corrente

"While the Gallup Poll is normally reliable, strategists in both parties are scoffing at a Gallup Poll in California that showed the 'yes' position on the recall of Gov. Gray Davis registering a whopping 63 percent. Private polling by both Democratic and Republican pollsters shows something quite different. In those polls, 'yes' runs between 51 percent and 53 percent and, on the replacement ballot question, Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is usually ahead of Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante by three to four points."

Since yesterday more than 15,000 people have joined our No Recall team. We're 260,000 strong: pledged to stop the madness, stop the recall and stop Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are enough of us to win this. All we need to do is act -- every single one of us, this week, today, right now.

The first action in our seven-day countdown is easy. We're asking you to print out a No Recall sign and post it somewhere visible such as a window, your cubicle or a public place. Print out a sign and let's get the momentum going. There are so many of us. Let's show California that No Recall is winning!

The Counsel to the President, Alberto R. Gonzales, informed the White House staff in a message this morning that the Justice Department would be sending a letter instructing employees to "preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation."

The letter, Mr. Gonzales's message said, "will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the Department's investigation."

Mr. Gonzales's message said the White House had been notified of the investigation on Monday evening.

I am very tired of writing about Karl Rove. Lately, though, I have felt a kind of moral obligation, and almost a patriotic duty to remind people of the man who really runs the White House. Politically, and strategically, nothing has happened in the Bush Administration without Rove's imprimatur. Reporters have discovered Rove’s steely control in the form of what they call a leak proof White House. Nothing comes out of the Bush White House without Rove's approval. Generally, that means nothing comes out of the White House.

Until Karl Rove wants something to leak.

The focus on Rove brought an odd twist to Bush's travels. When the president boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, he walked up the steps and waved - and not a single camera followed. He looked momentarily perplexed. All lenses were trained on Rove at the bottom of the steps.

For example, in July two enterprising Middle Eastern firms started offering cellphone service in Baghdad, setting up jury-rigged systems compatible with those of neighboring countries. Since the collapse of Baghdad's phone system has been a major source of postwar problems, coalition authorities should have been pleased.

But no: the authorities promptly shut down the services. Cell service, they said, could be offered only by the winners in a bidding process — one whose rules, revealed on July 31, seemed carefully designed to shut out any non-American companies. (In the face of strenuous protests the rules were revised, but still seem to favor the usual suspects.) Oddly, the announcement of the winners, originally scheduled for Sept. 5, keeps being delayed. Meanwhile, only Paul Bremer and his people have cellphones — and, thanks to the baffling decision to give that contract to MCI, even those phones don't work very well. (Aside from the fact that its management perpetrated history's biggest accounting fraud, MCI has no experience in building cell networks.

Text of an e-mail to White House staff Tuesday from counsel Alberto R. Gonzales about the Justice Department's investigation about the leak of a CIA officer's identity:

PLEASE READ: Important Message From Counsel's Office

We were informed last evening...

... by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee. The department advised us that it will be sending a letter today instructing us to preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation. Its letter will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the department's investigation. Any questions concerning this request should be directed to Associate Counsels Ted Ullyot or Raul Yanes in the counsel to the president's office. The president has directed full cooperation with this investigation.

repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand

The number of people without health insurance shot up last year by 2.4 million, the largest increase in a decade, raising the total to 43.6 million, as health costs soared and many workers lost coverage provided by employers, the Census Bureau reported today.

The increase brought the proportion of people who were uninsured to 15.2 percent, from 14.6 percent in 2001

The figure remained lower than the recent peak of 16.3 percent in 1998.

The number of uninsured increased each year from 1987 to 1998, even when the economy was booming. Small businesses accounted for many of the new jobs then, and such businesses are far less likely to provide insurance.

Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal-leaning consumer group, said: "It's hard to grasp the magnitude of the number of uninsured. It exceeds the aggregate population of 24 states."

The number of full-time workers without health insurance rose by 897,000 last year, to 19.9 million. Kate Sullivan, director of health care policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said the increase was alarming and predicted it would continue this year.

"Workplace coverage is becoming unaffordable for many employers and employees," Ms. Sullivan said.

On Friday, the Census Bureau reported that poverty rose in 2002 for the second consecutive year. The poverty rate generally declines when the economy expands, but there is no guarantee that the number of uninsured will also decline.

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said the numbers showed that "the nation must do more" to help the uninsured.

Mr. Thompson said, for example, that Congress should provide tax credits for the purchase of private insurance

But no action is imminent. Congress is preoccupied with efforts to help a large, politically potent group that already has insurance, the elderly, by adding drug benefits to Medicare.

Ace of Diamonds | Dick Cheney
"A former chairman of Halliburton (oil equiptment) and KBR (mercenaries). Now vice-president of US, he subcontracts part of the military intervention in Iraq to mercenary troops and awards the reconstruction of destroyed Iraqi infastructure to Halliburton."

King of Diamonds | George Bush
"Chairman of a baseball club and director of the oil company owned by Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden. He was declared President of the US by his father's Supreme Court appointees before the election results could show that he had lost the election."

King of Hearts | Karl Rove
"Brains-in-chief, Secretary General of the White House."

Eight of Spades | Lewis Libby
"Past and current mafia lawyer. Now also the Secretary General to Vice-President Cheney. Libby is in charge of the White House's ultra-secret National Energy Policy Development, and works closely with directors of Enron and major oil companies."




Play with a full deck here: The Bush Regime Card Deck from Reseau Voltaire

Update: More Bush Regime playing cards (thanks to Dave in comments) available here: HERE

"He wasn't involved," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of Rove. "The president knows he wasn't involved. ... It's simply not true."

McClellan urged anyone with information about the alleged leak to contact with Justice Department. "The president expects everyone in his administration to adhere to the highest standards of conduct," McClellan said. "No one would be authorized to do such a thing."

White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

What's the fuss about?" asked Novak, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who is also a conservative commentator on CNN.

"There is no great crime involved here... The fuss is made on this because it involves (Republican President George W.) Bush," he said on CNN. "I do not reveal confidential sources."

"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," Novak said, saying the information was disclosed to him while he was interviewing a senior Bush administration official.

But don’t miss the remarkable back-story here—the amazing silence of the Washington press corps over the past three months. This story broke in Robert Novak’s July 14 column.... And it was obvious that these “senior officials” may have committed a serious crime. But over the course of the past three months, have you seen a word—have you seen one word—from Washington’s pundits about this story? Of course not! Instead, pundits did what they do best—they hid beneath their mahogany desks, pretending not to have heard this report. ...Even in this morning’s New York Times, this story is given secondary status, folded into another story. It doesn’t even rate its own headline. The Times was brilliant at ginning up Clinton “scandals,” including Whitewater, the mother of all fake and phony flaps. Now it fiddles, diddles and blathers in the face of acknowledged White House crime.

What was done here was thuggish, malevolent, illegal, and immoral. Whoever peddled this story to Novak and others, in outing Plame, violated the law and put the lives of Plame's overseas contacts at risk. Compared to this, all of Clinton's peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production. If Rove or other high-ranking White House officials did what's alleged, then they've earned the wrath of God. Or, since God is probably busy, the media firestorm that will undoubtedly erupt.

Let me make this as plain as possible -- I was an unpaid advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and I know and respect some high-ranking people in the administration. And none of that changes the following: if George W. Bush knew about or condoned this kind of White House activity, I wouldn't just vote against him in 2004 -- I'd want to see him impeached. Straight away.

Whether or not he knew about it beforehand, for two and a half months--ever since two senior White House officials called six reporters and got Robert Novak to take the bait in his July 14 column--George W. Bush has "condoned this type of White House activity." No heads have rolled. No sanctions have been applied. The White House's posture has one of hunkering down: that this is no big deal, that this will pass, that nothing internal has to change, and that this is a tempest in a teapot.

Whether or not George W. Bush knew beforehand, his reactions since July 14 put him well over the line of "condoning." We don't need to write, "If George Bush knew about or condoned..." We need instead to write, "Since George Bush condoned..."

RICE: I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this, and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate.

My understanding is that, in matters like this, as a matter of routine, a question like this is referred to the Justice Department for appropriate action, and that's what's going to be done.

(edit)

SNOW: Well, when the story came out...his wife's name is in the paper....was it known in the White House that she was a CIA employee?

RICE: I'm not going to go into this, Tony, because the problem here is this has been referred to the Justice Department. I think that's the appropriate place...

SNOW:

(edit)

Was there, at least within the White House, a gasp when somebody said, "Uh oh"? And if so, did the White House take any action, back then in June, when the story appeared?

RICE: Well, it was well known that the president of the United States does not expect the White House to get involved in such things. We will see...

HUME: You mean the revelation of names?

RICE: Anything of this kind. But let's just see what the Justice Department does. It's with the appropriate channels now, and we'll see what the Justice Department....how the Justice Department disposes of it.

Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

An administration official told The Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to selected journalists to discredit Wilson.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that she knew "nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this, and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate."

More specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday. Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's [Valerie Plame] identity.

The disclosure could have broken more than one law. In addition to the federal law prohibiting the identification of a covert officer, officials with high-level national security clearance sign nondisclosure agreements, with penalties for revealing classified information.

An administration official said the leaks were "simply for revenge" for the trouble Wilson had caused Bush.

A key factor in the 2004 election will be how such candidates -- and their supporters -- react when they are given the opportunity to shift the focus of their criticism away from Bush and onto their fellow Democrats. If, like Bill Simon or Tolkien's trolls, they take the bait, they will end up sharing a similar fate -- a mossy relic forever on the political sidelines.

Keep in mind that a sitting president cannot single you out for attack without dragging you up to his level. Whenever the Bush campaign attacks any challenger, it is an opportunity for every challenger to "act presidential" by responding to that attack forcefully.

Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors. ( Remarks By George Bush, 41st President of the United States, At the Dedication Ceremony for the George Bush Center for Intelligence, 26 April 1999)

the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that an administration official leaked the name of an ["yellowcake" whistleblower Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, an] undercover CIA officer to a journalist, administration officials said yesterday.

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

The official would not name the leakers for the record ...

The official said he had no indication that Bush knew about the calls.

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another.

Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

RAY MCGOVERN: What this indicates, I mean, this is all sort of in the weeds until you step back and you say why is all this happening? It is all happening because there are lies upon lies, deceit upon deceit that have been used to justify this illegal war on against an unprovoked enemy, or an enemy that does not provoke us. Once the lies start unraveling, and people see they can speak out, that is going to be real trouble for the administration, and so what do you do? You do all you can to intimidate them. And how you intimidate them is to try to hurt them in a personal way. Going after somebody's wife, I mean, not even Richard Nixon stooped to that.

RAY MCGOVERN: Well, you know it's really interesting. When we saw these people coming back in town, all of us said who were around in those days said, oh my god, "the crazies" are back - "the crazies" - that's how we referred to these people.

RAY MCGOVERN: Well, when Wolfowitz prepared that defense posture statement in 1991, where he elucidated the strategic vision that has now been implemented, Jim Baker, Secretary of State, Brent Scowcroft, security advisor to George Bush, and George Bush said hey, that thing goes right into the circular file. Suppress that thing, get rid of it. Somebody had the presence of mind to leak it and so that was suppressed. But now to see that arise out of the ashes and be implemented. while we start a war against Iraq, I wonder what Bush the first is really thinking. Because these were the same guys that all of us referred to as "the crazies".

About 15,000 US soldiers and reservists have been told to prepare for service in Iraq , as other countries hold back from pledging troops.

Brian Moody signs up more soldiers for the Army National Guard than just about any other recruiter in Indiana. Across kitchen tables around the state, he has usually had an easy time convincing young people and their families that the military offers them what they want.

Until he met Jeff Fayette's mom.

"I came out of that house, and the dad had not said anything, and the mom said: `The people at work tell me you're trained to lie to me. My son is not fighting for anybody in Iraq. He's going to stay right here and he's going to be my baby,' " Moody said. "That's the kind of feeling we're up against now. I tell you, it's real easy to get depressed."

As the war on terrorism stretches into its third year, and the violence in Iraq drags on, Moody and other military recruiters across the United States are starting to get nervous.

But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this month, also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism in which federal authorities have used their expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance, or seize millions in tainted assets.

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive nonterrorism investigations," including the tracking of an unidentified fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets, the report said.

Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report represent only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism cases pursued under the law.

Once Bush declared in May that the major fighting was over, Japanese officials considered sending about 1,000 GSDF personnel to Iraq by October. As the security situation worsened, dramatized by the bombing of the U.N. center in Baghdad in August, the government kept pushing back plans to dispatch the SDF until early in 2004.

Up to 100 Ground Self-Defense Force personnel will probably be tasked with helping in the construction of social infrastructure in cities in northern Iraq. They will be put under the protection of U.S. troops.

President Bush is deeply morally unserious when he tells Americans that we can succeed in this marathon and still have radical tax cuts for the rich and a soaring deficit, and the only people who will have to sacrifice are reservists and soldiers.

The C.I.A. has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether senior Bush administration officials broke the law by revealing the identity of an agency operative, a government official said today.

The operative is the wife of a former envoy to Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who has publicly voiced skepticism about the Bush administration's policies on Iraq and on Iraq's reported weapons program.

After Mr. Wilson went public with his criticism, his wife was identified as a Central Intelligence Agency operative by the columnist Robert Novak, who attributed the information to senior administration officials.

"President Bush came into office promising to bring honor and integrity to the White House. Instead, the President took us to war on what appears to be false pretenses and is now using every means possible to obfuscate that fact. If the allegations are true, someone within this Administration has sought retribution against a former U.S. diplomat who sought only to bring truth to an otherwise murky situation by revealing the identity of his wife, an undercover analyst. This is a very serious charge. If it is true, they have gone way beyond petty retribution - they have undermined a key national security tenet and violated two federal laws.

Let me make sure I understand this correctly: Here in Colorado, a state that largely deplores welfare, affordable housing assistance and other entitlement programs, the city of Denver wants to give $10 million in welfare benefits to Wal- Mart?

Organized labor is widely disparaged as a weak and anachronistic force in American life, but, in one important matter, the labor movement is the vanguard: determined to reposition the capital that effectively belongs to working Americans to serve the true interests of those workers and, therefore, society's long-term interests too. Labor may be greatly weakened from its heyday, but one thing it possesses is capital assets--the power of the $400 billion in union-managed pension funds and the trillions in public-employee pension funds, where labor unions can exercise real influence over the patterns of investment.

