Woman of Mass Deception
A Tennessee state legislator from Memphis is claiming the coming war with Iraq will cost Tennessee's budget an estimated $1.3 billion in federal funding for roads, schools and other domestic needs.

State Rep. Kathryn Bowers, D-Memphis, said yesterday in an open letter to the governor, other legislators and the public, that she wants Tennessee citizens to know that the state's serious budget shortfalls will be compounded by a reduction in federal funds which she believes will be redirected to war spending, according to this story in today’s Tennessean newspaper.

Bowers wrote: ''We are very concerned about the cuts in the federal budget to provide money for a war in Iraq and the wrong message that is being sent to our children.”

The message Bowers is sending to children is that it is okay to lie in order to further your anti-war goals. Bowers’ claim is at best a half-truth, at worse a deliberate lie.

Bowers wrote the letter as part of her work as president of a national organization called Women's Action for New Directions, based in Arlington, Mass.

The organization’s web site says “WAND's mission is to empower women to act politically to reduce violence and militarism, and redirect excessive military resources toward unmet human and environmental needs.”

Bowers cited federal budget figures and projections from two reports of the National Priorities Project, described in the paper as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit Massachusetts-based group used as a resource for citizens and community groups to help them shape federal budgets and priorities,” for her wild claim that Uncle Sam will cut federal funding to Tennessee by $1.3 billion in order to help finance the war.

However, as The Tennessean helpfully notes, “The NPP reports … did not link the federal funding loss and cost of war as Bowers did, said Anita Dancs, the NPP's director of research. Dancs said in one report that the NPP calculated the amount taxpayers in every state would pay to fund a war based on the assumption war would cost $100 billion.

The Tennessean’s description of NPP is a joke, by the way. The "about us" section of the organization’s own website says this about itself: “For a number of years, NPP has focused on the trade-offs between military spending and tax breaks with social spending. This has enabled us to build bridges between the peace community and the many groups fighting for social and economic justice, expanding the number of groups who will work on both community needs and peace.”

In other words, NPP is allied with the anti-war Left.

But back to Bowers.

In a separate report, unrelated to the war, the NPP claims President Bush has proposed cuts federal funding to certain programs that will result in Tennessee losing $2.4 billion. Those cuts included $178 million in highway planning and construction, $22.1 million in the clean water revolving fund; $6.4 million in the Workforce Investment Act; $4.6 million in the low-income energy assistance program; $760,600 in airport improvements; $678,180 in the drinking water revolving fund; and $19,689 in schools.

But none of those cuts is related to the war and not going to war will not mean Tennessee gets that extra money.

Bowers ignores that inconvenient fact. And having set up the straw man, she goes in for the kill:

“My concern is that because of our state budget crunch, we will not be able to make up those dollars and we'll have to cut services even more — and people think we're cutting state dollars, but it's federal dollars being cut,” she told the newspaper.

After all, she said, Tennesseans pay $219 million in taxes for the federal government's nuclear weapons program, and that’s enough to buy Head Start for 32,047 Tennessee children; affordable housing units for 3,123 Tennessee families; and salaries for 5,101 elementary schoolteachers.

In other words, Ms. Bowers implies, if you favor a strong defense and/or the war with Iraq, you are against Head Start, decent housing and paying Johnny's school teacher well. That's absurd. You can be for all of them. Or none of them. You can even be in favor of kicking Saddam's butt so Johnny's affordable house and his school teacher's place of work won't be hit by one of Saddam's WMDs in the hands of terrorists down the road a few years .. or a few months ... from now.

But that’s not the kicker.

This is. One of WAND’s five stated policy goals is

Eliminate the testing, production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do in Iraq?

You can ask Rep. Bowers yourself, by emailing her at rep.kathryn.bowers@legislature.state.tn.us.