By: Mark Hulbert  

Pencils ready? Here's a pop quiz on how the stock market is affected by the political party that is in power.

	True or false: The stock market performs better when the President is a Republican.
	False. Since 1901, the Dow Jones Industrial Average's average annual gain, after inflation, has been nearly twice as high when a Democrat has occupied the White House.
	True or false: During Republican Presidencies, the stock market has performed better when Congress also has been controlled by Republicans.
	False again. On average during the 28 years since 1901 in which a Republican has been President and Democrats have controlled Congress, the DJIA has produced a 2.2% real return (before dividends). On average during the 25.8 years in which the Republican party has controlled both branches of government, in contrast, the Dow has produced an inflation-adjusted return of just 1.2%.

If you are like most investors, you failed both questions. The prevailing wisdom going into last Tuesday's election was that investors prefer a Republican Presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress. And as is so often the case with the conventional wisdom, it was wrong.

By: Patrick Ennis  

Polls showed in 2000 that George W. Bush was the man Americans would most like to have a beer with, never mind that we are repeatedly told that Bush doesn't drink beer (a revelation which would get you dirty looks and unkind comments in rural Tennessee or Arkansas). He was and is commonly described as "folksy", and "plain spoken". He speaks with a discernible Texas twang, wears cowboy boots, and sometimes even a ten-gallon hat, as he did at last week's tree lighting ceremony at the White House. He vacations at his ranch in rural Crawford, Texas.

Thus, he achieves the populist appeal that his Democratic rival had sought with his tales of busting his hump on the family farm. Why did Texas Rancher George ring so much more truthfully than Farmboy Al? After all, there is nary a sole in the electorate, generally uninformed as it is, that doesn't know that Texas Rancher George, he with whom they'd like to have a beer and talk about baseball, comes from a wealthy family originating in New England, via Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School (but not Vietnam).

Ironically, the same people who promoted this down-to-earth persona also managed to label Gore as an elitist, even though he wasn't the one who claimed not to drink beer. Does anyone seriously believe that the boys at Andover really say things like "That dog won't hunt", or that Miller Lite was ever a beverage of choice at Kennebunkport? Whether or not Al Gore literally shoveled manure as a lad, it seems the President still figuratively does.

"There is nothing good natured or hyperbolic about saying America would have been better off with a racist segregationist President. Strom Thurmond disavowed those views. Friday night, Trent Lott embraced them. That was a racist thing for Senator Lott to say. He's unfit to lead the party of Lincoln."

- Paul Begala

Editorial from:  

The Bush administration's anti-environmental agenda has been gathering steam since the November elections. First it weakened rules governing industrial air pollution. Then it proposed a major revision in the rules governing management of the national forests. The revision could undermine protections for fish and wildlife.

The administration provided the same benign rationale for the forest rules as it did for the air pollution rules. Existing regulations, it said, had become too prescriptive, too costly and too cumbersome. But in the name of regulatory efficiency, the administration would also eliminate mandatory environmental reviews. The only obvious beneficiary would be the timber interests and others who use the forests for commercial purposes.

From:  

We're back! If you missed us last week because we were stuffing our faces with turkey, don't worry - we've included some stories from the past two weeks, so all of our idiots are covered. Top of the chart this week is none other than Suzanne Terrell, who got her ass handed to her by Senator Mary Landrieu. Next is John LeBoutillier, who has such a passionate hatred for Bill Clinton that we actually feel a bit sorry for him. And oozing into third place is the Wall Street Journal, who recently coined a new phrase for "the poor". Elsewhere we find Trent Lott (4), Paul O'Neill and Larry Lindsay (5), George W. Bush (6) and Katherine Harris (8). And bringing up the rear we've got Rush Limbaugh (10). Enjoy.

Editorial from:  

President Bush's Secretary of Commerce, Donald Evans, told more than 1,000 scientists, economists, and other experts attending a conference on global warming last week that their task was to "jump-start" President Bush's new five-year program of research into the causes of global warming and possible responses. The Secretary is just a bit behind the times. There is already an enormous body of research on the subject, perhaps 20 years' worth, nearly all of it pointing to the need to adopt exactly the kind of remedial steps that the Bush administration has so far refused to take. What needs jump-starting is not research but policy.

Obviously we could all benefit from research. Sophisticated modeling can tell us more about global climate change and instruct us in how best to adapt. But the world does not need another excuse from Mr. Bush to delay the political steps necessary to begin slowing emissions right away.

By: Bruce S. Ticker  

The circumstances surrounding the tragedy were suspicious from the get-go. It occurred during the watch of a President who demonstrated day after day that he could not be trusted and repeatedly demonstrated contempt for public opinion.

The episode provided him with an excuse for the war that many critics fully expected Bush to initiate. And there are many questions that have yet to be answered.

Mainly, could the White House have prevented these attacks? Did Bush have advance warning yet let it occur so he would have his reason to engage in a war?

