By: Doug Goodkin  

We have the War Against Poverty, the War Against Drugs, and the War Against Terrorism. Needless to say, we're losing all of them. I say let's make a war that we can win. My proposal? The War Against Stupidity.

Now you might think this would be the most difficult of all wars to win, but as a schoolteacher, I have hope. I'm fortunate to work in a school where the teachers think - they read books, they write poems, essays, songs, and stories, they discuss current affairs and even timeless questions. They think about how they think and they think about how to help children to think. And the results are impressive. The children do think and they show promise of growing into adults who will continue to think.

Of course, we all think - it's what the brain does. But here I speak of thinking clearly, critically, analytically, expansively, and imaginatively, with intention and purpose. It's the kind of thinking Descartes recommended, fueled by healthy skepticism, doubt, and directed questioning...

By: Brian Balta  

For those who want a war, the inspectors are seen as trying to find something, anything that would justify a war, and only one single find would be totally sufficient to precipitate a conflict. And, if the inspectors don't find anything, then they are viewed as ineffective, and this is then taken as another reason for war.

For those who don't want a war, the inspectors can be a method of keeping Iraq contained. If you've got a couple hundred inspectors going around Iraq for months at a time, they're going to be able to find and dismantle a lot of stuff, just like they did the last time they were there. However, if they don't find anything, it is taken as evidence that Saddam really doesn't have anything left around.

What is remarkable to consider is the fact that the news media, the people who play as much of a role in shaping public opinion as anyone else, have been turned entirely over to following the first point of view, that the inspectors are there to find a reason for war. The second idea, that inspections could bring about peace and save lives, is not even given consideration.

By: Firas Al-Atraqchi  

They've pretty much tried it all: blaming Saddam for anthrax, West Nile Virus, 9-11, and ties to terrorists. They showed us cartoons of roving sci-fi labs in Iraq's hyperspace (because, apparently, no one has seen the mobile labs let alone provide proof they exist), movies of Saddam being kissed on the armpits (sure, that's a good reason to launch a hygienic war), and played audio of two incompetent Iraqis who just sit their saying "yes, yes" over and over again.

"Yes", even U.S. Secretary of State Powell's excitement that the "new" Osama bin Laden audio tape links Saddam to bin Laden fizzled when the latter called Saddam irrelevant and an "infidel of Islam". So what wag the dog scenario are we to see in the next few days and weeks?

One would think the poor dog is fatigued (you would be too if you were told to shake your tail to every song and dance) and has opted for early retirement. Oh wait, where did all the Social Security go?

By: David Callaway  

Call it the great duct tape conspiracy.

After seventeen months of bluster, warmongering and global intimidation by our administration, the old bogeyman himself pops out of the sand one day and suddenly we're all reduced to scurrying for rolls of silvery tape to save our hides.

What happened to our just cause? What happened to our solemn vow to defeat terrorism wherever it exists? More importantly, what's happened to 3M shares since the administration triggered this run on duct tape? And what ties does Dick Cheney have to the duct tape lobby?

Granted, no government wants it to appear that it hasn't taken every precaution to protect its citizens from a terrorist threat. But starting a national panic isn't the way to do it.

By: Geurino Calemine  

I work in Washington, DC - a city that has already suffered two major terrorist attacks in the past year and a half. I watched the Pentagon burn from my bedroom window, and I watched firefighters with gas masks walk past me in my office building during an anthrax scare. I attended multiple memorial services for members of my union who died in the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

And no one should want to go through that ever again.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is guaranteeing it will happen again. And again. And again. By attacking Iraq, a country with no connections to 9/11, Bush will enrage millions and spawn countless new recruits for Al Qaeda.

For these and other reasons, I oppose the war in Iraq. And I thank the patriotic people who brave the cold and make their voices heard in the name of peace and national security. That is about as American as you can get. And many of us who live and work in prime terrorist targets appreciate it more than words can describe.

