O. Ricardo Pimentel  

Let me translate into "bigotspeak" what Sen. Rick Santorum meant when he compared gays to bigamists, polygamists, and practitioners of incest and adultery.

Translated: Hey, I place you in the same category as all those scummy people I just mentioned. Oh, and if you act on who you are, you're also a criminal.

But, he added, he has no problem whatsoever with homosexuals.

OK, I have no problem with bigots as Senators. I just object when they spew bigotry.

By: Shant Minas  

Under this administration, criticism of official government policy has become synonymous with treason, unpatriotic, and un-American. In some cases vocal criticism can attract Soviet-style scrutiny. (Bring it on, Ashcroft.) The big-money media outlets have become de facto voices and puppets for the administration and its policies instead of offering objective coverage and analysis of the consequences of war.

I urge Americans concerned about the direction our country is heading to take a stand against this deeply corrupt administration and begin a mass movement to get Bush to resign office.

Barring that, we can begin work on the most important campaign in the history of American politics: "Anybody But Bush" 2004...

By: Robert Higgs  

For the sailors on the U.S. aircraft carriers steaming back to their home ports, the war is over, but for Mona Hassan it has just begun. Gesturing as if she were plucking out her own eyes, she wails: "I would take them and give them to my son." Hoarse with grief, she pleads: "Take my eyes, take them! Who can watch their child like this, and live?"

Mona is grieving for her five-year-old son, Ali Mustafa Hassan, who lost both eyes when his three-year-old cousin, Hassan Ali Hussein, triggered an explosion by picking up a bomblet from a U.S. cluster bomb that had fallen into the garden outside their home in Baghdad. Now little Ali, swathed in bandages, lies wailing in a hospital bed, and Mona suffers inconsolably.

Mona Hassan is weeping, but George W. Bush is not.

By: Robyn E. Blumner  

Sometimes, before an abusive government practice gains widespread attention, bad things have to happen to someone with this bio: American citizen, blond wife, adorable children, good job, and high-status friends.

That victim would be Maher "Mike" Hawash, a naturalized American of Palestinian descent who has been held in federal custody as a material witness to a terrorism investigation since March 20.

A federal judge has ordered Hawash detained "but not indefinitely", with a closed-door hearing to review his status set for April 29. By that time he will have spent more than five weeks in prison with no formal accusation or charge against him. Welcome to Ashcroft's America.

By: Ruth Rosen  

Starving public programs and services, of course, has always been the goal of the Bush administration. Behind the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism is a methodical plan to unravel the New Deal, the social contract forged 70 years ago that placed a safety net under mothers with small children, the infirm, the ill, the elderly, and the unemployed.

Through a brilliant public relations campaign, this administration has managed to convince ordinary middle-class, working families that huge tax cuts (targeted to the wealthy), ending the estate tax, and a gigantic federal deficit will improve their lives.

But it won't. These same people need public schools for their children, health insurance for their families, home health care for elderly parents, state universities for their college-age kids, and Social Security for their retirement.

By: Molly Ivins  

Boy, there is no shortage of creatively terrible ideas from the Republican Party these days. Those folks are just full of notions about how to make people's lives worse - one horrible idea after another bursting out like popcorn - and all of them with these sickeningly cute names attached to them.

Consider the Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act (Senate version) and the Family Time Flexibility Act (House version). The Bush administration is leading the charge with proposed new rules that will erode the 40-hour workweek and affect more than 80 million workers now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

By: Paul Krugman  

Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it doesn't: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask some hard questions - not just about Iraq, but about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001 the World Health Organization - the same organization we now count on to protect us from SARS - called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10 billion per year - a small fraction of what we will spend on war and occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America's first major postwar acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to the Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And that must be true - we wouldn't let innocent people die just to spite the French, would we?

By: P.M. Carpenter  

His hypocrisy has become so routine it's barely even newsworthy these days. We simply expect it, so it no longer qualifies as an interesting development to be reported. Nevertheless, what should have been newsworthy - indeed, profoundly striking - about this particular hypocritical go-around was its global scale.