[...]

Morgan Stanley, the "all-service" financial house, provided one of the most blatant examples of how Wall Street firms betray their clients from organized labor. Three Morgan Stanley analysts issued an advisory on investment strategy in November 2002 urging investors: "Look for the union label...and run the other way." Labor officials were not amused. Scores of union pension funds hire Morgan Stanley for investment advice and park huge sums in the firm's various investment funds. As the labor clients raised protests, Morgan Stanley changed its tune, drafting a pro-union declaration for the AFL's approval.

The primary target for education and informed pressure, however, are the pension fund trustees, starting with the Taft-Hartley pension funds that are directly supervised by labor and management representatives. Until quite recently, most labor trustees have been as passive and conventional as their corporate counterparts. "The culture of the financial industry is intimidating," Blackwell explains. "The trustees are spirited off to conferences in Hawaii or wherever there's a golf course, and the fear of God is put into them on their fiduciary responsibility. On top of that, these trustees are workers. They don't have the time to become experts, or the technical and legal support to question the investing decisions. So we are providing that."

"So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers' (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry." - Josh Marshall commenting on this Edison/Liberty Partners swindle.

State fund buys school operator

Florida's state pension fund is investing $174-million in a controversial for-profit school management company.

Through one of its money managers, Liberty Partners, the pension fund has agreed to buy out the shareholders of Edison Schools Inc., taking the New York company private.

In effect, the fund that provides for the retirement pensions of Florida teachers and other public employees will own a company that has played a leading role in privatizing school management. - By Helen Huntley, Times Personal Finance Editor, Published September 25, 2003

Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on." Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Bush repeated the same story on January 5, 2002, stating, "First of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error, and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake...."

This is false. Nobody saw the jetliner crash into the first tower on television until a videotape surfaced a day later.

What's more, Bush's memory not only contradicts every media report of that morning, it also contradicts what he said on the day of the attack. In his speech to the nation that evening, Bush said, "Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans." Again, this statement has never been satisfactorily explained. No one besides Bush has ever spoken of these "emergency plans," and the mere idea of their implementation is contradicted by Bush's claim that at the time, he believed the crash to have been a case of pilot error.

The panic motif runs through the rest of the President's actions that day.

Bush's aides later offered, and retracted, the excuse that he spent the day flying around the country because of threats to Air Force One believed to have been received at the White House. What nobody has ever explained is this: If you think Air Force One is to be attacked, why go up in Air Force One?

Poverty rose and income levels declined in 2002 for the second straight year as the nation's economy continued struggling after the first recession in a decade, the Census Bureau reported Friday.

The poverty rate was 12.1 percent last year, up from 11.7 percent in 2001. Nearly 34.6 million people lived in poverty, about 1.7 million more than the previous year.

Median household income declined 1.1 percent between 2001 and 2002 to $42,409, after accounting for inflation.

Even before the data was made public, House Democrats charged the Bush administration was trying to hide bad economic news by releasing the numbers on a Friday when people are paying more attention to the upcoming weekend. In previous years, the estimates were released on a Tuesday or Thursday.

Census Bureau spokesman Larry Neal said the time change wasn't politically motivated. It was originally scheduled to be released this past Tuesday, he said, but was moved to Friday because statisticians asked for more time to process the numbers.

"These are the official estimates of income and poverty in America and every debate on income and poverty for the next year will rehash them," Neal said. "The notion that we should, could or would suppress these numbers doesn't pass the laugh test."

Another Friday outrage
Last Friday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, known as FERC, announced settlements with energy companies accused of manipulating markets during the California energy crisis. Why on Friday? Because the settlements were a joke: the companies got away with only token payments. It was yet another demonstration of how electricity deregulation has gone wrong.

Most independent experts now believe that during 2000-2001, price manipulation by energy companies, mainly taking the form of "economic withholding" — keeping capacity offline to drive up prices — added billions of dollars to California's electricity bills. A March FERC report concluded that there had been extensive manipulation of prices in both the natural gas and electricity markets.

Using methods widely accepted among economists, the California Independent System Operator — which operates the power grid — estimated that withholding by electricity companies had cost the state $8.9 billion. This estimate doesn't include the continuing cost of long-term contracts the state signed, at inflated prices, to keep the lights on during the crisis.

Yet the charges energy companies agreed to added up to only a bit more than $1 million. That is, the average Californian was bilked of more than $250, but the state will receive compensation of about 3 cents.

Flipping through photographs of drone aircraft uncovered by U.S. search teams in Iraq, Robert S. Boyd, the Air Force's senior intelligence analyst, stopped at one showing the inside of a fuselage.

Two glass viewing ports could be seen at the bottom of the metal frame. Fastened above was a bracket, which Boyd said was likely for mounting "a camera or recorder of some sort." Also squeezed into the cramped space were the flight controls, leaving little room, Boyd noted, for much else -- certainly not anything capable of dispensing biological or chemical warfare agents.

Bush issued what amounted to a correction of another statement Cheney made on "Meet the Press." When asked about the possibility of a connection between former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney said, "We don't know." Three days later, Bush said in response to a question that the government has no evidence of such a link.

$900 million to import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves

Musharraf said there were four conditions under which he would send troops: when there is a request from the Iraqis, when he feels the troops would be welcome, when there are other Muslim troops participating in a multilateral force, and when there is a Security Council resolution authorizing such a force.

Dean, who opposed the war, said he would vote -- if he was in Congress-- to give the administration the requested funds, but added that the $87 billion should come from the "excessive and extraordinary" tax cut that Bush "foisted upon us."

When it comes to the political and economic sacrifices and strategies that are also required to fight this war successfully, [the Bushies] are cowardly wimps.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "is in no position to question the patriotism" of President Bush's critics on Iraq, having once scathingly condemned President Clinton's military strategy in Bosnia, a Democratic leader said Thursday.

Rep. Steny Hoyer quoted DeLay as saying that the 1999 NATO-led bombing campaign was "President Clinton's war."

"It was ... as if DéLay has blocked out from his memory" what he and other Republican critics said about President Clinton's response to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1999, said Hoyer, the Maryland lawmaker who is the second-ranking Democratic leader in the House

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell tried on Thursday to explain away remarks on Iraq dating back to the beginning of the Bush administration, before the United States decided to invade Iraq.

Speaking in Cairo in February 2001, on his first Middle East trip, Powell said that Iraq had not developed "any significant capacity" in weapons of mass destruction and was not able to attack his neighbors with conventional weapons

"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place," he added.

Cheney said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that since becoming vice president, "I've severed all my ties with [Halliburton], gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years."

Democrats pointed out that Cheney receives deferred compensation from Halliburton under an arrangement he made in 1998, and also retains stock options. He has pledged to give after-tax proceeds of the stock options to charity.

[Senator Frank] Lautenberg, D-N.J., asked the Congressional Research Service to weigh in.

Without naming Cheney or Halliburton, the service reported that unexercised stock options and deferred salary "are among those benefits described by the Office of Government Ethics as 'retained ties' or 'linkages' to one's former employer."

Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 through August 2000. The firm's KBR subsidiary is the main government contractor working to restore Iraq's oil industry in an open-ended contract that was awarded without competitive bidding.

"Well, there are lots of ironies in the situation in Iraq," Bremer said.

In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish states would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as the best ultimate solution.

"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New York Times. "There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."

The Commerce Department issued disappointing economic data showing demand for durable goods dropped by a sizable 0.9 percent in August, raising doubts about the manufacturing sector's delicate recovery. The decrease in new orders for durable goods, items including cars and home appliances expected to last at least three years, was the first and largest decline in four months and bigger than the 0.5 percent dip economists anticipated.

new applications for jobless benefits fell last week by a seasonally adjusted 19,000 to 381,000, a seven-month low, the Labor Department said. But at least half of the decrease was attributable to workers not being able to file claims because of Hurricane Isabel, which hit the East Coast, a department analyst said.

Back here on Dogwood, tensions are running high as well. We have had three mortar attacks this week. Two have managed to land rounds within our little compound in one case injuring 3 soldiers and causing one to run panicking into some concertina wire injuring himself. So far non of my soldiers have been injured, but we are taking more precautions as a result of the recent attacks. One big change is all exterior lights in the compound are now kept off at night so as to prevent the enemy from using them as aiming point. Additionally, soldiers are keeping their body armor and helmets closer to them and we have practices getting everyone to the bunkers several times in the last few days. We are also looking at building sandbag walls around each tent, but that will take us a couple of weeks to complete as we have a lot of tents and soldiers.

Poor kids.

For quite some time this White House has functioned like a heavily leveraged business, an overextended investor that suddenly gets a margin call. To extend the business metaphor, the White House has been surviving not on profits but expectations of future profits or, in other words, credibility. The White House has been able to get the public to sit tight with a lot of objectively poor news (a poor economy, big deficits, bad news from abroad) on the basis of trust.

A much-anticipated interim report by the Bush administration's chief weapons hunter in Iraq will offer no firm conclusions about the former Iraqi government's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, senior officials said yesterday.

The weapons inspector, David Kay, is expected to present his report to Congress late next week -- an event that senior U.S. officials had just weeks ago pointed to as providing a possible vindication for the administration's prewar claims that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had restarted its efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

But officials yesterday sought to play down expectations that Kay's report will contain any major revelations. Kay, who is in Washington this week finishing the document, is "still gathering information from the field," the CIA's chief spokesman, Bill Harlow, said yesterday. "Don't expect any firm conclusions. He will not rule in or rule out anything." ...

More recently, however, other officials, some of whom have spent time in Iraq, said the survey team had not gathered any substantial information, in part because the military members of Kay's group were threatening and arresting some Iraqi scientists and technicians who had in the past worked on weapons programs.

A big explosion was heard Thursday in central Baghdad and smoke could be seen billowing from the scene.

It was the third known blast in the capital on a day that began with a bomb attack on the hotel where NBC-TV had operations. A Somali night watchman was killed

A resolute speech and two days of personal diplomacy by President Bush are failing to soften resistance to his postwar strategy for Iraq, and a U.S. resolution designed to bring fresh peacekeeping troops and financial support remains stalemated.

Resistance from other nations is so stiff that Bush did not solicit contributions from the leaders of France, Germany, India and Pakistan and none were volunteered. Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the possibility of Turkish peacekeepers with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul - without getting a clear commitment.

Bush's failure to win a promise of fresh soldiers in meetings with the leaders of India and Pakistan -- aides said the president did not even ask --

BAGHDAD -- When grease-stained technicians at the Baghdad South power plant needed spare parts recently, they first submitted a written request to Bechtel Corp., the engineering firm given more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts to fix Iraq's decrepit infrastructure.

Then they went to the junkyard.

They scoured piles of industrial detritus for abandoned items that could be jury-rigged into the geriatric plant, such as the hydraulic pump from a bulldozer that was used to restart a broken water condenser.

"Of course we'd like new parts," sighed Ahmed Ali Shihab, the senior operations engineer. But he said repeated appeals to Bechtel and the U.S. military had not yielded any significant new equipment. "All we have received from them are promises," he said.

Although U.S. officials said the requests for new parts were beyond the scope of Bechtel's contract, the failure to get much-needed equipment to Baghdad South more than five months after the first reconstruction teams arrived here illustrates the dearth of planning, funding and coordination that has fettered the overall American effort to rehabilitate Iraq.

Still, it would be difficult to say Schwarzenegger "won" the debate so much as survived it as the candidates frequently interrupted one another and strayed from the specific topic. Schwarzenegger did not have the grasp of state government as Bustamante and State Sen. Tom McClintock, nor did he display any more passion than independent Arianna Huffington and Green Party candidate Peter Camejo.

The other four candidates largely agreed that decisive action was needed to right the ship, but they challenged Schwarzenegger from both the right and the left in ways that made his views seem overly generalized and lacking an awareness about the perils of politics and navigating state government.

At the Revere House restaurant in Tustin, a largely conservative crowd booed when Huffington wisecracked about Schwarzenegger's treatment of women, then cheered when Schwarzenegger responded that he had the perfect part for her in "Terminator 4."

At times, the exchanges among the candidates were so sharp that the audience groaned or gasped. ... Throughout the debate, Schwarzenegger was directly and aggressively confronted for the first time by his opponents -- especially columnist Arianna Huffington ... When Schwarzenegger kept interrupting at another point in the debate, Huffington retorted: "This is the way you treat women, we know that. But not now."

As television reporters jammed the south lawn behind the Student Union for their 5 p.m. newscasts, dozens of red-faced Schlowarzenegger supporters chanting, "Yes on recall, yes on Arnold!" collided with a batch of anti-recall demonstrators who were countering with "No on recall!"

SCHWARZENEGGER: ... Remember one thing, in California we have a three-strike system. You guys put wool over the people's eyes twice, the third time now, you're out. On Oct. 7, you guys are out. It's that simple, OK?

If all remaining conditions are timely satisfied, Halliburton anticipates that DII Industries, Kellogg Brown & Root and the other affected units would make the Chapter 11 filing in November.

The Democrat leaders must finally decide: Are they going to be the party of Franklin Roosevelt's moral clarity, or the party of Ted Kennedy's extremist appeasement," the Texas Republican said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation.

"Our critics can try to change the subject, but the debate will come down to one question: Are we at war or not? One choice, one vote."

M Hey, all this schoolgirl talk over the last few weeks made me realize one thing - there are no USED PANTIES SHOPS in Montreal, like the ones they have in Japan. I sure would love to get my hands on some pissed-in panties from a cute Japanese girl! Man, just think about it - the white cotton, the yellow-stained crotch, the perfume. They even have panty vending machines in Japan! Yup, Montreal definitely needs dirty panty shops. Any cutie who's into OMORASHI, please get back to me. [BLEEP!]

George, here's what to do in Iraq: Declare victory and bring the troops home.

Certainly, the American people would accept a change in policy. They have accepted the official story from the start — the weapons of mass destruction, the "link" between Saddam and bin Laden, the "Woman Warrior" story about Pvt. Jessica Lynch. They are not paying much attention to Iraq. They will accept a pullout.

Your war, a Republican war, of which the politically profitable part is over. We are now in the losing part. The occupation of Iraq could drag on well past November 2004.

"Isn't it smarter to fight the war on terror in the streets of Baghdad than the streets of Brooklyn?"