Renters Receiving U.S. Aid to Pay More Under Budget Proposal

By: Robert Pear  

The Bush administration is proposing to increase rents charged to thousands of poor people who receive federal housing aid.

The increase would be accomplished by changing three little words in federal law. The minimum rent for tenants, which is "not more than $50" a month under current law, would have to be "at least $50" a month under President Bush's plan.

In budget documents sent to Congress last week, the administration said the proposal was "intended to promote work" by people who live in federally subsidized housing.

The proposal is the latest example of what critics describe as onerous requirements placed on poor people by Mr. Bush's budget. Under it, families would face more difficulties in obtaining hardship exemptions from the minimum rent requirement.

By: Marie Cocco  

Bush to Baby Boomers: You're on your own.

The President did not say this, not in so many words. He said it in so many numbers. President George W. Bush's budget is a road map for a pension system with stripped-down security for future retirees.

The biggest wrecking ball? Bush's proposal for two new tax-free savings accounts, geared to families who can save as much as $45,000 a year. Creation of the accounts, in which all investment gains would be forever free of tax, would most likely cause many small and medium-sized business owners to drop pension-savings plans for employees, retirement experts say. If owners could tuck away that much money for themselves without the hassle of regulations and paperwork for employees, why would they take up the workers' burden? The savings plans are seen as such a pension threat that even some House Republicans, usually the President's handmaidens, are balking.

Audits of the working poor increase dramatically, as corporate government starves the IRS.

By: Molly Ivins  

The decline in auditing rich people and corporations actually started 14 years ago. Then, audits of the working poor increased by 48.6% in 2001. Those applying for the EITC have a one in 47 chance of getting audited, while those making more than $100,000 have a one in 208 chance. In 1988, that number was one in 9, according to the Institute for Public Affairs.

The inimitable B. Rapoport of Waco, Texas, puts it like this: "You earn $50,000 a year and you pay $9,000 in income tax. That won't send you to the poorhouse, but it sure as hell makes your budget tighter. Now I make more than a million a year, I pay $400,000 in taxes, that leaves me $600,000 to live on. It doesn't affect my standard of living at all; I'm still rich."

What is it with rich people that 60% of a $100 million is not enough? What kind of sickness is that? You make $100 million on stock options, do you honestly think you earned it? Did you work 10,000 times harder than a guy who gets $10,000 a year for digging ditches? Even a thousand times harder? A hundred? Ten?

By: Susan Cornwell  

Once high-flying Enron Corp. aggressively manipulated the tax code so that it paid no federal income taxes from 1996 through 1999, a report by congressional investigators released on Thursday showed.

The study by the Joint Committee on Taxation said Enron's management viewed its tax department as a profit center and was assisted by outside advisers that included major accounting firms, investment banks,and lawyers.

Now-bankrupt Enron also paid just $325 million in federal income taxes for the period 1990 to 1995 and $63 million for the 2000 to 2001 period.

By: Mary McGrory  

The pope, God bless him, has the right idea. He has sent a cardinal, his personal emissary, to Baghdad.

He is Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, and he is carrying a message to Saddam Hussein. May his eminence make a lengthy stay. And when he returns to Rome, the other 170 members of the College of Cardinals - some of whom might welcome a chance to do good - should follow him, one by one, to Iraq.

These measures may not cancel the bloody enterprise that consumes the White House. They may only delay it, and not for long. But everyone needs a respite from the encircling apprehension and dread. Beginning with the President, all should take a deep breath and reassess. Colin Powell is working overtime to close the loop on Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. In his masterly U.N. speech he made the case against Saddam Hussein, but not the case for war. He needs a rest. The orange alert has worn everybody out.

By: Bob Herbert  

He's at it again.

President Bush traveled to Nashville on Monday to talk, among other things, about compassion, which is a topic this President probably should leave alone. Mr. Bush's idea of compassion tends to send a shiver of dread through those who are disadvantaged.

