By: Jack Rabbit  

To the refutation of their reasons for going to war, Mr. Bush and his associates have responded with bluster and propaganda. They continue to repeat what has been refuted. We are given an audio tape in which Osama bin Laden expresses his support for the Iraqi people and told by administration spokesmen that this proves a connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. It does nothing of the kind. We are also told that the burden of proof is not on those who charge Saddam with possessing weapons of mass destruction, but on Saddam to prove that he is not in possession of banned weapons. In short, the demand is being placed on Saddam to prove a negative, something that is logically impossible.

Mr. Bush may think less of this tactic if one were to demand that he prove that he stopped drinking many years ago as he claims. However Mr. Bush and his allies wish to spin it, the burden of proof is on them to prove their case against Saddam. They have not.

By: John Chuckman  

The world's diplomats have worked a small miracle so far in stopping the crazed ideologues in the White House from launching a rash, unnecessary war. And most of the world's people support the diplomats in this. There is spontaneous revulsion at Mr. Bush's fevered statements about Iraq.

Mr. Blix has done a hero's work trying to establish a rational inspection regime as an alternative to war while being subjected to a storm of abuse and misinformation from the White House.

Saddam Hussein has twice subjected Iraqis to needless death and misery on a large scale with failed wars against Iran and Kuwait. True enough, in both cases, he was encouraged by the amoral foreign policies of the United States, and in the case of the war against Iran, he was more than encouraged: Saddam was supplied with tools and weapons and had a number of his brutal acts excused and covered up.

"I just sigh and remind myself that common sense is an oxymoron."

- Bryan Zepp Jamieson

By: Bill Moyers  

So what's this flag doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo - the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. And during the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's Little Red Book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running websites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

Editorial from:  

This is no way to run an ethics process. There have been serious and credible allegations, detailed in this newspaper, that Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-OH) and members of his staff, who are investigating mutual fund practices, pressured the mutual fund industry to dismiss its Democratic lobbyist and hire a Republican. Most disturbing was this sentence in the Post report: "Six sources, both Republicans and Democrats who all declined to be identified, said certain members of Oxley's staff have suggested the congressional probe might ease up if the mutual fund trade group complies with their wishes." The article named one former Oxley staffer who now works for Mr. Blunt, as well as the committee's chief of staff, Robert U. Foster III. The correct question here is not should the ethics committee investigate but rather: How in the world could it not?

By: P.M. Carpenter  

Not since the Johnson-Nixon era has an American President's credibility been so abysmal. Persistent lies about foreign policy - how we got into Vietnam, why we were staying in, and how we were faring militarily and politically - forced early retirement on a discredited LBJ. Even Lyndon had had enough, already. And though Richard Nixon ran with experts when it came to foreign policy fibs, the fatuous cover-up of domestic misdemeanors chiefly strangled his credibility and finally sent him packing.

Assuming presidential history is still taught in some high schools, the above, I imagine, is at least the bare minimum that most students are asked to retain into adulthood: Johnson... Vietnam... lies... downfall; Nixon... Watergate... lies... downfall. Future history students, however, shall have an even easier time of it when asked to recall the gist of George W. Bush's downfall: He lied about everything.

Historical simplicity, which inattentive high schoolers - and 43 himself - love so much, is usually easy to complicate. But Bush is laying such a chronically recidivist path of policy misrepresentations and deliberate deceit, he is making retrospective clarity - the holy historical grail - possible...

By: Paul Krugman  

But you don't have to be a doomsayer to feel that the negatives greatly outweigh the positives - that an economy that is already hurting badly is all too likely to get even worse. So what will the administration do about it? Nothing, of course.

Why is the administration so uninterested in helping the economy? Here's my theory: The depressed state of the economy provides a convenient if bogus rationale for the huge, extremely irresponsible long-run tax cuts that, after Iraq, constitute this administration's principal obsession. To do anything else to help the economy would suggest that it's possible to create jobs now without putting the country's future solvency at risk - and that's not a message this administration wants to convey.

"Cowboy George has not been content with just fucking up America these past two years, he is now intent on spending the rest of his time fucking up the whole World."

- Rack Jite

By: Dana Milbank  

A Bush administration bookkeeping decision has left a funding shortfall for the AmeriCorps national service program that could force enrollment cuts of as much as 50% - instead of the 50% increase President Bush had promised.