[MANJOO:] It was brought to their attention two years ago?

[HARRIS:] Right.

[MANJOO:] So what was the flaw?

[HARRIS:] Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.


[MANJOO:] So you can break in and then hide your tracks.

[HARRIS:] You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did.

[MANJOO:] Who would have access to this? Are we talking about elections officials?

[HARRIS:] A couple situations. Obviously anybody who has access to the computer, whether that's the election supervisor, their assistants, the IT people, the janitor -- anybody who has access to the computer can get into it. ,

Some family members of Sept. 11 victims are unhappy with the pace and direction of the commission's 18-month inquiry, which passed its midway mark in late August.

They want the committee to pinpoint government failures and, where necessary, to name those accountable.

"What we want is investigative hearings with witnesses who answer questions pertinent to the investigation," said Carol Ashley, whose daughter Janice was killed at the World Trade Center.

Ashley is a member of the Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission, which released a midterm report card giving the commission poor marks, including D's for the public meetings it has held.

[BBC reporter Mr Neil said that according to the source, the [draft Kay Report] will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material [in Iraq]".

Two-thirds say they think that Iraq will be in better condition five years from now than it was before the invasion. Only 8 per cent think it will be worse off.

But they are not convinced that Iraq is better off now - 47 per cent said the country was worse off than before the invasion and 33 per cent said it was better off.

The survey found that 62 per cent thought ousting Saddam was worth the hardships they have endured since the invasion.

Six in 10 said they viewed the new Iraqi Governing Council favourably, but most saw its priorities as set by coalition authorities.

The poll, of 1178 adults, was conducted face to face in the respondents' households from August 28 to September 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Gallup plans to poll extensively in Iraq and has established a centre in Baghdad to co-ordinate the polling effort.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.

Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953 after being shown plans to launch a preventive war against the Soviet Union; as quoted by Jonathan Schell, in the Nation (March 3, 2003)

"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time....I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

A federal judge on Friday let proceed an antitrust case that accused the Monsanto Company and other big agricultural seed giants of conspiring to control the world's market in genetically modified crops.

In a 13-page decision, Rodney W. Sippel, a federal district judge in St. Louis, dismissed part of a class-action lawsuit that was filed in 1999 by a group of farmers who said they had suffered huge losses because of global opposition to genetically modified crops.

But Judge Sippel allowed the antitrust portion of the case to proceed, possibly setting the stage for a court battle over whether the world's biggest producers of agricultural seeds got together in the late 1990's to fix prices and control the market for those valuable biotechnology seeds, which are now planted on more than 100 million acres worldwide.

Congress will miss its Sept. 30 deadline to enact a highway and transit funding bill, a delay that states say could cost 90,000 people their jobs and billions of dollars in extra construction costs because of delays.

Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more reservists could be called upon if other countries do not soon pledge thousands more troops to form a third multinational division in Iraq.

When it announced a troop rotation plan in July, the Pentagon assumed that it would have available a third multinational division of 10,000 to 15,000 troops to replace the Army's 101st Airborne Division early next year.

"There are many countries out there talking about it, and we have every hope that that will happen," [Pace] said, "but hope is not a plan."

Earlier Wednesday, Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum said Iraq plans to remain a member of OPEC, dismissing any suggestions that the U.S.-occupied country would withdraw from the producers' group it helped found.

Iraq's role in the cartel has been the subject of debate for months, with some U.S. officials suggesting it drop out of the cartel to avoid the constraints of export quotas that would one day apply to its slowly recovering oil output.

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday asked the federal courts to prevent the Secret Service from keeping anti-Bush demonstrators far away from presidential appearances while allowing supporters to display their messages up close. The civil liberties group filed the lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of four advocacy organizations that claimed that the Secret Service forced them into protest zones or other areas where they could not be seen by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or be noticed by the media covering their visits.

The ACLU complaint lists several incidents where protesters were forced to assemble blocks away from where the president or vice president was speaking, while supporters of the administration's policy could hold their signs up in front of the building.The civil liberties group cited examples across the country, including Philadelphia; Columbia, S.C.; Phoenix; Stockton, Calif.; and St. Louis.

For the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, Bush seemed to be in a crisis that was purely political, and largely of his own making.

His address to the United Nations, replete with his usual good-and-evil rhetoric ..

Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council yesterday barred journalists from two leading Arab satellite news channels from government buildings and press conferences. The council said the two-week ban was imposed on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya (two of the most popular television news stations in the Middle East) because it suspected that the stations had violated rules that include not disclosing information about pending attacks on American troops.

[David Kay,] the man in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is briefing senior intelligence officials in Washington this week but the public may not be told of his findings right away.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice suggested there are no plans to release Kay's findings immediately. There had been expectations in Washington that the report would come out this month.

Criticism is welcome.

But you can't accuse the president of treason without some evidence to back it up.

"I determine that .. acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001

We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.

Bush, who did not sit in the chamber for Annan's [UN] address ...

Many of us are familiar with the five stages of grieving identified three decades ago by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross. As individuals face death or any great loss they go through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Those stages apply to the demise of major policy initiatives as well and we’re watching that happen now as the White House comes to grips with the collapse of its policy on Iraq.

The administration keeps seeing what the problem is but cannot bring itself to take the cure.

It’s stuck. It cannot get past stages one (denial) and two (anger). And the clock is ticking.

I wish it were 1972 again or even 1992 again and I could feel sanguine that the United States was going to toddle along, for better or worse, under a basic bipartisan consensus that recognized certain constitutional boundaries and limits that could not be breached. I wish that we had an independent media that was less focused on entertainment values and instead recognized that it had an intrinsically important role in democracy. I wish that we were not in the grip of a revolution in technology and communications at the same time as a radical group of idealists have seized power. I wish we had the luxury of choosing candidates purely on the basis of their commitment to a bottom-up revolution of the people and progressive ideas.

Unfortunately, it is not that time. The modern Republican party presents a clear and present danger to everything we hold dear --- the social safety net, the rule of law, civil liberties, consumer protection, a clean environment, international legitimacy --- everything. They envision a one-party state. They mean to completely and thoroughly change the way this country works.

Ask a Democrat about 2002 and it won't take long before the name Max Cleland comes up. Cleland is the former Georgia senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam. Because he favored some union and civil service protections in the homeland security bill, Cleland was attacked in a vicious campaign ad showing pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cleland lost, and Democrats are still furious over the treatment of this war hero and political moderate.

God, gays and guns
Madison Capital Times
By Rep. Mark Pocan
September 23, 2003

Distraction. If you look the word up in the dictionary, you'll get a couple of definitions.

"The act of distracting, drawing someone's attention away from something." "An obstacle to attention." "Something that serves as a diversion."

The Republican agenda this fall is as follows: a bill to limit birth control to sexually active young women (God); a bill to stop stem cell research that could save thousands of lives in the future (God); a bill to change the definition of marriage from the terribly confusing "husband and wife" to "man and woman" (gays); and a bill to allow residents and nonresidents to carry concealed guns like cell phones anywhere they want to, as well as reducing penalties for having guns and other weapons in schools (guns).

I'm dead serious.

Instead of figuring out how to bring Wisconsin together and find solutions for our weak economy, the Republicans have thrown in the towel and admitted intellectual defeat. Instead, they offer us ways to score political points with narrow special interests, divide our population and create a discussion about anything but their lack of solutions for the economy.

[...]

A good day of Bible thumping and safety lock clicking is good legislative theater for sure. But we're calling your bluff.

It's time to offer some real solutions to real problems rather than provide legislative sleight of hand. Do you have that in you?

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the challenge, did not immediately say whether it would appeal.

The appeals court reinstated a ruling by a district court judge who refused to postpone the election. The judges based their decision on the state's constitution, not any precedent set by Bush v. Gore.

Events during the past two years have set before us the clearest of divides: Between those who seek order and those who spread chaos; between those who work for peaceful change and those who adopt the methods of gangsters; between those who honor the rights of man and those who deliberately take the lives of men and women and children, without mercy or shame.

The mood at the White House is not one of panic.

[BUSH:] My attitude about all of this -- and I really don't pay that much attention to it.

[BUSH]: I would rather fight them there than here. I know I would rather fight them there than here, and I know would rather fight them there than in other remote parts of the world, where it may be more difficult to find them.

HUME: Now, how about this big lawn out here? How did that get here?

BUSH: Isn't it fabulous? Well, we've come out here -- you know, a lot of times, well, after I -- after I made the decision -- not made the decision -- told ...

... Tommy Franks and Don Rumsfeld that they had -- that they had the orders to move in on Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was in the Situation Room, and it was a dramatic moment. It was a heavy moment for me, and I wanted to come outside and reflect, so I came out and got the dogs and we walked around the South Lawn a couple of times.

BUSH: It's bad enough that I cannot run.

The first three pages of Kissinger's book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study - but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s - describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.

This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn't comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger's theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections - as opposed to, say, from God.

But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".

"My liberal friends said, 'I'm not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say'," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There's this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we're facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being 'shrill', of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)

Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn't have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."

tTo quote a state department official who put it pungently to a reporter earlier this year, describing the dominance of the Pentagon hawks: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup'. And then it all makes sense."

"Until about two weeks ago [the White House] believed their own propaganda that all was well in Iraq and at home," Mr. Kristol said. "But reality has set in, and they're hard-headed in dealing with the problems they face."

[Democractic Sentator Jon Corzine of New Jersey,] former chairman of Wall Street investment bankers Goldman Sachs & Co., reminded Republicans of his 30 years experience with financial markets and said personal accounts invested in the stock market were "an uncertainty and a risk." It would be a mistake for millions of Americans to rely on stock market income for their retirement, he said.

In the current system, "security is guaranteed. Dignity is guaranteed," Corzine said, noting that Bush's tax cuts amount to $12 trillion over 75 years, more than enough to restore solvency.

In the marble-floored corporate offices of Al-Hafidh General Trading Co., Waleed and Hani Hafidh vented the rage of many Iraqi businessmen Monday over the country's new wide-open foreign investment policy.Puffing furiously on imported cigarettes, the Hafidh brothers asserted that the economic reform package unveiled by Iraq's recently appointed finance minister in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Sunday will destroy the country's small yet burgeoning private sector, create a permanent "world occupation" of its economy and render the Iraqi people "immigrants in their own land."

"Everything we asked for was thrown onto the trash heap," said Waleed Hafidh, echoing the thoughts of many business people in the Iraqi capital, some of whom appeared on Arab satellite television stations to air their grievances Monday.

"It's the wrong approach," said Sam Kubba, who heads the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington. "It's a recipe for disaster because it gives the impression that they're trying to sell off all the Iraqi resources. They should go about it much more slowly. Start by getting a democracy in place first and letting the people elect a government."

In an interview today in New York, Mr. Chalabi professed gratitude to the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein's government, but his specific proposals were directly at odds with the policies Washington is pursuing in Baghdad and at the United Nations. He demanded that the Iraqi Governing Council be given at least partial control of the powerful finance and security ministries, and rejected the idea of more foreign troops coming to Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi's strategy, he says, is to get from the United Nations General Assembly sovereign status for the unelected 25-member Governing Council. This move to lobby other nations for a swift transfer of some sovereignty is going down poorly in Washington, according to the Iraqi leader's aides.

Mr. Chalabi has sent representatives to France and Germany to discuss putting Iraqis back in charge under a new United Nations mandate that would end American control of the occupation, even if American troops remain in Iraq. His aides say he also plans to tell the Senate that the United Nations could save billions of dollars on Iraq's reconstruction by allowing an Iraqi administration to handle it.

"People in D.C. are accusing us of `conspiring with America's enemies,' " one aide said, describing the reports of his advance men on the mood in Washington.

Howard Dean recently noted that his health care plan would cost about $87 billion, "which happens to be almost exactly the amount the president . . . asked to wage war in Iraq for another year." Given a choice, he said, Americans would choose "health insurance that nobody can take away."

MOVING TARGET: "Acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 [congressional authorization for military force in Iraq] is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

-- President Bush, March 18 letter to Congress.

"We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th."

-- President Bush, Sept. 17.

JetBlue Airways Corp. hired Deloitte & Touche to assist the company in the analysis and development of its privacy policy following the release of customer information as was disclosed last week.

New York-based JetBlue said it shared passenger itineraries, but no payment information, with the Department of Defense for a Department of Defense project related to military base security.

The information was released to Torch Concepts, a Defense Department contractor, which has since disclosed that no identifiable customer data was released to any third party.

The blast occurred at the entrance to a parking lot next to the U.N. compound at the Canal Hotel, scene of a devastating car bombing last month that killed about 20 people, including the U.N.'s top envoy.

The powerful blast was heard throughout the city and hurled the hood of the car some 200 yards. The detached arm of one victim lay more than 100 yards away.

Master Sgt. Hassan al-Saadi, among the first on the scene after the explosion, said he was told by injured policemen that a gray 1995 Opel with Baghdad license plates had approached the entrance to the parking lot.

"A guard went to search the car, opened the trunk and the car exploded, killing him and the driver. When I arrived, there was fire and smoke, even the guard's body was ablaze," he said.

(edit)

Authorities identified the slain policeman as 23-year-old Salam Mohammed.

PANIC AMONG STAFF

In Baghdad, Hanan Tahir, a nutritionist with the World Food Program, said the attack near the U.N. building caused panic among staff.

"They were screaming, shouting," she said. "They were crying and they were running."

Aqeel Abd Ali, a guard at the building, said the torso and head of the bomber had been found, and the face was still recognizable. Police were trying to identify him.

At a nearby hospital, Wahid Karim, who had a chunk of metal removed from his head, said: "I didn't even hear it. I lost consciousness. I came round in my car. The driver was bleeding."

U.N. spokeswoman Antonia Paradela said 19 people were wounded, two of them Iraqi U.N. staff.

"This incident today once again underlines that Iraq remains a war zone and a high risk environment, particularly for those working to improve the lives of the Iraqi people," Kevin Kennedy, the senior U.N. official in Baghdad, said in a statement read out by Paradela at the scene.

Paradela said U.N. staff did not know why they were being targeted. "It's not really for lack of security that this happens," she said. "If people are willing to kill themselves there's not a lot we can do."

She said security was being reviewed.

"People are just talking here and seeing if we can operate in these conditions. There are deliberations here and deliberations in New York."

