By: David Michael Rothschild  

Governor Whitman also used another popular ploy to pay off her tax cuts; letting the lower levels of government raise the revenue that she eliminated. What happens when you cut aid to the municipalities and the counties? They are forced to raise taxes and cut services. What happens when you refuse aid to the states? They are forced to raise taxes and cut services. Even if the lower levels of government could avoid cutting essential services, the problem with shifting the tax burden to local sovereignties is that each level of government has increasingly regressive tax structures. The federal income tax is progressive. States raise money on generally less progressive income tax structures, sales taxes (which are at best flat), and lotteries (which are completely regressive). Property taxes (at best flat) are the most common way for counties and municipalities to raise revenue. Governor Whitman was looking for a way to defer the pain of taxes to local governments away from her domain. The prospect of power and popularity drove her to create a more regressive tax structure, although I am sure that she understood that she was shifting the tax burden to the working poor. While I have concluded that Whitman is a power- and money-hungry popularity hound, with no true convictions, the similar play on the federal stage is much more sinister, with much more disastrous consequences.

The federal government, run by the Bush regime, is basing its tax model on New Jersey. It is cutting taxes, but not spending (although it is not increasing spending on most services, standardized programs such as Social Security and Medicare are increasing on their own), and shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy, to the middle classes...

Editorial from:  

Many of the Bush administration's judicial nominees have been evasive about their positions on abortion, but not William Pryor. Mr. Pryor, Alabama's attorney general, has declared that Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling upholding abortion rights, "ripped the Constitution and ripped out the life of millions of unborn children". He has shown the same lack of subtlety - and fierce ideological agenda - on issues ranging from civil rights to states' rights and gay rights. His extremism and disdain for the legal rights of many Americans make him unsuited to be a federal judge.

Mr. Pryor, who has been nominated to the Atlanta-based United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit, has a record of incendiary comments that show a lack of judicial temperament and a cynical view of the law. When he disagreed with the Supreme Court's decision to delay an execution in a capital punishment case, he dismissed the court as "nine octogenarian lawyers". On another occasion, he ended a speech with a prayer for "no more Souters", a blast at Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a moderate.

As Alabama attorney general, Mr. Pryor has turned his office into a taxpayer-financed right-wing law firm...

Nothing personal, George...

It's just the economy...

Report from:  

Methane emissions created by grass-munching cows, sheep, deer, and goats are believed to account for about half of New Zealand's emissions of greenhouse gases.

Now the country is attempting to clear the air by introducing a levy on pungent emissions by mid-2004.

The tax will fund a new Agriculture Emissions Research body to meet commitments to the Kyoto Protocol global environment agreement.

From:  

This is becoming depressingly familiar: George W. Bush appearing at the top of the list because of the disaster going on in Iraq. But there are some other important areas of conservative idiocy to attend to this week. Take Orrin Hatch (2) for example, caught in a double-whammy of stupidity and hypocrisy. Or John Warner (3), making a fool of himself in Afghanistan. Or Bill O'Reilly (5), who is just a huge crybaby. And that's not all - we've also got Donald Rumsfeld (8) comparing Baghdad to Washington DC, Louis Zizza (9) picking a fight with Pam Anderson, and Tucker Carlson (10) getting ready to eat shoe. Enjoy.

"On Friday, Senators on the intelligence committee cut a deal that lets 'a thorough review' - ie: a Republican whitewash - go forward into whether the spy community ginned up prewar intelligence. The Democrats, already Fausted by their prewar fear of being pantywaists, naturally caved on open hearings. Open, closed, who cares? Congress is looking in the wrong place. They're scrutinizing those who gathered the intelligence, rather than those who pushed to distort it."

- Maureen Dowd, in her op-ed in the New York Times, June 22, 2003

By: Eleanor Clift  

Bush wins the spin for now. The debate over weapons of mass destruction is an inside-the-Beltway story; it's not resonating with the public. The bigger question is existential: do the gods punish hubris?

This is the most arrogant administration in memory. Every day brings another issue where a careful observer of the political scene cannot believe what's happening. The latest outrage has the White House spinmeisters editing a report by the EPA on the status of the environment to omit mounting concern about climate change. The spinners have already stricken the phrase "global warming" in favor of the more benign "climate change". The offending line declared: "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." In its place, the White House inserted a bunch of gobbledygook about how the "complexity of the Earth system" and various "interconnections" make it a challenge to render scientific judgments.

Howls from environmentalists go unanswered. The administration's attitude is like the phone company before the breakup of AT&T when Lily Tomlin, the comedic actress, appeared on stage as a telephone operator telling irate customers: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

Editorial from:  

The EPA and the National Academy of Sciences both issued reports last year targeting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicle exhausts as primary sources of these greenhouse gases.

But Mr. Bush, who as a presidential candidate called for limiting power plant emissions, now seems determined to forestall such costly consequences for the energy industry by raising doubts about whether it is truly at fault.

Last year, he simply dismissed the EPA report as a document "put out by the bureaucracy". This year, his political aides headed off EPA at the pass.

