FEBRUARY 18, 2005

SOME HISTORY ON JOHN NEGROPONTE

The Bush administration is drenched in blood. Bush himself is responsible for two unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered. He's also responsible for our descending into torture in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. He's responsible for people being exported to other countries to be tortured. He has appointed Alberto Gonzales, a man who believes torture is legitimate, to be Attorney General. He has appointed a man named Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security. Chertoff has signed off on torture. Now he brings back John Negroponte, a relic of the Reagan administration. This item about Negroponte's bloody history is at http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/extra/archives/001464.html:

Negroponte is certainly a good choice to get inside the mind of a terrorist, since as U.S. ambassador to Honduras under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, he reportedly collaborated with a top-secret Army death squad, ominously called Battalion 316, that kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of civilians there. Honduras was a key ally for the Reagan crowd in its covert "contra" effort to topple Nicaragua's leftist government.

BUSH'S LEAVE NO CORPORATION BEHIND BILL

George W. Bush has signed legislation that limits class action lawsuits against corporations. Bush tries to couch this in terms of stopping "frivolous" lawsuits and "tort reform." It's really just another big gift for big business. The legal system is being restructured so that people like you and I can't sue corporations. It's a license to maim and kill for big business. This story by Jesse J. Holland is at story.news.yahoo.com:

As President Bush signed legislation Friday aimed at discouraging multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuits, he made clear he had his sights set on much broader restraints.

Next up, Bush said, should be curbs on asbestos litigation and medical malpractice awards.

"We're making important progress toward a better legal system," he said during an East Room signing ceremony for the class-action bill. "There's more to do."

THE BUSH SEX SCANDAL IN THE MAKING

Think back just a few years about how the right-wing media feasted on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. We had the sordid Ken Starr investigation and an impeachment and the shrieks of right-wingers that Clinton had destroyed the country with his licentious ways. It's poetic justice somehow that a sex scandal looks ready to engulf the Bush administration. This may also swamp the administration of George H. W. "Poppy" Bush. In her book The Family Kitty Kelly uncovered allegations that "Poppy" may be a pedophile, but there has been scant attention from the mainstream media until now. This story by Wayne Madsen is at www.onlinejournal.com:

Now that is has been discovered that "Jeff Gannon" (real name James D. Guckert), a "reporter" for Talon News Service, a front operation run by the conservative Republican-oriented GOPUSA.com, was using an alias as a cleared White House reporter, details are emerging that threaten to immerse the Bush administration in a major scandal.

"Gannongate," which is only now being mentioned by the mainstream news media, threatens to expose a potentially damaging GOP pedophile and male prostitution ring dating back to the 1980s and the administration of George H. W. Bush. James D. Guckert, using the name Jeff Gannon and possibly other aliases, was also running gay porn sites, one with a U.S. Marine Corps theme that solicited males for prostitution.

CRITICISM OF BUSH IS LEGITIMATE AND VERY AMERICAN

Singer/songwriter Iris DeMent has a song called "Wasteland of the Free." In the song she talks about the various hypocrisies you see from right-wingers, such as touting Christianity, but doing everything contrary to the precepts of Christianity. The Right has tried to inculcate the belief that you can't criticize Bush or his policies, or you're aiding the terrorists. Never mind that starting unnecessary wars, or torturing people supplies ample arguments to terrorists to justify their actions. Reggie Rivers has some thoughts in this piece linked at www.commondreams.org:

But how many rules can the United States break before it's guilty of engaging in simple violence rather than legitimate warfare? Can you imagine us giving our blessing to any nation that held American POWs without giving them protection of the Geneva Convention? We would immediately condemn that action. But somehow, when we're the nation committing the same offense, we shrug as if it's no big deal.

I know I'll be accused of being a member of the Blame-America-First crowd, and that's OK. Too many of our citizens are part of the Blame-America?-Never! mindset, and that has the danger of leading us down a very tyrannical path. But how many rules can the United States break before it's guilty of engaging in simple violence rather than legitimate warfare? Can you imagine us giving our blessing to any nation that held American POWs without giving them protection of the Geneva Convention? We would immediately condemn that action. But somehow, when we're the nation committing the same offense, we shrug as if it's no big deal.

I know I'll be accused of being a member of the Blame-America-First crowd, and that's OK. Too many of our citizens are part of the Blame-America?-Never! mindset, and that has the danger of leading us down a very tyrannical path.

FEBRUARY 17, 2005

HOW WE HATE BUSH'S SS PLAN: LET US COUNT THE WAYS

If someone lies and lies to you and leaves behind a trail of disaster and death, don't you finally think that person has lost any credibility? That's George W. Bush. Just review the guy's whole record, from the way he left business partners holding the bag, from the way he made most of his wealth with the Texas Rangers baseball club, his connections to the Saudi Royal family, the lousy way he left the state of Texas after being Governor there, the way he stole the presidency in 2000, and the way he lied us into a war with Iraq. And yet there are still people foolish enough to believe in this guy. This piece by David Smith looks at the sucker punch Bush wants to deliver on Social Security. The article is at www.tompaine.com:

With a stunning absence of specifics, President Bush used his State of the Union address to propose a radical "reform" of Social Security that would result in lower guaranteed retirement benefits for virtually all Americans born after 1950, add trillions to the national debt, and jeopardize our best program to provide for workers and their families in the event of disability or death.

The president suggested that by 2018, the system would be paying out more than it would be taking in, and that by 2042 it would be exhausted and bankrupt. He is wrong on both counts.

THE MYTH OF SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

I'm still reading K.C. Cole's book The Universe and the Teacup. In one essay she talks about the myth of "sustainable growth." It's a concept used to justify the idea of MARKET, MARKET, MARKET. We have to find new markets, doncha know. Everything has to be sacrificed to THE MARKET. In this essay she talks about some work by Albert A. Bartlett:

Bartlett recently wrote a paper designating people who believed in the continual possibility of growth as the modern-day Flat Earth Society. That's because a flat Earth could extend infinitely in all directions, accommodating any amount of garbage or providing any amount of land to grow crops or atmosphere to absorb the gases we pump in.

MEET YOUR NEW DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

John Negroponte is like an insect infestation you just can't eradicate. He keeps swarming in some new role where he can create mayhem. Negroponte was recently Ambassador to Iraq and now Bush has appointed him to the new post of Director of National Intelligence. This spot is designed to consolidate our intelligence into one "czar." Back during the Reagan years Negroponte was down in Central America denying there were death squads roaming places like Honduras. These were death squads being funded by our taxpayer dollars. David Corn writes about the new "czar" at www.thenation.com:

While he was in Honduras and for years afterward, Negroponte refused to acknowledge the human rights abuses. In a 1982 letter to The Economist he said it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The next year he maintained, "There is no indication that the infrequent human rights violations that do occur are part of deliberate government policy." And during his 2001 confirmation he stated, "I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras." How then does he account for a 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation that concluded, "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and linked to "death squad activities"?

THIS HAS A REALLY ROTTEN SMELL

The Bush administration wouldn't issue phony terror alerts or lie to get Bush elected, would it? This story reveals that Tom Ridge, former head of Homeland Security, met with pollsters during the Bush campaign. How, pray tell, do pollsters relate to homeland security? There seems to no depth this gang won't sink to. This story by Pete Yost is linked at www.commondreams.org:

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met privately with Republican pollsters twice in a 10-day span last spring as he embarked on more than a dozen trips to presidential battleground states.

Ridge's get-togethers with Republican strategists Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff during a period the secretary was saying his agency was playing no role in Bush's re-election campaign were revealed in daily appointment calendars obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge told reporters during the election season.