By: Bev Conover  

If any of us are to have a future worth having, the world's leaders, the members of Congress, the U.S. corporate media, and people of all political persuasions who value freedom and democracy had better start seeing George W. Bush for what he is: a sociopath and a passive serial killer.

Psychiatrists tell us that all serial killers lack the emotions that make us human; that they have to learn to emulate those emotions in order to get by in society. Hence, a charming, well educated fellow like Ted Bundy who is known to have murdered 15 women and may have killed 36 before he was caught.

If we believe the psychiatrists, a sign of a future serial killer is a child who delights in torturing and killing animals. George W., as a child, did exactly that. In a May 21, 2000, New York Times' puff piece about the values Bush gained growing up in Midland, Texas, Nicholas D. Kristoff quoted Bush's childhood friend Terry Throckmorton: "'We were terrible to animals', recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. 'Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them', Mr. Throckmorton said. 'Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'"

By: Charles Sullivan  

Under the American oligarchy, the poor serve as little more than canon fodder for the rich. It is disproportionately the poor who are sent to fight and die on foreign soils, not the rich. It is the poor who are exposed to biological agents, radioactive munitions, and chemical warfare, not the rich. The maniacal plans for the U.S. government's war on democracy, its wanton plunder of other sovereign nation's resources, its deliberate murder of millions of innocent civilians around the world, is solely for the benefit of multi-national corporations. The poor suffer and die; the rich reap the reward. It is mostly the poor who are filling our jails and prisons to capacity and beyond. The truth is clear: We are living under an oppressive form of government in the U.S. that promotes class warfare; a system that abuses the poor to benefit the rich. It is a form of slavery in which the multitudes serve the corporate elite without really knowing it. It is the story of Robin Hood gone wrong; wherein the rich rob the poor and continually bedevil them.

The more the corporate stooges who occupy the White House and most of Congress stir up jingoistic fervor - what most Americans mistake for patriotism - the more bleak the outlook for the poor pawns who are waving the flags. For they are the unwitting souls who will be sacrificed at the alter of corporate avarice. It is their blood that will be shed for the acquisition of land and oil - for the sole benefit of the rich...

By: Mary McGrory  

With Kissinger, we have again the Grand Canyon-size discrepancy between man and job. Kissinger is a brilliant diplomat devoted to asserting his country's power - and his own.

He helped write some of the darkest chapters in American history: The prolonging of the Vietnam War included the shameless exploitation of U.S. POW's as the alibi for covering a retreat that had been inevitable for four years. The subversion of Chile's elected Socialist government led to more rage, tears, and deaths that are not yet counted. In Central America, of course, Kissinger was on the wrong side.

And from George W. Bush's point of view, he's ideal.

It's not just that Kissinger the power-lover guarantees exoneration for the powerful. He shares Bush's view that 9/11 was all Bill Clinton's fault...

By: Brian Knowlton  

The global image of the United States has suffered a dramatic bruising in the past two years, most seriously in Muslim countries but also to a surprising extent among many traditional allies, a major new opinion survey has found. The souring attitudes toward the United States were matched by broad discontent with world economic and social conditions, the survey found.

"Since 2000, favorability ratings for the United States have fallen in 19 of the 27 countries where trend benchmarks are available", said a report from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center which, in association with the International Herald Tribune, surveyed 38,000 people in 44 countries in late summer and early fall.

GOP's Tammany Hall: Bush Administration Brings Back Patronage

Editorial from:  

The loyalty oath is back, dressed as a dollar sign. The Bush administration has approved giving cash bonuses of up to $25,000 each to the almost 2,000 political appointees in the federal work force. Many of the 1.7 million civil servants on the federal payroll receive bonuses, but bonuses to political appointees were banned during the Clinton administration because of the way they were used as favors in the first Bush administration.

Restoring the practice opens the door to ethical and financial abuses, of course. Such bonuses are entirely subjective, depending on the whims of department secretaries or even the White House as opposed to the kind of job-performance criteria that apply to regular civil service jobs. But the practice will also create a rift between political appointees and civil servants, because the pool of money available for bonuses is unchanged. Employees will compete for the bonuses, which can then be used as tests of loyalty. Those who toe the party line get them. Those who don't, won't. Call it loyalty for cash.

"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

- Thomas Jefferson

By: Christopher Marquis  

The Bush administration will repeal a Clinton-era rule that allows states to use unemployment insurance money to help people who take a leave from work to have babies or adopt children, officials said today.

The executive action will effectively shut down legislative efforts in as many as 16 states to make unemployment compensation money available to working parents who have taken time off to care for a newborn or adopted child.

The move prompted an outcry among family rights advocates and women's groups, but was welcomed by business groups that had opposed the rule since President Bill Clinton approved it in June 2000.

