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Bush Stem Cell Lie: Bush Vetoes Stem Cell Bill, Although Cells
"would be destroyed in any case" , Politex
The photo-op following Bush's veto of the stem cell bill passed by Congress was attended by "scores of children born as a result of an embryo-adoption program and their parents," according to NYT reporter David Stout. Looking at the children, Bush said, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.” Yet, later in the article Stout reports, "the bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday, and earlier by the House, would apply to excess embryos harvested for in-vitro fertilization that would be destroyed in any case if not used in research." GOP Senate majority leader Bill Frist and GOP anti-abortion senator Orrin Hatch were among 19 Republicans who backed the bill and rejected Bush, apparently understanding the distinction between the specifics of the bill and Bush's use of the children to confuse the issue.
The Future: Bush's Economic Dictatorship (excerpts), Part 4, Teresa Tritch
...The growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.......C. The Too-Easy Answer
When confronted with evidence of growing income inequality, Bush administration officials invariably say the answer is more and better education. “We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap,” said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, in a typical retort last January when tax data showed an increasing concentration of wealth among the highest-income Americans. Education is critically important to individuals, society, the economy and democracy itself, and deserves strong government support. But it is neither a satisfactory explanation, nor a remedy, for today's income inequality.
Today, according to the bureau, 37 percent of flight attendants have completed college, as have 35 percent of tour escorts, 21 percent of embalmers, and 13 percent of both security guards and casino dealers. Mr. Hacker notes that more people are expected to earn college degrees in preparation for well-paying professions. “But we cannot expect the economy will automatically create better-paid positions to match the cohort acquiring higher education,” he writes. Underscoring the point, the Bush administration's own Economic Report of the President in 2006 shows that average annual earnings of college graduates fell by 5 percent from 2000 to 2004. In those four years, the difference between the average yearly pay of a college graduate and a high school graduate shrank from 93 percent to 80 percent.
IV. The Future of Income Inequality
The fast-growing gap between the rich and poor and middle-class Americans is not something that has just happened. The Bush policies are an attempt to dismantle the institutions and norms that have long worked to ameliorate inequities — progressive taxation, the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicaid and so on. The aims that can’t be accomplished outright — like cuts in Social Security — are being teed up by running deficits that could force the shrinkage of government programs, even though the public would not likely condone many such cuts unless compelled to by a fiscal crisis. Such policies are grounded in an ideology that began taking shape some 30 years ago, when economic policy makers began to disdain the notion of harnessing and protecting society’s collective potential in favor of crafting incentives to align individuals’ interests with those of the market. This campaign has gone by many names — “starve the beast,” or “repeal the New Deal.” Economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, calls that approach “you’re on your own,” or YOYO....
The problem now is that most any attempt to reduce inequality — even a measly increase in the minimum wage — is rejected as misguided. And policies that under one set of economic conditions might allow for a justifiable modicum of inequality are pursued beyond all reason. For instance, the rationale for the tax cuts in 2001 was to return the budget surplus that Mr. Bush inherited from President Clinton. The rationale for the tax cuts in 2002 and 2003 and 2006 was to stimulate the economy. The surplus has long since been replaced by big deficits, the jobless recovery ended three years ago and inequality is on the rise....
The Present: Bush's Economic Dictatorship (excerpts), Part 3, Teresa Tritch
...The growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one....III. Inequality During the Bush Years
For the last few years, the tide has been rising again, but most boats have been staying where they are, or sinking. One key reason is that the link between rising productivity and broad economic prosperity has been severed. Take another look at this graph. During the years that George W. Bush has been in the White House, productivity growth has been stronger than ever. But the real compensation of all but the top 20 percent of income earners has been flat or falling. Gains in wages, salaries and benefits have been increasingly concentrated at the uppermost rungs of the income ladder. The Bush administration would like you to believe that the situation will correct itself. Most recently, the new Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., reiterated the administration’s viewpoint at his confirmation hearing in June when he said that “economic growth, job growth, productivity growth, hopefully will be followed by increases in wage income.” Well, hoping certainly won’t make it so.