With the cost of the occupation mounting, Iraq's U.S. administrator said Monday he believed the $87 billion that Bush requested from Congress last week would suffice to put Iraq back on its feet.

"It's a lot of money no matter how you slice it, even here in Washington -- $87 billion is not chopped liver," Paul Bremer told ABC's "Good Morning America" show.

"We have done a very careful analysis of what is needed and we are confident that this will put Iraq on the path to peace and stability," he added.

link to this post - by Leah A :   4:31 PM | |

But, you know, I don't think we're serving our nation well by allowing the discourse to become so uncivil that people say -- use words that they shouldn't be using.

Thousands of Dean supporters -- many of whom profess never to have been active before -- have taken to the streets on their own initiative to pass out Dean fliers at urban fairs and farmers markets, donate blood and clean up beaches in his name, and raise millions of dollars for the former Vermont governor at house parties.

The 1994 "Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act" (USERRA) requires employers to save the job position held by a Guardsman or reservist called to active duty. But labor experts warn that over the last year there has been a startling increase in incidents where civilian firms have "reorganized" their operations so that returning part-time soldiers have come home to the unemployment line. In a number of cases, employers have directly issued layoff orders for returning reservists despite USERRA. ...

Worse, some experts say, this is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Since the vast majority of the 300,000 reservists and Guardsmen mobilized in the aftermath of 9/11 remain on active duty, the vast majority of incidents will probably not occur for a year or more, said Bridget J. Wilson, a San Diego attorney who works in both military law and employment issues. ...

"We have never used the reserves like we are doing now," Wilson told DefenseWatch. "The [National] Guard is no longer the state militia it once was."

Wilson said that USERRA is a "great" law that for the most part has worked to protect part-time military personnel from arbitrary and unfair actions by their civilian employers.

"The president doesn't want to make the public square faith-favored, he simply wants to make it faith-friendly."

HHS has finalized regulations giving faith-based organizations access to nearly $20 billion in social service grants...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has finalized regulations making faith-based groups eligible to compete for $8 billion in housing grants.

Now with the state locked in a bitter battle over property taxes and the airwaves abuzz over the drive to recall California's governor, Wisconsin Republicans and their allies are threatening to throttle Democratic lawmakers - including Gov. Jim Doyle, who took office just nine months ago.

The slumping economy has proved to be a boon to the Army's efforts to recruit the 100,000 enlisted soldiers it needs this year to fill its active-duty and reserve ranks,

"That's the driver, the economy," said Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the head of the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox...

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told the families that she would demand answers to questions about an exit strategy in Iraq and support for the troops before she would vote for $87 billion that President Bush has requested to finance the administration's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I will not sign a blank check until I get my questions answered," McCollum said.

A new poll indicates, for the first time, that a majority of Americans disapprove of President George W. Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq.

The weekly news magazine Newsweek, in a poll released Saturday, finds Mr. Bush's approval rating on Iraq had fallen 6 percentage points since last week, to 46 percent.

The survey also found most Americans - 56 percent - believe the amount of money being spent on Iraq is too high. Six in 10 people, in a Washington Post poll released last week said they do not support Mr. Bush's $87 billion request for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Newsweek poll also found Mr. Bush's personal popularity had dropped to 51 percent, and that a majority of Americans - 57 percent - disapprove of his economic policies.

As potentially embarrassing statements from Arnold Schwarzenegger's past have come to light, his campaign has developed an unusual standard defense: He made it up.

A suicide car bomber killed an Iraqi policeman and himself outside the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Monday, an attack that came as the U.N. considers expanding its role in Iraq.

He [Blackwell] takes the opposite point of view of Barry Lynn and says groups such as his have misinterpreted the Founding Fathers' concept of separation of church & state.

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments."

Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for bringing this important issue up. I have to tell my colleagues, it is humorous watching people doing historical cartwheels, trying to rewrite history as radical revisionists have been doing for the past 30 years, trying to tell us that the Ten Commandments is some political gimmick. Well, if it is, it is a political gimmick that the Father of our Constitution also employed.
James Madison, in drafting the Constitution, which radicals now claim to be trying to protect, said, We have staked the future of the American civilization not on the power of government, but on the capacity of Americans to abide by the Ten Commandments of God.

Now, if the revisionists do not like that, that is fine, but please, do not insult Americans' intelligence, please do not try to do a verbal burning of our American history books. Let us talk about the simple facts.

How To Spot the Good Guys
(It's About People You Can Trust)

In the end, you are whom you associate with. If you run around with despicable people, the heavy odds are that you are despicable as well. ... People who give you ... dishonest answers or anything consistently destructive are to be avoided.

If you don't believe me, listen to George Washington ... "Associate yourself with men [sic] of quality if you esteem your own reputation, for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company."

You tell them, G.W. [typed in, since not on the Parade site]

Never mind the $140 million paid to Richard A. Grasso for his work as a casino greeter. Never mind the hypocrisy of the New York Stock Exchange directors giving Mr. Grasso his money and then booting him for taking it. The big shocker in the Grasso imbroglio may be that two years afterEnron, almost a year and a half after WorldCom and long after corporate America told us that we were through with scandals and back on ethical ground, anyone who turns over a corporate rock can still find the earth crawling with maggots.

When they are ready, [the Iraqi's] new army will have 735 men.

In Washington, politicians and military planners say the United States needs to rely much more heavily on Iraqi soldiers and police officers, both to restore order and to lighten the load on overworked American troops. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that strengthening the Iraqi security services is a top priority. Pentagon planners have optimistically spoken about replacing American soldiers with Iraqi troops.

But on the ground here, the Iraqi cavalry appears a long way off.

Until now, the American-led occupying force has made only desultory efforts to train a force to replace Saddam Hussein's army of 400,000, which disintegrated with Mr. Hussein's defeat.

"I did not anticipate the level of violence that we're going through right now," said General Eaton, the former commander of Fort Benning, Ga., where the Army trains its elite Ranger units.

Even if the United States can find enough officers who pass security and other checks to carry out this plan, these troops will not be available until next summer, General Eaton said.

The new units will be lightly trained, to carry out tasks like guard duty and border patrols, rather than raids and weapons sweeps. At first, they will carry only assault rifles and some light machine guns in a country where rocket-propelled grenade launchers are sometimes displayed at funerals.

The new army will be of little use against well-armed guerrillas, much less as a deterrent to the established armies of Iran and Turkey, Iraq's neighbors to the east and north, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy institute. That is likely to remain the case for the next several years, he said.

"One of the great problems here is that they are creating an Iraqi army that is seen by most Iraqis as not an Iraqi army, but as a paramilitary force that looks more like a tool of the occupation than a national defense force," Mr. Cordesman said.

About 20 American, Australian and British officers and enlisted soldiers are on hand to oversee Vinnell Corporation, a Virginia subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman Corporation, which runs the training under contract.

Peggy Noonan (the interviewer): You were separated on September 11th. What was it like when you saw each other again?

Laura Bush: Well, we just hugged. I think there was a certain amount of security in being with each other than being apart.

George W. Bush: But the day ended on a relatively humorous note. The agents said, "you'll be sleeping downstairs. Washington's still a dangerous place." And I said no, I can't sleep down there, the bed didn't look comfortable. I was really tired, Laura was tired, we like our own bed. We like our own routine. You know, kind of a nester. I knew I had to deal with the issue the next day and provide strength and comfort to the country, and so I needed rest in order to be mentally prepared. So I told the agent we're going upstairs, and he reluctantly said okay. Laura wears contacts, and she was sound asleep. Barney was there. And the agent comes running up and says, "We're under attack. We need you downstairs," and so there we go. I'm in my running shorts and my T-shirt, and I'm barefooted. Got the dog in one hand, Laura had a cat, I'm holding Laura --

Laura Bush: I don't have my contacts in , and I'm in my fuzzy house slippers --

George W. Bush: And this guy's out of breath, and we're heading straight down to the basement because there's an incoming unidentified airplane, which is coming toward the White House. Then the guy says it's a friendly airplane. And we hustle all the way back up stairs and go to bed.

Mrs. Bush: [LAUGHS] And we just lay there thinking about the way we must have looked.

Peggy Noonan (interviewer): So the day starts in tragedy and ends in Marx Brothers.

George W. Bush: That's right--we got a laugh out of it.

The Bush administration tried to fast-forward past such questions last week, as its critics used its call for an additional $87 billion for Iraq to demand specific answers. Inside the White House, as a senior administration official put it, the current question is "When can we make this look more like Bosnia or Kosovo?"

In many circumstances, altruism makes good evolutionary sense. Vampire bats have irregular mealtimes because their sources of blood supply are not willing donors, yet they die if they don't eat for three days. So it makes sense to share excess blood with thirsty neighbors, hoping the favor will be returned.

Investors trying to determine whether mutual fund companies put shareholders' interests above their own face a difficult task.

After recent charges that four fund companies allowed a hedge fund to make illegal trades, investors understandably want to know how to protect themselves. But there's little they can do to guarantee they're not buying into fund companies that have questionable ethics, said Don Phillips, managing director of fund tracker Morningstar Inc.

"It is hard to know who is [trustworthy], because frankly, what these firms have done is unfathomable," Phillips said.

The companies facing charges by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are Bank of America's Nations Funds, Banc One, Janus and Strong. The improper trades could have cost investors billions of dollars, Spitzer said.

"The president has always felt it is important to be up front with the American people about the challenges and threats we face," said Suzy DeFrancis, a spokeswoman for the White House.

"He has consistently told the American people the facts as he saw them and urged us to take the actions necessary to prevent terrorist attacks."

Unbowed by arguments with allies, President Bush will challenge the United Nations with a call to action for money and troops in Iraq and Afghanistan despite lingering differences and a reluctance by many countries to make major contributions.

[Democrats] have spewed more hateful rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein ... Are they leaders or are they just liberal pundits?

Distinctly Big, if Extinct: The 1,500-Pound Rodent
Upper and lower pairs of ever-growing incisors are what make Phoberomys a rodent ... the order Rodentia can now be said to have a greater size range — from less than half an ounce to 1,500 pounds — than that of any order of placental mammals ... one more example of how successful rodents are. Of 4,600 mammal species, 2,600 are rodents. In terms of individuals, there are lots of them. "Wherever there have been rodents," she said, "they have been very abundant."

Still other optimists assert that although payrolls may be shrinking now, new jobs — millions of them — are just around the corner. But a recent New York Federal Reserve Bank study, the first to try to explain what distinguishes this recovery and its early 1990s cousin from others in the last half-century, puts a serious damper on their predictions.

The study by economists Erica Groshen and Simon Potter concludes that most job losses in the two recent recessions involved permanent elimination of positions, not temporary and easily reversible layoffs. And it says that most of what gains there have been so far this time have involved establishing new jobs in wholly different parts of the economy from where the losses occurred.

"If job growth now depends on the creation of new positions in different firms and industries," Groshen and Potter write, "then we would expect a long lag before employment rebounded."

Translation: Don't expect a jobs boom — and a big new lift for the economy — anytime soon.

President Bush recently honored the Army unit that led the attack on Baghdad, awarding it a well-deserved presidential unit citation for "extraordinary heroism." Formal recognition of military service is so important for the morale of the troops.

I am concerned, though, that there will be no specific campaign medals for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Participants in these campaigns will get a generic "Global War on Terrorism" service/expeditionary medal.

We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.

"I determine that .. acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001

tWe've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.

In the last six days, U.S. troops have shot at Iraqi police, journalists, a wedding party and a top Italian diplomat searching for looted antiquities.

The Americans are under increasing pressure as the guerrilla resistance has stepped up its hit-and-run attacks and is bringing more firepower and sophistication to the fight.

Unsure of who will shoot at them next, the U.S. forces have been involved in "friendly fire" attacks in which 10 civilians have been killed in the past two months.

In areas where resistance is stiffest, the massive response by U.S. soldiers is changing once-neutral residents into outright opponents.

The military keeps no record of Iraqis who have been killed either intentionally or as innocent bystanders in the primarily urban combat.

Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark reversed course yesterday on the issue of Iraq, saying that he would "never have voted" for the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war, just a day after saying that he likely would have voted for it.

President Bush has often used major speeches to bolster his standing with the public, but pollsters and political analysts have concluded that his recent prime-time address on Iraq may have had the opposite effect -- crystallizing doubts about his postwar plans and fueling worries about the cost.

In Kansas, Amanda Bellew, wife of Army Spec. Jason Bellew, a member of the 129th Transportation Company, said she and other family members were hoping to gather 50,000 signatures on their Web site, www.129bringthemhome.com, to present to Congress in opposition to the extended tours.

Clinton is adored by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority for leading the coalition that halted the brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanians seeking independence four years ago.

He appealed to them to speak out against ethnic killings.

"You cannot build a new Kosovo on retributive violence," he said. "No one ever gets even in this life."

"Last time I was here, I admitted that you could never forget the injustices and inhumanity you suffered and that no outsider, including me, could force you to forgive anyone," Clinton said. "But you should try. Not for them, but for you. I want you to be free."

[Kevin] Gambrell said for years the Indians have been told by oil and gas companies to sign blank leases to build pipelines across their land and the companies would fill in the lease rates later.

Still, asked about Dr. Dean's criticism of the war, General Clark responded: "I think he's right. That in retrospect we should never have gone in there. I didn't want to go in there either. But on the other hand, [Dean] wasn't inside the bubble of those who were exposed to the information."

So Which Story Is It?
President Bush's declaration Wednesday that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties but that there was "no evidence" he was linked to 9/11 had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality. Only a few days earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney on national television had expanded the administration's claims, hinting darkly that Hussein's security forces might have been involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that Iraq was at "the heart of the base" of the terrorist threat that culminated in Sept. 11.

Who is the public supposed to believe, Bush or Cheney? In delivering a different message depending on what day of the week it is, the administration is shredding whatever remains of its credibility on Iraq.

After two years of declines, the total net worth of America's richest people rose 10 per cent to $955-billion (U.S.) this year from 2002, according to Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the nation's 400 wealthiest individuals.

"The charges of the hysterics," [Ashcroft] added, "are revealed for what they are: castles in the air built on misrepresentation, supported by unfounded fear, held aloft by hysteria."

n a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his reelection.