FEBRUARY 16, 2005

IN DEFENSE OF THE GOLDEN RULE

One of the great hypocrisies of the Christian Right is that it advocates survival of the fittest. The Christian Right is an enabler of predatory capitalism, which is totally contrary to the Christian teaching of the Golden Rule. I was skimming an essay by mathematician K.C. Cole who notes that math proves the Golden Rule. In her book The Universe and the Tea Cup she quotes Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan from their book Microcosmos:

Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

THE COWARDS AT CNN

This column is about a man named Eason Jordan, a former executive at CNN, who had to resign after controversy arose over some remarks he made. He allegedly said that journalists in Iraq had been targeted by the U.S. military. There have been incidents of the U.S. military firing into areas where journalists are known to be. In any event, the matter should have quickly disappeared. But in the right-wing atmosphere that predominates today he wound up resigning and CNN accepted his resignation. It makes you think a little of the movie High Noon where Gary Cooper played a sheriff forced to face down a gang of thugs by himself because the townspeople were nowhere to be found. This column by Jack Lessenberry is at www.metrotimes.com:

Many years ago, Charles Eisendrath, who runs the Knight-Wallace fellowship program at the University of Michigan, told me he had just met a brilliant young man who was reinventing international news coverage.

His name was Eason Jordan, and at that time he was in charge of international news at CNN, which, as you may remember, beat the dung out of the traditional networks with its coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Jordan then was barely 30; after that his rise was steady, and as of a week ago he was the network’s executive vice-president and chief executive for news.

YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH

George W. Bush has made a big deal of "faith based" initiatives. It's one of those things where you divert federal funds to religious organizations to do good things like help the poor and needy. Like a number of Bush's proposals, this one hasn't seen much action. Bush cares about things like tort reform that help big business, or destroying the environment to help big business, or starting wars to get oil for big business. This story talks about how Bush stiffed his "faith based" supporters. The story by Alan Cooperman and Jim VendeHei is at www.washingtonpost.com:

A former White House official said yesterday that President Bush has failed to deliver on his promise to help religious groups serve the poor, the homeless and drug addicts because the administration lacks a genuine commitment to its "compassionate conservative" agenda.

David Kuo, who was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for much of Bush's first term, said in published remarks that the White House reaped political benefits from the president's promise to help religious organizations win taxpayer funding to care for "the least, the last and the lost" in the United States. But he wrote: "There was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda."

IF THE GANNON STORY HAPPENED DURING THE CLINTON YEARS . ..

I don't like tabloid news. I never paid that much attention to the hot air about the Monica Lewinsky story because I thought it was mostly a non-story if you care about really substantive news. Now we have the story of Jeff Gannon, a.k.a. James Guckert, a "reporter" for Talon News Service. It turns out Mr. Gannon is allegedly a gay prostitute. Can you imagine the caterwauling that would have occurred in the right wing media if Bill Clinton's administration had been connected to a gay prostitute/journalist? Fire and brimstone would be raining from the sky. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and all the rest of these creeps would talk about it 24/7.

This is yet another case of turnabout being fair play. I'm particularly interested in how Mr. Gannon got clearance to attend White House press conferences. Was national security compromised? Joe Conason takes a swing at the right-wing media in this column linked at www.commondreams.org:

Proof that "the liberal media" is but a figment of right-wing mythology has now arrived in the person of one James Guckert, formerly known as Jeff Gannon. Were the American media truly liberal—or merely unafraid to be called liberal—the saga of Mr. Guckert’s short, strange, quasi-journalistic career would be resounding across the airwaves.

The intrinsic media interest of the Guckert/Gannon story should be obvious to anyone who has followed his tale, which touches on hot topics from the homosexual underground and the investigation into the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the political power of the Internet. But our supposedly liberal media becomes quite squeamish when reporting anything that might humiliate the Bush White House and the Republican Party.

FEBRUARY 15, 2005

ANOTHER GOOD ARGUMENT AGAINST THE REPUBS ON SS

It's ironic, isn't it, that an alleged deficit in Social Security spending sends Republicans into a tizzy, but they have no problem with the garganguran deficits run up by the Bush administration? This is a good argument that I found at www.bartcop.com:

"In 2018, Social Security will begin paying out more money than it takes in. This is what Dennis Hastert calls the “crisis point.” But the entire federal government is paying out more money than it takes in right now. Indeed this has been the case for four years, thanks to GOP tax-and-spending policies, and it will continue. Why is it that a modest deficit in Social Security that won’t begin for over a decade requires immediate radical action, while a vastly greater overall federal deficit occurring right now doesn’t?"

--Paul Glastris, using logic to decipher GOP greed

THE LATE ARTHUR MILLER DESCRIBED THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

The late playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s in response to the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Communist witch hunts. Although The Crucible was set during the Salem witch trials, it was clearly an allegory for what was happening with McCarthy. It is appropriate now in another time of witch hunts and intolerance of dissent. This speech by a character in The Crucible sounds eerily like John Ashcroft or George W. Bush saying there is no middle ground. You agree with them or you're aiding the enemy. E. J. Dionne writes about it in his column at www.washingtonpost.com:

For our own moment, consider this speech by Deputy Governor Danforth defending the role of Salem's witch-hunting court. "But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time -- we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will be one of those."

FEBRUARY 14, 2005

ALL THE MISLEADING ARGUMENTS TO PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY

I saw a letter to the editor of The Fresno Bee a few days ago that took the approach of saying that Social Security wasn't really safe until 2042. The Social Security trust fund is secured by government bonds, and this guy was saying the government won't have the money to redeem the bonds. Voila! A crisis. If the government doesn't have the money to secure Social Security, then the government wouldn't be reliable for anything, it seems to me. That would be a simply catastrophic situation on every front, not just Social Security. The no- money- for bonds argument is addressed in this article by Charles R. Morris linked at www.commondreams.org:.

Repudiating American government bonds would be such a catastrophic financial event, for both the country and the world, that it is usually regarded as unthinkable. But it takes only mild paranoia to imagine that some “conservatives” may speculate that repudiating obligations just to the trust funds may not have such dire consequences-that external investors may somehow consider them a different order of promise; indeed, that Wall Street and other big-asset holders might be relieved to see them dispensed with. And to the mildly paranoid, the administration’s drive to make its tax cuts permanent, even as it raises the alarm over Social Security, seems almost designed to force such an outcome.

IF ARMAGEDDON IS NIGH, WHY IS SOCIAL SECURITY IN "CRISIS"?

An interesting idea. Right-wingers bleat about the rapture being upon us, so they don't care about little things like global climate change or nuclear proliferation. But they have problems with the alleged bankruptcy of Social Security? There's something inconsistent here. This item is from www.thiscantbehappening.net:

HERE'S A THOUGHT, BY GOD--Bill Moyers and Robert Scheer both say America is in the hands of a fundamentalist cult that believes in Armaggedon, and that these people have no concern about the future--global warming, vanishing oil reserves, dead oceans--because they think we're headed for the rapture anyhow and God will provide. They may be right. And yet, these same arch-conservative religious fundamentalists are backing the President's scam to gut Social Security on the (false) grounds that it will face bankruptcy in 40 years. If Armaggedon is upon us, who cares about Social Security? Could it be they, like the president, just want to kill the program...

WAL-MART: THE MALEFACTORS OF GREAT WEALTH

You wish President Theodore Roosevelt could be here to talk about Wal-Mart, the country's biggest retailer. Back in his day Roosevelt talked about the "malefactors of great wealth," and there is no greater example than Wal-Mart. They force down wages, destroy unions, drive out small businesses, and systematically violate labor laws. Meanwhile, members of the Walton family, Wal-Mart's owners, are multi-billionaires. Just remember how Wal-Mart treats its employees the next time you see the TV commercial with the little smiley guy rolling back prices. This story by Steven Greenhouse is at www.nytimes.com:

Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailer, has agreed to pay $135,540 to settle federal charges that it violated child labor laws in Connecticut, Arkansas and New Hampshire.

