By: E.J. Dionne Jr.  

Today is the second anniversary of President Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Republicans claim it's outrageous that Senate Democrats are filibustering Estrada's nomination and won't just fall in line behind all of President Bush's judicial nominees. But if the Democrats simply let everyone through, they would have no claim to being a legitimate opposition.

Here are some facts on judicial nominations. The number of Bush circuit court nominees the Senate has confirmed: 22. The number of Bush nominees confirmed to the district courts: 101. The number of Bush judicial nominees currently being filibustered: 2. The claim that Democrats are being obstructionist: priceless. And laughable.

By: Steve Chapman  

The Bush administration is clearly unhappy about the Canadians' habit of thinking for themselves. John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, expressed deep disappointment: "You expect your friends to stop the movement of poison to your neighborhood." He may be forgetting that the Canadian government controls only its own neighborhood - unlike the U.S. government, which aspires to rule a lot of the world beyond its borders.

U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci warned that decriminalization might force American customs agents to spend more time checking out Canadians entering the U.S. Well, of course. I mean, our law enforcement officers have never had to worry about people smuggling pot into the country before, have they?

But decriminalization in Canada wouldn't have much effect on drug use in America. How do I know? Because decriminalization in America hasn't had much effect on drug use in America.

From:  

Some teachers in Oakland are rallying behind two students who were interrogated by the Secret Service. That followed remarks the teenagers made about the President during a class discussion. The incident has many people angry.

For years the classroom has been the setting for the free expression of ideas, but two weeks ago certain ideas led to two students being taken out of class and grilled by the United States Secret Service.

It happened at Oakland High. The discussion was about the war in Iraq. That's when two students made comments about the President of the United States...

Editorial from:  

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday, President Bush warned of a "crisis" over the Senate's failure to confirm his nominations quickly enough. Judicial vacancies, he said, "are causing delays for citizens seeking justice". In truth, judicial vacancies are at the lowest level in years, and the Senate has been confirming President Bush's nominees more rapidly than it did President Bill Clinton's.

The only "crisis" at hand is that the White House is having trouble getting its most politically extreme nominees confirmed. What kind of nominees are Senate Democrats balking at? One, an Arkansas anti-abortion activist, has written that women should be subordinate to men. Another argued, as a Justice Department lawyer, that Bob Jones University should keep its tax-exempt status even though it discriminated against blacks. Senators who demand that federal judges have a record of standing up for equality for women and minorities are not obstructing - they are doing their jobs.

White House Press Secretary Shows Little Regard for Truth

Editorial from:  

Before President Bush rode a Navy jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, press secretary Ari Fleischer informed the world, inaccurately, that the carrier would be hundreds of miles offshore. That distance over water, Fleischer suggested, would be too long for the President to safely make the hop in a slower, cheaper helicopter with limited range.

As President Bush flew on Air Force One from Washington toward California for his rendezvous with the Navy Viking jet, Fleischer claimed, implausibly, that he had no idea how far offshore the carrier was steaming and could not get the answer.

At the time Bush landed on the carrier and prepared to address the nation, the ship was less than 40 miles from shore. White House officials advised the press and television networks, falsely, that the carrier was about 100 miles offshore. The officials knew the truth, because they manipulated the television camera angles for fear the coastline might be visible.

By: James C. Dao  

A sharply divided Senate Armed Services Committee voted today to repeal a 10-year-old ban on the development of small nuclear weapons, asserting that the United States must begin looking at new ways of deterring terrorist groups and so-called rogue nuclear powers like North Korea.

The Bush administration, which requested the repeal, said it had no plans to develop a new low-yield nuclear weapon. But it contends that the existing prohibition has had a chilling effect on weapons research at a time when the United States is trying to reconfigure its military to address post-Soviet threats.

By: Helen Thomas  

Should critics of the U.S. attack on Iraq hang their heads now that the United States has won the Second Persian Gulf War?

Absolutely not!

People who opposed the attack on Iraq never had any doubt that the United States - the world's lone military superpower - would roll over a pitiful Third World country. That wasn't the point.

Instead, it was a question of why should the U.S. military kill thousands of innocent Iraqis, maim thousands more and ruin their country to take out one man. All of that, for questionable U.S. motives.

By: Cliff Montgomery  

The U.S. Defense Department's "Militarily Critical Technologies List" (MCTL) is "a detailed compendium of technologies" that the department advocates as "critical to maintaining superior U.S. military capabilities. It applies to all mission areas, especially counter-proliferation." Written in 1998, it was recently re-published with updates for 2002.

