By: Lawrence J. Korb  

Not only did Clinton spend a large amount of money on the military; most of it was spent wisely. In the first Persian Gulf War, less than 10% of the bombs and missiles that were dropped on Iraq were smart weapons. That number jumped to 70% during this war because the Clinton administration ordered large quantities of upgraded munitions that made these "dumb" weapons smart. The Clinton administration also invested heavily in the technology that gave the on-scene commanders a much more vivid picture of the battlefield than a decade ago.

It was the Clinton administration that improved the accuracy of the Tomahawk cruise missile and upgraded the Patriot missile, which was so much more effective this time than the original Patriot in the first Persian Gulf War. The Clinton administration also kept the quality of our military personnel high by closing the gap between military and private sector compensation, a gap that the first Bush administration had allowed to grow, and improving retirement and health benefits for military retirees.

So if this latest military effort warrants a victory parade for the troops, let's insist that Clinton and his Secretaries of Defense are invited. They deserve it. And if the Bush administration wants to learn how to rebuild the nation of Iraq, they might ask their predecessors how to go about it.

By: Kurt Vonnegut  

The other day I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said: "Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers."

What are conservatives? They are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail - and so on.

Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

By: Denise Giardina  

Here is what is coming clear. George W. Bush and his cabal lied to the American people so they could attack another country to seize its oil wealth. Bush has, as Doonesbury and others have pointed out, assumed the mantle of Julius Caesar. He is in the process of ruining the American republic and establishing an American/corporate empire. A favorite motto at the White House is "Let them hate us, as long as they fear us." Emperor Caligula liked that saying too.

The American people should be clear about two things. History never judges kindly a rich, powerful nation that attacks a small, poor one. The second is that empires - all empires - end up on the ashbin of history.

By: Josh Meyer  

Sen. Bob Graham on Sunday accused the Bush administration of engaging in a "cover-up" of intelligence failures before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to shield it from embarrassment, and said the war with Iraq has allowed Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to become a greater threat to Americans than ever before.

Graham (D-FL), a presidential candidate and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also accused the administration of jeopardizing the safety of Americans by blocking the release of a congressional report on the government failures that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon...

By: Lisa Kadonaga  

I know you told us, back in early 2001, that you had given up e-mail (at least from your old g94b@aol.com address) - but I can't help wondering if you still take a glance at the Internet now and then. Because every single person I know who's vowed to "give up the web" has eventually come back to browse. And even a person with a will of steel, such as yourself (you ARE still avoiding sweets like Ari said, right?) would surely be tempted now and then.

The other thing is, there are an incredible number of web pages which are devoted to you - what you say and do, how you spend your summer (and other) vacations, and even what you wear. Admittedly, they don't all have nice things to say... but hey, as you yourself said during the campaign, at least they're all talking about you, and you like that general idea just fine.

But I did want to ask you how you felt about this particular item...

By: Len Nasman  

Those flag wavers who like to delude themselves into believing that the USA is the best in everything need to wake up and realize that we have a lot of work to do before insisting that the USA has the right to claims of being the "best".

Of course we are a great country. However, there is a lot of room for improvement. Unfortunately, the foolish arrogance and insane policies being promoted by the current political powers are leading us downward, not forward.

Ten Nobel Prize winning economists all claim that the proposed tax give away to the rich will do long-term damage to the economy. Even the administration's own budget analysis shows increasing record deficits, with no chance for more than 50 years to ever return to a budget surplus.

By: Jonathan Weisman  

Under Bush's original proposal, households with $40,000 to $50,000 in taxable income would receive an average tax cut of $482 and a boost of 1.2% to their total after-tax income. For households earning more than $1 million, the average tax cut would be more than $89,500, with an increase in their after-tax income of 4.2%, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The $550 billion version that passed the House last week is even more skewed. Those same middle-income households would receive a tax cut of $452 and an income boost of 1.1%, while millionaires would receive a cut of $93,537, enough to increase their after-tax income by 4.4%. The more modest $350 billion tax cut that passed the Senate Finance Committee last week would trim the average millionaire's tax cut a bit, to $64,431. But it would also trim the middle class cut to $415.

