Last week Bush called the House-passed tax bill "in the right direction," writes Matthew Miller in an LA Times syndicated column, "thereby tacitly endorsing a sop to wealthy heirs--including himself and his kids." What Miller is talking about is the Republican plan to eliminate estate taxes, a plan he thinks is filled with "deceit, injustice, and hypocrisy." To listen to Bush, Lott, and Archer, "you'd think an estate tax phase-out was mainly about saving 'family farms,' said to face onerous burdens once Dad and Mom pass on and the taxman cometh....That's a nice sound bite, but it's also a fraud. The first $650,000 of an estate is exempt from taxes." This covers 98% of the estates in the country, leaving the elimination of the estate tax only benefiting the richest two percent in the country. "The depth of the GOP's duplicity here is thus stunning. Under the guise of a populist reform, they would allow the wealthiest handful in our society to avoid an estimated $330 billion in taxes over the next decade--a gap that would likely end up being plugged by new levies on the middle class," opines Miller.

An estate tax loophole that's already in place costs taxpayers $25 billion per year. Say, your Dad bought 100 shares of Microsoft at $30 a share years ago and the price is now $200. If Dad dies and leaves you the stock, you pay estate taxes on $30 a share, not the capitol gains run-up in value. This has led conservative economist Irwin Stalzer of the Hudson Institute to conclude that it's a contradiction for economic conservatives like Bush to be against both affirmative action and estate taxes because if "you're against giving certain groups unfair advantages in life because of an arbitrary trait like race, how can you be in favor of preserving unfair advantages for certain other groups because of an arbitrary asset like rich parents?" If Bush really wanted to support the entrepreneural spirit he claims he's for, one would think he would want to do so by "raising taxes on big estates and using the revenue to cut marginal tax rates for everyone," concludes Miller. Of course, that will never happen, for two reasons. First, Bush has fallen in lock step behind the House and Senate GOP in his campaign for the White House. (He's even speaking in GOP tongues: "I support getting rid of the death penalty" means he's against estate taxes. See Slate 7/29/99.) "Secondly, the 300 (mostly unnamed) "pioneers" who have contributed to and organized his campaign money machine are the ones with the big estates that want such taxes eliminated. 7/29-31/99

POLITEX: BUSH CHARTER SCHOOL SYSTEM IN SHAMBLES AS HE PUSHES FOR NATIONAL MOVEMENT. A couple of weeks ago in Seattle, Bush said he may not be super-smart, but he's a good administrator. That's not true when it comes to his Texas charter school system. Yet, in Milwaukee last week, he said when it comes to education we should "set high standards and high expectations," neither of which he has done in Texas. He said the charter school movement "should encourage local folks to develop accountability measures," which has not happened under his guidance in Texas. He also said that charter schools would "provide an outlet for educational entrepreneurs," which may have happened in Texas under Bush, depending upon his definition of "entrepreneur." (HC 7/21/99) The fact is that ten percent of the independent charter schools operating in Texas this Spring are under investigation by state and federal governmental authorities for financial failures, student abuses, fund misappropriation and forgery. Although the state has poured $77 million into Texas charter schools since September 1996, the schools are only answerable to the Texas Education Agency for their financial, not their educational activities, suggesting that Bush was more interested in the charter schools as exercises in entrepreneurial privatizing, not education. Also, he did not provide the TEA with the money or the manpower needed to police the charter school system, so the ten percent figure for financial failure, student abuses, fund misappropriation, and forgery may be only the tip of the iceberg. Yet, Bush takes reporters to charter schools in Massachusetts, California, and Wisconsin and talks about what he would do as president. One would think he would want to brag to reporters about what he's done in Texas.

