in your rag must be written by a nut case.  Every article starts out by raging on George Bush.  Where can a person go to get the history on Carl Rove without having to read a bunch of crap by a nut case?

Ed note: A couple of good places to start are: http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2003/386 and http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2003/399. Using the name "Karl Rove" should also help.

Is the tide turning?

George W. Bush and his puppetmaster Karl Rove tried to upstage the Democrats with a State of the Union Address full of tricks and gimmicks, martian distractions and rattling sabers.  

It backfired.  The stunning results from Iowa far overshadowed Bush's lame, malapropic stump speech.  Space travel, gay marriage, steriods in baseball, these are the burning issues for a Republican Party smug enough to be certain they can steal any election.  

The week's signature GOP moment came from Tom DeLay's Texas, where a woman who sells vibrators was arrested for possessing more than two.  In a state that's just been redistricted to prevent any Democrats from going to Congress, we see the GOP as the ultimate Luddites.  Are Texas men that insecure?  What will they ban next?  Massage oil?  

Come November, we can expect Osama bin Laden to be miraculously "found" whenever Rove decides the timing is best.  

A terrorist attack will explode here or there precisely as the Democrats gather steam.  Bush may dump Dick Cheney into a cardiac unit to grab headlines and expand his base.  

AUSTIN, Texas -- My fellow Americans, the state of the union's finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In its most recent projection, the Congressional Budget Office says it expects $1.4 trillion in total deficits from 2004 to 2013. Bush's new future spending proposals -- including everything from the goofy manned-flight-to-Mars to the promotion of marriage -- already total an additional $2 trillion.

            When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion and his first budget proposed to reduce it by $2 trillion over the next decade. Today, the debt is $7 trillion. Last year, Bush predicted a deficit of $262 billion. According of the CBO, the deficit is currently $480 billion. Bush plans to cut biomedical research, health care, job training and veterans funding, and that still leaves a projected deficit of $450 billion.

HB 272, the Defense of Marriage Act has been assigned to the Ohio Senate Finance and Financial Institutions Committee.  The bill is on an extremely fast track.  The bill is going to have a hearing on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 at 1:00 PM in the Finance Hearing Room in the Ohio Senate AND on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 at 9:00 AM in the Finance Hearing Room.  

THE BILL IS MARKED FOR A VOTE ON WEDNESDAY. We need to take action now!!

Contact via email or phone members of the Committee to let them know that this legislation is bad for Ohio business and would affect unmarried partner households in Ohio, which, according to the 2000 census, make up 5.2% of Ohio's population.  

HB 272 is additionally unnecessary since Ohio law already explicitly states that marriage is between one man and one woman.  This is discriminatory and unnecessary language that will threaten the benefits currently offered by at least 53 public and private employers in Ohio.  Members of the Finance Committee need to vote NO on HB 272.

Members of the Committee:

Senator Bill Harris -- Chair 614-466-8086

The father of President Bush the Second called it “the vision thing” -- which he was widely presumed to lack. By early 1987, Time magazine reported, George H. W. Bush was using that phrase “in clear exasperation.” Then, as now, journalists seemed to clamor for presidential candidates to seem visionary.

     Many politicians have grandly quoted from the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The biblical invocation plays into the media-fed notion that great leaders succeed when they persevere according to their own lights.

     But such popularized concepts of political leadership -- encouraged by countless journalists -- are long on vision and short on hearing. With apparent self-assurance, politicians often have a way of filtering out the messages they don’t want to hear, even from their own supporters.

     President Lyndon Johnson epitomized the alpha and omega of a leader’s visionary determination. To his enormous credit, he pushed hard for civil rights legislation soon after becoming president. But meanwhile, he plunged ahead with the Vietnam War -- and he didn’t want to hear what many people,