The latest Bush-Gore dust-up is over their competing policies for providing health insurance for children in low-income families. In particular, they're arguing over a program called CHIPs, the State Child Health Insurance Program, a program that was passed with bipartisan support in 1997 and that aimed to provide coverage for children whose parents couldn't afford private insurance but made too much money to qualify for Medicaid.

In Bush's press release it says: "When the CHIPs program was first implemented, Governor Bush embraced it as an opportunity to help deliver health coverage to thousands of uninsured children, and signed legislation providing health insurance for more than 423,000 children."

Well, not exactly. Bush, who while campaigning loves to promise crowds that "we'll love the babies," did eventually "sign" a bill that provided health insurance to roughly that number of kids. That�s not the whole story.

First, a few details: The CHIPs program involves a mixture of federal and state money. The federal government will pay for health coverage for children whose parents make up to double what is considered the poverty line as long as the state agrees to foot a portion of the bill (in Texas' case, 26 percent of the tab). A number of Republican governors have eagerly embraced the program, most notably John Engler in Michigan, John Rowland in Connecticut, Christie Todd Whitman in New Jersey and George Pataki in New York.

But in healthcare policy circles, Bush has actually been rather notorious for trying to make sure the program covers as few kids as possible. Though the program allowed states to insure kids at up to double the poverty line -- or 200 percent -- Bush first tried to limit coverage to kids whose parents made up to 133 percent of the poverty line, later agreeing to bump it up to 150 percent. Bush fought tooth and nail with the state legislature to keep coverage to 150 percent, rather than the more generous 200 percent. In human terms, this meant denying coverage to roughly 200,000 Texas children. The legislature eventually won, and Bush signed the bill. But Bush fought it every step of the way.

So, signed it? Yes. But "embraced" it? Well, that sounds like a bit of a stretch. Doesn't it?

To clarify matters I talked to Dan Bartlett, Bush's press spokesman who covers healthcare policy matters. According to Bartlett, the charge that Bush tried to lowball the CHIPs program and keep coverage at 150 percent is just a misleading "snapshot" of the legislative process. Bush followed the lead of the legislature's Interim Committee on Children's Health Insurance, which recommended starting with coverage at 150 percent, and then later eagerly signed the bill when the full legislature decided to go with 200 percent. The key point in Bartlett's version of events is that Bush was basically just following the lead of the interim committee.

That's not how Texas state Rep. Glen Maxey sees it. Maxey, a Democrat, has worked closely on the CHIPs issue in Texas and was on that interim committee. Maxey calls Bartlett's version of events a "blatant outright lie, a Texas tall tale." The committee never recommended the 150 percent coverage level. Not only did Bush push hard for the lower coverage number, he also slow-rolled the process so that the program wouldn't get up and running until roughly a year after it could have gone into effect.

"Out of the roughly 500,000 who the program should cover, only 28,000 [have been enrolled]. Other states have been up and running for a long time. We're turning back money to the federal government," he says. (Maxey also notes that one of the reasons Bush resisted the program so mightily was that the enrollment process could lead to something called "Medicaid spillover." That means that in the process of signing up for CHIPs, some parents might discover they were actually eligible for Medicaid. The last thing candidate Bush wants is rising Medicaid rolls in Texas while he's running for president.)

The bottom line seems to be that Bush worked pretty hard to cover as few kids as possible under the CHIPs program. To say that he "embraced [the program] as an opportunity to help deliver health coverage to thousands of uninsured children" isn't just a stretch. It�s a lie.

Lie No.1: "Every federal worker is offered a personal account to help improve their retirement 1.3 million have these accounts. Al Gore , who calls these bipartisan proposals risky, has a substantial amount of his money invested in the stock market. If he is building his own retirement security in the market, why does he object to young Americans doing the same?"
-- George W. Bush, May 15, 2000

Some lies are rooted in incompetence; others are based in boasting that's gone too far (see Gore on the Internet or Love Canal or "Love Story"); and still others are intended to confuse and deceive.

George W. Bush got some unwelcome attention last week for a fib from the first category. After announcing his support for the partial privatization of Social Security, Bush told an audience of senior citizens that it was hypocritical for Gore to oppose privatization, since the vice president himself had a good deal of his own money in the stock market.

Whoops! Turns out Gore has no money in the stock market. That left the Bush team struggling to cobble together a convoluted argument that Gore really did own stocks, since he is the executor of the trust his late father left his mother, and that trust owns stocks.

But Bush is getting a lot less attention for another fib that fits clearly into category three: lies meant to deceive and confuse.

Lie No. 2: The Texas governor told reporters with some glee that only now that he has proposed allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their 12.4 percent Social Security tax in private investment accounts is Gore saying that such investments are risky.

