By: Daniel Patrick Welch  

The sad and graphic fact is that, as ordinary Americans, our hands are already covered in blood, and getting bloodier by the minute. This is not a difficult point to argue; nor are its component facts inaccessible to any American who cares to seek out the truth from sources beyond the nightly TV news. The time is right to raise the bar and oppose with greater stridency.

We are rapidly becoming an international pariah, and our leaders aren't listening. Why would they? Americans who care are waking up to the fact that these are just not a particularly sane group of people. They can hardly be called 'conservatives', nor even radicals for that matter. They are fundamentalist loons, an American Taliban who has seized control of government and policy making apparatus-for whom fighting a holy war against condom use is actually a serious part of government policy. It is just not normal to spend thousands of dollars to cover up the statue of Lady Justice.

I guess John Ashcroft thought Justice needed to be more modest - and if that's not a scary metaphor, I don't know what is.

By: Norm Walker  

I cannot remember a day in my lifetime that I held a President in such low regard as I do George W. Bush. I know, I know, I should respect the Office if not the man. When I see him with that smirk on his face unilaterally declaring war on the world there is no way I can think of the Office separately. He is the Office. Even though Richard Nixon was a low life and a crook he did posses a degree of intelligence and spoke in a knowledgeable manner.

The Twig is simply a lackey for the Right Wing. He is on a puppet string and dances the dance he is told to dance. He has improved when he is on script but, when they let him out on his own he reveals that he is close to being a moron. Everytime I see him on television I shake my head in disbelief that he is the President of the United States.

"A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy."

- Benjamin Disraeli

Stolen from:  

William J. Clinton	George W. Bush
Humblest beginnings. Grew up in poor, single parent home.	Born into wealth, power, and privilege, though runt of litter.
Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale scholar. Admitted as a result of own effort and ability.	Admitted to Yale and Harvard as a result of Affirmative Action for offspring of wealthy white people.
Fought for allowing institutions to level the playing field for minorities who were less privileged than he was as a poor, white boy from a single parent home.	Fighting to prevent institutions from leveling the playing field between underprivileged minorities and minorities like him in the top 1% wealth bracket.
Despite difficult background, famously compassionate and generous, even toward opponents.	Despite privileged background, famously arrogant, vindictive, and small.
Consummate Winner:	Consummate Loser:
Reached most powerful office in the world on as a result of own hard work and election by the American people.	Reached most powerful office in the world as a result of enlisting Poppy's friends in successful fight to crush American democracy.
Competence and commitment enabled survival throughout eight year assault by hostile, failed national media and power-abusing Republican/government prosecutors.	Three years of incessant media propaganda in his favor, combined with "wartime", failing to prop him up. Current approval rating now stands at 15 points lower than most recently elected President's on day after "impeachment".

By: Andrew Sarchus  

Having convinced gullible Americans that President Bush gained both gravitas and legitimacy following the terrorist attacks in September 2001, the right-wing spin machine is starting to portray him as the "anointed one" as well. David Frum's propaganda piece: The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush is a first step towards canonization of an intellectually-deficient, dishonest, mean-spirited man elevated to high national office by five Supreme Court Justices who shredded constitutional principles in doing so.

Bush cited Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher in the 2000 presidential campaign - in answer to a question that may well have been planted by the Bush team. Bush's invoking the name of Christ was ingenious, because the answer assured a powerful voter turnout of right-wing Christian fundamentalists that make up so much of the Republican Party's base. That candidate Bush was unable at the time to articulate a single philosophical idea advanced by Jesus, other than saying: "He changed my heart", was not discussed further in the campaign.

By: Aaron Crowell  

When Congress opened for business last week, one thing was instantly clear: It's Tom DeLay's House first and Hastert's second. Recently elevated to majority leader, the former exterminator from Sugarland, Texas, has installed his deputies in almost every position of power and is now free to pursue his agenda at full throttle.