The 10-year $1.35 trillion tax cut that passed in 2001 also gave the rich a windfall...

By: Paul Krugman  

Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard - too hard, its critics say - to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors - the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire - which includes FOX News and the New York Post - is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market"...

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

- General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient

Editorial from:  

Ever since Bush was selected by the Supreme Court to live in the White House, we've seen supply-side theory - giving the people what you want to produce - being employed on the domestic front. It's a matter of government selling its citizens things they don't want to buy. The people voted for Gore, but the Supreme Court gave us Bush. The people want Church and State separated, but Bush and Sec. of Ed. Paige give us faith-based public education. The people said they preferred medical care and better education to tax cuts for the rich, but to no avail. The people want a clean environment, but the corporations pulling the Bush strings give us dirty water and dirty air. The people want fair, unbiased judges, but Bush appointees have solid records of being against civil rights and workers' rights. Initially, the people didn't want a war in Iraq, but the growing documentation of administration lies indicates that supply-side propaganda changed that. Now, mainstream pundits are beginning to wonder what kind of "democracy" Bush wants to provide for the Iraqi people.

Clearly, the Bush administration is a supply-side government. Don't give the people what they want to buy, but what you want to sell them, then invest in distortions and lies to make your sale.

The U.N. should resist the U.S. steamroller and press for an early end to the occupation of Iraq.

By: Jonathan Steele  

The performance of U.S. forces in the first month of their occupation has been too poor to justify their remaining a day longer. There is also a pragmatic case for their withdrawal. Some of those who have started shooting at U.S. troops are probably former Saddam Hussein loyalists. But they will soon be joined by patriotic Iraqis who have no love for the former dictator but find the presence of outsiders humiliating.

Iraqis need some help in recruiting and training more police, but replacing the U.S. army with a U.N. peacekeeping force is not a solution. Iraq is not at war with its neighbours, or at risk of it. Civil war is not imminent, and hasn't been for 50 years. The Kurdish leaders have shown great commitment to a united Iraq and are trying to secure a credible role in a central government. Everything points to the need to end the occupation now. Iraq should be allowed to govern itself.

By: Jay Bookman  

The concept of America as world empire, so controversial as to be almost unsayable just a few months ago, is now close to conventional wisdom. The topic is featured regularly on the covers of national newsmagazines, is discussed in popular books, and is celebrated on newspaper op-ed pages.

In fact, some of those who once shied from the word "empire", even as they advocated policies to that effect, now embrace the label with varying degrees of fervor.

"We need to err on the side of being strong", says Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for a New American Century. "And if people want to say we're an imperial power, fine."

By: Christopher Brauchli  

To help attack the problem and the poor (and while urging support for his massive tax reduction), President Bush asked Congress for $100 million and 650 new employees to identify potentially erroneous claims by the poor before any money is paid out. Under the new rules, the IRS is going to demand that folks claiming the credit produce ahead of time what is described as the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers.

Those thinking the foregoing is harsh should be reminded that the amounts of money that have been lost because of the cheating poor is estimated to be between $6.5 billion and $10 billion annually and that's a lot of money. In fairness, this must be contrasted with the $132 billion of which the government is cheated by the non-poor, the $70 billion lost through offshore accounts, the $46 billion evaded by corporations, and $30 billion evaded by partnership investors.

By: Molly Ivins  

Look, if there are no WMD's in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation.

What I cannot believe is that respected journalists - most notably Tom Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner - would simply dismiss the nonexistent WMD's as though it made no difference. Of course it matters if our government lies to us.

Why do you think people were so angry at Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin? At Richard Nixon over the "secret war" in Cambodia? Even at Bill Clinton over the less cosmic matter of whether he had sex with "that woman".