Labor Department officials said most of the 24 violations covered by the settlement involved workers under age 18 operating dangerous machinery, including cardboard balers and chain saws. In the agreement, Wal-Mart denied any wrongdoing.

FEBRUARY 13, 2005

SINCLAIR BROADCASTING: BIG TIME RIGHT WING PROPAGANDA

How can you take someone seriously when they claim that 95% of the corporate owned media lean to the left? How can you take them seriously when they state that Dan Rather claimed that Saddam Hussein is a "nice guy"? This is the story of the far right network Sinclair Broadcasting and its CEO David Smith. The story is at www.rollingstone.com:

Last year, when conservative commentator Armstrong Williams took $240,000 in payoffs from the Bush administration to promote its education policies in the media, he needed to reach a national television audience to satisfy the terms of his lucrative deal. Fortunately for Williams, he was good friends with David Smith, the CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation's largest owner of television stations.

THE MANY COSTS OF OUTSOURCING

People who want to defend the outsourcing of American jobs by corporations might want to consider there are consequences beyond the loss of jobs in this country. There is also a transfer of technology to other nations, and increasingly there is a transfer of private information about each of us. CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is a strong opponent of outsourcing and he talks about the issues involved in an interview posted at motherjones.com:

Among the many consequences is the pain that is being felt by working men and women in this country, particularly our middle class. But the other impact is the transfer of technology and our knowledge base. We’re exporting our privacy as well, because medical and financial records are being exported so that cheap overseas labor can work with those documents and records.

Each time we transfer knowledge bases overseas, whether it be manufacturing or technology or research, that is a service that will obviously be performed by a competing economy -- whether emerging or not, a competing economy. And it is work that will not be done by the U.S. economy and our workers. The result is -- and this is at the margins at this point, but could grow to an increasingly larger share of the trade-deficit problem -- the result is further pressure on the U.S. economy.

BUSH JUST LIES AND LIES ABOUT THE DEFICIT

Molly Ivins outrages right-wingers because she's so dead on with her analysis and her reporting. She also has an incredible wit. In this column she talks about the absolute travesty of the new Bush budget and how the claim that this is a deficit reduction is an absolute bald-faced lie. This column is at www.workingforchange.com:

In the first place, they're trying to fool you into thinking the deficit is less than it is by using a fake number from the previous year -- an early deficit estimate set way high so they could claim the deficit had been "dramatically reduced." Last year's actual deficit was $412 billion, the largest ever, and under Bush's budget this year, it will be $427 billion. The actual deficit, with war spending included, would balloon to $1.4 trillion by 2010 under this plan.

RIGHT-WINGERS CHANGE THEIR TUNE WHEN IT'S PERSONAL

Right-wingers sit on high throwing down their lightning bolts of denunciation at all mortals who sin against the mighty doctrine of conservatism. But when it's personal, they suddenly change their minds. Rush Limbaugh was only too happy to call for harsh punishments for drug offenders until el-Rusho got caught with his hand in the pill jar. Nancy Reagan is in favor of stem cell research. It's not easy to be self-righteous and judgmental when it involves you or your family. This commentary by Ellis Henican is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Nancy Reagan supports stem-cell research after her Ronnie gets sick.

Dick Cheney opposes the gay-marriage ban after his daughter comes out.

Rush Limbaugh is suddenly an advocate of treatment - not prison - for people addicted to narcotics. Oh, I almost forgot: The epiphany comes while Rush is being investigated for drugs.

FEBRUARY 12, 2005

READ KITTY KELLEY'S BOOK THE FAMILY

I've been skimming Kitty Kelley's book about the Bush dynasty. The Family reveals the Bushes to be the thugs most of us knew they were, but there is good documentation to use for anyone who wants to believe in the goodness of George W. Bush and his cohorts. All the Bushes are despicable, but I have a particular interest in the guy who stole the White House. This section of Kelley's book shows the whole "compassionate conservative" schtick was phony all along. Bush ran for Congress in 1978, and this excerpt is from page 545:

During the 1978 campaign, he had vehemently opposed abortion rights, gay rights . . ., and affirmative action. . .. He also said that Social Security would be bankrupt in ten years unless people were allowed to invest the money themselves. Not exactly the views of a "compassionate conservative," as he later labeled himself. He took the same positions during his 1994 campaign for governor, adding to the political mix two more items key to his agenda: guns and God.

CONVERT OR ELSE

This is outrageous. A group of villagers in India were told they had to convert to Christianity, or they wouldn't get any aid to help them cope with the devastating tsunami that swept away their village. I don't ever remember anything in the Bible that says you forcibly convert someone. This story is at in.news.yahoo.com:

Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.

Samanthapettai, near the temple town of Madurai, faced near devastation on the December 26 when massive tidal waves wiped it clean of homes and lives.

ANOTHER GOOD ARGUMENT AGAINST BUSH'S SS SCAM

I hadn't really thought about this, but this letter in The Fresno Bee has a good point. If we have to depend on the stock market's performance for our retirement, then we have to go contrary to our own interests in many other ways, such as decent wages, benefits, caring for the environment, and so on. Have you ever noticed that when there is a major merger, usually accompanied by major layoffs, how the value of the stock of the merged companies increases? So, on the one hand we cut our own throat while trying to salvage our retirement. This letter is at www.fresnobee.com:

If the masses depend on the stock market for their retirement funds, they will have a stake in shrinking their own interests. This system will, of course, favor corporations, while dividing and forcing working people against each other. Labor unions might become obsolete. Privatization of Social Security is a very bad idea.

THE RISE OF NEO-NAZIS

This is scary stuff. Neo-Nazi hate groups are trying more and more to go mainstream. The present climate in this country gives them a good opportunity. With our government fostering policies that openly target Arabs and Muslims as suspected "terrorists" it's not a far reach to start scapegoating any non-white groups as dangerous to the "American way of life." This article by Stephanie Simon is at www.latimes.com:

White supremacist groups around the country are moving aggressively to recruit new members by promoting their violent, racist ideologies on billboards, in radio commercials and in leaflets tossed on suburban driveways.

Watching with mounting alarm, civil rights monitors say these tactics stake out a much bolder, more public role for many hate groups, which are trying to shed their image as shadowy extremists and claim more mainstream support.

FEBRUARY 11, 2005

BUSH'S WAR ON THE POOR

I've never understood the absolute contempt Republicans in general have toward working class people and the poor. But the whole history of Republicans in the 20th and 21st century has been to make life more difficult for poor people. Maybe it's some belief that God is "punishing" poor people for their sins, although Jesus Christ said "blessed are the poor" and praised those who aid the poor. Paul Krugman writes about the incredibly nasty budget of George W. Bush and its assault on the poor at www.nytimes.com:

First, the facts: the budget proposal really does take food from the mouths of babes. One of the proposed spending cuts would make it harder for working families with children to receive food stamps, terminating aid for about 300,000 people. Another would deny child care assistance to about 300,000 children, again in low-income working families.

And the budget really does shower largesse on millionaires even as it punishes the needy. For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities informs us that even as the administration demands spending cuts, it will proceed with the phaseout of two little-known tax provisions - originally put in place under the first President George Bush - that limit deductions and exemptions for high-income households.