"He's changed his tune," Bush said. "I believe it's important to be consistent. I believe it's important to have somebody who's willing to take a stand. I believe it's important to have somebody who's willing to have the same message all of the time in the course of a campaign."
-- The Washington Post, quoting George W. Bush, May 17, 2000

Bush accused the vice president of flip-flopping on the privatization issue because the administration once proposed placing some general revenue funds into the stock market in order to get a higher rate of return, and thus extend Social Security's solvency further into the future.

But this is comparing apples and oranges. The debate over Social Security reform is fairly well-established and its terms pretty clear. Many conservatives argue that all, or a portion, of Social Security should be transformed from an entitlement into private, individually owned accounts whose values would rise or fall on the vicissitudes of the stock market. That's the privatization argument. Liberals and others who support the current system say that Social Security should remain a guaranteed entitlement for all Americans who pay into the system. That's the anti-privatization argument.

There is a possible common ground. The Clinton administration proposed something called "USA accounts." These would be individual retirement accounts -- partially subsidized by the government using money from the surplus. The key difference is that these accounts would be set up in addition to the current Social Security program -- not using money from Social Security. That would give individual workers a way to start building wealth of their own without endangering the bedrock, gauranteed retirement benefits provided by Social Security.

The whole debate is about security and guarantees and additional benefits directed toward those who get dealt particularly hard knocks in life (orphans, widows, etc.) versus another idea which makes Social Security into something more like a 401(k) plan.

What made the Clinton administration proposal different was that there was no assumption of gain or loss by individual Social Security recipients. You may agree with Gore or Bush on the question of how best to save Social Security. And you may think the Social Security reform debate itself is screwy.

But here Bush is just playing fast and loose with the facts and hoping no one will notice. Gore has enough real flip-flops (anybody for gays in the military? medical marijuana? Elian?) that Bush shouldn't need to fabricate them

At the height of a campaign swing in which Gov. George W. Bush proposed a sweeping "New Freedom Initiative" to benefit people with disabilities, the campaign of Vice President Al Gore was rude enough to say that Bush's Texas record on disabilities was wanting. And the Bush people got PO'ed pretty quick.

What had Gore said?

That "Bush fought against a U.S. Supreme Court decision favoring people with disabilities who want to live in their own communities rather than institutions."

That "protesters in wheelchairs demonstrated outside Bush's mansion against his support of Texas Attorney General John Cornyn's position" on the Supreme Court case Olmstead vs. L.C., in which the state of Georgia was sued by two disabled women who wanted to live in communities rather than in an institution.

The Gore campaign also noted that in February 1999, "fifteen protesters, most in wheelchairs, were arrested for trespassing as they protested Texas' decision" to side with Georgia in the case.

Harsh rhetoric indeed against a man who had spent the week declaring that "Our goal now is clear: to remove the last barriers to full and independent lives for all Americans with disabilities." The Gore camp charged that just over a year ago, Bush was fighting to keep barriers for two disabled women to have full and independent lives.

So on Wednesday, Team Bush sent out a press release hammering Gore for having "blatantly misrepresented Governor Bush's record on improving access and independence for Texans with disabilities."

Gore was just lying again, the Bush campaign said. "Texas is recognized as a leader in responding to the Supreme Court decision. ... Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on the Olmstead case, Governor Bush gave an executive order explicitly calling for a review of the Texas system in light of the Supreme Court ruling and changes to comply with the ruling."

So which is it? Bush's father, President George Bush, was a leader in the fight for the groundbreaking Americans with Disabilities Act, after all. Surely this was another example of Gore's shaky alliance with the truth.

Not so fast. For one thing, the Bushies don't deny Gore's claim that their man supported his attorney general's decision to file a brief siding with the state of Georgia -- and against disability rights advocates -- in the Olmstead decision.

Nor are the Bushies disputing that 15 protesters -- most of whom were in wheelchairs -- were arrested outside the back gates of the Governor's mansion, where they'd congregated to protest what the disability rights organization ADAPT called "the intent of the state to keep people with disabilities warehoused in nursing homes and other institutions -- against their will."

According to Clay Robison, the Houston Chronicle's Austin bureau chief, "the demonstrators hardly posed a threat to public safety, much less to the governor, who wasn't even home at the time. But they had ignored officers' orders to clear the exit." So they were arrested, many of them spilling from their wheelchairs.

Bush's response at the time? "They criminally trespassed. They were given due warning."

So if the Bushies don't deny any of these facts, what was the Gore camp lying about? Maybe they were hoping that no one would read past the headline on their press release.

So how is Bush's record on disabilities?