Neither will growth alone. As the post-World War II history of income inequality illustrates, productivity improvement is only one piece of the prosperity puzzle. The economic health of most American families also depends greatly on what government does. If it merely “gets out of the way,” inequality is bound to persist and — if recent results are any indication of future performance — worsen. The Bush administration, though, has not even done anything as benign as get out of the way. The policies it has pursued — affirmatively and aggressively — have widened the gap between rich and poor.
A. The Tax Wedge
Tax cuts are the most obvious example. The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center computed the combined effects of tax cut legislation from 2001, 2003 and 2006. The tax cuts’ contribution to the income gap was significant. In 2006, the average tax cut for households with incomes of more than $1 million — the top two-tenths of 1 percent — is $112,000 which works out to a boost of 5.7 percent in after tax income. That’s considerably higher than the 5 percent boost garnered by the top 1 percent. It’s far greater than the 2.5 percent increase of the middle fifth of households, and fully 19 times greater than the 0.3 percent gain of the poorest fifth of households. The disparities are driven by tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the most affluent....
B. The Assault on Programs for the Poor and Middle Class
Tax cuts are not the only policies widening the gap between the rich and other Americans. Earlier this year, President Bush signed into law a measure that will cut $39 billion over the next five years from domestic programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015. The president and the Republican Congress have also done harm to the finances of the poorest Americans — and to the notion of basic fairness — by not increasing the federal minimum wage — it has been $5.15 since 1997 While C.E.O. salaries have been soaring, the take-home pay of waitresses and janitors has been hit hard by inflation. The Bush administration has also been trying, with mixed success so far, to pursue other policies that would have the effect of shifting money to the rich. The most ominous is its often-repeated desire to “address our long-term unfunded entitlement obligations.” That’s code for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent while cutting Social Security....In 2004, over the objections of Congress, the administration overturned time-and-a-half regulation for overtime....
The History: Bush's Economic Dictatorship (excerpts), Part 2, Teresa Tritch
...The growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one....II. A Brief History of Income Inequality
While it has long been the case that the rich do better than everyone else, it has not always been true that, in the process, the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squeezed. In post-World War II America, between 1947 and the early 1970’s, all income groups shared in the nation’s economic growth. Poor families actually had a higher growth in real annual income than other groups. Part of the reason was a sharp rise in labor productivity. As workers produced more, the economy grew and so did compensation — wages, salaries and benefits (see graph)....Government policies worked to ensure that productivity gains translated into more pay for Americans at all levels, including regular increases in the minimum wage and greater investment in the social safety net. Full employment was also a government priority. And, of course, unions were strong back then, giving workers bargaining power.
From the mid-1970’s until 1995, the trend reversed. The gap between the rich and poor widened at a rapid clip. The upper echelons — generally the top 20 percent of American households — experienced steady gains, while families in the bottom 40 percent were faced with declining or stagnating incomes. The growing divide coincided with a slowdown in productivity growth and a reversal in the government policies that had been promoting income equality. Legislators balked at raising the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit, a feature of the tax code that rewards the working poor by ensuring that work pays better than welfare. During the “supply side” era in the 1980’s, fostered by the policies of Ronald Reagan, taxes became less progressive. The goal of full employment was eclipsed by a focus on inflation fighting that remains to this day. As trade began to play an ever bigger role in the American economy, manufacturing jobs diminished and labor unions declined, reducing workers’ clout in setting compensation. Regulatory laxness reached its apex in the fiscal disaster of the savings and loan meltdown, which drained public resources from socially and economically useful programs and polices.
The trend toward increasing inequality was interrupted, briefly, in the late 1990’s. Productivity growth rebounded, and for a half decade, all income groups participated in the prosperity. Even then, the richest Americans had the best run, propelled largely by stock market gains. In fact, when the stock market hit its all time high in 2000, post-war income concentration also peaked. But government policies of the day helped to ensure that the lower rungs also had a boost. Clinton-era welfare reforms are often cast as a success story of market-based incentives. But in fact, they were supported by a big increase in the earned income tax credit to help solidify the transition from welfare to work. At the same time, budget deficits were conquered by shared sacrifice — a mix of tax increases and spending cuts affecting all groups....