THE BUSH BUDGET GAME

Right-wingers have this strange idea that the way to contain federal spending is to create massive deficits, which creates a situation where you cut expenditures or else. Of course, their gripe is any expenditures that help ordinary people. If the money is spent in the form of tax cuts or subsidies for the rich, or spent on defense they have no objection. Let the deficits be damned! E. J. Dionne talks about the absolute lunacy of conservative "thought" on budget deficits in this column at www.washingtonpost.com:

And at least some of the president's supporters are perfectly candid about the game that is being played. So I offer three hearty cheers for my conservative friends on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Writing on Tuesday -- beneath a cheeky headline, "Hooray for the Deficit" -- the Journal's opiners argued that "the much-loathed budget 'deficit' is the main, and perhaps the only, reason we may finally get some federal spending restraint."

"The good news," the Journal declared cheerfully, "is that the size of the current deficit is once again focusing political attention back where it belongs, on the rapid rise in federal outlays."

OUTSOURCING TORTURE

Conservatives have derided liberals as "bleeding hearts" for caring about the rights of accused criminals. But I wonder how many conservatives would feel about the U.S. government seizing them, slapping them in leg irons, stashing them on a jet, and taking them to Syria to be tortured. It's simply surreal that people who self-righteously beat their chests about "moral values" have absolutely no problem with people being tortured or murdered. And we're talking innocent people here. Bob Herbert writes about it in his column at www.nytimes.com:

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

THE RAPTURE INDEX

We've split the atom. We've landed on the moon. We've sent probes to Mars and Saturn and elsewhere in the solar system. We've conquered many diseases that were scourges of times past. But superstition is alive and well. We find it in the form of people who call themselves fundamentalist Christians. They believe in the "end times" and that they're about to be spirited away to heaven any time. What's most troubling, of course, that some of these people have it in their power to destroy our planet. I have to wonder how people like George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, et al think they're heaven bound anyway. I think they have a different destination. Jon Carroll writes about the rapture in this column at www.sfgate.com:

The Rapture Index is based on 45 prophetic categories, things like drought, plague, floods, liberalism, beast government and mark of the beast. "Beast government" is apparently the European Union; the news that the EU is looking for a new president is seen as a sign that the end time is drawing nearer. The latest "mark of the beast" is a plan by the Antichrist that will result in said mark being implanted in the right hand or forehead of unbelievers. The relatively high number of this indicator is explained thusly: "Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags." There are some parts of this belief system I have not yet grasped.

The Rapture is a good thing, and therefore floods, famine, drought and all that are also good things because they portend the coming of end times. Even liberalism is a good thing, because there need to be a lot of Christ- deniers for the end times to come. (Among the prophesied Christ-deniers: the pope. That part is pretty much played down in the pamphlets.)

FEBRUARY 10, 2005

YOU WANT TO TALK FUZZY MATH?

Back in the 2000 presidential campaign George W. Bush called Al Gore's analysis of Bush's ridiculous tax cut ideas "fuzzy math." In the years of the Bush administration we're getting a demonstration of the real fuzzy math. The prescription drug bill that Republicans twisted arms in the middle of the night to pass is going to cost almost twice the initial projected cost. The bill is also a big bonanza for drug companies and a rotten deal for consumers. This story by Robert Pear is at www.nytimes.com:

The Bush administration offered a new estimate of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit on Tuesday, saying it would cost $720 billion in the next 10 years.

That is much more than the $400 billion Congress assumed when it passed legislation creating the benefit in late 2003.

MORE EVIDENCE 9/11 MIGHT HAVE BEEN PREVENTED

According to report just released from the 9/11 Commission, the FAA had ample warnings that airplanes might be hijacked and used in a suicide attack. When you think of the 3,000 victims of that day, and the thousands killed since in the "war on terror," you don't know which emotion should come first, weeping or outrage. This story by Eric Lichtblau is at www.nytimes.com:

In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.

But aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security," and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures," the commission report concluded.

SCIENTISTS PRESSURED TO CHANGE THEIR FINDINGS

Two hundred scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they were pressured to alter their findings because the findings were deleterious to business interests. In Bush world nothing matters except profit, even if lives and the environment are endangered. This story by Julie Cart is at www.latimes.com:

More than 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they have been directed to alter official findings to lessen protections for plants and animals, a survey released Wednesday says.

The survey of the agency's scientific staff of 1,400 had a 30% response rate and was conducted jointly by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

FEBRUARY 9, 2005

COMPANIES THAT PROVIDE PORN BIG REPUB CONTRIBUTORS

Maybe this is a case of do as I say, not as I do. The people who bellow the loudest about "family values" and all the rest are usually the people who are wallowing in the sleaze. One thinks of Newt Gingrich, who went after Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky, but was cheating on his own wife at the time. We learn now that cable companies that make big profits from porn are also big contributors to the Republican party. Wonder when we can expect to see those contributions given back? This story by Jake Tapper and Avery Miller is at www.commondreams.org:

I think they made a really smart business decision," said Tim Connelly, publisher of Adult Video News, the trade journal of the adult entertainment industry. "So today Adelphia, tomorrow Wal-Mart."

While the corporations generate millions in profits from providing adult content, their political contributions are often given to those elected, in no small part, because of their stance on "moral values."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Cable has given millions in political donations since 1998. The national Republican Party committees are its biggest organizational recipient, with donations totaling $851,000. President Bush is its biggest individual recipient with $109,000 in donations.

Adelphia has given $166,000 to Republican committees, $17,000 to conservative Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., and $12,000 to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., one of the most conservative members of the Senate.

BUSH: THE POOR DON'T NEED FOOD AND HEAT

One could say that George W. Bush's budget is an equal opportunity disaster (except for the very rich). All kinds of people are getting clobbered: airlines, farmers, children, the poor, the environment. And he still wants to push for tax cuts for his rich friends. What a guy. This story by Robert Pear is at www.nytimes.com:

Under President Bush's budget, many food stamp recipients, farmers, veterans, small-business owners, nursing students, air travelers and Amtrak passengers would have to pay more or would receive less from the government.

Spending for domestic programs, aside from security and entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, would decline slightly in 2006, to $389 billion, and would remain flat for the next four years - a freeze with no obvious precedent in the last two decades. The budget promises to reduce the deficit to $207 billion in 2010, from a record $412 billion last year. Mr. Bush proposes stricter eligibility rules for food stamps, expected to save $57 million in 2006 and $1.1 billion over 10 years. Under the proposal, welfare recipients who receive only child care, education, training and other services would no longer be automatically eligible for food stamps. Poor people receiving cash assistance would remain automatically.

WHAT CONSERVATISM HAS WROUGHT

Right-wingers who cheerlead George W. Bush or speak rapturously of Ronald Reagan can't see the forest for the trees. Under the boot of the extreme right life has gotten worse for the majority of us. This is a good post at the AARP website about what the right wing has done to us. The post is at community.aarp.org:

The Index of Social Progress, released by the Fifth International Conference of the International Society for Life Quality Studies, ranks 163 nations...and we aren't first. Denmark holds that distinction. As a matter of fact, we aren't even in the top 25; we're 27th, which puts us at the approximate level of Poland and Slovenia. They have determined that chronic poverty is the greatest threat to our social progress since 33 million Americans--12 million of them children--are poor. Contrary to the popular perception, the majority of the poor in the US are members of established family households who work full-time and are white. NO OTHER economically advantaged country tolerates such a level of poverty. Other factors impeding American social progress include slow economic growth, increasing unemployment, insecure access to adequate healthcare and deteriorating schools in urban areas...and these are precisely the targets of the cheap-labor conservatives' ruinous agenda. OUR DECLINE IS THEIR FAULT. This puts the lie to any disingenuous rhetoric about an "Ownership Society;" these people hate prosperity and are bent upon turning America into one big banana republic...and we're more than halfway there!

