By: Gene Lyons  

It turns out that there's a connection between the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on the United States and the war in Iraq after all. But it's not the one President Junior and his advisors expected to find. Instead of unearthing Saddam Hussein's vaunted "weapons of mass destruction" or producing evidence of collusion with Osama bin Laden, what the fall of Baghdad has again exposed is the Bush administration's stubborn incapacity to heed "intelligence" that doesn't fit its pre-existing world-view.

Moving unwelcome information up the chain of command is difficult in ALL hierarchical bureaucracies, from the Little Rock Police Department to the CIA. Hence, in part, the CIA's failure to anticipate events as portentous as the collapse of the Soviet Union or India's development of nuclear weapons. Nobody's eager to give the boss the bad news. But the problem becomes acute when the people at the top are politically ruthless, determined ideologues, like the Bush administration's dominant figures.

Add extreme dishonesty and the media-enhanced cult of personality that has developed to cover Bush's obvious intellectual shortcomings, and you've got yourself the makings of a real mess...

No question about it... Bush HAS turned this country around!
Fuk'n IDIOT!

By: Chris Marshall  

If high-ranking intelligence officials are to be believed, there is a smoking gun which strongly suggests that George Bush should be impeached for lying to the American people in order to generate support and justification for war. Everyone should be clear about what it is. There is much to criticize about how the Bush administration lied and manipulated public opinion. But right now the single most damaging piece of evidence in the case against Bush is the forged letter proffered as evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium for use in nuclear weapons, which Bush touted in his State of the Union speech. It now appears that not only was the document a forgery, it is almost inconceivable that Bush and his cronies didn't know it was a forgery before they presented it to the American people and the world as evidence - a clearly impeachable offense.

Weeks After Bush's Declaration of Victory, U.S. Troops Still Fighting and Dying

By: Robert Burns  

When President Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, there was little discussion of what he meant. For all practical purposes, it seemed the war was over.

It is not.

Since the President made his statement to waves of applause from sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, 47 American servicemen have died in Iraq. Commanders say there is much more fighting ahead.

The total number of American deaths in Iraq since the war began March 19 is 183, according to the Pentagon's count. The number stood at 138 on May 1; two weeks ago it was at 171.

By: Paul Krugman  

Last Thursday a House subcommittee met to finalize next year's homeland security appropriation. The ranking Democrat announced that he would introduce an amendment adding roughly $1 billion for areas like port security and border security that, according to just about every expert, have been severely neglected since Sept. 11. He proposed to pay for the additions by slightly scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $1 million per year.

The subcommittee's chairman promptly closed the meeting to the public, citing national security - though no classified material was under discussion. And the bill that emerged from the closed meeting did not contain the extra funding.

It was a perfect symbol of the reality of the Bush administration's "war on terror". Behind the rhetoric - and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny - lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn't fit the administration's agenda.

"I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much. It was like a mosquito bite in the evening that is there in the morning, an irritant."

- Hans Blix, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, in an interview with the Guardian

By: Paul Krugman  

So what will Mr. DeLay and his associates do with their lock on power, once it is firmly established? They will push through a radical right-wing agenda. For example, expect to see much less environmental protection: Mr. DeLay has described the Environmental Protection Agency as "the Gestapo".

Above all, expect to see the wall between church and state come tumbling down. Mr. DeLay has said that he went into politics to promote a "biblical worldview", and that he pursued President Clinton because he didn't share that view. Where would this worldview be put into effect? How about the schools: after the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay called a press conference in which he attributed the tragedy to the fact that students are taught the theory of evolution.

There's no point in getting mad at Mr. DeLay and his clique: they are what they are. I do, however, get angry at moderates, liberals and traditional conservatives who avert their eyes, pretending that current disputes are just politics as usual. They aren't - what we're looking at here is a radical power play, which if it succeeds will transform our country. Yet it's considered uncool to point that out.

From:  

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I could swear I saw Dubya standing in front of a big "Mission Accomplished" banner a couple of weeks ago. Well, mission ain't accomplished folks, which is why the Bush administration are in the number one slot this week. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans (2) are trying hard to downplay any investigations into the missing WMD scandal, Tom DeLay (4) is up to all kinds of shenanigans, and Larry Craig (5) shows us what Republicans really mean when they say "support the troops". Bringing up the rear we have Trent Lott (7), who thinks people will be interested to read his autobiography (they won't), Halliburton (8), who are cashing in nicely on the war in Iraq, and George W. Bush (10) who... well... you'll see! Enjoy.

"Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic, and cruel."

- Time magazine's Joe Klein

By: Mary Dalrymple  

"If they want the child tax credit, they ought to be able to have it in a package that actually creates jobs and helps the economy grow", said DeLay. He said the expanded Senate bill will come before the House on Thursday. After passage, it would have to return to the Senate.

The House vote will be on an $82 billion package that, like the Senate's, expands the child tax credit for low-income families. Low-wage workers who make between $10,500 and $27,000 could claim a refund worth 15% of their income over $10,500.

House Republicans want to extend the full benefit also to married couples who make up to $150,000. The benefit currently starts to disappear for couples that make $110,000 or more.

From:  

President Bush's approval rating has dropped to 57% from 73% since April as voters soured on his handling of the economy, a poll published on Wednesday showed.

The Quinnipiac University survey revealed that nearly twice as many American voters were more concerned about the sagging economy than about the possibility of terrorist attacks in the United States.

"'Like father, like son' must be a phrase they hate to hear in the White House", said polling director Maurice Carroll. "Bush scores in the stratosphere on the fight against bad guys abroad and at home. But like his father after Gulf War I, his numbers on the economy are low."

"[H]ow many million blowjobs are worth the life of one soldier sent to die in a FARCE?"

- Kebo, from a Smirking Chimp commentary

By: Thomas L. Friedman  

Whenever Mr. Bush says: "It's not the government's money, it's your money", Democrats should point out that what he is really saying is: "It's not the government's services, it's your services" - and thanks to the Bush tax cuts, soon you'll be paying for many of them yourself.

As the former Nixon-era Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson just observed in this newspaper, when Mr. Bush took office the 10-year budget projection showed a $5.6 trillion surplus - something that would easily prefinance the cost of Social Security. The first Bush tax cut, coupled with continued spending growth and the post-9/11 costs, brought the projected surplus down to $1 trillion. "Unfazed by this turnaround," notes Mr. Peterson, "the Bush administration proposed a second tax-cut package in 2003 in the face of huge new fiscal demands, including a war in Iraq and an urgent 'homeland security' agenda." Result: now the 10-year fiscal projection is for a $4 trillion deficit.

This in turn will shrink the federal government's ability to help out the already strapped states. Since most states have to run balanced budgets, that will mean less health care and kindergarten for children and the poor, higher state college tuition, smaller local school budgets, and fewer state service workers. And Lord only knows how we'll finance Social Security.

Everyone wants taxes to be cut, but no one wants services to be cut, which is why Democrats have to reframe the debate - and show President Bush for what he really is: a man who is not putting money into your pocket, but who is removing government services and safety nets from your life.

"Intelligence throughout the decade showed that they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out they did have a weapons program."

- Pretender-in-Thief George W. Bush

Congressional Analyst Now Sees This Year's Deficit Exceeding $400 Billion

By: Alan Fram  

The Congressional Budget Office now expects this year's federal deficit to exceed $400 billion, shattering the previous record even as President Bush and lawmakers consider creating expensive new prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients.

A $400 billion deficit would be nearly 4% the size of the U.S. economy. Many economists consider that to be a significant measure of the government's ability to afford its red ink. As the condition of the budget worsened in the 1980's and early 1990's, there were seven annual federal deficits that were at least that large compared to the economy.

This year will mark the second consecutive one with a budget deficit, following four straight annual surpluses in the second term of the Clinton administration.

By: Thomas Oliphant  

For those who enjoy contortionist acts, President Bush has one for the ages on Medicare this week.

Out on the road the President will appear the apostle of bipartisanship, repeating his handlers' most poll-tested phrases to market more choices, security, reform, and "a strengthened Medicare system". Back here, he will be undermining a bipartisan idea that actually fulfills the goals his puppeteers have him "embracing".

Bush-style conservatism is not the free market, competitive kind, however. It is big-contributor favoritism, the kind insiders in Washington love. The President remains committed, even as Bush was regurgitating his buzzword bromides, to a Medicare proposal designed to favor the health insurance racket and to herd senior citizens into insurance schemes they would not embrace if choice and a free market were Bush values.

Editorial from:  

The fact that federal agencies were involved in the partisan squabble is outrageous. Investigators usually assigned to track down terrorists or drug smugglers were sent off to try to find a small plane that had ferried one of the missing Democrats out of Texas. Documents relating to the search were later destroyed - in theory because the search did not involve a crime. Democrats are well within their rights to demand state and federal inquiries.