"It hasn't been great," says Michael Auberger, national organizer and cofounder of ADAPT, which stands for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today. "He opposed the Olmstead decision, which was a Supreme Court decision that pretty much says that people with disabilities have a right to live in the community and use Medicaid dollars and have that choice."

The Bushies don't try to dispute this. But they point out that after Georgia lost the case in a 6-to-3 decision that came down on June 22, 1999, Bush gave an executive order to review the Texas system in light of the Supreme Court ruling. And the campaign cites the Bush proclamation in response to the Supreme Court ruling beneath the header: "Texas is recognized as leader in responding to the Supreme Court decision."

"That stretches the truth a long way," says ADAPT's Auberger. "He hasn't done anything to initiate Olmstead in Texas.Up until -- believe it or not -- about a week ago, George Bush hadn't supported anything for disabilities including the ADA. But he has now taken a political position that is significantly different from that."

Now, Auberger says, Bush says "that the Olmstead position should be supported, he now has very strong support for the ADA; all of a sudden he's supporting all these disability issues. I don't know if his father got to him, or he got religion, or what."

It should be noted that Auberger is no Gore man, either. "Al Gore's support of the disability community -- as with the administration -- has been lukewarm at best," he says.

When I call the Bush campaign to clarify where the "blatant misrepresentation" of the Bush record is, I'm put through to Ray Sullivan. Didn't Bush support the state of Georgia in the Olmstead decision?

"I know that the attorney general did file an amicus brief based on some federalist concerns," Sullivan says. "And as you know, the attorney general is elected here independent of the governor."

Right, but Bush had supported the attorney general in that decision, right?

"It wasn't so much an issue of serving and caring for the disabled, but whether the state or the federal government should be in charge of caring for them on the state level," Sullivan says.

Great, but where's the misrepresentation of the Bush record on the disabled?

"The Gore folks were trying to attack the governor on being opposed to community care," Sullivan says. "The governor supported the goal of community care. He had concerns, as did the state of Texas, about some of the issues of federalism in the case."

But the Gore people don't say that Bush opposes community care, I say. Just that he sided with Georgia in that Supreme Court decision, and that there were disabled protesters arrested outside his mansion. Where's the "blatant misrepresentation"?

"The misrepresentation is the implication that the governor did not support community care and is opposed to the Olmstead decision," Sullivan says.

Perhaps mindful of the fact that their utterances are judged meticulously, the Gore people were precise in their accusation. The charge doesn't say anything about Bush's general position on community care, even back then, and it does conclude that Bush's position on Olmstead is now different.

"Bush now says he will enter an Executive Order supporting the most integrated community-based settings for individuals with disabilities, pursuant to the Olmstead decision, and call for the identification and removal of barriers to community placement," the Gore statement reads -- bending over backwards (again, they kind of have to) to make sure that the entire Bush record on this issue is presented.

In fact, the Gore people even make sure that we know that during the protest "Governor Bush was not at home."

Just because Gore has a record of misrepresentin', that shouldn't mean that we take Bush's word for it every time he cries "Lie."

Because here, Bush was lying about what Gore was accusing him of. More than that, Bush was lying about his own record -- which is understandable, considering what his record is.

It's hard to imagine any candidate would want to own up to disabled protesters spilling out of their wheelchairs in his backyard as his security force arrests them, after all. It's not a shot you'll see in a campaign brochure anytime soon.

one has to wonder about a big ass bla bla bla article that would say this yet conveniently leave out this......

The Colombian Connection: Al Gore & Big Oil
NewsMax.com

It�s a major scandal waiting to break, the story of a Colombian tribe of Indians, a major oil company and the vice president of the United States.
In a startling expose in the current issue of The Nation, writer Ken Silverstein uncovers the shocking tale of Gore�s historical super-close connection to the giant Occidental Petroleum company, its ongoing attempts to despoil the U�wa tribal ancestral homeland, and the shady role the Clinton administration is playing behind the scenes.

And the expose is given more weight in view of the fact that it appears in an ultra left-wing publication one would expect to be backing ultra liberal Al Gore�s presidential bid to the hilt.

Briefly, the dispute, which turned violent when Colombian security forces used tear gas against members of the tribe demonstrating against Occidental�s drilling plans, resulting in the subsequent death of three children who drowned when fleeing the melee, involves the company�s plan to drill on U�wa tribal land, which the company believes holds 1.4 billion barrels of oil worth about $35 billion in today�s prices.

Interestingly, in view of Gore�s pretensions to be a dedicated environmentalist, one of the principal objections to Occidental�s drilling is its record of disastrous oil spills from its Ca�o Limon pipeline, just north of U'wa land and repeatedly bombed by guerrillas. The spills, Silverstein reports, have badly polluted rivers and lakes.