On day one of the DeLay era, he did just that when he introduced new rules for the House which received unanimous Republican support. At first glance they're arcane but they speak volumes about how DeLay will practice his version of American democracy...

By: Michael Kinsley  

It's odd. Stock dividends play a much smaller role in the economy than they used to. Ending the alleged "double tax" is a hardy perennial of conservatives, but it was on no one's urgent wish list except that of Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, for whom it's been a hobbyhorse for years. Now a chorus of Republican politicians and other conservative voices declare daily that taxing a stock dividend check just like a teacher's salary check is a monstrous injustice and a huge peril to our prosperity. They're saying it because Bush is saying it - but why is he saying it?

Bush, in a funny way, seems to be a man of ideas. He doesn't have a lot of them himself, but hand him one and he'll run with it, undeterred by opposition, or by subsequent evidence and logic. He has the unreflective person's immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated. Tell him he can't be for tax simplification and offer a Rube Goldberg contraption like this at the same time and he'll say: "Oh, yeah - just watch me."

Editorial from:  

As the 30^th anniversary of the Roe decision approaches, women's right to safe, legal abortions is in dire peril.

President Bush's assault on reproductive rights is part of a larger ongoing cultural battle. If abortion were the only target, the administration would not be attempting to block women's access to contraceptives, which drive down the number of abortions. His administration would not be declaring war on any sex education that discusses ways, beyond abstinence, to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Scientifically accurate information about contraceptives and abortion would not have begun disappearing from federal government websites.

A big thrust of Mr. Bush's aggressive anti-choice crusade has been to undermine the legal foundation of the Roe decision by elevating the status of a fetus, or even a fertilized egg, to that of a person, with rights equal to, or perhaps even exceeding, those of the woman...

By: Ralph Martire  

I wonder when we'll get straight talk from the President about the big decisions he's making for our country. For instance, take his public stance on Iraq and try to square it with his stance on North Korea.

Just the other day, when discussing the Iraq situation, the President said he's tired of all the lies and deceit. I assume he means the ones emanating from Baghdad, not the beltway. If he's tired of spin, how does he think the American public feels about being fed a load of hooey to justify a war? And if the President doesn't like the nomenclature of class warfare, then he should stop engaging in it by pushing tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit one class - the wealthiest - while ignoring most working Americans.

By: Hazel Henderson  

Economic and technological globalisation was always a project of global corporations, financiers, and their political allies in mature industrial societies. The blueprint was the "free" market enthusiasms of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism was followed by the "Washington Consensus" policies we still see today.

Even though a welter of evidence is now in - from the 1997 Asian meltdown, Russia's default, and now that of Argentina, the ideologues who believe in this form of globalisation still promote these policies with the familiar cry: TINA (There Is No Alternative). As psychiatrists know, people who cannot conceive of any alternatives to their current behavior are deemed to be suffering from clinical depression. And scientists note that it is illogical to imagine that repeating a similar experiment could lead to dissimilar results.

But we now see an even deeper set of contradictions, all signaling a lack of systems thinking among the ideologues of laissez faire globalisation. In the West, these interdependencies are recognized as "what goes around - comes around". In the East, the same phenomena are known as "Karma".

"The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's good or bad for the country."

- Mickey Kaus, in essence saying: lying to the country to sell your economic plan is OK

"When a Hispanic or a black kid gets a let up, Mr. Bush wants to make a federal case out of it, literally. Of course, Mr. Bush himself is the beneficiary of a very special kind of affirmative action, preferences that help the hard drinking, underachieving near-do-well children of the Eastern moneyed elite. That's affirmative action for you."

- Paul Begala, on CNN's Crossfire

By: Paul Krugman  

As a drunk is to alcohol, the Bush administration is to budget deficits.

During the 2000 campaign George W. Bush often pledged to maintain fiscal responsibility. Right up to the passage of the 2001 tax cut his people said they could cut taxes, pay for new programs like prescription drug coverage, and still pay off most of the federal government's debt.