Eighteen months later, key administration officials have concluded that Bush's order has turned into a debacle. Some economists say the tariffs may have cost more jobs than they saved, by driving up costs for automakers and other steel users. Politically, the strategy failed to produce union endorsements and appears to have hurt Bush with workers in Michigan and Tennessee -- also states at the heart of his 2004 strategy.

The strategizing was "too clever by half," [Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist with ties to the administration,] said. "It presupposed that nobody was watching what we were doing, and it presupposed that our credibility was of no importance."

American soldiers in northern Iraq mistakenly fired on a car carrying the Italian official heading up U.S. efforts to recover Iraq's looted antiquities, killing the man's Iraqi interpreter, an official said Friday in Rome. The Italian, Pietro Cordone, was unhurt.

President Bush said Wednesday, flat out, that there's no evidence Saddam Hussein had anything to do with Sept. 11.

Now he tells us.

The president's defenders can of course correctly point out that Mr. Bush has never actually claimed otherwise. But there is such a thing as fostering an impression, and over the past year the White House has so assiduously invoked Sept. 11 whenever warning about Iraq's intentions, or crowing about Iraq's defeat, that no one could fail to grasp that there was an underlying message: American troops had to fight their way into Baghdad because American citizens perished in the attacks of two years ago.

American troops suffered more casualties outside Baghdad yesterday. And why are they there? Will the commander in chief come clean?

"On balance, I probably would have voted for it," Clark said. "The simple truth is this: When the president of the United States comes to you and makes the linkages and lays the power of the office on you, and you're in a crisis, the balance of the judgment probably goes to the president of the United States."

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.

The president has insisted that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, a continuation of the administration's effort to link Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center. While almost three-quarters of the public believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, the polls after the president's recent speech show that less than half believe that Iraq is the ''central front'' of the war on terrorism. Moreover, the majority believe that the war has increased the risk of terrorism. A shift is occurring in the middle, which is neither clearly pro-Bush nor clearly anti-Bush. The big lie is coming apart.

There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None. The implication of such involvement was an attempt to deceive, a successful attempt at the big lie.

I'm not sure that the president knows it is a lie, however.

Right now there's huge money flowing into far left propaganda machines ...

Right now, the left is booked a full roster of character assassins. I mean these guys make Donald Segretti and the Nixon plumber unit look like the Muppets.

Character assassination and irresponsible editorial behavior is simply unacceptable

WILLSON: Well, I think we're fucked.

The Shiites, who make up 65 per cent of Iraq's population, are clearly key to the country's future. Having borne the brunt of Saddam Hussein's brutality in the aftermath of two uprisings in 1991 and 1999, they are relieved to be rid of him and largely tolerant of the American presence.

"I don't like having an invading army here, but the Americans should stay until they have restored security, rebuilt the country and we have our own president," says Nasir Abbas, a falafel cook at a Baghdad restaurant. "Then they should leave. But whatever the Hawza says, we will follow."

The Hawza, a collection of Shiite religious scholars in Najaf that enjoys massive respect among Shiite Muslims, appears divided between moderates and radicals over the approach to take towards the Americans.

But the loudest voice emanating from this opaque institution is that of the most outspoken cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, a young man who comes from a long line of authoritative ayatollahs and who appears to enjoy the widest support among ordinary Shiites, especially the younger ones.

Using the Hawza's biweekly newspaper, Mr. Sadr has been stirring up anti-American feeling, blaming coalition troops for every evil that besets the country, and calling for their immediate withdrawal.

He has so far stopped short of urging his followers to take up arms against US troops. "But we are all waiting for the religious leaders to give us a sign," says Mr. Ibrahim, whose cafe seat gives him a view of a mosque minaret damaged by US shelling during the war. "If the scholars tell us it is time for jihad [holy war], even the women will go out to fight."

klep-to-crat na-tion (klep-te krat na-shen), n. 1. a body of people ruled by thieves. 2. a government characterized by the practice of transferring money and power from the many to the few. 3. a ruling class of moneyed elites that usurps liberty, justice, sovereignty, and other democratic rights from the people. 4. the USA in 2003.

The Kleptocrats have taken over. Look at America's leadership today ? not just political, but corporate, too. Tell me you wouldn't trade the whole mess of them for one good kindergarten teacher.

Yet, they're in charge! Here we are, living in the wealthiest country in history, a country of boundless possibilities, a country made up of a people deeply committed to democratic ideals, a country with the potential for spectacular human achievement ? but we find ourselves ruled (politically, economically, culturally, and ethically) by a confederacy of kleptocrats.

They have collected up our democratic powers piece by piece, hoarding them in the privacy of their own fiefdoms. These elites (fully abetted by the governmental elites they have bought), now effectively control the decisions that affect We the People ? everything from public spending priorities to environmental degradation, wages to war, what's on the "news" to who gets elected.

This would be terribly depressing except for one thing, which is that one basic has definitely NOT changed in our land: The people (you rascals!) still have that instinctive and tenacious belief in our historic democratic principles. The antidote to kleptocracy is the age old medicine of democratic struggle, agitation, and organization ? and all across our country, the rebellion is on!

Inhale a bit of our country's pungent, brawling, inspiring history of grassroots rebels, then tell me that battling the bastards today is too hard, too uphill, or takes too long. What else are you doing that is more worthy of your efforts than trying to establish the moral principles of fairness, justice, and equality for all in our America?

In an apparent search for pointers on how to police a hostile population, the U.S. military that's trying to bring security to Iraq is showing interest in Israeli software instructing soldiers on how to behave in the West Bank and Gaza, an Israeli military official said Thursday.

"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed that only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion being spent monthly on the war can be accounted for by the Bush administration.

"My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he said.

The Texas Senate dropped thousands of dollars in fines and restored parking and cell-phone privileges Thursday for Democrats who were punished for fleeing the state to block a Republican-led redistricting plan.

The Democrats instead will be placed on a probation of sorts until the start of the next regular legislative session in January 2005. They were told if they leave again to break a quorum, they would have to pay $57,000 apiece in fines.

If any of the senators are absent without a sufficient excuse for more than 72 hours when their attendance is required in the chamber, the fines and sanctions also would be reinstated.

Now just imagine for a moment that a Democratic politician had told a soft-core men's magazine in 1977 about gangbanging a "black girl"--and when asked about it in 2003 said he didn't remember a thing about the interview or the incident itself, but also said he made the whole thing up to get attention. Would that story have been relegated to the bin of youthful escapades by Fox, CNN, the New York Post, Peggy Noonan, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and the rest? Or would we be hearing a lot about "character" and the "I was lying" defense? Suppose that same Democrat told Playboy in 1988 he didn't allow his wife or mother (?!) to wear pants in public. And suppose that in 2000, two British television journalists accused that Democrat, now 53, well past the youthful-escapade phase, of groping them, and publicly declared themselves disgusted and offended? Let's say that he told Entertainment Weekly this past July how fun it was to push Kristanna Loken's head into a toilet in Terminator 3 ("I wanted to have something floating in there"). Let's say papers in Britain were reporting all this and more--from feeling up women in the presence of his wife to heavy use of illegal steroids to rumors of an extramarital affair with a 16-year-old actress--wouldn't we be hearing about it night and day?

As people with family members and loved ones in the military, we have both a special need and a unique role to play in speaking out against war in Iraq. It is our loved ones who will be on the battlefront. It is our loved ones who will risk injury and death. It is our loved ones who will return scarred from having injured innocent Iraqi civilians.

This letter shall serve to remind you that these soldiers have now been away from our homes for eight months, away from their children, wives and parents, away from their universities and jobs, involved in a guerilla war in an unknown country, not knowing the culture or the language of the place, menaced by mines, bombs and guns, risking their lives 24 hours a day, standing in their uniforms and carrying their equipment in temperatures of up to 130° F. The National Guard soldiers are civilians, not active members of the Army. They have never received the training for combat in the desert or to face urban guerrillas. We know that, since their arrival at AR Ramadi, our young soldiers have been patrolling and searching the houses of presumed guerrilla forces. We know that they lack adequate equipment, that in many cases they have patrolled without bulletproof vests and without the necessary ammunition to face the guerrilla forces.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.

If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground.

The AP reporter was fired on by one of the tanks with three rounds from its 50-caliber machine gun. An AP photographer said his car was shot up by American troops, the windshield blown out and all the tires flattened. The photographer and his driver were not injured.

Hours later, soldiers pointed tank cannons at reporters every time they tried to approach to find out what had happen.

Initially as U.S. forces took fire from unknown positions, the soldiers shot back with no obvious targets in an apparent effort to protect themselves until reinforcements arrived, a witness said.

Wednesday night's shooting at the wedding in Fallujah came after American soldiers mistakenly killed eight U.S.-allied Iraqi police officers outside the town in a friendly fire incident.

In Baghdad, police backed by U.S. soldiers and helicopters sealed a large part of the center of the city Thursday in a raid to capture car thieves.

About 100 Iraqis danced in the streets and carried a large photo of Saddam dressed in military fatigues. There was celebratory gunfire and the people chanted: "With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam."

We like our presidents as we like our morning TV hosts -- comfy.

The millionaire trial lawyer promised to [fight for the working class.]

"'the successful son of a mill worker promised to fight for the working class'?

The two former energy company executives promise to respect the environment.

"We can't afford an open-ended entitlement that has no limitations on costs," said [Representative Patrick J. ] Toomey.

Hitchens has riotous fun [in The Long Short War] heaping contempt on several of the volunteer "human shields" who left Iraq before the bombing began. They "obviously didn't have the guts," he jeers, hunkered down in his Washington foxhole. Bearing witness to his own bravery, Hitchens reports in March 2003 that, although even the wife of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is having doubts about going to war, "I am fighting to keep my nerve" - truly a profile in courage, as he exiles himself in the political wilderness, alongside the Bush administration, Congress, a majority of U.S. public opinion, and his employers in the major media. Outraged at the taunt that he who preaches war should perhaps consider fighting it, Hitchens impatiently recalls that, since September 11, "civilians at home are no safer than soldiers abroad," and that, in fact, he's not just a but the main target: "The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians. It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls" (emphasis in original). No doubt modesty and tact forbid Hitchens from drawing the obvious comparison: while cowardly American soldiers frantically covered themselves in protective gear and held their weapons at the ready, he patrolled his combat zone in Washington, D.C. unencumbered. Lest we forget, Hitchens recalls that ours is "an all-volunteer army" where soldiers willingly exchange "fairly good pay" for "obedience" to authority: "Who would have this any other way?" For sure, not those who will never have to "volunteer."

To discover our true human nature, Freud once wrote, just reverse society's moral exhortations: if the Commandment says not to commit adultery, it's because we all want to. This simple game can be played with Hitchens as well: when he avows, "I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinion might be," one should read, "My every word is calculated for its public effect."

It’s a fabulous country we have.

She's a fabulous First Lady. (Applause.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So was your Mom! (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: I'm sorry she's not here tonight. And speaking about my mother, I'm still listening to her, by the way. (Laughter.)

She is a fabulous First Lady, a great wife -- (applause.)

This guy [Powell] has done a fabulous job. Washington, particularly in August, is a dangerous period -- a dangerous time, because there's a lot of speculation.

I am, one, sad that Ari's leaving. He's done a fabulous job for my administration.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person, and America is lucky to have her service -- period.

[T]here is something even worse being taken, being stolen, by this administration. As Jim Hightower observes in his excellent new book, "Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back," what they're really stealing is the very idea of this country, the idea that there's a common good, that we're all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better.

In this country, we have the most extraordinary luck – we are the heirs to the greatest political legacy any people have ever received. Our government is not THEM, our government is US (with room for improvement, to be sure). All this right-wing propaganda about how the government is The Enemy, the government needs to be strangled, needs to be starved, needs to be hocked off, as though schools and hospitals were horrible things – it's all nuts.

It's our government, we can still make it do what we want it to when we take the time and put in the energy it takes to work with other people, organize, campaign and vote – we can still make the whole clumsy, money-driven system work for us. And it's high time we did so.

After rising for three straight weeks, new claims for unemployment benefits dropped last week to the lowest level in nearly a month, raising hopes that the pace of layoffs may be starting to slow down again.

The more stable four-week moving average of claims, which smooths out week to week fluctuations, however, rose last week to 410,750, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week, and the highest level since the middle of July.

Although other parts of the economy are improving, the labor market is expected to be the last to heal. Economists believe companies will want to wait until profits get stronger and they have more confidence in the rebound's vigor before they go a hiring spree.

Wednesday night's shooting at the wedding in Fallujah came after American soldiers mistakenly killed eight U.S.-allied Iraqi police officers outside the town in a friendly fire incident. The military has apologized for the incident and opened an investigation.

Witnesses said guests at the wedding shot guns into the air in celebrartion, and passing American troops in Humvees, believing they were under attack, opened fire, killing the teen and wounding six other people.

I don't hate Bush. I despise him.

I hate what he's doing to this country, I resent and abhor his attacks on my civil liberties and the way he's feeding my grandchlidren's seed corn to his friends as a party snack. I think he must be stopped from getting any more of our nation's and the world's children killed to try and carry out a foreign policy which seems to have been dreamed up by a bunch of rich frat boys while drinking beer and watching the super bowl.

I am deeply grateful that we are so close to an election and I intend to do whatever is in my small power to see that he is defeated in it.

Is he some sort of right-wing version of the Great Satan the right saw when they looked at Clinton? Not for me. He's a petulant little man with a great deal of money and media support and some smart tacticians behind him.

He's not worthy of the emotion Clinton inspired. He's not the kid that won the game, in schoolyard terms - he's the kid whose chauffeur came looking for you after school.

Hatred is too big a word for such a small quivering hermit crab of a man.

"The president's critics will spew their shrill rhetoric anew, but we understand we have a war to win," said Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas. "Security never goes on sale."

1. Projection-filled: "spew" sounds pretty "shrill" to me


2. Full of hidden and false assumptions: What does winning the war in Iraq mean, operationally? And if we do win it, does that have anything at to do with winning the war on terror? And what is the operational definition of that?


3. Full of lies: Security is exactly "on sale." First, because a large part of the war has been privatized, and second because our domestic security is underfunded, now and for the forseeable future, because the Rovelicans can't handle money, starting with the tax cuts for the super-rich.

Over the past year or so, getting headlines in Texas but only modest coverage elsewhere, the "Texas Miracle" has been disrobed. It was a scam, a hoax. The governor had put the fear of Bush into the school bureaucracy. You will perform, the principals and superintendents were told. You will dramatically bring down the dropout rate and dramatically raise the reading and math scores. Bonuses were promised to those who succeeded, demotions and pay-docking to those who didn't.