That seems like ancient history now. Nearly everyone’s income fell in 2001 and 2002, due to the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, recession in 2001 and the ensuing jobless recovery. In the last few years, though, the trend toward inequality has reasserted itself — with a vengeance.
Sunday Funnies, Bell, Tomorrow, etc.
Israel Attempting to Rid the World of Anti-Semitism
(By Mr. Fish)
The Rome Conference on Lebanon
(By Martin Rowson)
The Rice Trip to Lebanon
(By Martin Rowson)
Condi Plays Pin The Target on Lebanon
(By Mr. Fish)
Tony Blair, Bush's Doormat
(By Martin Rowson)
Meet Knuckles: Coming to a Secret Prison Near You!
(By Mark Fiore)
This Modern World: Gloomy Gus and Perky Pete Read the News
(By Tom Tomorrow)
Sutton Impact: Global Warming? Keep Laffin'!
(By Ward Sutton)
The Facts: Bush's Economic Dictatorship (excerpts), Part 1, Teresa Tritch
...The growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.I. The Growing Divide
New figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households — those making more than $315,000 in 2004 — grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data, most notably from the Census Bureau, indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. In all, the top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003....
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, compared the latest data from Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez to comprehensive reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at the top(pdf) of the income ladder as of 2004. • The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation’s income, their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years. • The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph). • The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.
These disparaties seem large, and they are. (Though the latest availabe data is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble. But what makes today's disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last bull market of the late 1990's — when a proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats — the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households — the bottom 60 percent — average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all....
As income has become more concentrated at the top, overall wealth has also become more skewed. According to the latest installation of a survey that the Federal Reserve has conducted every three years since 1989, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans accounted for 33.4 percent of total net worth in 2004, compared to 30.1 percent in 1989. Over the same period, the other Americans in the top 10 percent saw their share of the nation’s net worth basically stagnate, at about 36 percent, while the bottom 50 percent accounted for just 2.5 percent of the wealth in 2004, compared to 3.0 percent in 1989....
Attacks On Truth: How Bush Turns Information Into Propaganda (excerpts) , Krugman
... A few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda. At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole. But it’s dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.
Here’s how the process works. First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts. Sometimes the officials simply lie. “The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,” Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave. Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice’s response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, “as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.” (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it’s still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) “But,” she went on, “that’s a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11.”
Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag. Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.) Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina....
...The climate of media intimidation [by the Bush administration] that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone....Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?
Op-Eds: The Latest from Ireland, Clothier, Australia, Kane, Pringle, and Mickey Z.
U.S. right-wing ministers visit Latvia and nation strikes at gays , Doug IrelandLast Friday saw the conclusion of an international evangelical Christian conference in Riga that fanned the flames of anti-gay hate. Called “Let Your Kingdom Come,” the conference was attended by homo-hating pastors and missionaries from the United States—more evidence of increasing attempts by the U.S. Christian right to globalize Christian fundamentalist homophobia. American speakers at the conference focused on the struggle against the “oppressive power” of the gay rights movement. Scott Lively, president of the California-based Abiding Truth Ministries, said, “A war has begun between Christians and homosexuals.” Lively is co-author of the anti-gay book “The Pink Swastika.” The mission of Abiding Truth Ministries and its affiliated Pro-Family Law Center is to “oppose the ‘gay’ movement and its destructive agenda by providing essential pro-family information and resources,” according to Lively, who also leads the American Family Association of California. In 2004, Lively’s Pro-Family Law Center brought suit to have San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome removed from office for performing “illegal” gay marriages....
From Iraq to Lebanon: Let sleeping giants lie
, Mickey Z.
The “root cause” of the current Middle East reality show, we’re told, was the “unprovoked” kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Historical context be damned, when it comes to waging war, my friends: pretext rules the day. All a belligerent government needs is a good international incident to inflame them...and if no such incident should occur, well, don’t look now but here comes the U.S.S. Maine steaming down the Tonkin Gulf.
It’s an excuse we all learn in childhood: “He started it” or “She hit me first.” From this rudimentary alibi grows the convenient myth of the “sleeping giant.” By portraying oneself as the unwitting target of an unwarranted sneak attack; all the bases are covered. Not only are you claiming innocence and the role of victim, you might even be excused for reacting angrily...maybe even with a little too much force.