As soon as the bill passed, those rosy budget projections fell apart. Then came Sept. 11. "Lucky me, I hit the trifecta", declared Mr. Bush, claiming - falsely - to have said during the campaign that his budget promises didn't apply in the event of recession, war, or national emergency. But until this week officials insisted the deficit was temporary.

Now the budget director, Mitch Daniels, has admitted the obvious: The federal government faces the prospect of large deficits as far as the eye can see. And sure enough, the drunk has turned mean...

By: David Corn  

Fleischer engaged in additional arithmetic acrobatics. At his January 6 briefing, he pushed the tax cuts as a package that would provide 92 million taxpayers with an average tax cut of $1,083 in 2003. This is about as disingenuous as it gets. The CTJ numbers show that most of the bottom 80% ($77,000 and less) receive much less than one thousand bucks. The average gain for taxpayers in the $46,000-to-$77,000 slice (the second quintile) is $657. Obviously, the people below will get less. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, nearly 80% of income tax filers would receive a tax cut below $1083. Almost half of all tax filers would get a tax cut of less than $100. The average tax cut only hits four digits because so much is tossed at the top 20%. That raises the average - but has no real consequence for the under-$75,000 crowd.

When asked whether the White House disputed the notion that most of the benefits from eliminating the dividend tax would end up with better-off taxpayers, Fleischer responded: "When you look at the statistics, more than half the money from dividend taxation goes to seniors." But being a senior is not inconsistent with being wealthy. The Tax Policy Center calculates that 40% of the dividend-exemption benefits that would accrue to the elderly will land in the hands of seniors with incomes exceeding $200,000...

By: Molly Ivins  

Speaking of damned lies and statistics, one of the little games being played in Washington is that the Republicans want to switch to Enron accounting on the economy.

They're leaning on both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation to change the way they make their economic estimates.

According to the R's, "static scoring" - as opposed to your "dynamic scoring" - overestimates the cost of tax cuts by ignoring their role in boosting economic growth. Why, claim the R's, tax cuts pay for themselves!

If that's so, why are all the states going broke? Bring on Arthur Andersen and mark-to-market accounting - that'll perk up the economy.

From:  

U.S. leaders are among the least trusted in the world, a survey identifying growing disquiet in global affairs has revealed.

Only a quarter of 15,000 citizens polled place faith in U.S. chiefs, compared with 42% who trusted U.N. leaders.

Heads of charities and other non-governmental organisations (NGO's) were the most trusted.

And just one-in-five Argentines, and one-in-seven Germans and Italians, believes the world is becoming a better place.

By: James Toedtman  

The Bush administration has concluded that it won't be able to balance the federal budget any time in the next decade.

One week after President George W. Bush announced his proposal to cut taxes by $674 billion over the next decade, his budget director, Mitch Daniels, said Wednesday that budget deficits would continue "this year and for the foreseeable future".

The President's 2004 budget proposal, due early next month, forecasts annual deficits throughout the next decade, Daniels said. "We ought not hyperventilate this issue", he stressed. He called the deficits, which will range from $200 billion to $300 billion in each of the next two years, "historically modest" and said they did not include the cost of any military conflict in Iraq.

More delightful proof positive that most SUV's are, in fact, morally repugnant. Go, America!

By: Mark Morford  

...Only a small fraction of SUV's are ever used for actual work, or for their off-road capabilities, or by people who actually need them for inclement weather or for their hauling utility. And SUV's are, as Bradsher points out, intentionally designed to appear more reptilian and threatening, in an attempt to instill a false sense of ruggedness and menace and a get-outta-my-way machismo. And, of course, they succeed. Sort of.

Furthermore, SUV's are marketed, and widely accepted, as more safe, more solid, and protective, which is of course one of the industry's biggest and most contemptible lies.

In truth, SUV's kill a great many more passengers than they save. They crush other cars, and study after study proves they themselves have shockingly high fatal rollover rates and lethal side-impact dangers. And, given the horrible visibility from SUV's, their drivers have a rather unfortunate habit of running over their own children in the driveway. True.