Suddenly, as if in the Land of Oz, kids in low-income districts who had been dropping out of high school at rates of 30 and 40 percent and higher were apparently born again, burying their faces in their books into the wee hours. And then the truth came out. They were still dropping out at the same old percentages; they just weren't being counted as dropouts. They weren't even being listed as "whereabouts unknown"—as if they might have moved to another district and forgotten to leave a forwarding address. They had simply disappeared. They were los desaparecidos. Maybe General Pinochet had them kidnapped for interrogation and torture.

Anyway, if you want to read more about the "Texas Scandal," I recommend you get on the Web and look up a series of marvelous pieces that a fine reporter, Michael Winerip, has been doing in The New York Times. (My only quibble is that all the articles have been half buried on the education page at the back of the Metro Section, instead of starting on page one. After all, we do say we really care about kids and education.)

As a sample, here is some of what Winerip found on the scene in Houston, where he described Sharpstown High School: "[This] poor, mostly minority high school of 1,650 students had a freshman class of 1,000 that dwindled to fewer than 300 students by senior year. And yet—and this is the miracle—not one dropout to report. Nor was zero an unusual dropout rate in this school district that both President Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige have held up as the national showcase for accountability. . . . Westside High here had 2,308 students and no reported dropouts; Wheatley High 731 students, no dropouts. A dozen of the city's poorest schools reported dropout rates under 1 percent."

This was the district cited as the model for Bush's No Child Left Behind law enacted by Congress in the first months after his inauguration. Congress authorized $18 billion to launch the program nationwide. Oddly, the president has budgeted only $12 billion, lopping off one-third of the money. This is the disconnect that runs through nearly all of the president's cornerstone policies. He utters grand slogans and then slips behind his Wizard of Oz curtain and pretends that's all he has to do. Just wear a sincere tie or some military-style clothing and speak the appropriate stately catchwords while standing in front of a giant flag, and then say "God Bless America" at the close, and people will give him the second term his father was unable to achieve.

Some of the change strategies being used against American schools by the current administration have already been tried in Texas but recent news reports cast doubt on the integrity, authenticity and value of those change strategies.

What was once proudly called the "Texas Miracle" - an impressive (apparent) shift in school performance - might have been more of a flimflam operation in some places than a true miracle, judging from the harsh audit report published by the TEA (Texas Education Agency) ruling on procedures used by the Houston ISD when reporting dropouts in 2000.

As far back as the year 2000 when the current President was Governor of Texas and the Secretary of Education was Superintendent of the Houston ISD, the TEA (Texas Educational Agency) issued a harsh report warning that the Texas system for recording dropouts when combined with various incentive programs would lead to serious under-reporting and under-counting. (Dropout Study: A Report to the 77th Texas Legislature) In short, the report stated that some schools and districts might sweep the dropout problem under some magic carpet. Instead of taking care of these troubled students, the system might erase them.

So then, what is our purpose here?

Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we so often have heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof? Or is it that our incursion is a result of our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. Coincidence?

This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. At least to me, oil seems to be the reason for our presence.

[...]

I once believed that I served for a cause: "to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States." Now I no longer believe that; I have lost my conviction, as well as my determination. I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.

Tim Predmore is on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division near Mosul, Iraq. A version of this essay appeared in the Peoria (Ill.) Star Journal.

Troops wounded in combat in the nation’s war on terrorism are being handed more than just discharge papers when they leave military hospitals — some also are getting a bill.

At a daily rate of $8.10, hospitalized troops, including those wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being charged for their meals.

The U.S. Army on Tuesday revealed that all records and documents about the weapons that jammed during the March 23 ambush that led to the death of nine Fort Bliss soldiers were destroyed in the Iraqi attack and that there is no way to trace the weapons' histories.

The official 507th report, which was released by the Army on July 17, suggests that the "malfunctions may have resulted from inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment."

Arlene Walters, mother of Sgt. Donald R. Walters, who died in the attack and would have celebrated his 34th birthday Tuesday, said her son was dedicated to his job and to details. She said she finds it hard to believe that her son's weapon wasn't kept clean.

"He kept his guns as clean as can be," she said. "He even talked to his dad about it."

The sharply partisan rhetoric that marked past Clinton-Gore campaigns crept into Clark's address.

"Why has American lost 2.7 million jobs? Why has American lost the prosperity of a $5 trillion surplus and turned it into a deficit that deepens every day? Why has our country lost our sense of security and feels the shadow of fear? Why has America lost the respect of so many people around the world?"

With each question raised by Clark, the crowd shouted, "Why?"

"That's the questions we're going to be asking and one more: Why - why are so many here in American hesitant to speak out and ask questions?" Clark said.

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties," the president said. But he also said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

The president's comment was the administration's firmest assertion that there is no proven link between Saddam and Sept. 11. It came after Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday clouded the issue by saying, "It's not surprising people make that connection" between Saddam and the attacks.

Last month, the EPA's internal watchdog found the agency, at the urging of White House officials, gave misleading assurances there was no health risk from the dust in the air after the towers' collapse.

The White House "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security Council control EPA communications after the attack, according to the inspector general's report.

Seven days after the attack, the EPA announced that the air near the site was safe to breathe, but the agency did not have enough information to make such a guarantee, the report found.

Rumsfeld also offered some perspective about his relationship with the military.

He says there's never a problem in someone following his orders. Instead, Rumsfeld says the problem is telling someone to do something that "in retrospect you wish you hadn't." He didn't elaborate what that might be.

Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, are the first to show that animals are capable of recognising unfairness. They trained capuchin monkeys, which are native to the forests of South America, to exchange a token for food. Once the monkeys were used to handling the tokens, Brosnan set them up in pairs and rewarded each in turn.

If both received a piece of cucumber as a reward, they behaved as before. However, if Brosnan gave one a grape, which they considered a more prized morsel, the other often refused to accept the cucumber. Worse still, if one monkey was rewarded for doing nothing, then four times out of five the other refused to participate further

The peaceniks will stay with Howard Dean.

Iraqis and international observers say that the military's tactics - including use of overwhelming force against houses filled with women and children - have resulted in the detentions of hundreds of innocent people and the deaths of others. They say the coalition is creating new enemies as fast as old ones are eliminated.

U.S.-led coalition troops have shot and killed at least 58 and possibly as many as 81 civilian noncombatants since major combat was declared over May 1, according to a review of reports first compiled by Iraq Body Count, a London research group that bases its estimates on published or broadcast reports by news agencies and human-rights groups.

The military says it does not count civilian deaths. Asked about the issue, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said: "The loss of life is a tragedy for anyone involved, but the numbers are really very low."

When pressed, Bremer acknowledged that he could not say how many civilians the coalition troops had killed.

"It is the same scenario every day," said Eman Ahmed Khammas, the director of Occupation Watch, a Baghdad-based advocacy group. "The number of civilian casualties is increasing. But there are no statistics."
The most frequent complaints from Iraqis and observers are that soldiers fire indiscriminately in crowded civilian areas, that they often base raids on faulty information, and that they erect poorly marked checkpoints and fire without warning on cars that approach without stopping.

New intelligence assessments are warning that the United States' most formidable foe in Iraq in the months ahead may be the resentment of ordinary Iraqis increasingly hostile to the American military occupation, Defense Department officials said today.

That picture, shared with American military commanders in Iraq, is very different from the public view currently being presented by senior Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who once again today listed only "dead-enders, foreign terrorists and criminal gangs" as opponents of the American occupation.

The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were concerned about retribution for straying from the official line. They said it was a mistake for the administration to discount the role of ordinary Iraqis who have little in common with the groups Mr. Rumsfeld cited, but whose anger over the American presence appears to be kindling some sympathy for those attacking American forces.

Republicans will have begun an orchestrated campaign to present Mr. Bush's potential opponents as shrill and negative.

"There's a confusion between objectivity and even-handedness, they are not the same thing," Krugman said. "If Bush said the earth was flat, the reports in the mainstream media would say, 'Shape of the Earth: Views Differ."'

Nevertheless, the nation's jobless rate was still 6.1 percent last month, and the number of payroll jobs has declined every month since January. Nearly 100,000 jobs were lost last month alone, and in recent weeks the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits has been rising.

Some analysts are concerned the lack of job creation could short-circuit the stronger growth evident in many recent economic reports. Without more jobs, and the added income they would provide for unemployed people going back to work, the spurt of growth triggered by federal income-tax cuts and low interest rates might subside in the first half of next year, analysts have warned.

"Although a sluggish recovery appears to be the most likely short-term scenario, the world economic outlook is characterised by an unusual degree of uncertainty, with downside risks predominating," the OECD] said.

But 25 minutes into the speeches by the returning [Democratic] senators, invisible Republicans cut off their microphone.

To explore every phony statement in the vice president's "Meet the Press" interview would take far more space than is available. .... Opponents of the war are fond of saying that "Bush lied and our soldiers died." In fact, they'd have reason to assert that "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz lied and our soldiers died." It's past time the principals behind this mismanaged war were called to account for their deliberate misstatements.

The Irish rock singer Bono confronted President Bush in the Oval Office yesterday with what AIDS activists say is a vast gap between funding he promised in the State of the Union address and the actual money headed for Africa.

The U2 singer said afterward that he felt "depressed," and that he and Bush had "a good old row" over how much the White House was allocating to fighting the global HIV-AIDS pandemic. Bush had promised $15 billion over five years for vaccines and treatment, but the administration wants to send only $2 billion next year. AIDS activists said the money is needed now.

State Department types were taken aback last week to find that a longtime diplomatic photo exhibit along a busy corridor to the cafeteria had been taken down. The two dozen mostly grainy black and white shots were a historic progression of great diplomatic moments, sources recalled.

Then they were gone. And what was put up in their place? What else? A George W. Bush family album montage of 21 large photos of the president as diplomat.

the leaders of the Republican majority in the Florida legislature publicly asserted that if the outcome of the Florida voting were still in dispute on Dec. 12, the deadline for naming the state's presidential electors, the legislature itself would make the decision whether Florida's decisive votes would make George Bush president. They cited the authority granted in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says that "each state shall appoint in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors" to cast the state's ballots for president.

The legislature did not have to follow through, because the U.S. Supreme Court settled the issue by halting the vote-counting and declaring Bush the winner. But in the course of the hearings before the high court, Justice Antonin Scalia told the lawyers representing Al Gore that "in fact, there is no right of suffrage under Article II."

[Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government takes the] view, which I share, that contemporary Americans would react with disbelief and anger to the "extraordinary . . . assertion that American citizens have no constitutional right to vote for president."

[Keyssar's] proposed solution: Adopt a one-sentence constitutional amendment stating "All American citizens shall have the right to vote for presidential electors in the state in which they reside."

I remember being astonished at the reminder in 2000 that our votes for president count only if the legislature chooses to count them.

Meanwhile, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the Bush administration had never accused ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of being involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also said there was no indication of Iraqi involvement in the attacks. A recent Washington Post poll said more than two-thirds of Americans believe the ousted Iraqi leader was involved.

Exhibit A is Brian Bosma. He appeared onstage in a necktie, prior to the president's arrival. When the president got there the Indiana House minority leader had an open collar. In a News 8 interview immediately following the speech, the tie was back on.

Former state Republican chairman Mike McDaniel helped organize the event. “They wanted them to be themselves and that's what we were trying to get out of those shots and it worked for the most part,” he said.

Wilma Hart, had this to say to the White House staffer: “I said, ‘Do we look like we just crawled out from under a rock someplace?’”

Anti-ideological, the true independents do not even listen to candidates who are partisan, strident and negative.

It's hard to believe that it was just a slip of the tongue rather than a calculated lie when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sullied the memory of those who died on 9/11 by exploiting their deaths for propaganda purposes. The brainwashing of Americans, two-thirds of whom believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks, is too effective a political ploy for the Bush regime to suddenly let the truth get in the way.

"We know [Iraq] had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with Al Qaeda in particular and we know a great many of [Osama] bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime " Wolfowitz told ABC on this year's 9/11 anniversary.

We know nothing of the sort, of course, and the next day Wolfowitz was forced to admit it. He told Associated Press that his remarks referred not to a "great many" of Bin Laden's lieutenants but rather to a single Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi. "[I] should have been more precise," Wolfowitz admitted.

he number of reported gun-related killings in Baghdad has increased 25-fold since President Bush declared an end to major combat May 1. Before the war began, the morgue investigated an average of 20 deaths a month caused by firearms. In June, that number rose to 389 and in August it reached 518. Moreover, the overall number of suspicious deaths jumped from about 250 a month last year to 872 in August.

Conservative Bill Simon, who lost to Davis in 2000, spoke for many recall supporters when he called the ruling "an outrageous interference with the rights of California voters and a transparent attempt to thwart the will of the people."

"Plaintiffs' claim presents almost precisely the same issue as the court considered in (the Bush decision), that is, whether unequal methods of counting votes among counties constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause," the judges wrote. "In Bush, the Supreme Court held that using different standards for counting votes in different counties across Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs' theory is the same, that using error-prone voting equipment in some counties, but not in others, will result in votes being counted differently among the counties."

For the corporate state and its political minions such public distrust, apathy and self-centeredness is a heaven sent blessing for as we have seen in recent years fewer and fewer people are taking part in the democratic process, leaving a small cadre of fascist plutocrats to govern and regulate our republic's affairs. No longer do we see national policy dictating politics, but rather egocentric politics dictating national policy.

A large measure of the blame for this condition can be laid at the doorstep of the national media upon which people read, listen to and watch each day. Rather than live up to its responsibility to act as a reliable "fourth branch of government" it has become for the most part simply a messenger boy for the ruling plutocracy. Meanwhile, the public is left in the dark and uninformed of the facts that go toward the formation of a responsible citizenry.

[...]

The husband and wife investigative team of Akre and Wilson had prepared a WTVT/Fox 13 documentary on how Florida dairymen had been secretly injecting the genetically engineered rBGH into their cows and how Florida supermarkets quietly reneged on promises not to sell milk from treated cows until the hormone gained widespread acceptance by consumers.