When Bush became Governor in 1995, one of the first things he did was to push a charter schools bill through the legislature as a sop to the school voucher advocates who supported him with contributions during his campaign. "During his first few months as governor in 1995, Bush helped persuade the Legislature to allow nonprofits...to create special public schools that would operate independently of local school districts," writes Stuart Eskanazi in the 7/22/99 issue of Houston Press, the source of information for this piece. "Called 'charter schools' because the Board of Education issues what effectively is a charter for them to open, they would operate relatively free from many state regulations. Charter schools are given more latitude in creating a curriculum and do not have to adhere to a minimum seven-hour school day for students. The administrators can hire just about anyone they want as teachers and pay them whatever they want. The goal is to give charter school operators enough flexibility to create a learning environment that best serves a student niche, whether it is high achievers or dropouts." Although the TEA, a state agency, was empowered to oversee the working of the charter schools, the Board of Education, a group elected by the voters throughout Texas, decides who gets the charters. The first 20 charters were granted by the 15 member Board of Education in the Spring of 1996. A near-majority of the board's membership consists of Theocrats far to the right of Bush and Mike Moses the Bush-appointed head of TEA who resigned last week although he was not up for re-appointment until 2002. Many of the members of the board had been calling for Moses' resignation since he, along with Bush, began to carve away its powers two years ago. A Bush aide once called the board, and we're paraphrasing, "the last booth on the right in the carnival of life." "Not since awarding the first 20 charters has the Board of Education demanded the CEOs or other key officers of proposed schools to come before it for a face-to-face interview. Instead, the board has relied on the assessment of a 45-member application review committee, appointed by board members and the education commissioner, to grade the written applications. Only now, at a time when embarrassing audits of charter schools threaten the entire movement, is the Board of Education leaning toward supplementing the committee evaluation with a return to in-person interviews."

Here are the TEA's most ambarrassing findings thus far:
*One of the first 20 charter schools, Cypress Lodge in East Texas, never opened, but collected $240,000 in state checks, which has never been recovered.
*Harrison Charter School in Waco was $300,000 in debt before it opened. The state granted its charter without knowing that the head had a history of financial troubles. The school has since been shut down.
*Rameses School in San Antonio had its charter revoked because of possible school attendance inflation. The state pays charter schools between $4,000 and $5,000 per student.
*Four charter schools under the rubric of "Life's Beautiful Educational Centers, Inc." in Houston owes debts totalling several hundred thousand dollars. These schools overestimated the projected number of students who would attend, did not cut their costs when the actual number was lower, and spent their money for the entire year during their first five months.The corporation claims its books were taken during a burglary, leading a puzzled TEA official to note that "the black market on school records isn't very good."
*Writing about the troubles of Impact Charter School in Houston, Eskanazi opines, "If it wasn't bad enough that the Board of Education approved a charter school with a CEO who didn't know she was CEO, it awarded a school based on a written application that featured this jumble of grammatical mumble: "Impact Charter target grade level 3 year old -- fourth grade.... Our focus will be that of Intervention by reaching the children at earlier age will prevent failure of later years."

When news of the shambles of the Bush charter school system reached the press, "Mike Shepherd, a board member of the Texas Language Charter School in Dallas, wrote a May 30 editorial in the Dallas Morning News titled "Failing charter schools are the exception." He cited two examples of quality charter schools. One is the Dallas Can! Academy. But TEA's audit division is investigating that charter school and its sister school in Houston for undisclosed transgressions." The other charter school Shepherd held up as a model of quality under Bush's administration is Renaissance Charter School, which had branches around the Dallas area at that time. Eskanazi looked at the Arlington branch, where a student said, "You name it, we don't have it!" Here's a list of what this model school didn't have: heat, desks, chairs, dictionaries, tap water, textbooks, chalkboards, trash cans, phones, filing cabinets, offices, a gymnasium, a lunchroom, vending machines. computers. Here's what this model school under Bush had: two rooms with dim bulbs overhead, a concrete floor to sit or stand on, one sofa for 40 students, holes in the ceiling, stains on the walls, bugs, a toilet that barely flushed (the students walked two-blocks through a busy commercial neighborhood to use library restrooms), and a second floor declared unsuitable for habitation by the City of Arlington.