By: punpirate  

There is a considerable disconnect today between the view Americans have of themselves and the view expressed by others around the world. A recent Pew Research poll found widespread world disgruntlement with the U.S. government and its actions in the world. However, according to a number of sources, from Robert Fisk of the U.K.'s Independent newspaper to other writers, such as Naomi Klein of Canada and Mark Hertsgaard in his book, The Eagle's Shadow, the rest of the world isn't at odds with the people of the U.S. - they're upset with the U.S. government. The two are demonstrably different. Most ordinary people around the world don't find ordinary Americans wholly objectionable. Very often, the perception by others of American citizens is that they are occasionally gauche, but still, engaging, open and, almost to a fault, individually generous.

By contrast, people around the world are enormously suspicious of the U.S. government. Easy to understand, because the U.S. government has treated the rest of the world's population with either suspicion, outright contempt, or as a ready market to be exploited. Moreover, that general hostility toward the U.S. has blossomed in the last two years, because the Bush administration has been the sine qua non exemplar of everything that's been wrong with U.S. government policy since WWII.

It is as if Bush and his gang have taken every bad policy imaginable and etched them in stone and made them manifest destiny on the daily news.

"[Bush is a man] with a ferocious will who fumbles in search of reasons to explain why he does what he feels like doing."

- Todd Gitlin, from the January-February, 2003 edition of the American Prospect

From:  

Happy new year! So what's in store for 2003? In a nutshell: the economy, war, war, racism, war, racism, corruption, and of course, war. And what do these things all have in common? Conservative idiocy of course! Kicking off the new year in style is George W. Bush, cracking the chart twice this week for his great new tax giveaway to the rich and his ridiculous assault on civil liberties. Dubya's administration also manages two spots (for war, and, uh, war). Meanwhile the GOP racists are back in full swing, represented this week by Charles Pickering (4) and Bill Back (5). Elsewhere we find Robert Mueller (6), David Laven (8), Thomas Kean (9), and Donald Rumsfeld (10) all doing terrible, terrible jobs. This week we also have a new feature, Idiots At Large, which highlights other conservative transgressions of the previous week.

"One thing in Pickering's long career is quite clear: He left the Democratic Party to join the Republicans in 1964 in protest against the Democrats' support for civil rights."

- Joe Conason

By: David S. Broder  

When George W. Bush was running for President, he did not campaign as an enemy of the federal government. But he claimed that he would limit its growth and power. And he derided his opponent, Al Gore, as an advocate of "big government".

That was then. Now that Bush is running the federal government, its size doesn't bother him so much. Two years after taking office, Bush is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state governments, and injected federal requirements into every public school in America.

With war looming it is no good the American public looking to its newspapers for an independent voice. For the press have now become the President's men.

By: Matthew Engel  

Now there is a new Republican President, elected even more controversially and pursuing a far more divisive agenda. Where are the pointy-head liberals now? The change can be summed up in Woodward's own career. As the Watergate investigator, he not merely protected his sources, he glamorised them. Now, still on the Post staff, he functions as a semi-official court stenographer to the Bush White House. And it is notable that those who talk to him - such as the President himself - always play the heroic role in his stories.

The worldwide turmoil caused by President Bush's policies goes not exactly unreported, but entirely de-emphasised. Guardian writers are inundated by emails from Americans asking plaintively why their own papers never print what is in these columns (in my experience, these go hand-in-hand with an equal number insulting us for the same reason). In the American press, day after day, the White House controls the agenda. The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites, hardly barks, but really loves rolling over and having its tummy tickled.

Indeed, there is hardly any such thing as the liberal press. Since Watergate, the Post has acquired a virtual monopoly over the Washington newspaper market, grown fat and - frankly - journalistically flabby. Its op-ed page is notable for its turgid prose, its conservative slant, and the apologetic tone of its more liberal contributors.

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