So what is the MCTL's opinion of Iraq's chemical weapons program? In making its chemical nerve agents, "The Iraqis... produce[d] a... mixture which was inherently unstable", says the report. "When the Iraqis produced chemical munitions they appeared to adhere to a 'make and use' regimen. Judging by the information Iraq gave the United Nations, later verified by on-site inspections, Iraq had poor product quality for their nerve agents. This low quality was likely due to a lack of purification. They had to get the agent to the front promptly or have it degrade in the munition."

Furthermore, says this Defense Department report: "The chemical munitions found in Iraq after the [first] Gulf War contained badly deteriorated agents and a significant proportion were visibly leaking." The shelf life of these poorly made agents were said to be a few weeks at best - hardly the stuff of vast chemical weapons stores.

By: Bryan Keefer  

President Bush's renewed push for his tax cut plan in the past few weeks has featured a good deal of spin, both old and new.

A staple of Bush's stump speech has been a statistic about what he implies is an average family. To take one example, Bush claimed on April 24 that "If you're a family of four, making $40,000 a year, this tax plan will reduce your taxes from $1,178 to $45 - a family of four, $40,000." He then suggested a few moments later, "that thousand dollars a year will mean a lot. Tax relief is good for the average citizen." He has repeated the statistic on a number of occasions, most recently a May 6 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As we have pointed out before, while the tax reduction Bush advertises for this theoretical family is technically correct, it benefits disproportionately for a household of its income level. Bush's suggestion that the hypothetical family's benefit demonstrates that "[t]ax relief is good for the average citizen" is also misleading and unrepresentative. According to an analysis of the President's proposal by the center-left Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a family in the middle one-fifth of the income distribution could expect a cut of $227.

"Democracy obscures the Divine authority of government."

- Justice Antonin Scalia

Editorial from:  

The best thing to be said for the tax-cut legislation being concocted in the Republican-led Congress is that the Senate version finally accepts the idea of providing emergency fiscal aid to the deficit-battered states. Even so, the $20 billion proposed is short of actual needs and is likely to be undercut by fresh state revenue losses resulting from other negative factors in the GOP proposals.

The worst thing to be said for the differing bills now moving through the two houses is that they continue to emphasize upper-bracket boons while totally ignoring the plight of the nation's unemployed workers. Most regrettably, the fight to kill off President Bush's favored dividend tax cut - thought to have been rejected earlier in the Senate - appears far from over. True, the latest Senate compromise won by Olympia Snowe of Maine trims this deficit-stoking measure to a quarter of the President's plan. But it introduces a sliding scale that would eventually let wealthier Americans shelter 20% of dividends.

By: Ted Rall  

Democratic leaders ought to select their nominee in a smoke-filled room, call off the expensive and divisive primary process and order all other comers to stand down. Forget the union rallies, the badges, and the buttons - whoever wins the nomination should invest every dime he can raise on the cruelest TV attack ads this country has ever seen.

Go after Bush's ultimate Achilles' heel: run countless loops of the inarticulate Resident's clashes with the English language. "Too dumb to talk", a sinister voiceover reads. "Too stupid to trust." Use time-proven Republican methods, like name-calling: Extremist. Out of touch. Tax and spender. Hates workers. Racist. Homophobe. Corrupt CEO coddler. Idiot. Drunk. Cut to the post-pretzel-incident photo: "America needs a sober President."

Forget ideas - voters respond to the personal stuff. Dwell on the two years Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. "Brave Americans gave their lives in Vietnam", a 30-second spot should intone as the camera pans over names of the fallen on the black wall in Washington. "Rich kid George W. Bush deserted. This coward snorted coke and drove drunk while other kids died." Who doubts that if Gore had played up Bush's DUI arrest, he would have picked up an extra 500 votes in Florida?

By: Alister Doyle  

A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq.

"Sometimes it's necessary to use a small and effective war to prevent a much more dangerous war in the future", Jan Simonsen, a right-wing independent in Norway's parliament, told Reuters. "If nobody acted then Saddam Hussein could have produced weapons of mass destruction and, in five or 10 years, could have used them against Israel", he said.

An award to Bush and Blair would be a U-turn after the Nobel Committee awarded the 2002 prize to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter last October. At the time, the committee chairman called it a kick in the shins to Bush's Iraq policies as Carter had been calling for a diplomatic solution.

By: Sidney Hall Jr.  

For a brief moment after 9/11, we recognized some genuine heroes in our midst, those who put their lives on the line to rescue strangers and those who put their own needs in back of the needs of others in the middle of tragedy. The celebration of this heroism may have become a little gaudy, but it was sincere.

Since then we seem to have become a nation of cowards celebrating illusions.

There is a President, who, in reaction to the devastation of 9/11, does not act with forbearance, curiosity to understand the root cause, and as a world leader. Instead he lashes out at blurry targets with more force than we were met with. This is not the act of a brave man. This is the act of a coward.