U.S. OUT OF STEP ON KYOTO TREATY

As the evidence of the danger of global climate change mounts, the Bush administration ignores the issue, and doesn't join the 25 nations of the European Union in implementing the Kyoto accords. It's disgraceful that the United States isn't taking a greater role in dealing with the issue. David Ignatius writes about it in his column at www.washingtonpost.com:

The Bush administration's official position is that the climate change issue is complicated and needs more study. Yet many of the administration's own scientists seem convinced that the problem is real and growing. The Environmental Protection Agency endorses the finding by the National Academy of Sciences that the Earth's surface temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century.

The EPA's Web site offers this blood-curdling warning: "Rising global temperatures are expected to raise sea level, and change precipitation and other local climate conditions. Changing regional climate could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies. . . . Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our National Parks may be permanently altered." And yet the administration does little except study the data.

FEBRUARY 8, 2005

BUSH ASKED FOR SUGGESTIONS

In his State of the Union address George W. Bush asked for suggestions--most certainly insincerely--about ways to "fix" Social Security. In this column Thomas Oliphant has some suggestions. For example, if you kept the estate tax for assets exceeding $7 million you could compensate for half of the projected Social Security gap. Oh, that's right, we can't tax rich people, can we? This column is at www.boston.com:

To provide still more context, it's worth thinking about another big economic issue that stems from aging -- the federal tax on estates. Bush wants to eliminate it entirely, forever, as part of his campaign to make all enacted tax cuts (which were passed as part of a budget gimmick to expire at the end of this decade) permanent. If instead, there was an estate tax only on assets exceeding $7 million and affecting less than 1 percent of the population, half the Social Security gap over time would vanish.

INTERESTING CALL TO MIKE MALLOY

A caller named Jerky called the Mike Malloy show on Air America Radio and he talked about the Ayn Rand cult of Objectivism. I've never read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I know just enough about libertarian ideas to know they're absurd. Ayn Rand celebrated "individualism" and selfishness. Jerky made the point that Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman, is an Ayn Rand disciple. He said Greenspan was a major force behind increasing the payroll tax for Social Security back during the Reagan administration. That tax fell heaviest on working class people. In the years since, the tax created a large surplus in the Social Security trust fund that was supposed to insure against the system becoming insolvent. Now that there is a sizable surplus, people like Bush and Greenspan are looking to plunder.

FIFTY MOST LOATHSOME PEOPLE IN THE U.S.

This makes for entertaining reading, and who doesn't need some entertaining reading these days? This top 50 list of the most loathsome people is at http://www.buffalobeast.com/66/50mostLoathsome2004.htm.

BUSH'S PHONY BUDGET

How can you possibly have the nerve to submit a budget that doesn't even include the cost for the war in Iraq, or the proposed borrowing to dismantle Social Security? But George W. Bush and his cronies have no shortage in gall. They've stolen, lied, and taken us into unnecessary wars, so why not lie about the budget too? The Washington Post discusses it in this editorial at www.washingtonpost.com:

First, the farcical aspects: To meet its claimed target of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, the new budget omits the cost of the war in Iraq; the cost of the president's proposed private accounts for Social Security; and the cost of correcting the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting growing numbers of middle-class taxpayers rather than the rich it is intended for.

FEBRUARY 7, 2005

JUMPING FROM FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE

I don't believe Social Security is in crisis the way George W. Bush claims. But even if you have concerns about the demographics of a large Baby Boom generation retiring, you should think of the old cliche about not jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security is exactly that. This article by Kathleen Pender is at www.sfgate.com:

As details of President Bush's plan for personal Social Security accounts dribble out, it appears they are neither entirely personal nor terribly secure.

The accounts would resemble 401(k) plans in some ways, but with less freedom and flexibility for workers.

THE WARD CHURCHILL NON-STORY

I've started noticing Ward Churchill's name in the news the past few days. I wondered who the heck Ward Churchill even was. It turns out he's an academic in Colorado who wrote a paper three years ago suggesting that the people attacked by the terrorists on September 11 got what they deserved. I don't agree with that. I think the people murdered on September 11 were victims. But the right wing in its usual way is trying to make Ward Churchill symbolic of all of those who have opposed the jingoistic foreign policy of the Bush administration. This article examines how Ward Churchill got to be such a big deal. The story by Kevin Drum is at www.washingtonmonthly.com:

PACK JOURNALISM....After reading yet another article about University of Colorado nutjob Ward Churchill in the LA Times this morning, I began to wonder. How did this story get so much play? I mean, the guy's an obscure academic in Boulder, and the "Roosting Chickens" paper that created all the flurry was written three years ago. What gives?

The short answer is twofold: it's the result of both the agenda-setting power of the right wing outrage machine and the agenda-setting power of the New York Times. According to Nexis, here's how the story developed.

CANSECO SAYS BUSH KNEW ABOUT STEROID USE ON TEXAS RANGERS

George W. Bush made a lot of his ill-gotten fortune from a sweetheart deal with baseball's Texas Rangers. Bush was able to buy into the Rangers with what was a relatively small investment. The Rangers were able to build a new stadium by using the eminent domain provisions of the law where the land of local people was grabbed to make room for the stadium, Bush became a figurehead general partner, and then went on to become Governor of Texas and then to the White House. Last year I thought Bush's references in the State of the Union speech to steroid use in professional sports was inexplicable. According to former player Jose Canseco, Bush was aware that Canseco and other players on the Rangers were using steroids back in Bush's baseball days. Back then Bush wasn't a politician. This story by Michael O'Keeffe is at www.nydailynews.com:

Canseco claims the team's general managing partner at the time - an aspiring politician named George W. Bush - had to have been aware that his players were using performance-enhancing drugs but did nothing about it.

White House spokesman Ken Lisaius declined to comment on the allegations, but he noted that President Bush called on players and owners during his 2004 State of the Union address to get rid of steroids and applauded the beefed-up drug policy Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to in December.

WHEN OTHER COUNTRIES DEVELOP NUKES IT'S BAD; U.S. NUKES ARE OKAY, THOUGH

George W. Bush and company have been rattling the sabers because Iran is supposedly developing nuclear weapons. They've made threatening sounds about North Korea because North Korea has a nuclear weapon. They attacked Iraq for having nonexistent nuclear weapons. But that doesn't stop Bush from developing new nukes here at home. This story by William J. Broad is at www.nytimes.com:

Worried that the nation's aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say.

The officials say the program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race.

YEAH, BUSH REALLY CARES ABOUT KIDS

This monster who calls himself George W. Bush has killed thousands and thousands of children in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here at home he claims he cares about educating and caring for kids, but his new budget slashes programs for kids. The poverty rate has risen dramatically under this vile administration and it's no accident. The Washington Post addresses the issue in this editorial at www.washingtonpost.com:

BETWEEN 2000 and 2003, the number of people living in poverty rose 14 percent. In 2003, the most recent year for which numbers are available, one out of every eight Americans was poor, a disproportionate number of them children. The number without health insurance was the highest on record; more Americans went hungry. The poorest fell further below the poverty line while the richest took home a greater share of national income than ever.

We recite these depressing numbers today, as President Bush prepares to unveil his fiscal 2006 budget, because budgets are not only dry, fact-choked documents but a measure of the national character. These are the budgetary times that try the nation's soul: tax cuts that have drained the available revenue; a deficit that demands austerity; a war on terrorism, at home and abroad, that requires resources to keep the country safe. In the face of this unhappy fiscal reality, the risk is that the budget ax will fall most heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, those with the greatest need for government help but the smallest voice in the corridors of power.