The President embraced AmeriCorps, a Clinton-era program, after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and has made it a central part of his "compassionate conservative" agenda. During his State of the Union address last year, he called for AmeriCorps enrollment to grow to 75,000 from 50,000.

Instead, it is possible that enrollment will be held to 26,000 this year unless changes are made, AmeriCorps officials said.

Iraq is just the first salvo in Bush's push toward U.S. global hegemony.

By: Jill Nelson  

The Bush administration attempts to justify war with Iraq as a reasonable and effective measure in its war against terror, but who among us really believes this? How can we convince ourselves that entering into a war that neither our traditional allies like France and Germany nor damn near anyone else besides Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria support, will do anything but increase terrorism?

Do we really believe members of Arab states in the region and around the world will rejoice when the United States of Iraq is suddenly forced into their midst? Will anyone? Haven't we learned by now that war, violence, and arrogance does not end terror, but spawns it? And that in the end, righteous rhetoric is always overwhelmed by the terrors of war and occupation?

"Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson."

- John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the United States Embassy in Athens, in his letter of resignation

By: Jeff Ritchie  

What we've seen so far is a foreign policy that is stunningly reckless, one which may yet cause the United States, the nominal leader of the free world and sole remaining super power, to become an international pariah. The administration's "won't take 'no' for an answer" stance on war with Iraq will damage our standing in the world community for a generation - and that's only if we somehow manage to avoid an invasion. War with Iraq could have dangerous repercussions.

The Bush administration dug its own grave in many respects. It started by rejecting the Kyoto Accords on the global environment and by repudiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the United States signed nearly thirty years ago. The administration also rejected an international ban on land mines, a pact to limit the sales of small arms in Third World countries, and the International Criminal Court.

By: David E. Rosenbaum  

The statistics that President Bush and his allies use to promote his tax-cut plan are accurate, but many of them present only part of the picture.

For instance, in a speech in Georgia last week, the President asserted that under his proposal, 92 million Americans would receive an average tax reduction of $1,083 and that the economy would improve so much that 1.4 million new jobs would be created by the end of 2004.

No one disputes the size of the average tax reduction, and the jobs figure is based on the estimate of a prominent private economic forecasting firm.

But this is what the President did not say: Half of all income-tax payers would have their taxes cut by less than $100; 78% would get reductions of less than $1,000. And the firm that the White House relied on to predict the initial job growth also forecast that the plan could hurt the economy over the long run.

By: Richard Cohen  

I am tempted to ask whatever happened to the conservative doctrine that local is best. But, with Ashcroft, I know the answer. He is determined to establish the uniform application of the death penalty - no more of these regional discrepancies.

Trouble is, the standard he wants is that of Texas or Virginia, where the death penalty is liberally applied, and not that of New York, where, somehow, the crime rate has fallen anyway. In at least one New York case in which Ashcroft has overruled the local prosecutors, a plea agreement had been reached whereby, in exchange for his life, the defendant was going to provide information. What that defendant's incentive might now be is something of a mystery.

Ashcroft, with an almost biblical bloodlust, has unfortunately become an ugly face of America abroad. In all of Europe - and much of the rest of the world - capital punishment has been abolished. Even some countries that retain it almost never use it anymore. It has become the sine qua non of a civilized nation: You don't torture, you don't execute.

By: Ted Rall  

For more than a decade, citizens who drive normal-size cars have been bullied, poisoned, and murdered by drivers of sport utility vehicles. Now they're being asked to like it.

Why are SUV owners surprised that nobody likes them? Americans have long defined themselves by the cars they drive; is it unreasonable to assume that someone who drives an oversized gas guzzler is a selfish, aggressive lout? People buy SUV's because they're imposing, so they can see over smaller cars. Is it shocking that drivers whose sight lines are blocked by these hulking machines, and who are blinded at night by the headlights of great overbearing tailgaters, are resentful?

More and more SUV drivers are coming out of stores to find their vehicles "keyed", stickered, or worse, and SUV's are replacing fur coats as the spray paint target of choice. Sure it sucks, but can SUV owners complain? Vandalizing property is a mere misdemeanor next to willfully endangering other people's lives and hastening the demise of the planet.

By: Jonathan Nicholson  

While the Bush administration's economic plan would speed up a variety of tax breaks, it would not accelerate two tax changes that experts say would greatly aid the nation's working poor.