We've been told that Bush's administrative style is to come up with big ideas, then appoint others to take care of the nuts and bolts activities of turning these ideas into realities. Time after time, we find that his ideas have not been thought through, he has not provided his administrators with the tools to do the work, and he seems unable or unwilling to make the needed corrections in time to head off disaster. Bush is implying to the nation's voters that because he says he wants quality, they'll get quality, but he's told that to the citizens of Texas already, and they're sitting on too many cold concrete floors with dim bulbs overhead, wondering when the textbooks will come. 7/26-28/99

POLITEX: BUSHNOCHIO REVISITED. Looking back into the dim past of last February, which is a long time ago in politico/dog years, we find a story in which we called our George "Bushnochio" because he was telling us he hadn't made up his mind about running for President while clearly going full steam ahead in creating the launching pad for his full-time insertion into the campaign. At the time, Bush and his spinners were actually telling us that the officials and policy experts were showing up on his front door unannounced to "pay their respects" to George as the governor of Texas and that it would be "disrespectful" to leave them standing in the cold outside the governor's mansion. As one longtime Bush insider expressed it, "'It's a phenomenon I've never seen before.' Other prospective candidates 'are scrambling for people' while Bush has to walk the fine line between possibly offending people by refusing to see potential supporters and not wanting to appear as if he's already got a campaign going." Yeah, sure. (HC 1/12/99)

Of course, it was Bush's poli-guru, Karl Rove, who was inviting these folks, leaving it to the Bush spinners to identify the resulting activities as a draft movement. ""Ninety percent of it's just reacting to people who call and ask for time' with Bush, said a national political operative with almost two decades of ties to the Bush family. 'It's as close as you get to a legitimate draft.'" Correction: it's as close as Bush will ever get to a legitimate draft. And it was a second try, at that. "As Bush prepared for his first governor's race in 1993, Rove tried to build an aura of a draft-Bush movement. He announced that 10 of 13 Republican state senators had signed a letter urging Bush to run for governor in 1994," writes R. G. Ratcliffe in a story in the Houston Chronicle this past Sunday. The thrust of the Ratcliffe piece is that "On the surface, it appears that Bush's bid for the Republican presidential nomination -- unprecedented in its early popularity -- ignited spontaneously in the eight months after his landslide re-election as Texas governor. But Bush's campaign success is actually based on more than two years of strategic planning and preparation as his aides and allies built a network of potential supporters and financiers."

Ever since Dubya got to Midland in the early 70's and discovered that the oil budness was not for him, he's been running for office or thinking about running for office. A losing run for the U.S. House in '78 and helping his father win the '88 Presidential race convinced him that he needed to get out from under Dad's shadow in order to have political viability. Helping to build the Texas Rangers stadium in Arlington allowed him to make that claim, and he went on to win the Texas governorship in 1994, with considerable help from strategist Rove. In 1996 his co-chairing of the Republican Nation Convention, undoubtedly a gift from Dad, enabled him to establish national GOP credentials. Next, in 1997 Bush began to move around the country, appearing at GOP fund-raisers in California, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. Then, with the beginning of a response created by his attendance at such events, Bush started to reject talk of of a presidential candidacy. Meanwhile, former GOP chairman Rich Bond was spending time in Iowa stirring up Bush presidential support. By June of '97 the Zogby American poll had 21% of the Republicans polled favoring Bush. The national press suggested that folks were confusing George with Dad, perhaps not realizing that the Bush push which began at the San Diego national convention in '96 had been fed for nearly a year by Bush fund-raising trips and stealth missions to primary states by Bush operatives. George claimed that he was amazed by the poll, although we wonder why, since he had spent a year in the field priming the political pump.

Just because the Bush campaign team is better than Gore's at this point, we shouldn't consider them perfect. They're developing a habit of bringing spinners and political strategists aboard, then discarding them when they don't work out. The recent Beckwith fiasco was not the first misstep. In June 1998, with former GOP U.S. Rep. Tom Tauke sitting in as the annointed Bush presidential campaign manager, what should have been a meeting to develop strategy for the upcoming gubernatorial campaign became a presidential strategy session with Tauke feeling the pressure to have Bush make an early announcement of his intentions to run for President by forming an exploratory committee. Even though Bush spent time that summer interviewing potential policy advisers such as Condoleezza Rice, his present foreign policy adviser, Dubya was telling reporters that he had not made up his mind about a presidential run. He was still saying that while winning the election in November and even during December when he met with Tauker, Rove, and the others to decide to announce the forming of the exploratory committee in March. By that time Tauke was dropped. Today, Rove decides campaign strategy and Joe Allbaugh, his longtime manager, manages the campaign activities. These two, along with chief spinner Karen Hughes, make up the Bush inner sanctum.

