By Eric Lotke
Campaign for America’s Future

Modern conservatism is dying. There’s still an election to be held, but conservatism as we’ve known it since Ronald Reagan is failing – ground down in the desert of Iraq, drowned in the floods of Hurricane Katrina, foreclosed by the housing crisis and poisoned by toys imported from China.

The American people are figuring this out. While conservatives repeat their time-worn slogans – “small government, low taxes, high security” – the American people are living the consequences.

We’ve seen eight years of a conservative presidency, six years overlapping with a conservative Congress, and 30 years of broadly conservative ideology. Now reality is showing how the values embodied in those slogans have been betrayed.

Conservatives say “shrink government.” We get inadequate levees, exploding steam pipes and schools without textbooks. Conservatives say “deregulate,” and now Thomas the Tank Engine is painted with toxic lead. Conservatives say “low taxes,” but it primarily applies to millionaires, billionaires and crony corporations.

What follows is a history of these problems, and the direction people want to go instead.

Appealing Slogans, Disastrous Results

The conservative shibboleth – “small government, low taxes, high security” – has timeless appeal, founded on genuine moral and constitutional values. But the application of those values by today’s conservatives is frightening.

Shrinking Government

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
– Ronald Reagan, First inaugural address, January 1981.

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
– Grover Norquist, Executive Director, Americans for Tax Reform.

The modern conservative movement is united less by belief in small government – a traditional constitutional value – than by disdain for government. They don’t just want to shrink it. They want to drown it in a bathtub. Such disdain courts exactly the kind of disasters we got.

Hurricane Katrina. A shrunken government failed in fundamental responsibilities when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Crucial levees had been left to rot and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been “systematically downgraded and all but dismantled.” Reconstruction remains a forgotten promise.

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The head of Sen. Barack Obama’s church rallies his congregation. Shades of things to come?

An Oklahoma legislator lets loose on the evils of homosexuality.
Un. Be. Lievable.

A message for women
By Martha Burk

The media is awash in stories about how women (except for some of us old gals over 50) are flocking to Barack Obama in droves and away from Hillary Clinton. Feminists are pitted against feminists as to which candidate, if elected, would be better for women, and many younger women are arguing with their mothers and aunties. But there’s a much bigger division looming, and it’s not between the Obama and Clinton camps. What everybody ought to be looking closer at is that “if elected” part. Women have suffered incredible setbacks under the Bush administration and it is in their hands whether that path continues after November.

A lot of Bush’s damage to the country as a whole, like the war and the tanking economy, is front and center. But much of the damage to women has been under the radar. Presidential appointees can do tremendous harm, mostly out of the public eye. Take Wade Horn, one of Bush’s Health and Human Services assistant secretaries. Horn founded the National Fatherhood Initiative to promote marriage as the solution to poverty, loudly touting his belief that “the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” Then he gave the group $12.38 million of the taxpayer’s money to push marriage instead of funding job training and educational programs to get women off welfare. But the marriage money is peanuts compared to the megabucks Horn poured into abstinence-only sex education in the public schools. That tab now comes to $176 million per year, even though the government’s own research shows the programs don’t work and teenage pregnancy is up for the first time in 15 years.

Not to be outdone, the Bush appointees over at the Department of Education have stayed busy dismantling Title IX, the law protecting girls from discrimination in educational programs, including sports. For decades courts have upheld the Education Department’s rigorous criteria for compliance as valid. But no matter. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued a Title IX “clarification,” allowing schools to refuse to create additional sports opportunities for women based solely on e-mail interest surveys. Failure of female students to answer e-mail surveys is now routinely counted by colleges as a lack of interest in participating in sports. Neither the standard nor the e-mail survey method of limiting opportunities applies to male students.

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5: Number of years the Iraq war has lasted. (March 19, 2008, the 6th year begins.)

3973: U.S. Deaths Confirmed By the DoD (as of March 3, 2008)

May 2, 2003: The day the President arrived on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished.”

64%: Percentage of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq (CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Feb. 1-3, 2008)

57%: Percentage of Iraqis who think it is acceptable to attack American soldiers. (Up from 51% in March and 17% back in February 2004.) (August 2007: ABC; BBC; NHK; D3 Systems of Vienna, Va.; and KA Research of Turkey)

81,000 – >600,000: Estimates of number of civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq
(Epidemiologists have estimated that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.)

49: Number of countries in the Coalition of the Willing when the invasion began in 2003
25: Current number of countries supplying 11,685 troops — about 7% of the size of the U.S. forces.

4 million: Number of displaced Iraqis: more than 2 million uprooted within Iraq, and as many have fled to neighboring countries.

$600 billion: Approved funds for the war ($499 billion spent as of today). President Bush has requested another $200 billion for 2008, which would bring the cumulative total to close to $800 billion.

$3 trillion: Estimate of true cost of war by Nobel Prize-winning economists (< #1>see below).

$270 million: Number of dollars the U.S. spends each day in Iraq

$390,000: Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq
(Congressional Research Service)

$9 billion: Amount lost & unaccounted for in Iraq

$1.4 billion: Amount of Halliburton overcharges classified by the Pentagon as unreasonable and unsupported

$20 billion: Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items

$3.2 billion: Portion of that $20 billion that Pentagon auditors deem “questionable or supportable”

75: Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq (The Nation/New York Times)

166,895: Troops in Iraq: 157,000 from the U.S., 4,500 from the UK, 2,000 from Georgia, 900 from Poland, 650 from South Korea and 1,845 from all other nations

6,000: Iraqi troops trained and able to function independent of U.S. forces (NBC’s “Meet the Press” on May 20, 2007)

27 to 60%: Iraqi unemployment rate (depending on where curfew is in effect)

28%: Iraqi children suffering from chronic malnutrition (CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

40%: Professionals who have left Iraq since 2003

34,000: Iraqi physicians before 2003 invasion

12,000: Iraqi physicians who have left Iraq since 2005 invasion

2,000: Iraqi physicians murdered since 2003 invasion

10.9: Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity (May 2007)

5.6: Average Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity (May 2007)

16 to 24: Pre-War Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Had Electricity

70%: Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies (CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

22%: Water Treatment Plants Rehabilitated

0: Number of WMDs found in Iraq

0: Number of connections between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11

0: Number of convincing reasons for starting the war, and continuing the occupation

By Mike Soraghan
The Hill

Congressional Democrats searching for a message that will resonate on the Iraq war are preparing an argument that getting troops out of the conflict is the only way to rebuild a spent military.

It’s a less ambitious argument than the “Out-of-Iraq now” proposals put forward last year, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top Democrats believe it will allow the party to criticize the war without being seen as criticizing those fighting it. It could also help Democrats to portray themselves as protecting the military and national security.

The Pentagon’s commanders have repeatedly testified that the Iraq war is straining the military, and Democrats say they can take that foundation and add the extra step of saying the strain is the reason to withdraw troops.

“This is about America’s security,” said Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.). “We have an Army that can’t deploy anywhere else in the world.”

Or, as a staffer put it, “You can’t rebuild an engine while you’re driving along at 60 miles per hour.”

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