This is an interesting and entertaining book with very important messages concerning politics, racial issues, gun control, environmental issues, and a whole host of other issues which our government has control over. This pretty much explains why I support liberal over conservative politics in many cases. This is a highly educational book and I think a lot of these issues Christians don't even have a clue about. While his biases against religion and pro-choice stances become exceedingly tiresome (and are completely unexplained) and his high and mighty attitude is annoying, a good portion of his views do coincide with Christian standards. Why most Christians support Republicans is beyond me apart from their pro-choice and anti-gay stances. Meanwhile, liberal philosophy coincides much more with Christian thought on issues including the environment, racial equality, social programs such as welfare and universal health care, education, gun control, criminal policies, and economics. Remember, God is not a Republican (nor is He a Democrat or any other political association for that matter). Read this book to find out a few reasons why.

Freedom of choice is a thing of the past. We're down to six media companies, six airlines, two and a half carmakers, and one radio conglomerate. Everything you will ever need is at Wal-Mart. You can choose between two political parties that sound alike, vote alike, and are funded alike by the same exact wealthy donors. You can choose to wear nondescript pastels and keep your mouth shut, or you can choose to wear a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and get kicked out of school. Britney or Christina, WB or UPN, Florida or Texas - there ain't no friggin' difference, folks, it's all the same, it's all the same, it's all the same… (xiv)

Chapter 2: Dear George

Your list of accomplishments - in just your first few months in office - is brutally impressive.
You have:

• Cut $39 million from federal spending on libraries
  
• Cut $35 million in funding for advanced pediatric training for doctors
  
• Cut funding for research into renewable energy sources by 50%
  
• Delayed rules that would reduce "acceptable" levels of arsenic in drinking water
  
• Cut fund for research into cleaner, more efficient cars and trucks by 28%
  
• Revoked rules strengthening the power of the government to deny contracts to companies that violate federal laws, environmental laws, and workplace safety standards
  
• Broken his campaign promise to invest $100 million per year in rain forest conservation
  
• Reduced by 86% the Community Access Program, which coordinated care for people without health insurance among public hospitals, clinics, and other health care providers
  
• Cut funding for the Girls and Boys Clubs of America programs in public housing by $60 million
  
• Pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol agreement on global warming, ultimately signed by 178 other countries
  
• Rejected an international accord to enforce the 1972 treaty banning germ warfare
  
• Cut $200 million from workforce training programs for dislocated workers
  
• Cut $200 million from the Childcare and Development grant, a program that provides child care to low-income families as they are forced from welfare to work
  
• Cut $700 million in funds for public housing repairs
  
• Cut half a billion dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency's budget
  
• Threatened to shut down the White House AIDS office
  
• Allocated only 3% of the amount requested by Justice Department lawyers in the government's continued litigation against tobacco companies
  
• Pushed through a tax cut, 43% of which goes to the wealthiest 1% of Americans
  
• Signed a bill making it harder for poor and middle-class Americans to file for bankruptcy, even when facing overwhelming medical bills
  
• Cut $15.7 million from programs dealing with child abuse and neglect
  
• Proposed elimination of the "Reading is Fundamental" program, which gives free books to poor children
  
• Pushed for development of "mini-nukes," designed to attack deeply buried targets - a violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (32-35)
  

Because you have your finger on The Button (you know, the one that could blow up the world), and because decisions you make have vast and far-reaching consequences for the stability of said world, I would like to ask you three pointed questions - and I would like you to give me, and the American people, three honest answers:

1. George, are you able to read and write on an adult level?

It appears to me and many others that, sadly, you may be a functional illiterate. This is nothing to be ashamed of. You have lots of company (just count the typoes in this book. In fact, isn't that a typo?). Millions of Americans cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level. No wonder you said "leave no child behind" - you knew what it felt like. (37)

2. Are you an alcoholic, and if so, how is this affecting your performance as Commander-in-Chief?

You've tried to dismiss the incident [drunk driving conviction] by saying "it was back in my youth." But you were NOT a "youth"; you were in your thirties.