"I know you've got reasons to be scared. Fear is not a stupid emotion, and people who live without any fear are often stupid. But people who are paralyzed by fear are unfailingly miserable and unsuccessful. Human history has been a contest between the builders and the wreckers. Every single time, since people first rose out of the African savanna a hundred thousand years ago, when it came down to it, the builders have prevailed. The people who believed in our independence have prevailed, the people who believed in our common humanity have prevailed. I want you to use your education to make sure that in the 21^st Century, we prevail."

- Bill Clinton, to the graduating students of Syracuse University

By: Clarence Page  

Some people think Hollywood entertainers should stay out of politics, especially when the entertainers say something that those people do not like to hear. Personally, I don't see any reason why entertainers should stay out of politics when we have so many politicians who are trying to be entertainers.

In that vein, it was ironically significant that, on the same evening when President Bush made his spectacular May 1 landing on an aircraft carrier in a jet, the Dixie Chicks opened their national tour to a sellout crowd in South Carolina. Despite widespread calls for boycotts over an anti-Bush remark that the Dixie Chicks' lead singer Natalie Maines made in London, the trio has continued to put thousands of bottoms in arena seats.

By: mike@subversivetalk  

In what was clearly a Barnum & Bailey photo-op for the reelection of President Knucklehead, the lie was put out that the Commander-in-Chief had to land via jet fighter on the aircraft carrier because it was too far out to sea for a helicopter to get there. Never mind how lights, cameras, and coiffured bobble-headed reporters got there to cover the action. No, the President had to fly via jet fighter, in full pilot's regalia. It was even hinted that the President was flying the fighter himself. I presume that if you poll Americans, a small majority would swear that President Knucklehead landed the jet himself. You know the same percentage that blames Saddam for 9/11.

Well of course this ridiculous reasoning was debunked easily and early. The story then went that the President wanted to experience what it was like to land on the carrier. It was a joyride. The President, of course, was trained at significant taxpayer expense to learn how to fly jets back during the height of the Vietnam War. Remember? The gung-ho warrior President to-be slipped his way into an elite Texas Air National Guard unit through patronage and greased palms. The gung-ho, tough talking, whiskey swilling, whore-buying buck from Midland was too chicken to actually go fight for his country in Vietnam. So his Daddy bought him a toy-army to play with. Well, it turns out that the gung-ho, conservative patriot scion of old money couldn't even handle the responsibility of fake war. He went AWOL and his military records are classified Top Secret (not officially, but practically).

By: Glenn Somerville  

By any measure, the Bush administration looks likely to take the United States into a 2004 presidential campaign down hundreds of thousands of jobs - and under pressure to prove it can fix the problem.

Since President Bush took office in January 2001, some 2.7 million jobs have been lost from private-sector payrolls, including more than half a million in February through April alone, according to government statistics.

There is little in recent economic data to suggest a sharp resurgence in growth. The most optimistic projections see a recovery of only 1.5 million jobs by the end of 2004, leaving hundreds of thousands unemployed as they go to the polls.

By: Randolph T. Holhut  

President Bush entered office with the strongest economy in U.S. history. Unemployment was at its lowest levels since the 1960's. The federal budget was balanced and generating surpluses. And in two short years, he has managed to send every major economic indicator straight down.

This is why you won't likely hear President Bush talk about his economic achievements during the 2004 campaign. He hasn't any.

Instead, we Americans can expect a steady diet of fear and misinformation regarding the "war on terror" - a war without end against an ever-growing list of foes. The Bush administration seems to think we'll forget about our economic woes as long as they can keep us afraid.

Editorial from:  

The Senate is showing no more enlightenment on the subject of energy than the House. Except for a few modest incentives for energy efficiency, a bill now awaiting action on the Senate floor would do next to nothing to ease America's dependence on foreign oil. Apart from making an expensive and chancy bet on nuclear power, it would do next to nothing to address the problem of global warming. All in all, this bill represents a serious failure of Congressional leadership, aided and abetted by an administration that had asked for little in the way of imaginative ideas and is getting even less.