Listening to Rove going on about past presidential elections and Hughes treating reporters to her velvet fist in an iron glove routine, one suspects that it's Rove who manufactures the Bush legends, while Hughes keeps a straight face while spooning them out to reporters. Her most memorable mythology was saying that the Austin church sermon given by Rev. Mayfield in January with Bush in attendance was instrumental in having Dubya decide to run for President. The sermon was about the need for good men such as Moses to step forward to lead the children into the promised land. Bush said it was the best sermon he ever heard. Hughes might have been more convincing if the Mayfield sermon had been given in 1976. What we're dealing with is the marketing of the President. And like all marketing, it all comes down to a big-money advertising blitz. And like all advertising, its purpose is not to inform, but to convince. The criteria is not truth, but the lawyer's sense of "legality." As the Bush camp's collective nose gets longer, let the buyer beware. 7/20-22/99

POLITEX: WHO HAS BOUGHT BUSH, HOW WILL HE PAY THEM BACK? When George began his most recent gubernatorial campaign, his 1998 report of campaign contributions was released on paper only, with the names of two contributors on each page. In order to get a complete list of Bush contributors, the interested citizen would have had to spend over a thousand dollars for a xeroxed copy. Dubya said his purpose was to insure the privacy of his contributors. Of course, anyone interested in making up a mailing list would consider the money to be the cost of doing business. The loser was the interested citizen who couldn't afford a thousand bucks but wanted to know if there was a relationship between the folks who gave George the dough and the bills he backed. Of course no politician is going to say that he votes on the basis of the interests of his campaign donors, but most citizens are smart enough to put campaign contributors and passed bills together and reach a conclusion. Dubya's actions suggest that it wasn't in his best interests to contribute to our education. Nothing has changed since them. Last week's story by Alan C. Miller in the L.A. Times served to put the final nail in the coffin of political naivete about Bush and his political motives. "The computer-assisted analysis, the most extensive of its kind, provides a detailed look at Bush's leading donors in Texas, including oil and other large industrial companies trying to avert mandatory pollution controls; businesses seeking relief from expensive civil suits, and conservatives advocating state-paid vouchers for students in private schools."

"In Texas, where individuals and corporate political committees may contribute unlimited sums to politicians, big campaign money is a way of life," writes Miller. " And for Bush, a pro-business Republican, turning to the economic powers in the Lone Star State was only natural. 'One of the reasons they give to him is that he gives in return,' said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks political money. 'His policies are very pro-business.'" Of course the Bush spinners do not see a quid pro quo between campaign cash and Bush policy: "A Bush spokeswoman said that large donations in no way influence the governor's positions on policy issues. 'He has a set of principles from which he does not waver.'" Actually, it's really a chicken/egg thing. One simply states principles that will ensure the campaign contributions you're looking for. George learned that little trick back in 1970 during his dad's losing campaign for the U.S. Senate, then did some post-grad work on the subject during his own losing U.S. House bid in 1978. Rather than questioning George's motives, it's more rewarding to look at the problem as a black box. The campaign money goes in one end, the bills favoring campaign contributors come out the other end. That's all we really need to know. Then the question becomes, do we want to vote for x-corporation and the principles it upholds as President of the United States? With this scenario, George is reduced to the role of conduit. Looking at the record, it's prettty obvious that Dubya backs the bills of the folks who give him cash. To understand who and what Bush would support as President, simply follow the money.

"An examination of Bush's fund-raising in Texas for the 1998 and 1994 gubernatorial campaigns found that much of the money came from contributors with major stakes in state regulation....These longtime alliances with major Texas corporate interests are significant: Many of the large donors continue to back Bush as he pursues the presidency. Indeed, Texans donated more than half of the $7.6 million Bush raised for his presidential campaign during the first quarter of this year." The L.A. TIMES offers in-depth looks at major Bush political issues engendered by campaign cash, tort reform and pollution, . "A major source of Bush's contributions came from businesses and individuals seeking relief from civil suits and caps on damage awards. He received $4.5 million from Texans for Lawsuit Reform, its officers and members of its 25 boards of governors statewide and from the Texas Civil Justice League and its officers, records show.... Today, at least 75% of Justice League members are contributing to Bush's presidential campaign, according to the organization's president, Ralph Wayne, who also serves as a co-chairman of the campaign. Bush embraced the state's lawsuit reform movement in his 1994 campaign and made the issue a top priority upon taking office. He declared a state of emergency to fast-track measures to limit punitive damages and make it more difficult to successfully sue businesses, doctors and others. In 1995, the Legislature imposed limits on damage awards by corporations and other defendants in state courts, restricted the locations where lawsuits could be filed and narrowed the state's major consumer protection law. Consumer groups and trial lawyers were sharply critical. 'Once again, Gov. Bush stood up for the large corporations and against the average citizens of Texas,' said Tom Smith, state director of Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group."