The provisions, an expansion in the amount of the child tax credit the poor can claim and a more generous limit for the earned income tax credit, could provide substantial help to lower-income workers without adding much to the package's $695 billion price tag, according to Len Burman, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

"It would make a huge difference", said Burman, who also served as Treasury's deputy assistant secretary of tax analysis in the second Clinton administration.

By: Deborah Charles  

Attorney General John Ashcroft on Monday announced 55 people have been charged with trafficking in illegal drug paraphernalia as part of a nationwide crackdown.

Ashcroft said selling drug paraphernalia is a billion-dollar industry and sales have skyrocketed through purchases over the Internet.

Of 17 indictments returned in the investigation, ten are against national distributors of drug paraphernalia and seven involve businesses located in western Pennsylvania, he told reporters at a Justice Department news conference.

"Our President doesn't talk about Saudi Arabia, he doesn't talk about Nigeria - where women are stoned because of adultery. He doesn't talk about the fact that most of these Iraqi arms we are trying to get rid of are the very arms and weapons that we gave to them."

- Carl Bernstein, former Washington Post reporter, who helped break the Watergate story three decades ago

If George bothered to examine the demonstrators, he would find typical Americans and Europeans and Asians, the bedrock of the world's strongest democracies.

By: Charles R. Steward  

Protestors are nothing more than a focus group? Take a closer look Mr. President.

Millions upon millions of people marched in hundreds of cities in America and throughout the world in the most massive, global anti-war protest in history. Everywhere, everyday-people were in the streets. My God! There is hope for this planet!

By: Norman Mailer  

My guess though, is that, like it or not, want it or not, America is going to go to war because that is the only solution Bush and his people can see.

The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state.

"That was a stupid and dismissive remark [about the protests] and the point is that [Bush] is bringing along a world coalition that he calls a coalition of the willing when it's really a coalition of the bullied and the bribed. The only way he's getting countries to go along with this is coming across with huge sums of money and asking leaders to overlook what is basically democratic expression in these countries."

- Eleanor Clift, on the McLaughlin Group

By: Paul Krugman  

These days, whenever Mr. Bush makes a promise - like his new program to fight AIDS in Africa - experienced Bushologists ask: "OK, that's the bait, where's the switch?" (Answer: Much of the money will be diverted from other aid programs, such as malaria control.)

Then there's the honesty thing.

Mr. Bush's mendacity on economic matters was obvious even during the 2000 election. But lately it has reached almost pathological levels. Last week Mr. Bush - who has been having a hard time getting reputable economists to endorse his economic plan - claimed an endorsement from the latest Blue Chip survey of business economists. "I don't know what he was citing", declared the puzzled author of that report, which said no such thing.

"I say to O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hedgecock, Hannity, and all others like them haranguing for battle to put up or shut up. You guys had your chance to dress in a green suit and pick up a rifle for your country, and you passed on it. You chose to serve yourselves. Today you talk tough while reaping the wealth that this nation can give, and you never sacrificed a thing for this country, just for yourselves. In my opinion, you are no different than the man on the Titanic who put on a dress and climbed aboard a lifeboat."

- Charles Henderson, a retired Marine Corps warrant officer

By: Bernie Sanders  

I want to let our friends in the U.K. know there are millions of Americans, including a growing number of Congress members, who oppose Bush's war plans with Iraq.

There are numerous reasons why the President's efforts are extremely misguided...

What's at stake, what's already happened, and what could yet occur.

By: Cass Sunstein  

Since the election of President Reagan, a disciplined, carefully orchestrated and quite self-conscious effort by high-level Republican officials in the White House and the Senate has radically transformed the federal judiciary. For more than two decades, Republican leaders have had a clear agenda for the nation's courts: to reduce the powers of the federal government; to scale back the rights of those accused of crime; to strike down affirmative-action programs and campaign-finance laws; to diminish privacy rights, including the right to abortion; and to protect commercial interests, including commercial advertisers, from government regulation. They have sought judicial candidates who would interpret the Constitution and other federal statutes in a way that would promote this agenda. And their nominees have been appointed to the bench.

To a degree that has been insufficiently appreciated, and is in some ways barely believable, the contemporary federal courts are fundamentally different from the federal courts of just two decades ago. What was then in the center is now on the left; what was then in the far right is now in the center; what was then on the left no longer exists...

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