By: Paul Farhi  

Sources here confirmed the generally heroic portrayal of the President and his aides, including the dramatic scene in which Bush is hopscotching the country in Air Force One as a security precaution. When a Secret Service agent questions the order to fly back to Washington by saying: "But Mr. President...", Bush replies firmly: "Try 'Commander in Chief', Whose present command is: Take the President home!"

Chetwynd said his approach to the post-Sept. 11 story was similar to that of a 1974 TV movie, The Missiles of October, a dramatization of the showdown between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba in 1962. "This is about how George Bush and his team came to terms with the reality around them and led the country in a new direction", he said.

He noted that the take-me-home scene is based on actual events. "Did [the President] assert his right to go home? Did the President decide to overrule the Secret Service? Yes, he did."

In researching D.C. 9/11, Chetwynd had access to top White House officials, including Bush. What's more, Chetwynd ran the script past a group of conservative Washington pundits, including Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke.

By: Crispin Sartwell  

If you seriously believed the Bush administration that Iraq posed an immediate threat because of its weapons programs, or that Saddam was intimately connected with al-Qaeda, you richly deserved your deception.

But the case was luridly bad from the get-go, riddled with holes that were obvious to anyone who was watching. We kept reaching for crudely forged documents and aluminum tubes. When Secretary of State Colin Powell got up in front of the United Nations to make the case that Saddam was connected to Osama bin Laden, he used as his main point the existence of an al-Qaeda training camp in Iraq. The camp was in the Kurdish autonomous zone, controlled not by Saddam but by the people to whom we had allied ourselves. That would have justified bombing D.C. - but not Baghdad.

By: Naomi Klein  

...According to InterAction, the network of 160 relief and development NGO's that hosted the conference, Mr. Natsios was "irritated" that starving and sick Iraqi and Afghan children didn't realize that their food and vaccines were coming to them courtesy of George W. Bush. From now on, NGO's had to do a better job of linking their humanitarian assistance to U.S. foreign policy and making it clear that they are "an arm of the U.S. government". If they didn't, InterAction reported, "Natsios threatened to personally tear up their contracts and find new partners."

For aid workers, there are even more strings attached to U.S. dollars. USAID told several NGO's that have been awarded humanitarian contracts that they cannot speak to the media - all requests from reporters must go through Washington. Mary McClymont, CEO of InterAction, calls the demands "unprecedented", and says: "It looks like the NGO's aren't independent and can't speak for themselves about what they see and think."

Many humanitarian leaders are shocked to hear their work described as "an arm" of government; most see themselves as independent (that would be the "non-governmental" part of the name).

"One thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain WMD from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more."

- pResident Smirk, in his pilot costume, aboard the USS Lincoln, May 1, 2003

"Weapons and explosives smuggled out of Iraq after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime may have ended up in the hands of al-Qaida militants in Saudi Arabia, according to Saudi officials and a former Iraqi army officer. Part of a major arms cache discovered by Saudi authorities during a May 6 raid in Riyadh appears to have come from Iraq..."

- Mohamad Bazzi, middle east correspondent for Newsday

Editorial from:  

The Bush administration, in particular its Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, has always wanted to transfer more control of America's public lands to state and local governments and to open them to a wider range of commercial and recreational uses. But Congressional Democrats and some moderate Republicans are only now realizing that what Ms. Norton is trying to engineer is not just a rebalancing of the scales but a revolution in public policy deeply at odds with a long bipartisan tradition of environmental stewardship and more threatening than anything attempted by James Watt, Ronald Reagan's reactionary Interior Secretary and Ms. Norton's onetime mentor.

The latest provocation is Ms. Norton's apparent decision to challenge a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit that she had failed to protect three million acres of public land in Utah threatened by off-road vehicles. The administration conceded in court that the vehicles were tearing up the land. But it took the bizarre position that the public, and in effect the courts, had no real standing in the matter, that when and how to protect wilderness were questions best left to the department itself.

By: James Ridgeway  

Perhaps Bush's inaction stems from his own history of stumbling in the corporate back alleys. Last week, the media revived a case from the early 90's, where it looks like Bush was involved in insider trading with the stock of an oil company of which he was an official. He dumped the shares shortly before the firm tanked, then failed to report his activity to the Securities and Exchange Commission for months. The ensuing investigation, handled by an agency whose director was a Bush appointee and whose general counsel was Bush the younger's own former attorney, was dropped.

Though Bush has shown he can play the game, too, he's not quite ready for the majors. The big difference between him and a guy like Kenneth Lay is that Lay at least was successful. Before he left the world of commerce for a life in politics, Bush lost money time and again. "It was dreadful", one investor told the Wall Street Journal. "I think we got [back] maybe 20¢ on the dollar", said another.

The hapless Shrub took shelter under his family tree. Nowhere is this blue-blood network more evident than in the feeble activities of the President before he became governor of Texas...

"Bill Clinton had (and still has) wet dreams over beautful women. George Bush, in contrast, has wet dreams over executions. Bill Clinton loved (and still loves) life. George Bush, in constrast, loves death. George Bush loves attacking nations that can't hit back, loves executing poor minorities, and loves stomping on women, especially poor and minority women. Remember how he oh-so-glibly, and with great relish, mocked Carla Faye Tucker's last cries for mercy: 'Oh, please, please, don't kill me!'? Remember that? What an asshole. I rest my case."