Before a puzzled world, the President turned on a dime and quickly hustled the revisionist reason for demolishing a non-belligerent country; that is, the "coalition's" determination to snuff out Saddam's human rights abuses. Yet the freedom-loving coalition he assembled contained some the world's most notorious human rights abusers themselves. How, with a straight face and no shame, 43 could boast of a coalition teeming with Saddam-like cutthroats and torturers staggers the mind and offends every sense of decency.

By: Frank Rich  

There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said: "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the "pure Hollywood" scenario - a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof?

Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon, and central command - where the real clout is - no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for it.

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now. Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the 80's. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's - these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people. ...my father was a man - that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

- Ron Reagan Jr.

Editorial from:  

The Republicans controlling Congress return this week to anguish over how much more of a tax cut the nation's wealthiest citizens have coming. The leaders and President Bush would be wise to focus instead on the needs of the growing army of unemployed Americans. A total of 2.6 million private sector jobs have been lost across the past two years - a record for any modern presidency. Mr. Bush should be jawboning on behalf of benefits for the jobless as heartily as he now tours the land for still more relief for the affluent.

In lobbying for "at least" $550 billion more in tax reductions, Mr. Bush is deriding the few resistant Senate Republicans for holding out for no more than what he terms a "little bitty" package of $350 billion in cuts over the decade. This sounds like a debate over whether to let the rich eat cake or brioche...

From:  

There was no question about who should top the list this week - step forward Sen. Rick Santorum and his disgusting comments on homosexuality. Bill O'Reilly (2) did his best to keep up with a bit of racism, and Karl Rove (3 & 4) managed to make it on twice this week - once for shameful behavior, and once for idiotic behavior. Elsewhere we have yet another Republican pervert in Richard Delgaudio (5), the Bush Administration (6 & 8) crack the list twice on the topic of weapons of mass destruction, Becthel (7) gets a massive taxpayer-provided windfall, and Jay Garner (10) is obviously letting power go to his head. Enjoy.

By: David Leonhardt  

For the first time since the 1980's, the average pay of workers at all income levels is falling.

The pay of the nation's top earners has become the most recent to fall behind inflation. The weekly salary of workers at the 90^th percentile of earners - who earn more than nine-tenths of all workers - fell 1.4% over the last year, to $1,439, according to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington.

The inflation-adjusted weekly pay of the median worker - half made more, half made less - fell 1.5% from early last year to early this year, according to the Labor Department. It was the biggest drop since the mid-1990's.

From:  

Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham said Sunday that President Bush has virtually abandoned Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism, which allowed al-Qaida to regroup while he pursued war in Iraq.

The Florida Senator also said that by refusing to allow an Iranian-style religious government to take power in Baghdad, even if elected by the Iraqis, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "demonstrates the kind of quagmire that we are potentially going to be in in Iraq".

"If you talk about a democracy, which means that people vote and select the political leadership that they desire, then you can't say: 'But there are certain segments of the population that are off-limits.'", he told ABC's This Week...

Editorial from:  

Put the legal framework aside for a moment and consider, simply, Sen. Rick Santorum's list: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home", he told an Associated Press reporter this week, "then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." By its grammatical construction this is a list of approximate equals, in this case equal in deviance. It may be broad-minded of Mr. Santorum (R-PA) to include adultery, as that must encompass some in his professional acquaintance. But that's small comfort to those who oppose prejudice against homosexuals, now offensively lumped in by the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference with bigamists and those who practice incest, not to mention the vast Caligulan landscape that "anything" might encompass.

That said, the legal framework matters. This is not one of those offhand gaffes, like Sen. Trent Lott's comparison of homosexuals with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. As is clear from the longer transcript of the interview, Mr. Santorum is espousing a worldview, and a disturbing one...

Making a mint inside "the iron triangle" of defense, government, and industry.