The L.A. Times found the same kind of relationship between campaign contributions by energy corporations and Bush pollution bills. " Bush received $1.5 million from 55 companies that operate aging oil refineries and industrial plants in Texas, led by Enron Corp. ($348,559) and Sterling Chemicals ($239,000). These facilities have come under fire for producing unusually high amounts of air pollution. Enron spokesman Gary Foster said the company gives to the campaigns of "candidates and officeholders who share similar philosophies on many different issues." Texas, like many large industrial states, faces pressure from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce smog levels because urban areas such as Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth fail to meet federal clean air standards. Houston has the second dirtiest air in the country after Los Angeles. Bush has advocated an industry-sponsored voluntary approach to reducing pollutants, with the companies receiving permits if they agree to upgrade their facilities. His top environmental aide met with industry representatives as they developed the voluntary program.... 'The governor apparently decided that his commitment to polluters was more important than his responsibility to do what was in the public interest,' said Ken Kramer, director of the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter."

The L.A. TIMES sums up: "The study found that Bush received $4.5 million from business, medical, real estate and other interests that waged a fight, supported by the governor, to make it more difficult to sue Texas firms. He also collected $1.5 million from companies whose aged oil refineries and power plants in Texas have come under pressure to reduce particularly high toxic emissions." Bush's unfailing need to support his corporate campaign contributors in opposition to the needs of the average consumer is the most telling trademark of any Bush administration, past, present, or future. 7/17-19/99

POLITEX: BUSH APPEARS AT MEETING TO SHOW HOSTS BAD ATTITUDE. You're having a party, so you invite this guy a month in advance and he tells you he's too busy to make it. Then it turns out that he's in town the day of the party and he could make it if he really wanted to. It's a big party, and a local gossip columnist bad-mouths the guy for non-attendance in the local paper the day before the party. You hear nothing, but, suddenly, the guy shows up announced with some friends at the back door, and he and his friends casually walk through the crowd. The guy has a thin, tense smile on his face and his friends appear stressed. Someone stops him and asks him why he decided to come by. Unsmiling, he answers that he just wanted to say hello to some friends of his who came to the party. He and his entourage leave by the front door, making no effort to join in the party activities and neither thanking the hostess for the invitation nor indicating any enjoyment in having attended. No wonder you're pissed!

"After declining repeated invitations (since May) to speak at UNITY, a convention of minority journalists discussing race issues, (George W. Bush) popped in at the last minute (in Seattle last) Thursday. But he stayed just 15 minutes and refused to answer questions from conference participants, irritating many of the journalists." ABC News reported that "an hour later, Democratic candidate Bill Bradley spoke with UNITY participants for an hour and a half and answered more than a dozen questions. Then, 30 minutes later, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., spoke and answered questions for about 45 minutes. And Vice President Al Gore is scheduled for a two-hour panel discussion today on race and technology."

"Around 11 a.m. Thursday, a Bush aide called a conference organizer and said the governor was at the convention center’s loading dock — stunning the organizers, who invited him back in May and again Tuesday. Previously, Bush staffers had said he was too busy to attend. Once at the conference, however, Bush declined to participate in a Q&A session with journalists, and instead walked briefly through an exhibition area.... He said he had read a Los Angeles Times article this morning that quoted attending journalists critical of his decision not to go. 'That, ' he said, 'made me realize it was an important issue.' But when asked why he thought it was important to make an appearance at UNITY which is meant to foster diversity and improved race relations, Bush said, 'I have a lot of friends here from Texas and I wanted to come and say hi.'"