The energy bill is in fact two measures, a subsidy bill and a tax relief bill, which will be joined on the Senate floor and can thus be treated as one. Like a House version approved last month, the bill is essentially a compendium of tired ideas favoring the coal, oil, and and gas industries, including one or two ideas the House hadn't thought of - notably a provision that would authorize oil and gas exploration in coastal waters that have been faithfully protected since the first Bush administration.

"The wife is to subordinate herself to her husband. [The woman] is to place herself under the authority of the man."

- James Leon Holmes

"[T]he textual, historical, and doctrinal basis of that decision [Roe v. Wade] is so far flawed... that this Court should overrule it and return the law to the condition in which it was before that case was decided."

- Carolyn Kuhl

From:  

Lies, damn lies, and the Bush administration. Yup, the folks who were supposed to be as honest as the day is long seem recently to have been going out of their way to lay the BS on extra-thick. Top of the chart this week we have Team Bush Misinformation Squad, a group of individuals who've been desperately spinning the Top Gun story. Then we discover that the Bush Administration (2) have been lying to us about weapons of mass destruction all along. And there's George W. Bush (3) himself lying to us about his hydrogen-powered car initiative. But it's not all liars this week, no sir. Check out Ted Nugent (5) who is either incredibly naive or just plain stupid (we're going with the latter) and John Mott (7) a cop on a patriotic mission to destroy critical thinking at all costs. Yup, the idiocy runs the gamut this week, so enjoy.

By: Carl Hiaasen  

No scene better illustrates the charade of "homeland security" than the one that unfolded last Wednesday in the waters off Key Largo. Three Cuban rafters were allowed to swim ashore while the Coast Guard tossed life preservers and watched.

If the swimmers had been Haitians, they would have been dragged out of the water like tuna and shipped straight home.

Migrants from Haiti are turned away or locked up, while migrants from Cuba - a nation whose government is openly sympathetic to anti-American causes - are usually accepted here with minimal screening.

Stop on President's Tax Cut Tour Aimed at Neb. Senator Would Close Plant for Most of Two Shifts

By: Mike Allen  

About 340 workers at an Omaha plastics factory will lose pay or have to work next Saturday to make up for time lost during a visit by President Bush on Monday to promote his "jobs and growth plan", their boss said today.

Brad Crosby, president of Airlite Plastics Co., said about 170 of his workers will lose a full day's pay and another 170 will be docked for part of their pay for Monday unless they make up the time they spend attending Bush's speech.

Airlite, which will shut down for its first shift and part of the second shift to provide a photogenic backdrop for Bush's speech, will be the Monday afternoon stop on a two-day swing by Bush to pressure Senators to support a large tax cut as the measure heads to the Senate floor. Bush will stand near a production line that makes polystyrene containers for shipping steak, vaccines, and other goods.

By: Bob  

I have been accused of being a communist, a traitor, and a disloyal American by people who have been deluded by the garbage they are being fed. When I asked them to be more specific, I was told I should support the President during a time of war. When I ask them whether they thought the war in Iraq was justified, they all responded that it was because of what happened on September 11, 2001. When I countered that there was no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9-11, I was essentially called a liar. What more proof is necessary to show that the media have not been serving the public interest when this sort of misinformation is allowed to persist?

The traditional role of the media has been to serve as a force to keep the government honest. Now, however, they are clearly serving as the government's advocate. Theoretically, this alone should be enough to stop further deregulation of the media, but it won't.

From:  

Common sense demands that the U.N.'s weapons inspectors return to Iraq without any further delay. As Tony Blair reaffirmed recently, the threat thought to be posed by Iraqi weapons was the principal reason for launching the war. Without independent, international verification of Iraq's capability, any future U.S. and British evidence showing their action to be justified may not be believed, as Britain's former U.N. envoy, Sir Crispin Tickell, trenchantly noted yesterday.

The U.S. argument that security concerns prevent the U.N.'s return will not wash; its own search teams have been at work for weeks, although they have found nothing of any great significance. Suspicions thus gain ground that Washington and London exaggerated the WMD threat for political purposes, that their intelligence was either faulty or used selectively, and that they now have something to hide...

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