By: Dan Briody  

That the Carlyle Group had its conference on America's darkest day was mere coincidence, but there is nothing accidental about the cast of characters that this private-equity powerhouse has assembled in the 14 years since its founding. Among those associated with Carlyle are former U.S. President George Bush Sr., former U.K. Prime Minister John Major, and former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos. And Carlyle has counted George Soros, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's estranged family among its high-profile clientele. The group has been able to parlay its political clout into a lucrative buyout practice (in other words, purchasing struggling companies, turning them around, and selling them for huge profits) - everything from defense contractors to telecommunications and aerospace companies. It is a kind of ruthless investing made popular by the movie Wall Street, and any industry that relies heavily on government regulation is fair game for Carlyle's brand of access capitalism. Carlyle has established itself as the gatekeeper between private business interests and U.S. defense spending. And as the Carlyle investors watched the World Trade towers go down, the group's prospects went up.

In running what its own marketing literature spookily calls "a vast, interlocking, global network of businesses and investment professionals" that operates within the so-called iron triangle of industry, government, and the military, the Carlyle Group leaves itself open to any number of conflicts of interest and stunning ironies...

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

- Abraham Lincoln

From:  

Roemer, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, tried to review the transcripts of the joint hearings held last year by the House and Senate intelligence committees. He learned that he had no permission to see them, even though he had served on the joint committee hearings and had, therefore, read the material before.

Roemer called the experience outrageous. He noted that the commission, by law, must build upon the work of the congressional inquiry, which found that organizational problems and human failings had prevented U.S. intelligence agencies from unraveling the Sept. 11 plot.

"The basic foundational work of the commission is the joint inquiry's product", Roemer said. "To delay access to that, to hinder access to that, is out of bounds."

By: Rex Nutting  

When individual Americans are accused of helping terrorists, they're thrown in jail and their names are dragged through the mud. But when major U.S. corporations are caught trading with the enemy, they get just a slap on the wrist from the government.

In the past two weeks, the government has revealed that 57 companies and organizations have been fined for doing business with terrorists, despots, and tyrants.

However, neither the government nor the companies are forthcoming with the public about the details of the illicit trade with rogue governments like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan.

Report from:  

U.S. Allied Forces Commander, General Tommy Franks, and a second, unnamed party, could face trial in Belgium for war crimes under the country's amended genocide law after four Belgian doctors lodged a complaint in Brussels.

The four men, two of whom are still in Baghdad, work for the Belgian association Medicine for the Third World and were witnesses to the Allied invasion of the country.

Several events have already been cited by the doctors' lawyer, Jan Fermon, including an ambulance under fire from U.S. troops, the bombing of a market, an attack on a civilian bus, random excecutions, and inaction in the face of hospital pillaging.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell labelled the Belgian legislation a "serious problem" after joining Dick Cheney and George Bush Senior on a list of suspects in a lawsuit pertaining to alleged crimes committed during the last Gulf War.

"It finally came to me late last night. The economic mantra these days is 'private ownership' of all national resources and utilities. That's what the IMF and World Bank demand. That's how their clients (multinational corps) make (additional) big bucks off us all. But how do you get the country with the most government owned/run resources to sell it all off? Bankrupt them. Now all we have to do to hurry things up is get the world so pi$$ed off at the USA that the foreign money all takes flight. Then you'll see the biggest sell off of national resources ever."

- 'perrya', from a post on the Smirking Chimp forum

By: Steven Attewell  

The question is one of priorities: which is more important, American military defense or the Constitutional duty to provide for the "general welfare" of American citizens. When the Gulf War and the War on Iraq show us how much we invest in over-kill, given our total military dominance, one wonders exactly how much more we have to spend to be safe if what we have now isn't good enough. Terrorists don't fly fighter jets and they don't drive Abrams tanks - they use AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenades which can barely scratch us; so why the rush to increase military spending?

The obsession with military spending is more than a mistake: it's a deadly one, that annihilates the social programs that keep the most vulnerable Americans this side of starvation and allow the rest of us to live at a decent standard of living. When public funds get cut, private dollars which could have gone to consumption (new houses, cars, college tuition) or investment (pension plans, trust funds) have to go to fulfilling basic needs, and the economy tanks, shedding more jobs and wrecking more pension plans, and the spiral continues. When you remember that all of this is done in the name of our safety, you really have to wonder how safe an impoverished nation can be.

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