This week marks 16 years since one such "overreaction....
Seven Suggestions For Bush
, Peter Clothier
Bush, do you have any new game plans up your sleeve? You could yet surprise us all. Not likely, though. You'd need to do some serious rethinking, and I understand that's not your strong point. I do have a few suggestions for you, if you'll bear with me. They could be helpful:...
Notes on Today's News
, BC, Bush Watch Australian Editor
Surprise, surprise! Rice and Bush thwarted the cease-fire and gave Israel approval to continue in their invasion of Lebanon, with the hope that this will further inflame the ME conflict, a Judeo-Christian/Islamic World War, with the neo-con's believing that the US/Israel will prevail and the Israeli/American Empire can then annex the entire oil-producing ME into their empire. If it weren't so disasterous for the world, it would seem like a Disneyland fantasy. They obviously feel they're invincible despite the US failed quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because they feel invincible they are refusing to read the history lessons, the failure of the British Empire when they tried to do the same. You'd think Blair would have remembered British history, but no.
Meanwhile, the Israeli war machine, supplied by America, is using illegal and immoral chemical weapons, undoubtedly supplied by America, the same type of weapons America used in Fallugia. My opinion yesterday, about the UN outpost bombing has been confirmed today. Last night, Tony Jones interviewed the Israeli Foreign Minister spokesman, Mark Regev, posing strong questions but of course, Regev lied and lied and lied. It's worth not only reading the transcript but also watching the live video by getting into the article, clicking Home, the report.
Teen Screen: Prescription Drug Pusher In Schools
, Evelyn Pringle
Whenever a TeenScreen article appears in the mainstream media, it never discusses the fact that the survey is being used to label children with any number of mental illnesses. The point needs to be made that this so-called "suicide prevention tool" has a lofty purpose alright, but caring about whether or not kids commit suicide ain't it.
According to attorney, John Whitehead, founder and president, of The Rutherford Institute, and author of the award-winning book, "Grasping for the Wind," TeenScreen is driven "by recommendations from President Bush's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, which has called for mental health screening for all school-aged children, including those in preschool." "TeenScreen is sweeping across the nation," he warns, "and finding its way into our public schools." Although these programs are touted as suicide prevention tools, Mr Whitehead notes, "they seem to have more to do with drugging children than saving lives-and they are understandably raising an outcry among parents and child advocacy groups alike."
No Liebe For Lieberman
, Madeleine Begun Kane
Joe Lieberman thinks he's entitled
To votes and devotion unbridled.
But a GOP whore,
Who's still wrong on the war,
Has to forfeit his Senator title
Op-Eds: The Latest from Fisher (2), Wiener (2), Australia, Miller, Kane, Kastelein, and Floyd
The Limits of Presidential Power
, William Fisher
President George W. Bush's widespread use of so-called "signing statements" to unilaterally decide which parts of acts passed by Congress he will enforce continues to face mounting opposition as the practice came under sharp criticism from a blue-ribbon task force assembled by the nation's premier legal organization and a powerful member of the president's own party announced he will soon introduce legislation authorizing Congress to sue him in Federal Court....
While Beirut Burns
, William Fisher
As rockets rain down on Lebanon and Israel, and the world stares into the abyss of a catastrophic Middle East conflagration, it was comforting to note last week that members of Congress refused to get depressed about the scary state of world affairs. Instead, they busied themselves by concentrating their attention on some of the really crucial domestic issues facing our nation. Like a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage. Even though the Senate resoundingly rejected action on this dangerous "values issue“ and even President Bush couldn't really work up much public enthusiasm for it, the House of Representatives persevered. Or at least the God Squad wing of the Republican Party persevered....
The dangers and glories of manipulating reality
, Bernard Weiner
Digital photography is having profound effects on how information gets dispersed, and in reducing society's trust in the integrity of the visual image.
From Bombs in Beirut
to the Ballot Box in November
, Bernard Weiner
The disaster that is Bush policy in the Middle East provides a clear reason, if you needed more, why we must work twice as hard to defeat the GOP in the House and Senate in November. First job: To guarantee an honest election.