The night your conviction was finally revealed to the nation, just days before the election, it was painful to watch you swagger as you tried to chalk up your "irresponsible" action as the mere "youthful indiscretion" of having a few beers with the boys (smirk, smirk). I really felt for the families of the half a million people who have been killed by drunks like yourself in the twenty-four years since your "little adventure." Thank God you kept drinking for only another several years after you "learned your lesson." (41)

Perhaps the news anchor on Saturday Night Live put it best: "George Bush said he didn't reveal the drunk driving charge because of what his daughters might think of him. He had preferred they think of him as a man with numerous failed business ventures who now executes people." (42)

3. Are you a felon?

When you were asked in 1999 about your alleged cocaine use, you replied that you had committed "no felonies in the last twenty-five years." (42)

Also, you recently made it a requirement for any young person seeking financial aid for college to answer a question on the application form that reads: "Have you ever been convicted for any drug offense?" If they have, they are denied student aid - which means that many of them will not be going to college…Doesn't this move on your part strike you as a little hypocritical? You would deny a college education to thousands of kids who only did exactly what you have implied you did as a young person? Man, that takes some chutzpah! As you'll be receiving $400,000 a year from us until 2004 - from the same federal kitty that pays out the college aid - it seems only fair to make you answer the same question: "Have you ever been convicted of selling or possessing drugs (not including alcohol or tobacco)?"

We do know, George, that you have been arrested three times. Other than some peace-activist friends of mine, I don't personally know anyone who has been arrested three times in their life. (43)

Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life. Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege.

You learned at an early age that, in America, all someone like you has to do is show up. You found yourself admitted to an exclusive New England boarding school simply because your name was bush. You did not have to EARN your place there. It was bought for you.

When they let you into Yale, you learned you could bypass more deserving students who had worked hard for twelve years to qualify for admission to college. You got in because your name was Bush.

You got into Harvard Business School the same way. After screwing off during your four years at Yale, you took the seat that rightfully belonged to someone else.

You then pretended to serve a full stint in the Texas Air National Guard. But one day, according to the Boston Globe, you just skipped out and failed to report back to your unit - for a year and a half! You didn't have to fulfill your military obligation because your name was Bush.

Following a number of "lost years" that don't appear in your official biography, you were given job after job by your daddy and other family members. No matter how many of your business ventures failed, there was always another one waiting to be handed to you.

Finally, you got to be a partner in a major league baseball team - another gift - even though you put up only one one-hundredth of the money for the team. And then you conned the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas, into giving you another perk - a brand-new multimillion-dollar stadium that you didn't have to pay for.

So it's no wonder you think you deserved to be named President. You didn't earn it or win it - therefore it must be yours! (45)

You went to federal court and sued to stop the votes from being counted - because you knew how the vote would turn out. If you were truly sure you had the vote of the people, you wouldn't have minded all those votes being counted. (45)

Chapter 3: Dow Wow Wow

• From 1979 until now, the richest 1% in the country have seen their wages increase by 157%; those of you in the bottom 20% are actually making $100 less a year (adjusted for inflation) than you were at the dawn of the Reagan era.
  
• The world's richest two hundred companies have seen their profits grow by 362.4% since 1983; their combined sales are now higher than the combined ross domestic product of all but ten nations on earth.
  
• Since the recent mergers of the top four U.S. oil companies, their profits have soared by 146% - during what we were told was an "energy crisis."
  
• In the most recent year for which there are figures, forty-four of the top eighty-two companies in the United States did not pay the standard rate of 35% in taxes that corporations are expected to pay. In fact 17% of them paid NO taxes at all - and seven of those, including General Motors, played the tax code like a harp, juggling business expenses and tax credits until the government actually owed them millions of dollars!
  
• Another 1,279 corporations with assets of $250 million or more also paid NO taxes and reported "no income" for 1995 (the most recent year for which statistics were available). (52-53)

There was a headline the other day that said GM's profits were down 73% from last year. That sounds bad - but last year was nothing short of a profit orgy. Even with that 73% drop, GM will still pocket over $800 million profit in the first half of 2001.

Are dot-coms folding left and right? Of course they are! Big deal. That's what happens with any new, revolutionary invention - a ton of entrepreneurs hop on board to find their fortune, and in the end only the mediocre but ruthless few are still standing. Its called C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M. In 1919, twenty years after the invention of the automobile, there were 108 automobile manufacturers in the United States. Ten years later the number had whittled down to the Big 44 U.S. auto companies. By the end of the fifties it had dropped to 8, and today we have a grand total of 2 ½ U.S. car manufacturers. (55)

Chapter 4: Kill Whitey

So, um, why is it exactly that I should be afraid of black people?
I look around at the world I live in - and, folks, I hate to tell tales out of school, but it's not African-Americans who have made this planet such a pitiful, scary place to inhabit. Recently a headline on the front page of the Science section of the New York Times ask the question "Who Built the H-Bomb?" The article went on to discuss a dispute that has arisen between the men who claim credit for making the first bomb. Frankly, I could have cared less - because I already know the only pertinent answer: "IT WAS A WHITE GUY!" No black guy ever built or used a bomb designed to wipe out hordes of innocent people, whether in Oklahoma City, Columbine, or Hiroshima…