By: Jim Hightower  

One of the most absurd oxymorons in our country is "shareholder democracy".

The claim by corporate image-makers is that these autocratic corporate empires are actually flowers of democracy governed by and for the millions of little shareholders like Old Aunt Emma in Dubuque, with her 100 shares of Microsoft or Wal-Mart or Disney.

Hogwash. Start with the fact that nearly 60% of Americans own no stock at all - even through a mutual fund or 401(k). And most of those who do own stock have only pittance, like old Aunt Emma's 100 shares. Indeed, 90% of all corporate stock is firmly in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of Americans.

But, second, the CEO's and top managers rule their corporate fiefdoms with an iron fist, not tolerating even the pretense of shareholder democracy.

By: Paul Krugman  

Chutzpah, according to the classic definition, is when you murder your parents, then ask for sympathy because you're an orphan. But what do we call it if after you are placed with foster parents, you try the same thing all over again?

I ask this question in light of the tax-cut package the House is expected to pass today - a package that relies on exactly the same bait-and-switch tactics used to sell the 2001 tax cut. Since the scam involved in the 2001 tax cut remains one of the wonders of modern political economy, it is a measure of our leaders' contempt for the intelligence of the public - or maybe for the press - that they think they can use the same tricks a second time.

By: Marie Cocco  

The tax debate on Capitol Hill is all haggle now, a nitpick among Republicans over just how huge a gulp can be swallowed - $550 billion? $350 billion? Split the difference? Then, too, there is the high-stakes wrangle among lobbyists and their pet lawmakers over just which investors should get the biggest tax breaks on their profits.

It is all done in the name of priming the pump, though there is not a single bit of evidence the first round of Bush tax cuts added a single job. Since the 2001 tax cut was enacted, nearly 2 million private-sector jobs have disappeared - out of the 2.7 million lost since the downturn began officially in March 2001.

The number of payroll jobs in April was down to 130.3 million, the lowest in nearly four years. The average number of hours worked weekly fell to 34, the least since the government started keeping track in 1964. The average spell of unemployment is now nearly 20 weeks, the longest since January 1984...

"It has something to do with physical posture and so on. This President has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command..."

- David S. Broder, on Meet the Press

By: Marty Heldt  

Nearly two hundred manila-wrapped pages of George Walker Bush's service records came to me like some sort of giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.

I had been seeking more information about his military record to find out what he did during what I think of as his "missing year", when he failed to show up for duty as a member of the Air National Guard, as the Boston Globe first reported.

The initial page I examined is a chronological listing of Bush's service record. This document charts active duty days served from the time of his enlistment. His first year, a period of extensive training, young Bush is credited with serving 226 days. In his second year in the Guard, Bush is shown to have logged a total of 313 days. After Bush got his wings in June 1970 until May 1971, he is credited with a total of 46 days of active duty. From May 1971 to May 1972, he logged 22 days of active duty.

Then something happened. From May 1, 1972 until April 30, 1973 - a period of twelve months - there are no days shown, though Bush should have logged at least thirty-six days service (a weekend per month in addition to two weeks at camp).

By: anonymous  

As a leader, Hussein manipulated the media. He squelched dissent by orchestrating his public events to make sure that only his supporters were around him - squelching dissent is necessary if one is to rule unilaterally, after all. His ego was so in need of stroking, that he erected statues of himself all over Iraq.

As a leader, Bush manipulates the media. From campaigning year-round to get his agenda pushed through Congress, to flying by plane rather than helicopter to the deck of a carrier which was only 30 miles offshore, he manipulates what appears to be a most willing media.

He squelches dissent by making sure only well-wishers attend his events. Sharpshooters are placed atop buildings, and "First Amendment Zones" have been moved back a comfortable pace.

He rules unilaterally, telling the world that "you're either with us, or you're against us"...

By: Chuck Nowlen  

Firebrand author and columnist Molly Ivins had the antidote for a decidedly liberal UW-Madison audience Monday night: "I can tell you guys are really desperate and you need some cheerin' up," Ivins deadpanned at one point, bringing the packed Wisconsin Union Theater house down - seemingly with her irreverent, Texas-drawl delivery alone. "Well, just be happy that you don't wake up every mornin' in Texas, where the price of gas is so high that women who want to run over their husbands have to car pool."

Not that Ivins' 90-minute talk - the last in the Wisconsin Union Directorate's 2002-2003 Distinguished Lecture Series - was anything close to one-liner escapism.

Her topics, in fact, were dead serious at their core: the ironic arrogance of a superpower democracy at war, the tyranny of religious fundamentalism mixed with government and the dark chutzpah of quasi-governmental corporate corruption, to name just a few.

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