FEBRUARY 6, 2005

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE "PRO-LIFE" CROWD

People who like to crusade under the banner of being "pro-life" aren't really pro-life at all. They're anti-choice in reproductive rights. When there are living and breathing children who are in distress the pro-life crowd couldn't care less. The greatest example of pro-life hypocrisy is their support of wars such as the one in Iraq. Who do you think gets killed more than anyone else in wars? It's children. It's women carrying fetuses. Where's the outrage from the pro-life crowd about that? This piece by Daniel C. Maguire is at www.commondreams.org:

OK, 'Pro-Lifers,' here goes.

Archbishop Tutu (would that we had even one bishop like him in the United States!) writes:

'Some 2 million children have died in dozens of wars during the past decade. This is more than three times the number of battlefield deaths of American soldiers in all their wars since 1776. Today, civilians account for more than 90 percent of war casualties.'

Children are the prime casualties of modern war. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University writes:

'Children in urban war zones die in vast numbers, not just due to violence, but also from diarrhea, respiratory infections and other causes, owing to unsafe drinking water, lack of refrigerated foods, and acute shortages of blood and basic medicines in clinics and hospitals.'

QUEEN LAURA IS PICKY, PICKY

The head chef at the White House says he was fired because he couldn't meet Laura Bush's "stylistic requirements." I would sure like to know what "style" Mrs. Bush favors. There aren't too many fancy ways to serve hog jowls and grits, I guess. This story by Marian Burros is at www.sfgate.com:

Unlike members of the White House staff who maintain the fiction that resigning was their decision, the executive chef, Walter Scheib III, minced no words Friday in saying he had been fired.

"We've been trying to find a way to satisfy the first lady's stylistic requirements," Scheib said in a telephone interview, "and it has been difficult. Basically, I was not successful in my attempt."

THE TERRIFYING SCENARIOS OF GLOBAL WARMING

George W. Bush can fear monger all he wants about the imaginary demise of Social Security, or conjure up the boogeymen terrorists like Osama bin Laden, but I'm convinced there is a clear and present danger to all life on earth in the form of global climate change. There is just too much evidence it's happening for us to blindly pretend that it is not. If you care about at all about future generations, then you should become an activist on the issue of global warming. This article by Geoffrey Lean at www.commondreams.org lays out some horrifying scenarios:

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.

Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.

U.S. MAY NOT BE THE MODEL FOR GLOBALIZATION

I wonder how many right-wingers who think globalization is such a good thing will feel if the new globalization is dominated by China and India, both of whom are becoming major players in the new global economy. I have nothing against better lives for the Chinese and Indians, but if we're going to have globalization I would like to see our planet better off for it, and I would like to see working people all around the world benefit from it. This analysis by Martin Jacques is at www.dawn.com:

Indeed, there is something faintly bizarre about the psychotic worship of American values, the incantation of its applicability to each and every country, at a historical moment when, for the first time since its emergence half a millennium ago, the modern world will, in the not too distant future, no longer be monopolized by the west. It is not difficult to imagine that, by the middle of this century, both China and India will rank among the top five largest economies in the world, with China perhaps the biggest. Nor is this just an economic story, which is how it is generally told. With economic strength comes, in due course, political, cultural and military influence: such has been the case with the emergence of all great powers.

FEBRUARY 5, 2005

U.S. IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION

You'll get the usual babble from right-wingers that the United States is a "Christian nation," or more lately, that Christians are being persecuted. You know, people don't say "Merry Christmas." They say "Happy Holidays" and the Christians are under attack! Anyone who reads any history about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they crafted knows they deliberately created a separation between church and state. They were a lot smarter than the people running our government now. This piece by Brooke Allen is at www.thenation.com:

The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time."

MORE ON THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND CHRISTIANITY

William Edelen is one of my favorite writers on religion. He exposes the myths that get perpetrated by the Christian right. As I said above, you don't even need to do extensive research to find that the Founding Fathers were not Christian in the way the Christian right defines Christianity. In his column of February 20, 2005, Mr. Edelen quotes the Founding Fathers themselves on religion. The article is at www.williamedelen.com:

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, 1968, vol.2, p.420, quote:
"One of the embarrassing problems for the nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was the fact that NOT ONE of the first six presidents of the United States was a Christian. They were Deists."

In Deism there is no personal God, only an impersonal "force" or "energy" or "natures God" or "providence". In Deism, the bible is nothing but literature, and bad literature at that. Jefferson and Paine both called it "a dunghill" Others of our founders used the same language. In Deism, Jesus was nothing more than a nomadic teacher. I will now let these men speak for themselves:

THE BULLYING TACTICS OF THE RIGHT

This article reminds me of some my own experiences with right-wingers. Draped in terminal self-righteousness, they'll attack you as being naive, advocating "class warfare," a "traitor" if you disagree with the war-making of our government, a "baby killer" if you favor reproductive rights, an "environmental wacko" if you believe clean air and water are actually important, and so on. Name calling is about all they have because they're wrong on almost everything. Actually having to apply ethical and intellectual standards to any issue shoots them down in flames. This article by Michael Arvey is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:

When you dissent and apply reasonable criticism to an out-of-control regime, the emailers brand you as a traitor and therefore as an enemy of America (a smear technique perfected by 20th century tyrants); either conform to groupthink, or expatriate. (If my accusers will first agree to enlist as fodder for Bush's policy of "just" wars-the military is currently offering a $15,000 sign-up bonus-I will seriously consider expatriation.) Uninformed rightists often mistake Hitler for a socialist from the word 'socialist' in National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP, and many of the right's rhetorical strategies are reminiscent of the virtuoso hater himself. In 1934 Hitler once directed this dangerous epithet at the "red terror" and Jews: "Beasts, criminals, conspirators, traitors, well-poisoners."

IF BUSH REALLY CARED ABOUT HEALTH CARE . . .

The last job I had was with a company owned by a guy in Monterrey, Mexico. They didn't have any paid sick leave, which I thought was fairly astounding in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It appears that is not unusual now, especially for people in low paid occupations. If Republicans really cared about keeping the population healthy, they might want to consider making paid sick leave mandatory for employers. When people have to go to work or not get paid they tend to go in sick and spread whatever ails them around to other people. Ellen Goodman discusses the issue in this article at www.workingforchange.com:

Today, 47 percent of the private employees in this country get no paid sick leave. That includes 76 percent of low-wage workers. And to continue the waiter's theme song, it also includes 84 percent of the people who are alone with your dinner.

In addition, 86 million workers don't have a single paid sick day that can be used to care for their kids or their parents. Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women & Families puts it this way: "A lot of women are one sick child away from losing their job."

FEBRUARY 4, 2005

SOME THINGS BUSH DIDN'T SAY IN THE SOTU

You almost wish that when George W. Bush gives a speech that a fact checker could be running concurrently with his speech. It could be something scrolling underneath the picture of Mr. Bush giving the facts in contrast to the lies emanating from his mouth. In the State of Union address, the fact checker might have filled the entire screen. David Corn writes about the things Bush didn't say in the State of the Union in this article at www.commondreams.org:

There was, of course, no mention of Iraq's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction. No recognition that America's standing in the world has fallen to an all-time low. No acknowledgment that the administration had failed to plan adequately for the post-invasion period. Bush has not a bashful bone. For him, the Iraqi election was a signal (from God?): full steam ahead. He did not shy away from the freedom-is-our-mission rhetoric of his inaugural speech, which was widely criticized for being cynically unrealistic. Bush declared, "America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." And he named names, calling upon Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two autocracies long supported by Washington, to move toward democracy. Certainly, he--or Condoleezza Rice--might be on the phone tomorrow to Cairo and Riyadh, explaining that Bush does not expect immediate action. Nevertheless, such words probably will provide encouragement to democracy activists in those countries and in others. These people, though, should keep in mind that Bush's father--who clearly is no role model for his son--egged on the Shiites in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War and then did not come to their rescue when they were slaughtered.