"Many of the journalists attending Unity said they were even more annoyed by the Texas governor’s quick walk-through than by his initial turn-down. The conference, they said, was not intended to be a campaign stop for candidates, but rather a way of fostering serious dialogue about race issues. 'What’s the point of just showing up?' said E. R. Shipp, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the ombudsman for The Washington Post. 'Journalists ask questions. We’re not precinct captains or potential donors. We’re not a pep rally.' Conference organizers were so upset by Bush’s actions that they held a news conference in the afternoon to criticize him. 'UNITY: Journalists of Color wishes to express its extreme disappointment over Gov. George Bush’s inadequate visit to the UNITY ’99 convention,' said Catalina Camia, UNITY president. 'As a serious presidential contender, we believe Gov. Bush missed a tremendous opportunity to share his plans for the country’s future with nearly 6,000 journalists representing media outlets of every type, size and place in America.'" Frankly, we find Bush's behavior to be both arrogant and egregious. In fifteen short minutes he managed to insult both minorities and journalists at the very time they were meeting to consider the state of politics and communication in the United States. Bush's behavior showed them much to consider. In spite of his supposed wooing of minorities, one suspects that George didn't want to be there, and since he chose not to take out his petulance on his handlers who must have pressured him to attend, he took his frustrations out on his hosts. Perhaps George needs some time out. 7/14-16

What Bush said in California was very important, because it's an explanation of who he really is: "I've been in positions where I've made decisions my whole life, in business and in politics. And I know how to bring people together, I don't know how I learned that, but I just did ... Just because I mispronounce the name of a country, doesn't mean I don't know how to lead.'' (Reuters , 7/1/99) Notice, Bush never says he knows his geography, as a "lover of history" (Chris Matthews' term) should. He never even attempts to defend his intelligence. He just says he knows how to "bring people together," namly, his advisers, and he has "made decisions (his) whole life." Looking at his whole life, one can conclude that his best decisions came when he let other people decide, because when he made decisions on his own, they were generally failures. That's why a couple of years ago, those who knew Bush personally were amazed that, given his personality and his intellectual limitations, he was even contemplating the presidency.

If Bush were to be elected, he would be our first Maitre d' President , a charming front man who can sit his campaign contributors at the Washington money table and tell them what his idea people in the kitchen have cooked up for them. This thought is based on Bush's own critera: don't judge me by how smart I am, judge me by my friends and my decisions. Here's a thumbnail sketch of George's friends and decisions. He's gotten money from friends of his father and his uncle to run oil companies that have failed to return profits. He's taken his money out of those companies and purchased a very small share of a sports attraction that benefited from additional taxes and condemnation procedures. Others were put in charge of building the actual stadium, the key ingredient in the team's profits. George became the man who, with Laura, sat in his box seat at all the home games and waved to the crowds. He became Texas governor because his poli-guru, Karl Rove, kept him away from the media as much as posible and allowed Guv. Ann, who had very mixed emotions about a second term, to self-destruct. As governor, Bush is known for claiming the programs of others when he was sure they were slam-dunks, stonewalling and spinning his administrative scandals created, in part, by a poor selection of friends and campaign contributors for top-level positions and failing to supervise them, and otherwise rewarding his friends and campaign contributers who supported and backed him through his oil years, his baseball years, and his years as governor. George always has had three things working for him: family name, money, and personality. Perhaps that's enough for, say, being a Michael Jackson and selling Pepsi, but one wonders if it's enough for the voter who would prefer something more than a maitre d' as President. 7/8-10/99

BRASIN'S BEAT: BUSH AND THE MYTH OF CALIFORNIA HISPANIC SUPPORT. George seems to be doing in California what we reported he was doing in Pennsylvania last week: attempting to create a myth that he's receiving a groundswell of Latino support when he's not. A story by Mary Anne Ostrom in the San Jose Mercury News points to the political sham in the golden state. True, Bush attended a Mexican-themed section of the Del Mar Fair the other day, but his support of Latino political goals was mixed. He was for educating illegal immigrants but against affirmative action. Ostrom reports, "While his fundraisers in La Jolla, Irvine and Los Angeles' Century City were packed with wealthy Republican contributors, his attempt to reach out to Latino voters attracted only a handful. Even so, Bush made a few remarks in Spanish, declaring at one point, '`If you can't read, you can't realize the American dream.'' He then posed for photos with a youthful Mexican dance troupe decked out in traditional, colorful Mexican dresses."