You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering, or the abject misery visited upon millions, and I'll bet you ten bucks I can put a white face on it faster than you can name the members of 'N Sync.
And yet when I turn on the news each night, what do I see again and again? Black men alleged to be killing, raping, mugging, stabbing, gangbanging, looting, rioting, selling drugs, pimping, ho-ing, having too many babies, dropping babies from tenement windows, fatherless, motherless, Godless, penniless. "The suspect is described as a black male…the suspect is described as a black male…THE SUSPECT IS DESCRIBED AS A BLACK MALE…" No matter what city I'm in, the news is always the same, the suspect always the same unidentified black male. I'm in Atlanta tonight, and I swear the police sketch of the black male suspect on TV looks just like the black male suspect I saw on the news last night in Denver and the night before in L.A. in every sketch he's frowning, he's menacing - and he's wearing the same knit cap! Is it possible that it's the same black guy committing every crime in America?

I believe we've become so used to this image of the black man as predator that we are forever ruined by this brainwashing. In my first film, Roger & Me, a white woman on Social Security clubs a bunny rabbit to death so that she can sell him as "meat" instead of as a pet. I wish I had a nickel for every time in the last ten years someone has come up to me and told me how "horrified" and "shocked" they were when they saw that "poor little cute bunny" bonked on the head. The scene, they say, made them physically sick. Some had to turn away or leave the theater. Many wondered why I would include such a scene. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave Roger & Me an R rating in response to that rabbit killing (which compelled 60 Minutes to do a story on the stupidity of the rating system). Teachers write me and say they have to edit that part out of the film so they won't get in trouble for showing my movie to their students.

But less than two minutes after the bunny lady does her deed, I included footage of a scene in which the police in Flint open fire and shot a black man who was wearing a Superman cape and holding a plastic toy gun. Not once - not ever - has anyone said to me, "I can't believe you showed a black man being shot in your movie! How horrible! How disgusting! I couldn't sleep for weeks." After all, he was just a black man, not a cute, cuddly bunny. There is no outrage at showing a black man being shot on camera (least of all from the MPAA ratings board, who saw absolutely nothing wrong with that scene).

Why? Because a black man being shot is no longer shocking. Just the opposite - it's normal, natural. We've become so accustomed to seeing black men killed - in the movies and on the evening news - that we now accept it as standard operating procedure. No big deal, just another dead black guy! That's what blacks do - kill and die. Ho-hum. Pass the butter. (58-60)

And why isn't Congress trying to ban the scary and offensive lyrics of Johnny Cash ("I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die"), the Dixie Chicks ("Earl had to die"), or Bruce Springsteen ("…I killed everything in my path/I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done"). (61)

You probably thought things had gotten better for blacks in this country. I mean, after all, considering all the advances we've made eliminating racism in our society, one would think our black citizens might have seen their standard of living rise. A survey published in the Washington Post in July 2001 showed that 40 to 60 percent of white people thought the average black person has it as good or better than the average white person.

Think again. According to a study conducted by the economists Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, and David C. Clingaman, the average income for a black American is 61% less per year than the average white income. That is the same percentage difference as it was in 1880! Not a damn thing has changed in more than 120 years.

Want more proof? Consider the following:

• About 20% of young black men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four are neither in school nor working - compared with only 9% of young white men. Despite the "economic boom" of the nineties, this percentage has not fallen substantially over the last ten years.
  
• In 1993, white households had invested nearly three times as much in stocks and mutual funds and/or IRA and Keogh accounts as black households. Since then, the stock market has more than doubled its value.
  
• Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac catheterization, a common and potentially lifesaving procedure, regardless of the race of their doctors. Black and white doctors together preferred white patients for catheterization about 40% more often than black patients.
  
• Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment for stroke.
  
• Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.
  
• Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954. (62-63)

Eventually, after a long procession of court losses, demonstrations, and riots, we got the message: if we didn't wise up, we were going to have to start sharing some of the pie. We learned an important lesson: if you're going to be a successful racist, better find a way to do it with a smile on your face!

So white people got smart and took down the signs, stopped lynching black men who might have stopped on the street to talk with out women, passed a bunch of civil-rights laws, and ceased saying words like nigger in public. We even got magnanimous enough to say, Sure, you can even live in our neighborhood; your kids can go to our kids' schools. Why the hell not? We were just leaving anyway. We smiled, gave black America a pat on the back - and ran like the devil to the suburbs. Now we get to have things just the way we always used to have them in the cities. When we walk out to pick up the paper in the morning, we look one way down the street and see white people; look the other way, and guess what? - more white people!