DEREGULATED ENERGY WAS SUCH A GOOD IDEA, WASN'T IT?

"Kenny Boy" Lay of Enron fame was a big benefactor and good friend of George W. Bush. Our esteemed Governor Groper has also had ties to Enron, and would still like to push for energy deregulation despite the disaster that struck California a few years ago. Republicans were largely responsible for pushing energy deregulation in California. It's interesting that new revelations about Enron reveal the company was scamming the energy market years before the energy crisis hit California. This story by Gene Johnson is at www.sfgate.com:

Disgraced energy giant Enron Corp. was running scams to drive up the cost of power years before the 2000-01 West Coast energy crisis, according to audio transcripts and documents unveiled Thursday by a public utility north of Seattle.

By November 1997, Enron apparently knew of loopholes in California's ill-advised deregulation plan, and by May 1998 -- a month after the plan took effect -- Enron was already falsifying transmission schedules to inflate prices, Snohomish County Public Utility District officials said Thursday as they unveiled new evidence at a news conference.

REMINDERS OF NIXON ONCE AGAIN

When Richard M. Nixon won a second term as president in 1972 he and administration decided they would wield a heavy stick in dealing with political opponents. Among the things Nixon did was compile an "enemies list" of journalists and other critics of the administration. We learn now that George W. Bush banned some people from an event in Fargo, North Dakota, because they were opponents of Mr. Bush. Bush has stated on a few occasions that he is president "of all the people," although we know that certainly isn't true. This is just more glaring evidence of the repressive, authoritarian character of this administration. This article appears at www.democracyradio.org:

In response to reports out of Fargo, North Dakota that dozens of citizens - including the producer of Democracy Radio’s The Ed Schultz Show and an elected city commissioner - had been banned from attending President Bush’s speech today, I released the following statement:

News of the Bush blacklist of dozens of citizens from a Fargo, North Dakota speech is as frightening as it has become routine for this Administration. To blacklist a local citizen because he produces a radio program at odds with the political agenda of the White House is dangerous for Democracy.

This Administration cannot promote freedom and liberty abroad while banning our most fundamental freedoms here at home. The pattern of stifling those voices that do not represent conservative orthodoxy has chilling implications for our Democracy.

BUSH'S SS SCAM IS A REALLY BAD IDEA

We can't emphasize enough how awful Bush's plan to "privatize" Social Security really is. He wants to take the most successful government program ever, one that lifted the majority of seniors out of poverty, and destroy it in the name of saving it. He is creating a crisis that doesn't exist. He wants to borrow an initial $2 trillion, plunging the government even deeper into debt. The real kicker is that unless you make more than 3% on your "investments" you don't gain a thing from Bush's plan. What you do is make stockbrokers rich from commissions and fees they can rake in. Paul Krugman explains in his column at www.nytimes.com:

But the official at the briefing made it clear that his boss was fibbing: if you invested your private account in government bonds, you would face benefit cuts equal in value to your investment, so you would be no better off than under the current system.

The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.

BOND MANAGER CRITICIZES BUSH SS SCAM

The manager of the world's largest bond fund says that George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security has more to do with giving Bush a "legacy" than resolving any crisis in the system. This story is at money.cnn.com:

Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund, is criticizing President Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security.

Gross, managing director at Pimco, called the argument about the solvency of Social Security "silly" and said it was an example of the president not focusing on more important issues, such as the budget deficit.

The president's argument for individual Social Security accounts is meant "to promote an agenda that has little to do with seniors and more to do with Bush, his ownership society, and ultimately his domestic legacy alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan and FDR," Gross wrote in comments posted on Pimco's Web site.

FEBRUARY 3, 2005

WHAT A SURPRISE--IRAQ HAD NO CHEMICAL WEAPONS

The CIA has released a new report showing that Iraq didn't have chemical weapons since 1991. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons were among the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed. Why was Iraq devastated by this war? Why are so many people dead or maimed for life? This story by Greg Miller is at www.latimes.com:

In what may be a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, intelligence officials familiar with the document said.

The report marks the first time the CIA has officially disavowed its prewar judgments and is one in a series of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of an effort to correct its record on Iraq's alleged weapons programs, officials said.

The CIA's decision to distribute the report - titled "Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s" - in classified channels underscores the awkwardness the agency faces as it continues to reconcile its prewar reporting with postwar realities in Iraq. Before the war, the CIA asserted that Iraq had stockpiled biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

MEDICAL BILLS SEND COUNTLESS PEOPLE INTO BANKRUPTCY

I remember a right-wing yahoo I call Mr Sarcasm once wrote a letter to the editor of The Fresno Bee saying that Bill Clinton's national health insurance plan was "socialized medicine." It wasn't, of course. It would have been a start toward a more responsible health care system in the United States. A new study says that half of people who go into bankruptcy are forced to do so because of catastrophic medical bills. It's unforgivable in a country as rich as this one that people have to face choices like this. Health care should be available and affordable for everyone. This story by Maggie Fox is at www.commondreams.org:

Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance, researchers said on Wednesday.

The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted.

"Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who led the study.

"Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection."

THE WISH FOR KINGS

Right-wingers hate equality. That's one of the reasons when you mention democracy in the United States they'll pipe up, "We're a republic, not a democracy." Democracy implies we're all equal somehow and that's not the way right-wingers want to believe. We can see full blown right-wing hatred of equality by the Bush administration. The administration is doing everything it can to reduce most of us to peasants. Bush's State of the Union was a call to arms to rush headlong into feudalism. Maureen Dowd has some thoughts at www.nytimes.com:

They wanted to yank us back in a time machine to a place before Vietnam was lost, free love was found, Roe v. Wade was enacted; they could roll back science to smother stem cells' promise. (Since it was reported last week that all human embryonic lines approved for federally financed research are tainted with a foreign molecule from mice, the administration can't even feign an interest in scientific progress. Who'd a-thunk that science's great hope would turn out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger?)

HAPPY ABOUT THE IRAQI ELECTION? MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T BE

Most Americans are tragically ignorant about the rest of the world. That includes Americans in policy making positions. The Bush administration and the journalistic establishment that acts as a cheering section is either willfully ignorant, or just uninformed about the consequences of Bush's incursion into Iraq. We're told we're supposed to celebrate "democracy" in Iraq, but Robert Parry talks about some consequences from this election that are ominous. The article is at www.consortiumnews.com:

But there is a dark potential to those pleasing images of Iraqis voting in the face of violence. Rather than pointing toward an exit for the United States from Iraq, the election may be just another mirage leading U.S. troops deeper into Iraq’s long and bloody history of sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Indeed, if the Sunni-based insurgency doesn’t give up in the months ahead, American soldiers could find themselves enmeshed in a long and brutal civil war helping the Shiite majority crush the resistance of the Sunni minority. The Sunnis, who have long dominated Iraq, find themselves in a tight corner and may see little choice but to fight on.