However, from Ostrom we learn that the state chairman of the Bush campaign has gotten himself in hot water over his method of attracting the Lationo vote for George's whistle-stops: "To swell the meager crowd of Latinos, Gerald Parksy, state chairman of Bush's California campaign, invited four workers from his Rancho Santa Fe horse farm to attend the event and paid them for a day of work. But none of them are registered to vote." Reading this, one Bush Watcher wrote to us with a few thoughts. 1)Is the INS is investigating Parsky to see if the four involved are here legally? 2)Is the FEC investigating Parsky beacuse FEC rules don't allow corporations to provide paid employees to federal candidates? Our Bush Watcher wonders if there are other similar arrangements between the Bush campaign and representatives of minority groups. For example, when Bush does a photo-op with inner-city kids, are they or their sponsors given money and who drives them to the location? Or, like business, is this just politics, as usual? 7/3/99

BRASIN'S BEAT: BUSH VIDEO SUPPORTS SEXUAL ABSTINENCE. The religious right has been using Christian rock-n-roll music in support of moral and ethical beliefs for a number of years. Bush appears to have picked up on this strategy with an expensive, controversial video that attempts to appeal to today's irresponsaible youth with a consideration of a lifestyle of sexual abstinence. As Clinton did with his appearances during the '92 presidential campaign, Bush appears to be interested in communicating with the VH-1 generation through this video, which can be viewed best by opening the window at "audio/video" and clicking on "realvideo (28.8)." It begins with a young man eating at a diner in the middle of a desert. He meets a young woman and they drive down the highway to a carnival. He attempts to kiss her and she grows fangs and turns into a ravaging beast. A high-angle shot in black and white shows them turning from each other and walking away across the desert in oppositie directions. This metaphoric approach to the Bush message of sexual abstinence was apparently created to address today's irresponsible youth in an oblique way. Only time will tell if this highly imaginative, if vague, response by Bush to such questions as abortion, contraception, and sexual activity in youth will work in our highly politicized society. 7/2/99

POLITEX: SEX AND GEORGE DOUBLE-STANDARD BUSH. Dubya wears his opinions about abortion like a badge of honor and is perfectly willing to tell anyone with a pencil or a microphone just what he would do if an abortion were ever contemplated in his family. He has said he wouldn't allow it, "except for circumstances threatening the life of the mother, rape or incest." If you're unsure where he stands on other aspects of the abortion issue, click on the abortion question at the top of this page. According to Naral, a pro-abortion group, "Bush has said he wants to reduce abortion. Yet, as Governor, he has offered no... insurance coverage of contraceptives, and no comprehensive sexuality education program."

However, when it comes to male sexuality, Bush turns mute. He is silent about the fact that Texas insurance companies pay for the use of Viagra and, at the same time, Texas has "no law requiring carriers that cover perscription drugs to pay for women's contraceptives." One Viagra pill costs $10, making its normal use at least twice as expensive as a contraceptive regimen. Just where does Bush stand on Viagra? After all, even ex-presidential candidate Bob Dole has taken a position on the anti-impotance drug, so it's not too soon for George to weigh in on the subject. With respect to insurance, his tacit support of a male anti-impotance drug coupled with his tacit rejection of a female contraceptive speaks volumes. Has George Double-Speak become George Double-Standard?

In yesterday's New York Times, Carey Goldberg reports that "around the country, more than a half-dozen state legislatures, swayed largely by insurers' coverage of Viagra treatment, have recently passed measures requiring carriers that cover prescription drugs to pay for women's contraceptives as well. More states are expected to follow. " Although for decades those same legislatures have argued that insurance companies couldn't afford the additional expense of contraceptives, when it turned out that these same companies were comfortable providing funds for the sexiual needs of males, the tacit policy of discrimination against women became self-evident. "In the United States, the statistic that coverage advocates most often cite is that women between the ages of 15 and 44 spend 68 percent more on out-of-pocket health costs than do men, much of it on contraception." As one female politician from California puts it, "Viagra made any argument against mandated contraception coverage 'laughable, really....No one can really argue it with a straight face anymore.'" Perhaps she'll revise that opinion after watching George whistle-stop and double-speak his way through California this week. 7/1/99