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Not in his wildest dreams... Imagine That!By Rick Horowitz
You could have knocked me over with a feather. There we were, me and the missus, doing our normal breakfast routine -- she's making the eggs, I'm reading the paper. That's when I see it, right there on the front page: the tax cut doesn't really cut taxes for some folks. According to this article, they made some kind of last-minute change in the president's tax cut package up in Congress and all of a sudden, there's millions of low and middle income people who didn't get included in the cutting. And this is just a day or two after I see this other article, about how they also made this other last-minute change in the president's package and left some other millions of low income folks without the increase they were expecting in their child tax credit. See, I'd been figuring all along that if there was any adjusting to do to get the whole thing to fit under that $350 billion limit of theirs, they'd just take a little bit of benefit away from the folks at the top instead of taking a whole lot of benefit away from the folks in the middle and the bottom who weren't making out so well in the first place. I know it's a complicated bill and all that, and now that they know, I'm sure they'll fix it right up. But after they made such a big deal about how this tax cut was going to help everyone who pays taxes, I was just surprised they'd slip up like that. Almost as surprised as I was when I heard how that Halliburton company is raking in the big bucks putting Iraq back together after the war. That's the place the vice president used to be in charge of, and I just figured they'd be uncomfortable looking like they had an inside track or anything, and not even have to bid on some of the contracts, but just have them dropped in their laps. Shows you what I know. Now the stories are saying they already stand to make $500 million, and there's plenty more -- maybe even billions -- where that came from. You could have knocked me over without a feather. And speaking of the war, were you as surprised as I was to read that we may have to keep more U.S. troops in Iraq than we thought we would, and keep them there longer? I saw this story the other day that said we're having trouble getting other countries to contribute their own troops to help with the peacekeeping. Can you imagine that? That after watching us fight the war exactly the way we wanted to fight it and not take any guff (or even any advice) from anybody, all these other countries aren't stepping right up to help us out of a jam when we want them to? Talk about a shock! Maybe the only thing more shocking than that is finding out that Jessica Lynch may not have amnesia after all. It's been so hard to keep up with her story -- whether she was shot or wasn't shot, whether she was stabbed or wasn't stabbed, even whether all those commandos and rangers and all the rest really had to come charging into the hospital with their guns drawn and their cameras rolling to "rescue" her, or whether they already knew before they ever got there that the enemy had skedaddled and they could just pick her up any time it was convenient. I've been noticing for weeks how this Jessica Lynch rescue business is about the last thing the Pentagon wants to talk about, or wants any of her rescuers to talk about either. But the one thing that all the stories kept saying is that Jessica Lynch herself wasn't going to help settle the argument one way or the other, because she didn't have any memory of any of it -- not being captured, not being held, not even being rescued. So we'd pretty much have to take the Pentagon's word for things. Except now I saw this other article where Jessica Lynch's father says she didn't lose her memory. He says she can still remember everything! And ever since I heard that, I was sure the Pentagon, or somebody, would be sending people right over to ask her the questions and get the whole truth and nothing but the truth once and for all, instead of leaving it hanging out there like some kind of patriotic legend. But they just don't seem all that interested in finding out. Am I surprised? Surprised doesn't begin to describe it. Posted 6/3/03. Click
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Rick Horowitz