FEBRUARY 2, 2005

DEMOCRACY ISN'T ALWAYS CONVENIENT

Hearing conservatives talk about "democracy" is like turning a kaleidoscope. The patterns are always shifting into something else. First, the war against Iraq was because of weapons of mass destruction. Then it was about freeing the Iraqi people from that awful Saddam Hussein. Then it was about giving the Iraqis democracy. But when it's not convenient, the Bush gang isn't as gung-ho about democracy. Take Egypt, for example. This article by Edward M. Gomez is at www.sfgate.com:

Among Washington's best pals in the Arab or Muslim worlds, which, together, routinely receive billions of dollars in U.S. aid: the governments of Egypt (a dictatorship), Jordan (an absolute monarchy) and Pakistan (a military dictatorship led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in 1999). Now, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 76, has hinted that "he could stand for a fifth [six-year] term." He also has "rejected opposition demands to open the balloting to other candidates." Mubarak, one of the Middle East's most powerful politicians, "has been running unopposed in public plebiscites since replacing Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by Islamic militants during a 1981 military parade." (Associated Press/Globe and Mail).

WERE THE IRAQI ELECTIONS TAINTED?

If voting was the only way you could continue to get food, do you think you would vote? That was evidently the choice some Iraqis faced in this recent "election." The election was largely a farce anyway. Voters didn't know for whom they were voting for one thing. Candidates had to be largely anonymous because of the insurgency. This article by Dahr Jamail is linked at www.makethemaccountable.com:

Voting in Baghdad was linked with receipt of food rations, several voters said after the Sunday poll.

Many Iraqis said Monday that their names were marked on a list provided by the government agency that provides monthly food rations before they were allowed to vote.

”I went to the voting centre and gave my name and district where I lived to a man,” said Wassif Hamsa, a 32-year-old journalist who lives in the predominantly Shia area Janila in Baghdad. ”This man then sent me to the person who distributed my monthly food ration.”

NUTCASE BLAMES EVOLUTION FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS

Boy, is this a stretch. We have an evangelical named D. James Kennedy who claims that evolution has killed 135 million people in peacetime. The last time I checked evolution was a scientific theory, subject to proof or disproof, and doesn't advocate the killing of anyone. Evolution merely explains how things have occurred on our little blue planet. But for the story of the surreal view of Mr. Kennedy check out the story at www.itaffectsyou.org:

It is Kennedy's opinion that Christians who embrace evolution are compromising their faith. He describes evolution as the most destructive idea ever to enter the mind of man, and a concept that has killed more people than all religions that ever existed.

"Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime," he said. "There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on it conscience." And it is amazing, he added, that evolution - despite its widespread acceptance - has no scientific basis. "There are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it."

IRAQI ELECTIONS DON'T COMPENSATE FOR ALL THE LIES

A right-wing writer to The Fresno Bee made that hoary old observation that "freedom has its price" in referring to all the innocent civilians killed in Iraq by George W. Bush's war. How easy to say when it's not you doing the fighting or the killing or the dying. How easy to say when it's not your home being blown up, or your family being laid waste. How blind of you not to notice that all the stated reasons for launching this war had nothing to do with bringing freedom or democracy to Iraq. Mark Morford talks about the Iraqi election in this column at www.sfgate.com:

But let us not forget the biggest disclaimer of all: Not a single one of BushCo's alleged reasons for dragging our fractured and bankrupt nation into one of the most brutal wars since Vietnam has actually proved valid or justifiable. The disgusting array of WMD/nuclear/biotoxin lies and deceptions are not suddenly erased because we set up some polling places.

IRAQI RECONSTRUCTION NOT PROGRESSING

In all the hubbub about the Iraqi election let's not forget that the basic infrastructure in Iraq is still largely in ruins. The lives of most people in Iraq are worse than before the war began. Baghdad was recently without water for an entire week. Arianna Huffington writes about the election and the stark reality that still lives on in Iraq in this commentary at www.latimes.com:

Let's not forget the woeful lack of progress in the reconstruction of Iraq. The people still lack such basics as gasoline and kerosene. The country is producing less electricity than before the war. There are food shortages, and the number of Iraqi children suffering from malnutrition has nearly doubled. According to UNICEF, nearly one child in 10 is suffering the effects of chronic diarrhea caused by unsafe water - a situation responsible for 70% of children's deaths in Iraq.

FEBRUARY 1, 2005

BUSH SS PLAN IS A SCAM

When dealing with free market economics, I have used the analogy of an amateur poker player playing against a professional, with the professional having four aces up his sleeve. You don't win. That's pretty much the tale of George W. Bush's plan to "privatize" Social Security. We'll hear about the grand and glorious returns you can get from investing in the stock market, as opposed to the safe, but modest returns you get from Social Security. The problem is that for Bush's plan to work the economy would have to perform in a way it has never performed in history. Paul Krugman writes about it at www.nytimes.com:

Schemes for Social Security privatization, like the one described in the 2004 Economic Report of the President, invariably assume that investing in stocks will yield a high annual rate of return, 6.5 or 7 percent after inflation, for at least the next 75 years. Without that assumption, these schemes can't deliver on their promises. Yet a rate of return that high is mathematically impossible unless the economy grows much faster than anyone is now expecting.

BUSH'S BUDGET REVEALS HIS REAL PRIORITIES

He can mouth off about "compassionate conservatism" all he wants, but George W. Bush wouldn't know compassion if it smacked him in his smirking chimp face. Since he assumed power, he has been busily reordering the federal government to benefit the very wealthy and corporations and making life more insecure and desperate for most Americans, particularly the poor. His new budget is an atrocity. William Raspberry talks about it in his column at www.washingtonpost.com:

Before you dismiss it as partisan hyperbole, hear Edelman's specifics: The basic structure of Social Security is under attack (on the grounds that the program is in crisis, though most respected economists say it isn't). Pell Grants for college tuition are on the cutting block. So are Section 8 housing vouchers (which started under Richard Nixon) and food stamps. Programs that have offered some protection for people in the lower third of the economy are under threat of evisceration.

And the rationale for the attack is a budgetary crisis created by the gift of $1.8 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH DON'T GENERATE JOBS

You hear it over and over from conservatives. Give tax cuts to those poor put-upon rich folks and they'll do really nice things with the extra money like creating lots of new jobs. Never mind that rich folks are already doing pretty well, thank you, and never mind that the tax cuts balloon the federal deficit. The Bush administration made grandiose claims for their tax cuts and, not surprisingly, their claims have been wrong. This article is an examination of job growth statistics since the last round of tax cuts. The article is at www.jobwatch.com:

With the newly released payroll employment data for December 2004 it is now possible to assess whether the administration's tax cut strategy produced the employment growth that was projected (see table and figure below). The final verdict is grim. Job growth over the last 18 months has fallen short by 1,703,000—more than one-third less than the number of jobs the administration said would be created without the tax cuts. Given that the economy failed to produce the number of jobs expected with no policy change, it seems hard to argue that the tax cuts were a successful strategy in adding any jobs—the promised 1.4 million additional jobs never materialized. The announced revisions (up 236,000 in March 2004) to the payroll employment series (see Data Note below) do not materially change this assessment.

TOWARD A NEW FEUDALISM

Since the ascension of Ronald Reagan, there is been a steady movement to reduce corporate taxes and make the rest of us pick up the tab. As Thom Hartmann points out in this article, corporations use an array of public services, and they should pay taxes to support those services the way the rest of us do. But in right-wing land corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes or have any of those nasty regulations that keep them from poisoning the air or the water or marketing shoddy products that kill people. This article is at www.commondreams.org:

A cornerstone of the conservative movement to consolidate power in the hands of a wealthy corporate elite, the campaign to end corporate income taxes altogether - and leave the rest of us to pick up the entire tab for corporate use of our institutions and corporation despoliation of our commons - first picked up steam when Reagan came to power in 1980.

As Cato Institute adjunct scholar Richard W. Rahn noted in Rev. Moon's Washington Times, "The idea and practice of the corporate income tax has been dying slowly for the last two decades."