In a subsequent law suit the reporters charged in detail that Fox TV, after being strongly pressured by Monsanto, violated the state's whistleblower act by firing the journalists for refusing to broadcast false reports and threatening to report the station's conduct to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

A Florida jury later concluded that Akre was indeed pressured by Fox lawyers and managers to broadcast what the jury agreed was "a false, distorted or slanted story" and was fired for threatening to blow the whistle and awarded her a $425,000 judgement. However, that decision was later reversed by a Florida court of appeals on a legal technicality when the judges agreed with Fox's lawyers that it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.

Akre recalls: "Prior to our dismissal, station manager Dave Boylan, a career salesman without any roots in journalism and seemingly lacking the devotion to serve the public interest that motivates all good investigative reporting, had flaunted the company's wealth in an attempt to make us back down. "We paid $3 billion for these stations," he told us on one occasion. "We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!"

Akre and Wilson were fired after a year-long battle over a TV news feature series they produced which highlighted the public health dangers of Monsanto's rBGH (increased antibiotic residues, increased levels of a potent human growth hormone factor called IGF-1, linked to the promotion of cancer tumors). Shortly before the original TV series was to run, an attorney from Monsanto contacted Fox TV and demanded that the script be altered. The station gave in to Monsanto's demands and told Akre and Wilson to rewrite and tone down the script. One year and 73 rewrites later Monsanto still wasn't satisfied and Akre and Wilson were fired. rBGH was approved by the FDA in February, 1994, with no labeling or special pre-market safety testing required, despite massive opposition by consumers and dairy farmers, and over the objections of scientific experts from the Consumers Union, the Cancer Prevention Coalition, and other organizations. - In Motion Magazine, "Monsanto and Fox TV Unite to Suppress Journalists' Free Speech on Hazards of Genetically Engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH or rBST)"

Some National Guard troops are coming home earlier. Congress is investigating complaints that they are from states that supported the Bush election campaign.

[A kindly Capitol mole] sent me a copy of "Fall Communications Environment," the funny memo dispatched yesterday by Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, to all of her GOP colleagues. ...

More than any time this year, Americans are increasingly concerned about the economy, their job situation, and the latest developments in Iraq. Because of these concerns converging together in recent weeks, anxiety about the direction of the country has escalated. In the most recent New Models survey conducted by the Winston Group (September 3-4, 1,000 registered voters), the direction of the country now stands at 37-51 right direction-wrong track."

The talks ran out of steam because, for the first time in WTO history, developing countries refused to let the United States and Europe steer negotiations to suit their interests, said Ottawa trade consultant Peter Clark.

A new "G22" bloc of developing countries led by Brazil — and backed by China, a growing economic powerhouse that recently joined the WTO — emerged as an immovable object to the usually unstoppable force of will that is Washington and Brussels. African, Pacific Rim and Caribbean countries also banded together in an informal alliance. "This signals that developing countries are tired of negotiations being stage-managed and having deals imposed on them," Mr. Clark said.

"This time the G22 and the African group got together, dug in their heels and stuck with their guns and made it clear they are not going to be rolled," he said.

"It's a new reality and they're going to have to face up to it."

Poor countries wouldn't accept the shallow subsidy cuts, which were offered only on the condition that they also begin negotiations on the so-called Singapore issues to protect multinationals' interests in developing countries.

"They were not prepared to engage on issues of interest to multinational business such as investment, competition policy and government because they saw the agricultural offer as a pig in a poke," Mr. Clark said.

When push came to shove, the rich nations were not prepared to give an inch to the poor ones on agriculture unless they got their quid pro quo in the form of progress toward an agenda which has nothing to do with trade and everything to do with massively undermining the ability of democratically elected governments to set the terms on which the ownership of the means of production is decided.

Earlier this month, Jarvis was fined £4,000 and ordered to pay £2,500 costs after two rail workers were electrocuted near York when a crane jib hit an overhead wire carrying 25,000 volts. In March it was fined the maximum £25,000 after a rail vehicle carrying workers, but not intended for that purposes, derailed and overturned. The group is also facing court proceedings in Liverpool over the death of a girl aged eight who stepped on a live rail.

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction, so far, has been a bust. Intelligence officials told NBC News there is no smoking gun. They thought they’d discovered a biological weapons lab, but it wasn’t one.

A massive CIA investigation, led by former U.N. weapons inspector Kay, is turning up only what former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein planned — not what he produced.

“He’s not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find — large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war,” said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector.

Despite the failed search, at Fort Stewart, Ga., on Friday, President Bush again raised the specter of Saddam’s weapons: “Because of our military, catastrophic weapons will no longer be in the hands of a reckless dictator.”

Whatever else can be said of the Terminator, he never shrinks from conflict or danger. It's difficult to imagine the Terminator ducking a political debate with Cruz Bustamante.

Indeed, the 2003 tax cut has already proved a major boon to some of America's wealthiest people: corporations in which executives or a single family hold a large fraction of stocks are suddenly paying much bigger dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient.

"This recall is bigger than California," the governor said in a speech at UCLA last month that kicked off his fight for survival. "What's happening here is part of an ongoing national effort to steal elections Republicans cannot win."

This effort, Davis said, "started with the impeachment of President Clinton when Republicans could not beat him in 1996. It continued in Florida, where they stopped the vote count, depriving thousands of Americans of the right to vote" after the presidential election in 2000. It has continued, he said, in redistricting fights in Colorado and Texas, and in "this recall to seize control of California just before the next presidential election."

Republicans and some others criticized Davis for those remarks. But they seem to have struck a chord among many California voters, especially Democrats. In a recent Field poll, more than half the voters who planned to vote against the recall agreed with the statement: "Republicans are engaged in a systematic effort to steal elections from Democratic officeholders."

"Davis has got a point," said Roy Jensen, 55, a carpenter and registered Democrat in the Bay Area town of Cupertino. Jensen said Davis was making the same point that Hillary Rodham Clinton, talking about the impeachment, made "about the vast right-wing conspiracy, and I think she was totally right."

Other characteristics [for fascism] on most scholars' checklists: the rejection of both liberalism and socialism; the primacy of the nation over the rights of the individual; the demonization of the nation's enemies; the elimination of dissent and the creation of a single-party state; the dominant role of a charismatic leader; the appeal to emotion and myth rather than reason; the glorification of violence on behalf of a national cause; the mobilization and militarization of civil society; an expansionist foreign policy intended to promote national greatness.

The Baath Party...

"The Internet was created by the United States of America - a Christian nation [ref. 1 2 3 ] and should not be used to spread anti-Christian, secular, or non-Christian propaganda and hatespeech. This is our Internet, and we should exercise our position as its owners and as the guardians of civilization to stop its misuse."

Landover Baptist is run by an organization that calls itself - no doubt in gleeful mockery of Our Lord - Americhrist Ltd. Its leader is a shadowy figure named Chris Harper who apparently has a history of anti-Christian bigotry. Although Landover Baptist claims to own vast properties and have thousands of members, in reality it exists only on the Internet and it's membership is quite small.

Ultimately, Landover Baptist is much more dangerous than any pornography site since it leads people to reject their only hope for salvation!

For this reason, this website was created to try and stop one of the more vile and dangerous misuses of the Internet: using it to mock Our Lord Jesus Christ, His teachings, and His followers.

If none of this works, we must inform the authorities of this obvious instance of anti-Christian hate crime, which is illegal in most areas. If it isn't illegal, we must pressure our congressmen to make it so!

Jesus Himself preached to the whores and money changers, the very people most in need of his Love. These unsaved trick-or-treaters - innocent children tricked by secular society and their non-Christian parents into participating in occult rituals - are exactly the ones in need of the Good News of Christ. And there they are, right on your door step!

When the abused child comes, have prepared a special handout for him or her with hidden Bible tracts. These can be written on the inside of candy wrappers, but avoid using any prepackaged Bible tract candy such as Bazooka Jesus as those would just be thrown out by the parent. Also be sure to include a personalized note and the phone number of your church so that the child knows he or she can contact someone on the outside world to get help.

These are the children we need to reach, and since they won't be coming to our churches and we can't currently reach them through the secular school system, Halloween represents our only - and, praise!, our best - chance to bring them over to Christ.

"The choice will be [Saddam's]," Col. Joe Anderson, commander of the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade in Mosul [who led the raid on the hide-out of Saddam Hussein's sons two months ago], told The Associated Press. "He'll always be given the opportunity to surrender," said Anderson, adding, however, "personally, I think the world is better off if he's dead."

Human rights groups and many Iraqis have said they would want Saddam Hussein put on trial for crimes against humanity, including the killing of 4 million people during the Baath Party's 34 years in power. Saddam's forces used chemical weapons to kill 5,000 Kurdish people alone.

But Anderson doesn't see any need for such a trial.

"We don't need to parade him around," he said. "What good is (former Serbian leader Slobodan) Milosevic on trial. ... It's a circus. What in the end does it prove?"

There were demonstrations around the world against the war.

But guess who was financing it? The world was. Figures released this week showed that private foreign citizens bought an unprecedented $129 billion in United States government and agency securities. Official accounts, mostly central banks, added $43 billion more.

All told, foreigners bought almost 80 percent of the net increase in Treasury and agency debt during the quarter. They now own 38 percent of outstanding Treasuries, more than double the figure of a decade ago.

We need that capital because of the huge current account deficit this country is running. That deficit — largely reflecting the trade deficit — went above 5 percent of gross domestic product in the first quarter for the first time in history. The second-quarter number, when it is released Monday, is likely to be about the same.

It's a nice situation while it lasts. We get cheap imports, which hold down inflation and enable consumers to buy more. The flood of foreign money helps to keep interest rates low while supporting the dollar. The war can be financed relatively cheaply at those low rates.

But borrowers may eventually need to pay attention to the views of the lenders. It would not be fun if foreigners began to invest the way they talk.

The American economy finally seems poised to roar ahead at rates not seen since the late 1990's, but economists and some political analysts say the surge may not help President Bush's re-election campaign next year.

A wide range of data suggests that the economy will probably grow at an annual rate of nearly 5 percent in the final months of this year and nearly 4 percent next year — rates that would normally be spectacular news for an incumbent president.

But in a disparity with no real parallels in the last half-century, most economists predict that unemployment will remain almost unchanged at nearly 6 percent through the elections in November 2004.

The biggest bait-and-switch move of this whole administration has been to substitute Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Ladin. Iraq had nothing to do with the acts of terrorism perpetrated against the United States. The real villains, both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, are now regrouping in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, while we're stuck in the quicksand in Iraq.

President Bush plans to address the upcoming meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, the White House announced Friday.
This year, the United States is pushing for a new U.N. resolution authorizing a multinational military force to help with the postwar reconstruction of Iraq.

Great, anybody who opposed this war in the first place was accused of lack of patriotism, and now anybody who points out that it's not going well is guilty of defeatism. If you raise your hand and ask where the weapons of mass destruction we were told were the reason for this war are, you're instructed to just Get Over It.

Well, I ain't gonna take it anymore. I am not shutting up for Bill O'Reilly or anyone else. I opposed our unprovoked, unnecessary invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it would be a short, easy war followed by the peace from hell. I predicted every terrorist in the Middle East would be drawn to Iraq like a magnet. I was right, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

Unemployment is expected to hold steady through year end and edge lower early next year. Payrolls are expected to grow over the next 12 months.

Where once the administration was motivated by greed, now it's driven by fear. ...

In the first months after 9/11, the administration's ruthless exploitation of the [9/11] atrocity was a choice, not a necessity. The natural instinct of the nation to rally around its leader in times of crisis had pushed Mr. Bush into the polling stratosphere, and his re-election seemed secure. He could have governed as the uniter he claimed to be, and would probably still be wildly popular.

But Mr. Bush's advisers were greedy; they saw 9/11 as an opportunity to get everything they wanted, from another round of tax cuts, to a major weakening of the Clean Air Act, to an invasion of Iraq. And so they wrapped as much as they could in the flag.

Now it has all gone wrong. The deficit is about to go above half a trillion dollars, the economy is still losing jobs, the triumph in Iraq has turned to dust and ashes, and Mr. Bush's poll numbers are at or below their pre-9/11 levels.

Nor can the members of this administration simply lose like gentlemen. For one thing, that's not how they operate. Furthermore, everything suggests that there are major scandals - involving energy policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked intelligence - that would burst into the light of day if the current management lost its grip on power. So these people must win, at any cost.

The result, clearly, will be an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history. Four months ago it seemed that the 2004 campaign would be all slow-mo films of Mr. Bush in his flight suit. But at this point, it's likely to be pictures of Howard Dean or Wesley Clark that morph into Saddam Hussein. And Donald Rumsfeld has already rolled out the stab-in-the-back argument: if you criticize the administration, you're lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

This political ugliness will take its toll on policy, too. The administration's infallibility complex - its inability to admit ever making a mistake - will get even worse. And I disagree with those who think the administration can claim infallibility even while practicing policy flexibility: on major issues, such as taxes or Iraq, any sensible policy would too obviously be an implicit admission that previous policies had failed.

In other words, if you thought the last two years were bad, just wait: it's about to get worse. A lot worse.

"The No. 1 issue facing the global economy is the need for more engines of growth." Treasury Secretary John Snow, as he prepares for next week's meeting of finance ministers and central bank presidents of the Group of Eight nations in the Middle East.

"The president will personally express his gratitude to the troops of the 3rd Infantry for the sacrifices that they have made in defending freedom in Afghanistan and, more recently, Iraq," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday. "The 3rd Infantry led the coalition offenses to liberate the people of Iraq, and they helped to begin the work of rebuilding Iraq."

U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a group of Iraqi policemen chasing bandits Friday, killing eight Iraqis and wounding seven others, witnesses said. It was the deadliest friendly fire incident since the end of major fighting.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight during a raid earlier Friday in the town of Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, the military said.

The Fallujah region has been one of the most dangerous for U.S. soldiers, with support for Saddam Hussein running strong in the area.

"I ask that you please be attentive to driving a jobs message more than ever before," added Pryce, fourth-ranking in the GOP leadership as head of the Republican Conference. "I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to communicate that job creation is our top priority."

1. What did National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice tell President Bush about al Qaeda threats against the United States in a still-secret briefing on Aug. 6, 2001?

2. Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft and some Pentagon officials cancel commercial-airline trips before Sept. 11?

