Last call

It's not difficult to understand, even for the misguided. In his column last week, author Matt Miller spelled out three big reasons to fire the Bush administration.

His first reason doesn't even address the fact that neocons / vulcans falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion. We were dragged into their Crusade at a time of their choosing, which further illustrates the inept handling of the aftermath of the war.

We are not safer at home. We just aren't. Three years later...why haven't we found a way to inspect a greater percentage of cargo containers at our ports? Why did our Republican-controlled Senate kill, 48-47, a bid to shift $70 million from a Department of Homeland Security administrative account to grants for securing chemical plants from terrorism. Join me in sounding the call to shore up our chemical plants!

Finally, Miller's third reason for ousting Bush is that he turned a record surplus into a record deficit. Yes, it's tough to pin all the blame on him for that one. But when Bush said, in that first post 9/11 speech, that we'd have to make sacrifices, besides the obvious (lives on the battlefield), didn't you think maybe he meant something we could all contribute to that would make a difference, for example, say, a gasoline tax? Instead, he threw us a tax cut bone. The amount we're spending in Iraq should have been used to pay for the war in Afghanistan and for shoring up our defenses.

Please vote tomorrow.