Betrayal of the Empire or Fealty to Humanity?
, Jason Miller
“See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.” [George W. Bush]
the real irony here is that Israel picked this fight through its ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, including the siege it has waged against the 1.4 million Gaza residents since January. As of July 11, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was 47:1 in Israel’s military incursion into Gaza. Through 7/19, Israel had killed 300 Lebanese civilians while losing only 29 of its own, 14 of whom were military personnel. Both territories subjected to Israeli state terrorism have suffered substantial damage to critical civilian infrastructure, including bridges, power plants, airports, and highways. Israeli infrastructure remains almost completely intact. Israel specializes in collective punishment of civilian populations....
Notes on Today's News
, Bush Watch Australian Editor
As soon as I woke up this morning, turned on Sky News and learned of Israel’s attack on the UN observer post, I thought that was a deliberate strike, undoubtedly planned by both Olmert and Rice yesterday. Why? Because Rice made noises about a UN peacekeeping force to ‘appear’ to be doing something, but both the Israeli’s and Washington want the Israeli bombing to escalate to include other ME nations, not a cease fire and peacekeeping. Therefore, bombing of a UN post would make potential peacekeeper nations think twice about sending troops from their countries to be fired upon and killed by Israeli’s. I’m also quite sure that Rice and Olmert talked about Israel escalating the war with pre-emptive strikes on Iran and Syria, and then force all nations to ‘take sides’ in WWIII which the neo-con’s have been pushing for. David Hardacre in Lebanon, essentially confirmed my thoughts (Middle East Correspondent discusses UN bombing claims, ABC Au).
Excellent article by Max Hastings in The Age, ‘The West has forgotten that might is not right’ and IMO, he’s spot on. Ed O’Loughlin and Paul McGeough, both ME correspondents, both wrote excellent analyses in the Sydney Morning Herald. A leading Arabic voice in the USA, Dr James Zogby, was interviewed on Lateline last night, who feels that Israel’s attacks may boost Hezbollah’s support. See transcript, ABC Au.
Another article by Malcolm Fraser, ex-PM, of the same party as Howard, the way the Libs used to be before poodle Howard embraced neo-con thinking, expresses exactly what I feel about Howard, his blind obeisance to Bush and Co, which makes me sick. Howard rings the White House to see what he’s supposed to say, then repeats what the White House says, verbatim. Weak as…Bonsai!!
Of course, I agree with the letter written by Chomsky, Pinter, et al (Scoop) And, while we’re all watching Lebanon, Israel is tightening the noose on Palestine (Scoop). Meanwhile, two Aussie journos have had close calls today as Israel bombed venues they were interviewing at, a nursing home and a hospital. It might be wise for Aussie journo’s in Lebanon to NOT let the Israeli’s know where they are after the deliberate strike on the UN today, since all who are not rabid supporters of Israeli war crimes appear to be labelled as enemies to be attacked and killed or maimed.
Ode To The Groper
, Madeleine Begun Kane
When diplomacy's needed, Bush gropes.
With his veto, he murders our hopes.
But there's one thing he's mastered:
It's causing disasters
So huge, we can't measure their scope.
Chris Floyd Sacked from Moscow Times - After Ten Years
, Richard Kastelein
This is a personal message from me. Chris can speak for himself, and I'm sure he will when the time is right, but I just wanted to let everyone know that today, after more than a decade of working with The Moscow Times, Chris Floyd was 'let go' by the new editor, who said Floyd's column no longer fits in with the paper's plans.
So that's it. After 10 years of the "Global Eye" column, and 12 years overall with the paper, it's over. After August 11, Floyd will no longer be published in the Moscow Times or, presumably, The St. Petersburg Times, which picked up the Moscow column each week.
He will, however, continue to publish his writings here at Empire Burlesque.