3. Who made a small fortune "shorting" airline and insurance stocks before Sept. 11

4. Are all 19 people identified by the government as participants in the Sept. 11 attacks really the hijackers?

5. Did any of the hijackers smuggle guns on board as reported in calls from both Flight 11 and Flight 93?

6. Why did the NORAD air defense network fail to intercept the four hijacked jets?

7. Why did President Bush continue reading a story to Florida grade-schoolers for nearly a half-hour during the worst attack on America in its history?

8. How did Flight 93 crash in western Pennsylvania?

9. Was Zacarias Moussaoui really "the 20th hijacker"?

10. Where are the planes' "black boxes"?

11. Why were Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials so quick to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks?

12.Why did 7 World Trade Center collapse?

13. Why did the Bush administration lie about dangerously high levels of toxins and hazardous particles after the WTC collapse?

14. Where is Dick Cheney's undisclosed location?

15. What happened to the more than $1 billion that Americans donated after the attack?

16. What was the role of Pakistan's spy agency in the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl?

17. Who killed five Americans with anthrax?

18. What happened to the probe into C-4 explosives found in a Philadelphia bus terminal in fall 2001?

19. What is in the 28 blacked-out pages of the congressional Sept. 11 report?

20. Where is Osama bin Laden?

WASHINGTON, DC—In light of recent budget concerns, President and Mrs. Bush attempted to take out a third mortgage on the White House Monday, but were denied. "Unfortunately, we're unable to serve the president's needs at this time," Washington Mutual loan officer Judy Schamanski told reporters. "Within the next 30 days, Mr. Bush will receive an adverse-action notice in the mail, which will outline the specific reasons for the denial. But, for starters, I would suggest that he get current on his second mortgage before he even considers a third." Schamanski added that Bush is more than welcome to reapply in the future, should his credit profile improve.

How, then, can the government pay for Medicare and Medicaid — which didn't exist in the 1950's — and Social Security, which will become far more expensive as the population ages? (Defense spending has fallen compared with the economy, but not that much, and it's on the rise again.)

The answer is that it can't. The government can borrow to make up the difference as long as investors remain in denial, unable to believe that the world's only superpower is turning into a banana republic. But at some point bond markets will balk — they won't lend money to a government, even that of the United States, if that government's debt is growing faster than its revenues and there is no plausible story about how the budget will eventually come under control.

At that point, either taxes will go up again, or programs that have become fundamental to the American way of life will be gutted. We can be sure that the right will do whatever it takes to preserve the Bush tax cuts — right now the administration is even skimping on homeland security to save a few dollars here and there. But balancing the books without tax increases will require deep cuts where the money is: that is, in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

“Friends, Americans, Countrymen, lend me your ears… lend me your sons and daughters, lend me your tax dollars… so we can wage war in the name of American national security (people worldwide are willing to die for it)… so I can cover up my incompetence in failing to protect you… so I can add to the Bush and Cheney family coffers at your expense and the expense of the Iraqi people. I don’t know what I’m doing, but if you spend enough money, you’ll want to believe that I do."

I listened for as long as I could tolerate his inane features and grating voice, then turned off the television. Then turned it back on. Then turned the channel. Then turned it back. Then almost threw a cushion at the screen. Then thought better and decided he wasn’t worth it. Is it possible that someone like that is practically running the world? Is it possible he might see another term in the White House? God forbid…

Everyone is asking, ‘What should be done?’. Pull out the American troops. Take them home. Bring in UN peace-keeping troops under the Security Council- not led by America.

Let real Iraqis be involved in governing Iraq. Let Iraqis who actually have *families* living in Iraq be involved in governing their country. Let Iraqis who have something to lose govern the country. They aren’t being given a chance. As long as any Iraqi isn’t affiliated with one of the political groups on the Governing Council, no one bothers to listen.

We have thousands of competent, intelligent, innovative people who are eager to move forward but it’s impossible under these circumstances. There’s no security, there’s no work and there’s no incentive. AND THERE’S NO ONE WHO WILL LISTEN.

Paradoxically, the increasing volatility of intense discontent puts Americans in a more nonzero-sum relationship with the world's discontented peoples. If, for example, unhappy Muslims overseas grow more unhappy and resentful, that's good for Osama bin Laden and hence bad for America. If they grow more secure and satisfied, that's good for America. This is history's drift: technology correlating the fortunes of ever-more-distant people, enmeshing humanity in a web of shared fate.

The architects of America's national security policy at once grasp this crosscultural interdependence and don't. They see that prosperous and free Muslim nations are good for America. But they don't see that the very logic behind this goal counsels against pursuing it crudely, with primary reliance on force and intimidation. They don't appreciate how easily, amid modern technology, resentment and hatred metastasize. Witness their planning for postwar Iraq, with spectacular inattention to keeping Iraqis safe, content and well informed.

Nor do they seem aware, as they focus tightly on state sponsors of terrorism, that technology lets terrorists operate with less and less state support. Anarchic states — like the ones that may now be emerging in Iraq and Afghanistan — could soon be as big a problem as hostile states.

ABC News says it has exposed a crucial weakness in the nation's port security system by shipping depleted uranium from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Los Angeles. Federal officials say the network seems to have committed a crime.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says most suspected terrorists at a U.S. prison camp in Cuba will probably be detained for the course of the global war on terrorism rather than face trial.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was quoted Thursday as saying that Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini never killed anyone and only sent people away on vacations in internal exile, a claim that distressed Jewish leaders.

Berlusconi's party was quick to say that the quotation had not been confirmed. The newspaper that published the comments said they were as close as possible to those transcribed from a tape-recorded interview.

WASHINGTON - Americans are finding it unexpectedly tough to hold onto their jobs but other areas of the economy are showing signs of a pickup, two government reports out on Thursday showed.

The number of U.S. workers lining up to claim first-time unemployment benefits showed a surprise increase last week, the Labor Department said, adding to a dismal labor market picture.

"It's surprisingly bad news," said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed 261 civil lawsuits earlier this week against alleged online music pirates, became a litigation target itself after a Novato, Calif., man slapped an injunctive action against the music trade group claiming its "clean slate" amnesty program is a deceptive business practice. ...
Eric Parke, a 37-year-old mortgage broker, says in a lawsuit filed in Marin County Superior Court in San Rafael that the amnesty offer is "hollow and deceptive" and provides "no real legally binding assurance" that those who sign the amnesty offer will not be sued at some later date by copyright owners.

I've actually gotten to the point where I hope Dick Cheney is embroiled in a Clancyesque conspiracy to benefit Halliburton. Because if it's not a conspiracy, it's naïveté and ideology. And that means our leaders have used goofball logic and lousy assumptions to trap the country in a cockeyed replay of the Crusades that could drain our treasury and strain our military for generations, without making us any safer from terrorists and maybe putting us more at risk.

In the past six weeks, Bush has cited "9/11" or Sept. 11, 2001, in arguing for his energy policy and in response to questions about campaign fundraising, tax cuts, unemployment, the deficit, airport security, Afghanistan and the length, cost and death toll of the Iraq occupation.

The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway.

Just days after the United States began pushing for a new U.N. resolution authorizing a multinational military force for Iraq, senior administration officials are seeking to lower expectations that large offers of foreign troops will be forthcoming.

The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway.

BUZZFLASH: Many of our readers don't realize that you are an economics professor at Princeton. How did you come to write a column for The New York Times op-ed page?

KRUGMAN: Well, they just called me out of the blue. Actually it was Tom Friedman who acted as intermediary, because I'd met him.

The Justice Department today for a second time defied the federal judge overseeing the case of accused terror conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, saying it would not comply with her order to turn over two top al Qaeda detainees for interviews by Moussaoui and his legal team.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will likely greet U.S. President George W. Bush with open arms next month-but the wallet may be closed.

The Japanese government has yet to define its strategy on Iraq. Even the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces to the country-the topic of fierce debate-is up in the air because of instability in Iraq.

Equally unclear is financial assistance. The government, financially strapped itself, has not compiled an estimate on how much it is willing-or able-to contribute, according to a government source.

Often, when we actually see a person we usually see only on television, that person strikes us as unexpectedly small. The White House struck me the same way when I saw it in the U.S. capital for the first time.

The small White House has sent out massive ``bills.''

The mess in Iraq has fundamentally resulted from the Bush administration's pursuit of unilateralism.

In his farewell address, George Washington, the first American president, said, ``Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. ... Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.''

Washington's farewell address holds out eternal lessons to be learned by all leaders.

Let's be frank. Many key members of the UN Security Council would find it hard to lend their troops, the UN's name, and the enormous legitimacy that the UN enjoys around the world to a venture headed by Rumsfeld, a man who has gratuitously denigrated many friendly countries in public.

It would be easier to reach the needed agreement if Rumsfeld were no longer secretary of Defense. But there are other reasons, too, that Bush should consider letting Rumsfeld go. It was, after all, his decisionmaking at key points in the past two years that led the US into the present mess in Iraq.

Reconstruction must be treated like a strategic campaign, not a pork barrel for Republican buddies. Contracts should be awarded to whoever can turn the lights on, or stand up a phone network, whether they are local Iraqis, or gulf Arabs, or Europeans or Turks.

And ideological experiments should be curbed in a situation where they can reap disaster. Example: The administration wants to privatize state-owned Iraqi firms as soon as possible, with the exception of oil. But the only people with enough money to buy them are Saddam cronies who got rich off sanctions-busting. Such projects will only increase unemployment and anger at the occupation, while creating a Russian-style class of mafia capitalists.

And while we're on the subject of reconstruction funding, Bush still hasn't leveled with Americans about the cost. Republican officials say the real price of reconstruction will be $75 billion (apart from military costs), of which $42 billion is supposed to come from our allies.

As they used to say in the 1970s, is somebody smoking weed?

To sell the allies and the American public on such a massive project, the President has to tell them what went wrong - and how he'll change it. For starters, why did Bush officials lull the public into believing that occupation would be cheap?

Even after the recent, tragic attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, the United States was not willing to unreservedly support a U.N. Security Council resolution to help protect U.N. and other humanitarian workers. Instead, the U.S. greenlighted the resolution only when its reference to the International Criminal Court (ICC) was deleted.

The situation couldn't be clearer: Despite its vast power, the United States feels trapped. Because its invasion of Iraq violated the U.N. Charter and defied the Security Council, it opened itself to a potential war crimes prosecution. Now, to avoid such a prosecution, it is forced to lose allies or potential allies -- such as the 35 countries it abandoned and alienated -- and to delay or impede important goals such as protecting peacekeepers.

Meanwhile, the U.S.'s own soldiers are in danger, dying every day in Iraq, and the U.S.'s past decision to flout the U.N., and invade in the first place, is doubtless harming its ability to protect even its own. It needs U.N. help for political cover, even though it threatened the U.N. with "irrelevance" before the war.

MATTHEWS: Well, what about avoiding what happened in Somalia, Howard? If we put a big U.N. force of Pakistanis and Turks and Indians in there, and a bunch of our guys get pinned down in some small town and they’re not there to help them, what happens then?

FINEMAN: Well, that’s why the Pentagon and, I think, the president want to keep military matters under the control of the United States command and the control of the coalition forces. That’s the problem that they’ve got. We want complete military control, and indeed all the Iraqis are going to continue to look to us for security while we try to turn over nonmilitary matters, civilian matters and such and reconstruction projects to the U.N.

It’s a very difficult sell. George Bush gave a great speech to the U.N. last year. He didn’t count on the fact that the U.N. can’t be shamed into doing anything, and he’s going to have to go back and give another great speech. But, I’m afraid it’s not going to shame them into helping this time either.

MATTHEWS: You know what? I think like in every other enterprise there needs to be a boss. It’s either the U.N. or us, and I think- Howard, am I right?

FINEMAN: Right.

"Had we not taken action, this economy would have been in a deeper recession," Mr. Bush said. "It would have been longer, and as many as 1.5 million Americans who went to work this morning would have been out of a job."

To back up Mr. Bush's assertion, White House officials cited a Treasury Department analysis but provided no details.

‘Iraq Is Not a Real Nation’

ABCNEWS' George Will called the bombing proof that, "Iraq is not a real nation, shouldn't be a nation. Yugoslavia wasn't a nation, and we found that out as soon as the tyranny that held it together was loosened. The Soviet Union wasn't a nation, [and] we found that out as soon as it flew apart, given a chance. Iraq is in the process of flying apart.

"Ask yourselves this," Will added, " 'Is there a majority in Iraq that the rest of Iraq would consent to be governed by?' "

(edit)

George Will said retreat is not an option: "What we learned is that the vacuum of what we now call the failed state is something that nature abhors, and into [which] flows al Qaeda and the rest. We are not going to leave. … but we have to understand that all of our vocabulary of democracy simply does not fit this when there is no majority that a minority will consent to be governed by."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Thursday the Bush administration has been pushing for months for a new U.N. resolution to internationalize the force in Iraq, but it took the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad to change the "atmosphere in New York."

(edit)

Seeking a new U.N. resolution, he said, "didn't sort of emerge out of nowhere a few days ago."

"It's been on our agenda ever since the fall of Baghdad," Wolfowitz said.

He described last month's deadly bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad as a "breakthrough -- a sad one" -- in bringing the international community aboard.

(edit)

"Things change. You exploit opportunities, you deal with surprises."

"Instead of pointing fingers at the security forces of the coalition, ... it's important for the Iraqi people to step up and provide information," Rumsfeld said at a news conference.

Earlier, Rumsfeld visited a mass grave site and a Saddam Hussein execution chamber, paying grim homage to atrocities of the deposed Iraqi president's rule.

Rumsfeld stood atop a mound of powdery dirt overlooking the graves of about 900 people summarily executed during a Shiite Muslim uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They were the unidentified among more than 3,000 massacre victims unearthed in Al Hillah, a 1,000-year-old city near the site of ancient Babylon, shortly after American forces moved through last spring on the way to Baghdad.

Dr. Rafid al-Hussuni, a physician who lost two uncles and two close friends in the massacre, stood beside a somber Rumsfeld and explained his efforts to safeguard mass graves around the country.

Al-Hussuni was involved in the Al Hillah exhumations and started a volunteer group to counsel patience among Iraqis desperate to open the mass graves to find the remains of loved ones. Hasty and haphazard searches could destroy evidence in possible criminal prosecution of those responsible.

"If you can arrest all those people and put them on trial, the hearts of the Iraqi people will be satisfied," said al-Hussuni, who still has not found the remains of his uncles or his friends.