At work, we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success. Look back down the aisle, though, and you'll see the blacks sitting where they've always been, picking up after us, waiting on us, serving us from behind the counter. (64-65)

Blacks invent it, we appropriate it. Comedy, dance, fashion, language - we love the way black people express themselves whether it's talking about giving your girlfriend "props" for a tasty dinner, or hanging out with your "peeps," or trying your darndest to "Be Like Mike." Of course the operative word there is like, because no matter how many millions he makes, to be Mike would mean spending an awful lot of time pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike. (66)

Lose all liberal "concern" for black people. Really. Black people are onto us. They know we say and do things to make it look as if progress has been made. They see us working hard to show how not-prejudiced we are. Skip it. We haven't made real progress. We're still bigots - and they know it.

Cut the crap about all your "black friends." You don't have black friends. A friend is someone you have over for dinner regularly, someone you go on vacation with, someone you ask to be in your wedding party, someone you go to church with on Sunday, someone you call often to share your most intimate secrets. That kind of friend.
Your black "friends" know that the chances of your dropping your toddler off with them in their part of town while you go on a weekend trip is about as good as your inviting them to go on the trip with you. (77)

Chapter 5: Idiot Nation

There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level - in other words, who are functional illiterates.
How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read it. And now you've read it. So we've already eaten into the mere 99 hours a year an average American adult spends reading a book - compared with 1,460 hours watching television.

I've also read that only 11% of the American public bothers to read a daily newspaper, beyond the funny pages or the used car ads.
So if you live in a country where forty-four million can't read - and perhaps close to another two hundred million can read but usually don't - well, friends, you and I are living in one very scary place. A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID is a nation that should not be running the world - at least not until a majority of its citizens can locate Kosovo (or any other country it has bombed) on the map.

It comes as no surprise to foreigners that Americans, who love to revel in their stupidity, would "elect" a president who rarely reads anything - including his own briefing papers - and thinks Africa is a nation, not a continent. An idiot leader of an idiot nation. In our glorious land of plenty, less is always more when it comes to taxing any lobe of the brain with the intake of facts and numbers, critical thinking, or the comprehension of anything that isn't…well, sports. (86-87)

Sure, there are a lot of teachers who suck, and they'd be better suited to making telemarketing calls for Amway. But the vast majority are dedicated educators who have chosen a profession that pays them less than what some of their students earn selling Ecstasy, and for that sacrifice we punish them. I don't know about you, but I want the people who have the direct attention of my child more hours a day than I do treated with tender loving care. Those are my kids they're "preparing" for this world, so why on earth would I want to piss them off? (101)

What kind of priority do we place on education in America? Oh, it's on the funding list - somewhere down between OSHA and meat inspectors. The person who cares for our child every day receives an average of $41,351 annually. A Congressman who cares only about which tobacco lobbyist is taking him to dinner tonight receives $145,100.

Considering the face-slapping society gives our teachers on a daily basis, is it any wonder so few choose the profession? The national teacher shortage is so big that some school systems are recruiting teachers outside the United States. (102)

And its not just teachers who have been neglected - American schools are literally falling apart. In 1999, one-quarter of U.S. public schools reported that the condition of at least one of their buildings was inadequate. In 1997 the entire Washington, D.C., school system had to delay the start of school for three weeks because nearly one-third of the schools were found to be unsafe.

Almost 10% of U.S. public schools have enrollment that are more than 25% greater than the capacity of their permanent buildings. (103)

The ultimate irony in all of this is that the very politicians who refuse to fund education in America adequately are the same ones who go ballistic over how our kids have fallen behind the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other country with running water and an economy not based on the sale of Chiclets. (106)

Colorado has been a trailblazer when it comes to tie-ins between schools and soft drink companies. In Colorado Springs, the district will receive $8.4 million over ten years from its deal with Coca-Cola - and more if it exceeds its "requirement" of selling seventy thousand cases of Coke products a year. To ensure the levels are met, school district officials urged principals to allow students unlimited access to Coke machines and allow students to drink Coke in the classroom. (110)

If turning the students into billboards isn't enough, schools and corporations sometimes turn the school itself into one giant neon sign for corporate America. Appropriation of school space, including scoreboards, rooftops, walls, and textbooks, for corporate logos and advertising is up 539%. (111)

Chapter 6: Nice Planet, Nobody Home

The last Ice Age was the result of a global temperature change of only 9 degrees. Right now, we're halfway there. Some experts are predicting a rise in temperature of 10.4 degrees just in the next century. (127)

That hole [in the ozone] is now over Antarctica - and its two and a half times the size of Europe! (130)

Chapter 8: We're Number One!