Everywhere you turn, support programs for the poor, the ill, the disabled, and the elderly are under attack. Children's services are being battered. As Mr. Bush smiles and talks about compassion, funding for programs large and small is being squeezed, cut back, eliminated.

The day after Mr. Bush's upbeat speech to the religious broadcasters, the Times' Robert Pear revealed that the administration was proposing a change in federal law that would result in rent increases for thousands of poor people receiving housing aid.

By: William Rivers Pitt  

Secretary of State Colin Powell set the stage for this new bin Laden statement early on Tuesday, much to the surprise of CIA Director George Tenet. Powell, during testimony at a Senate Budget Committee meeting, let it drop that the Middle East news network Al Jazeera had in hand a tape of Osama bin Laden. Tenet, seated with the Intelligence Committee, had not heard of this tape. One is left wondering at Powell's sources, especially after the story unfolded.

Powell used the existence of this tape, and the words he claimed bin Laden had said on it, to further tie Saddam Hussein to international terrorism. He claimed bin Laden was clearly establishing a connection between himself and Hussein on the tape, beyond all question. "This nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored", said Powell.

The actual tape, played and translated live on every major cable news channel, told a very different story. Osama bin Laden swore vengeance against America if Iraq was attacked, and demanded that the Muslim world stand in solidarity with the Muslim people of Iraq. In very clear words, Osama bin Laden told the people of Iraq to rise up against both American aggression and against "socialist" Saddam Hussein. If the translations that were provided were reliable, there is no ambiguity in bin Laden's words on the matter. So much, it seems, for Powell's case that Hussein and bin Laden are working together.

Editorial from:  

Amid the confusion and backdoor deals involved with finishing up the federal government's nearly $400 billion appropriations bill, there have been bits of good news. We're happy to note that the Senate and House conferees agreed to impose severe restrictions on Total Information Awareness, a Pentagon surveillance scheme concocted by John Poindexter that could have threatened the civil liberties of ordinary Americans.

Congress made the right move. The only wonder is that the Pentagon allowed the program to proceed as far as it did.

By: Robert Kuttner  

President Bush has managed to produce the most serious rift in NATO since its founding. He has stirred up the most serious bout of anti-American feeling since the Vietnam era, much of it coming from friends. The United States was pretty popular in the 1990's. We were the world's only remaining superpower, yet most of the world trusted the United States to use our awesome power prudently. Now a coalition is resisting U.S. leadership, not out of envy but out of plain anxiety that Bush is making disastrous miscalculations.

Since Nixon's opening to China, six U.S. Presidents have walked a delicate line, coaxing China to liberalize, inviting it into the community of trading nations, keeping a wary eye on China's military capacity, balancing the interests of Taiwan. Since Reagan, four administrations have worked to form an alliance with the new Russia, to diminish Russia's nuclear arsenal and help it become a normal nation.

But Bush's Iraq policy has accomplished the unthinkable - it has produced a French-German-Russian-Chinese axis that has little in common except a growing fear that the United States is being led by a lunatic fringe.

The Bush Administration's international and domestic slide into totalitarianism.

By: Geov Parrish  

Plenty of progressives snickered at last week's arrest in Spokane, Washington of a former Coast Guard officer and militia buff for spying. But ask yourself: Which is worse? Passing police plans for emergency deployment along to a bunch of self-deluded cranks in the woods? Or running roughshod over the world, planning new Hiroshimas and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people? Or, at home, trashing 200+ years of liberties and individual freedoms that, to use the cliché, generations of those soldiers once fought and died for? (Back when even our wars of empire weren't launched every 18 months like new product rollouts.)

What Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the rest of these Strangelovian zealots are doing - and don't forget their Democratic enablers - deserves far worse than impeachment. A few more all but inevitable months of unchecked abuse, and these traitors will have earned a place at the head of the list of people who have brought disgrace to the idealistic dream that was once the United States of America.