By: Mike Hersh  

I am not talking about making political hay about this. This is about our lives and safety. That's nonpartisan, at least to any decent human being. These are the most basic issues. No Patriot Act or Homeland Security Department can provide us with any national security unless we know the answers.

To be safe, we need to know what went wrong and why. It's very upsetting and troubling that certain politicians don't want us - or anyone else to know the truth. In intelligence jargon, those at the top inform others on a "need to know" basis. We cannot afford and should not let our elected officials hide the truth from us. We need to know.

By: Lynn Landes  

Just when you thought you couldn't get any more cynical. Guess which state did not have federal observers assigned to it by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for the 2002 mid-term election?

If you guessed Florida, congratulations, you're living in the real world... depressing, but real.

No state could match the staggering number of voting rights complaints due to voting machines and other shenanigans as Florida did in the 2000 presidential election. Yet the Bush administration's DOJ, under Attorney General John Ashcroft, did not see fit to send federal observers to Florida to monitor the voting process in 2002, although observers were sent to several other states. This is surprising news to many people and organizations who were told by DOJ officials that "Justice" would be down there in force.

By: John Chuckman  

One by one, in the dead of night, they push ghastly, rotting fingers through dank earth in an effort to grasp something solid and pull themselves up from moldering graves, figures of long-dead flesh, blank-eyed, capable of no feeling save an unnatural hunger that animates and drives them shakily forward. They are the gruesome remains of an earlier time, mysteriously returned to life, once more to exercise their malevolent influence on the planet. They are the Bush appointments - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Reich, and Poindexter.

And now we have the decayed bulk of Henry Kissinger again lurching into Washington. Kissinger has been reanimated and assigned to study the causes of what he himself helped create, terrorism.

By: Andre Achong  

It all boils down to one thing: arrogance. It is arrogant for Bush to think he can duck a legitimate inquiry into 9-11 by selecting as controversial a figure as Kissinger to lead it. It is equally arrogant of Mr. Kissinger to accept, knowing he is a wanted man outside of the United States for his heavy-handed and often homicidal "hit first and hit hard" foreign policy.

Will anyone in a position of power step up to the plate and say this whole 9-11 thing is an enormous farce being perpetrated on the American people? Will people stop mocking Bush for his malapropisms long enough to see how dangerous his Machiavelli act is becoming?

A disturbing pattern is emerging from this White House. Will anyone figure it out before it is too late?

By: Norm Walker  

Evil is about attitude. Hate is evil. Republicans hate Democrats. They must because they are always calling them names. They insult, degrade, and lie about Democrats. This pernicious behavior is evil.

A lot of these depraved people go to church on Sunday and many on Wednesday evening, and they pray to God for forgiveness. And then, again and again, they say bad things about people that help the poor and afflicted because it is the government people that are doing the aiding. This ill will toward the unfortunate is a policy of Republicans. It is a public display of the evil they practice daily.

These evil people are intolerant toward folks that have different views. They condemn to eternal hell those that do not believe as they do. Eternity is a long time to suffer for a mere difference of opinion. In general it's Republican policy to support harsh penalty's for minor infraction of societal rules. This is an evil attitude.

By: Bob Volpitto  

Historians characterize Franklin D. Roosevelt's first eight years of his presidency as divided into three parts: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. Contemporary historians will divide George W. Bush's first two years in the Oval Office also into three parts: Confusion, Corruption, and Chaos.

That enormously bloated $400,000,000,000-plus annual war budget coupled with tax relief for the affluent 1% of taxpayers added to the demise of the Federal Estate Tax combined with free reins given to corporations and the military will sink this country's economy beyond all hope of recovery. The fiscal policies of the Bush Administration, aided by an all too eager to please GOP controlled House and Senate, will lead us further away from national solvency until we become the mirror image of Spain's Philip II.

Further calamities are seen in Bush's obvious attempts to wipe out the environment, to circumvent corporate regulations, eventually to destroy the existence of the middle class and promote a militarily enforced government run by an oligarchy that counts among its core adherents fanatical theocrats.

"If entertainment becomes so much a part of politics, and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics, and who are then so energized to go out and hurt somebody, that troubles me about where politics in America is going,"

- Sen. Tom Daschle

By: Stephen Gillers  

The Justice Department asked a federal judge this week to seal documents that might otherwise aid parents in lawsuits against the maker of a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal, which the parents claim caused their children's autism. The department has the right to make the request, but if the court grants it, parents could be prevented from getting evidence that might prove their claims. The court should refuse.

Courts occupy a borderland between the private and the public. In resolving disputes, they gain control of information that litigants wish to keep private. Some of this information deserves privacy, like trade secrets or details of a divorce. But information that alerts the public to danger or that might help prove responsibility for injuries should be publicly available once it is filed in court.

"Bush is not an imbecile. He's not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he's incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he's a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."

- Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon

By: William M. Arkin  

What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been separated by a firewall of principle.

The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications, and other "information systems" an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.

The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it. This information is supposed to be true.

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