[Bush] defied UN human rights agreements, resulting in the United Nations removing the United States from its Human Rights Commission. (165)

What if the teeming billions of Asian, Africa, and Latin America get to thinking that the one billion of them without clean drinking water should actually have it? Do you know how much that would cost? At least 25% of our "Star Wars" program! (168)

Whose dumb idea was it to ignore the Russians' offer fifteen years ago to get rid of all nuclear weapons? Has everyone forgotten they were willing to disarm unilaterally after the old Soviet Union dissolved? Way back in 1986 (before the breakup of the USSR), at the summit in Iceland, Mikhail Gorbachev put on the table a goal of "final elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000." (He couldn't make a deal with Reagan because of Reagan's refusal to give up developing - you guess it - "Star Wars." In case Reagan didn't hear him the first time, Gorbachev reiterated the offer to Bush the Elected in 1989: "To keep the peace in Europe we need nuclear arms control, not nuclear deterrence. Best of all would be the abolition of nuclear weapons." (169)

We're number one in millionaires.
We're number one in billionaires.
We're number one in military spending.
We're number one in firearms deaths.
We're number one in beef production.
We're number one in per capita energy use.
We're number one in carbon dioxide emissions (more than Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom combined).
We're number one in total and per capita municipal waste (720 kilograms per person per year).
We're number one in hazardous waste produced (by a factor of more than twenty times our nearest competitor, Germany).
We're number one in oil consumption.
We're number one in natural gas consumption.
We're number one in the least amount of tax revenue generated (as a % of gross domestic product).
We're number one in the least amount of federal and state government expenditure (as a % of GDP).
We're number one in budget deficit (as a % of GDP).
We're number one in daily per capita consumption of calories.
We're number one in lowest voter turnout.
We're number one in number of political parties represented in the lower or single house.
We're number one in recorded rapes (by a factor of almost three times our nearest competitor - Canada).
We're number one in injuries and deaths from road accidents (almost twice as many as runner-up Canada).
We're number one in births to mothers under the age of twenty (again, more than twice as many as Canada, and nearly twice as many as number two New Zealand).
We're number one in the number of international human rights treaties not signed.
We're number one in among countries in the United Nations with a legally constituted government to not ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We're number one in number of known executions of child offenders.
We're number one in likelihood of children under the age of fifteen to die by gunfire.
We're number one in likelihood of children under the age of fifteen to commit suicide with a gun.
We're number one in lowest eighth-grade math scores.
We're number one in becoming the first society in history in which the poorest group in the population are children. (174-175)

Chapter 9: One Big Happy Prison

At the beginning of the nineties, there were about a million people in prison in the United States. By the end of the Clinton/Gore years, that number had grown to TWO MILLION. The bulk of this increase was the result of new laws being enforced against drug users, not pushers. Eighty percent of those who go to prison for drugs are in there for possession, not dealing. The penalties for crack use are three times as high as those for cocaine use.

It doesn't take much to figure out why the drug of choice in the white community is treated with so much more leniency than the drug that constitutes the only affordable high in the poor black and Hispanic community. For eight years there was an intense, aggressive move to lock up as many of these minority citizens as possible. Instead of providing the treatment their condition demands, we dealt with the problem by sending them to rot inside a prison cell. (197)

Then somebody finally figured out he wasn't Tiger Woods, and he was arrested and tried for theft and perjury.

His sentence? TWO HUNDRED YEARS TO LIFE!

You read it right. Two hundred years to life, thanks to California's "three-strikes" law, which says that upon a third criminal conviction you're put away for life. To date, no corporate executive has been sent away for life after being caught three times polluting a river or ripping off customers. In America, we reserve that special treatment for those who happen to be poor or African-American or fail to contribute to one of our fine political parties. (199-200)

We are one of the few countries in the world that puts to death both the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders. The United States is among six countries that impose the death penalty on juveniles. The others are Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen…

Even China prohibits the death penalty for those under eighteen - this from a country that has shown an intolerable lack of respect for human rights. (206)

Chapter Eleven: The People's Prayer

Reagan, Bush, Cheney, and the whole Lott of them are responsible for decades of cruel legislation designed to punish the poor, imprison those with health problems (drug addicts), or strip rights from desperate people here in America "illegally." But when they find themselves in a desperate situation, suddenly they have the compassion of St. Francis and the mercy of Mother Teresa. (231)

Acknowledgements

Promise me that you wont just put this book down and go back to playing solitaire on your computer or checking your E-mail for the tenth time today. I've checked mine two dozen times today already - and it's only noon. I'm not getting a damn thing done. (275)

back