"The Colombian Oil Workers' Union published a report in 1997 saying that Ca�o Limon is �the best example that petroleum exploitation should not be permitted [on the U�wa reservation] at any price,�" he wrote.

Silverstein says the U�wa opposition to Occidental�s plans represents something of a last stand. "A 1998 report by Terry Freitas � one of three U'wa supporters from the United States killed by leftist guerrillas while visiting the tribe's territory last year � says that the Colombian government stripped the tribe of 85 percent of its land between 1940 and 1970,� he explained.

He quotes Roberto Perez, president of the Traditional Authority of the U'wa People, as saying: "The key issue for indigenous groups is defending our territory ... The Occidental project is an affront to our livelihood, our lives and our culture."

Gore has repeatedly refused pleas from fellow Democrats to meet with Perez.

Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, for example, told Silverstein she wrote to Gore and asked him to meet with U'wa leader Perez and to support an immediate suspension of the Occidental project.

"I am concerned that the operations of oil companies, and in particular Occidental Petroleum, are exacerbating an already explosive situation, with disastrous consequences for the local indigenous people," she wrote. "I am contacting you because you have remained silent on this issue despite your strong financial interests and family ties with Occidental."

She wrote to Gore again on March 30 to complain about his failure to answer her previous letter. Finally Gore sent her a note saying he simply didn�t have the time to meet with Perez.

Most fascinating is the historical connection between the Gore family and Occidental Petroleum, in which Gore holds about a quarter of a million dollars worth of stock in trust for his mother. The connection goes back to Gore�s father�s close relationship with the late Armand Hammer, Occidental�s founder and the son of Julius Hammer, the man who founded the U.S. Communist Party. For all of his life, Armand Hammer remained close to the murderous Joseph Stalin, his successors and the entire Soviet leadership during the Cold War.

He also remained close to Albert Gore Sr., and later to Al Jr., bestowing his largesse lavishly on both.

Hammer, Silverstein notes, liked to brag that he had Gore Sr. "in my back pocket."

When Gore Sr. retired from the Senate in 1970, he got a $500,000-a-year job at a subsidiary of Occidental as well as a company directorship. When the elder Gore died, his estate included hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Occidental stock.

In the 1960s, Silverstein reports, the Gores discovered zinc ore near land they owned in Tennessee. "Through a company subsidiary Hammer bought the land for $160,000 - twice the amount offered by the only other bidder. He swiftly sold the land back to Al Gore Sr. and agreed to pay him $20,000 a year for mining rights.�

Gore Sr. then sold the property for $140,000 to Al Jr., who has gotten a $20,000 check just about every year since, although Occidental has never mined an ounce of zinc or anything else on the property.

In 1985, Al Jr. leased the property to Union Zinc, a competitor of Occidental.

In his book, "Witness to History," Neil Lyndon, an employee on Hammer's personal staff and the ghost writer of his memoirs, revealed that whenever Hammer he came to Washington he met with Al Gore for lunch or dinner.

"They would often eat together in the company of Occidental's Washington lobbyists and fixers who, on Hammer's behest, hosed tens of millions of dollars in bribes and favours into the political world," Lyndon revealed.

The ties between Gore and Occidental outlived Hammer. In 1992 the company lent the Presidential Inauguration Committee $100,000. In 1996, the company gave $50,000 in soft money to the Democrats in response to a phone call from Gore.

"All told, Occidental has donated nearly half a million dollars in soft money to Democratic committees and causes since Gore joined the ticket in 1992,� Silverstein wrote. In the current presidential campaign Occidental is his No. 2 oil industry donor with company executives and their wives kicking in $10,000 to Gore's campaign.

It�s paid off handsomely. In 1997 Gore, the fanatical opponent of vehicles powered by fossil fuels such as oil, supported the $3.65 billion sale to the company of the government's interest in the Elk Hills oilfield in Bakersfield, Calif., the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history.

"On the very day the deal was sealed Gore gave a speech lamenting the growing threat of global warming,� Silverstein reports.

***
For a full account of the Gore-Occidental relationship, see "The Buying of the President 2000," by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity.

You can read Silverstein�s blockbuster report in The Nation by going to: http://www.thenation.com

...somehow these bush "lies" cant hold a candle to....

"My first pledge will be to restore integrity to the White House. And I'll fire anyone who has lied to the American people or the United States Congress."
--algore

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
--algore

"I didn't know it was a fund-raiser."
--algore

everyone else did

....as far as digging up dirt on bush
it is in fact a waste of your time
the liberal media is working 24-7 on that right now

I think I am going to abstain from voting this year in protest.

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If you run from a Marine, you will only die tired.

AND TO ANSWER YOUR PATHETIC QUESTION...."TO PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON GOOD...." Can be as broadley interpreted as "The right to bear arms in a well organized malitia..."