By: Russ Baker  

Perhaps it was appropriate that President Bush chose Nashville's Opryland on February 10 to deliver his sermon on why taxpayer money ought to be given to religious groups. A cultural shrine to musical laments about unfaithfulness only underlines the President's breaking of faith - with the Jeffersonian creed separating church from state.

Bush's benign-sounding new executive order banning "discrimination" against faith-based charities in the distribution of federal social service grants and building monies will surely play well in the first round of opinion polls - especially among members of his right-wing religious constituency, the footsoldiers of the GOP.

But are mainstream journalists prepared to ask the tough questions that will expose the dangers inherent in this politically motivated initiative - even at the risk of offending powerful leaders of organized religion?...

By: Firas Al-Atraqchi  

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell dropped a bombshell at a Congressional hearingon Iraq and revealed that he had a transcript of an "upcoming" audio message from Osama bin Laden that betrays the links between bin Laden and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

However, the White House may have put its foot in its mouth this time around.

Upon careful scrutiny of the audio message from bin Laden (and broadcast at 3 pm EST on the Arabic News Network Al-Jazeerah), it appears the Bush administration may have been so desperate to pin anything on Saddam and bin Laden that they did not wait to actually hear the contents of the message, nor provide adequate and reliable translation.

The bin Laden message expresses solidarity with the Iraqi people, advises them to remain steadfast in the coming invasion of their country and declares that Saddam and his aides are not important. "It is not important if Saddam and his government disappear", the man thought to be bin Laden says. "This is a war against you, the Muslims, and you must take arms to defend yourselves."

By: Peter Lee  

But the American public, though woefully and willfully ignorant about boring polysci issues like war, peace, containment, deterrence, and that big Armageddon thing where the whole world goes boom, is reasonably adept at the science of semiotics. That is to say, they pick up the message Bush is sending, while not necessarily endorsing the truth or accuracy of the particular statements he is making.

The message: peace process fucked up, inspections fucked up, U.N. fucked up, NATO fucked up, relations with large parts of the world fucked up. And no question, it's all true!

The fact that all these were willfully, nay eagerly screwed up by the United States in its reckless and singleminded pursuit of a war in Iraq is beside the point. Bush has successfully destroyed, split, or compromised all the mechanisms available for making peace and foreclosed all the options except war. There is no turning back and there is no way out.

By: Richard Cohen  

...I see America going to war; he sees us embarking on a crusade. His cause is right because he feels right about it.

The rest of the world, particularly Western Europe, recoils from that approach. It senses in Bush's body language, not to mention his oft-repeated references to God, a man who is tone deaf to subtleties and nuances - "In Texas, we don't do nuance", he once told CNN's Candy Crowley - and whose speech evinces not suppleness but a certain crudeness. Even in the high formality of the State of the Union address, he said of al-Qaeda terrorists who had been killed: "Let's put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." It was a rhetorical smirk.

Recently, Bush has been telling us something in his walk. It is virtually a strut, the parade-walk of a man who has puffed himself up to show determination, leadership - something like that. Whatever it is, it is not welcoming. It has a "no trespassing" sign all over it.

By: Maureen Dowd  

Ignoring all the blatant Qaeda hooks to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan; ignoring the fact that Osama has never had any use for the drinking, smoking, womanizing, secular Saddam; ignoring the fact that Saddam has no proven record of sharing weapons with al-Qaeda, the Bushies have been hellbent on making the 9/11 connection.

The world wasn't entirely buying that rationale for war.

And then who but Osama himself should pop up on an audio tape, calling on Muslims to fight the U.S. if the "infidels" attack "our brothers in Iraq".

Osama's disdain for Saddam still gleamed through. He barely mentioned the Iraqi leader and seemed to be holding his nose when he gave permission to his Qaeda brethren to fight "the Crusaders" alongside Saddam's Baath Party, "even if we believe and declare that the socialists are apostates", and whether Saddam remains in power or not.

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