- lipsmacker, from the Smirking Chimp forum

By: Walt Brasch  

When Bill Clinton came into office, after George H.W. Bush had led the nation into a series of domestic crises, there were 10 million unemployed, a federal debt that was four times greater than under Reagan/Bush, higher welfare and crime cases than ever before, massive environmental and MediCare cuts, and a $230 billion deficit. When Mr. Clinton left office eight years later, the nation had experienced the biggest economic expansion in history. More than 22 million new jobs were created, unemployment dropped to the lowest rate in 30 years, and welfare cases were down by almost half. He also stopped massive Medicare and environmental cuts imposed by the previous Republican administration, and set aside more land for environment than anyone since Teddy Roosevelt a century earlier. He put 150,000 Americans into AmeriCorps to aid the impoverished, added the family medical leave policy, special tax credits for families whose children were in college, provided federal funding for more than 100,000 teachers and 10,000 police, and allowed two million more impoverished children to benefit from health coverage. He created stronger ties to other nations, directed the biggest expansion of the GI Bill of Rights since World War II, and gave America a $xx billion surplus...

"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months - fighting the administration, the White House. As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off, and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."

- " Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, died during the attacks on the World Trade Center towers

By: Peter Slevin  

The death of a U.S. soldier yesterday near Baghdad brought to nine the number of troops killed in Iraq this month in a string of sporadic rocket and sniper attacks. Fifty-four Americans have died in accidents or military action since President Bush declared the war ended on May 1, equal to more than one-third of the 139 wartime deaths.

Asked why there has been so little public discussion by the Bush defense and foreign policy team about the continuing attacks, one official said other issues have dominated the agenda, including the administration's efforts at Middle East peacemaking and the dispute over evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

"Part of it is that everybody is dealing with the WMD story", the official said.

"If Bush's definitive [State of the Union] speech was not triple-checked for accuracy, then the White House is grossly incompetent. If it was checked and the several untrue items were detected and allowed to remain in the speech, the White House is contemptuous of the truth and of all of us out here. If it was checked and the untrue items were not identified (which is what Rice is claiming), the intelligence process of the United States is a shambles..."

- Brian Cloughley, from his article Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing, on the CounterPunch website

Is the country better off with a President who actually has an active libido? Hell yes.

By: Mark Morford  

Look. It ain't rocket science. Lack of sex, repression of libido, ignorance of sexuality or sex education, lack of sexual celebration or outlet - these things, on a national level, on an energetic universal level, can only result in conflict, bitterness, angst and war, and the need to flaunt bogus machismo, invent new enemies, and strut around the planet thinking you're literally God's gift to empire when you're really just a draconian impotent bully.

Look at the world's most rigid and violent and oppressive nations for proof, at Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, China, et al. Notice their attitudes toward sex and women and sexual expression. Draw easy parallel with Ashcroft and Dick Cheney and Rove and BushCo's anti-gay anti-women anti-choice propaganda. Voilà.

Now, glimpse the current state of American affairs, that acidic stifling powder-keg feeling, that sense of sad closed-mindedness and deep-seated fear and the sense that the only real screwing going on is what the USA Patriot Act and the 2004 Bush budget are doing to you, right now...

By: Cynthia Cotts  

If media companies want to boost ratings and credibility at the same time, they should follow the lead of New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Nicholas D. Kristof and make weapons of mass destruction the top story of the summer. Not only have President Bush and his administration exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had WMD, but now that news of their lies has leaked out, the pro-war camp is spinning like mad. The odds of exposing a major cover-up are looking very good indeed.

In retrospect, the Bush administration's most publicized war stories have all been the products of smoke and mirrors. Contrary to the initial hype, the Hussein "decapitation strike" turned up no bodies and no bunkers. Chemical Ali walked out alive. Jessica Lynch was never shot, stabbed, or tortured by Iraqis. And despite all the hot tips Ahmad Chalabi spoon-fed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the WMD search teams have not found a single silver bullet or smoking gun. The war on Iraq is a Byzantine puzzle that begins and ends with a lie. The media have an obligation to expose it.

By: A.C. Revkin and Katharine Seelye  

The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs.

The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

By: Frank Davies  

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. And 22% said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001.

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq, and were never used. Most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. None were Iraqis.

How could so many people be so wrong about life-and-death information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years?

By: Arianna Huffington  

By all accounts, the battle within the Bush administration over just what information should have been used - or spun or hidden - to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world was a knockdown, drag-out fight between the facts and a zealous, highly politicized "who needs proof?" mind-set. And the truth was left writhing on the floor.

Hey, why let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good war?

This pathological pattern of disregarding inconvenient reality is not just troubling - it's deadly. And it's threatening to drag us into a Sisyphean struggle against evildoers in Syria, Iran, North Korea, or whatever locale Karl Rove thinks would best advance "Operation Avoid 41's Fate".

"Only when lions get to write history will hunters cease to be heroes."

- African proverb

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