<<http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/001745.html>>
Small Steps Towards Justice...Very, Very Small Steps Really...these are some incredibly tiny steps. Lilliputians would marvel at the near-atomic size of Bush's bold progress on terrorism. <<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/business/31irs.html>> The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday. The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year. It's decisions like this (the second time in three days that a purposeful underfunding of the IRS's law-enforcement capabilities has come to light) that make me distrust the Bush Administration on terrorism. You know that old poster, "Don't Sweat The Small Stuff...And It's All Small Stuff"? Well, take out the "don't" when it comes to government. Given the size of the federal budget, the amounts by which the IRS is being underfunded are paltry, at best - it's obvious by this point that Bush has no real commitment to lowering government spending or slashing the deficit, and we shouldn't be cutting law enforcement for whatever marginal savings he thinks he'll find by doing this. Of course, this presumes forethought rather than simple incompetence. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