The original Republican plan to draw new Congressional districts in outrageously contorted forms in order to capture current Democratic seats was, at the very minimum, political dirty pool. But the idea that Republican honchos felt that they had the right to bring federal security forces into the case pushes the issue to a whole different level, one that smacks of a sense of entitlement and disrespect for normal legal boundaries.

"Something got screwed up in terms of your priorities if you think it's more important to get rid of the dividend tax than it is to take care of 11 million kids."

- David Broder, on Meet the Press

"It's the richest Americans - the top 1% - who get the lion's share of the tax cuts, people like Treasury Sec. John Snow, Dick Cheney... Eleven million children in families with incomes roughly between $10,000 and $26,000 a year will not be getting the check that was supposed to be in the mail this summer. Eleven million children punished for being poor, even as the rich are rewarded for being rich."

- Bill Moyers, on Now

By: Alexander Bolton  

Democrats in Congress are accusing Republicans of turning a blind eye to contracts worth billions of dollars that the Bush administration has granted to companies with strong GOP ties as part of the effort to rebuild Iraq.

In the absence of any Republican investigations, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is looking into the matter.

Two of the biggest contracts have gone to a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney served for five years as CEO, and the Bechtel Group, which counts a former Republican cabinet official and a member of President Bush's export council among its executives.

A number of the contracts, such as the one to Halliburton, have been awarded without competition, creating the appearance that the government may be granting special favors or not spending its reconstruction funds efficiently, Democrats say.

By: Paul Krugman  

The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics - many of them current or former intelligence analysts - who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier".) In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous".

Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.

I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.

Stolen from:  

Watching Al Franken cut Bill O'Reilly to pieces last week on C-SPAN, (it sure is tougher debating someone when you don't control their microphone, huh Bill?), Mr. O'Reilly spouted a number of oft repeated right wing platitudes that constitute his "beliefs". Among them was the popular right-wing tonic; Mr. O'Reilly doesn't believe in "wealth transfer". Ever since Tom DeLay gave an expanded child credit to everyone but the poor and Bush told him he had gone too far, the idea of the government facilitating "wealth transfer" has become something a political hot potato. So let's take a look at what the right means when it says it doesn't believe in "wealth transfer".

When Republicans talk about "wealth transfer", they are usually referring to programs like welfare and food stamps, where poor people are prevented from starving. Let them eat cake! say the Republicans. Since Republican constituents hate the poor, there is little downside for Republicans who object to the wealth transfer that keeps poor children alive. But programs for the poor are just the tip of the federal iceberg when it comes to "wealth transfer".

"For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

- John F. Kennedy, from his commencement address at Yale University, June 11, 1962

From:  

You are about to enter a Thin-Skin Zone - because that pathetic crybaby Bill O'Reilly is in the top two spots of our list this week, after receiving a much-deserved verbal drubbing from Al Franken. Meanwhile, George W. Bush (3) is puttering around the Middle East in a golf cart, and we learned that Dick Cheney (4) was putting pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to cook their reports. We've also got a couple of homophobes, the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts (6) and John Ashcroft (7). In Congress, we've got Bill Frist (8) still pushing his ridiculous filibuster-busting scheme, and Tom DeLay (9) helping cover up the fact that we still haven't found any WMD's in Iraq. Enjoy.

"We shouldn't have spending we can't afford, and we shouldn't have tax cuts that we can't afford, particularly for the people at the top who don't need them... We cannot - cannot - in an effort to protect ourselves, in an effort to fight this war on terrorism, allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights and our freedoms and our liberties. Those things go to the heart and soul of what makes this country great."

- John Edwards, to the congregation at the Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God and Christ in Milwaukee, June 1, 2003

By: Anita Creamer  

The lies are shaping our lives, our world, and our future. Yet no one much seems to mind. Strange, this disconnection between what seems to be reality and what we choose instead to believe.

Maybe the Matrix really is in control, and while we busily go through the pretense of our lives, those in charge are feeding on our souls.

We're living in a dishonest age, an era of fraudulence.

The President took us into war on the basis of what seems to have been sketchy intelligence manipulated to provide the Bush administration the rationale it needed to do what it already intended to do: overthrow Saddam Hussein and make Americans feel better about the post-Sept. 11 world by kicking a little Middle Eastern derrière.

"The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons."

- G.W. Bush, in the Rose Garden, Sept. 26, 2002

"No reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities."

- DIA report, Sept., 2002

By: John Dean  

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose".

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all Presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

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