Craven Image: The Senate Bows to Imperial Power, Chris Floyd
Well, that didn't take long. Two weeks ago we wrote here that the "lockstep, lickspittle" U.S. Congress would scurry to give their approval to the dictatorial powers asserted by President George W. Bush after the Supreme Court struck down those claims in the Hamdan case earlier this month. And lo and behold, last week Republican Senator Arlen Specter introduced a bill that would not only confirm Bush's unrestrained, unconstitutional one-man rule – it would augment it, exalting the Dear Leader to even greater authoritarian heights.
a more abject surrender of Congressional authority – can scarcely be imagined. And the implications are profound. Besides providing what amount to ex post facto cover for Bush's clearly criminal domestic surveillance programs, the measure is a stinging confirmation that there is no crime the Bushists can commit that the craven rubberstamps in Congress will not countenance. Aggressive war, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, "extrajudicial killing" (i.e., murder), monumental corruption, spying on citizens, megalomaniacal assertions of tyrannical power – it's all good for the corporate bagmen, gormless goobers and extremist cranks now polluting the chambers on Capitol Hill....
Op-Eds: The Latest from Jenkins, Uhler, Brasch, Hammerschlag, Lendman, and Bosworth
We’re at War All Right – Right Here at Home
, W. David Jenkins III
“There never has been a state that has benefited from an extended war." From Master Sun-Tzu’s “The Art of War.” John Walsh’s recent article, “Flunking the Art of War,” contained the above quote and I couldn’t help but see it in a completely different context from what Walsh had intended. Walsh was obviously and appropriately applying the ancient wisdom of Sun-Tzu in comparison to our modern day U.S. President of War- and his complete failure in Iraq- and the results of our leaving Israel and Lebanon to “duke it out” amongst themselves since nobody ever really read his “Roadmap to Peace.” As I read passages from the sixth century B.C., while at the same time wishing that Bush could have mastered literacy beyond the likes of “My Pet Goat,” a stark and disturbing thought came forth– America may not survive the war within its own borders let alone the international blunders Bush has duct-taped to his legacy....
Part-Time Principles:
The Rhetoric of the Bush Morality
, Walter Brasch
If the President of the United States was concerned about “morals” and the “sanctity of life,” he would have condemned hunting and the gun lobby that was one of the primary contributors to his political campaigns. He would have condemned the spurious and vicious attacks upon Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2000 primary contest, and the Swift Boat attacks upon Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in the 2004 general election. There is a lot that the President of the United States could do to prove he is a moral leader, one who believes in the sanctity of life. But, his record, not his rhetoric, shows otherwise....
Senator Rick Santorum: Poster Boy for Obnoxious and Desperate Conservatism, Walter C. Uhler
Today, Mr. Santorum is the not-so-proud possessor of poor polling percentages, which indicate that even the good citizens of central and rural Pennsylvania (AKA the mostly "Alabamans" who live between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) have tired of his empty, "bogus nostalgia and right-wing extremist ideology" about "the traditional family."...
Thus, political desperation best explains Santorum's recent attempt to reframe the debate by announcing to Pennsylvanians and all Americans - during his speech to the National Press Club on July 20, 2006 - that "today the biggest issue facing our children's future is a war." However, with that speech - which was replete with reckless rhetoric designed to incite the mob and turn out the faithful on election day -- Santorum revalidated the timeless truth spoken by Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrel."...
Why They Hate Us, Michael Hammerschlag
"They have a right to defend themselves from terrorism," intoned our Chump in Chief, and that was the end of any hope for American intervention or mediation of Israel's savage attack on the Hezbollah and innocent Lebanese. ‘Like an pricked enraged giant, striking out in every direction,’ said the BBC, as Olmert showed he wasn't the moderate the world believed when he carried out the Gaza withdrawal, but a clumsy second rater who makes even Sharon look wise....To every country but America, Israel is the one sowing terror with their inaccurate artillery, and huge air strikes. To this neocon President and cabinet, there is obviously nothing Israel can do that would be beyond the pale- out of bounds- and Israel is encouraged by this in their depredations....
World War III: Rapture-Ready?
, Andrew Bosworth
There is no shortage of people itching for World War III. Fox News megaphones like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly - as well as members of the Outer Party, like New Gingrich - have proclaimed, with a glint in their eye, the dawn of World War III. As usual, ordinary Israelis, Arabs and even Americans are about to pay a steep price – unless, of course, they belong to a fundamentalist sect, in which case they will be saved. Indeed, America’s own President and Sloganeer-in-Chief, George W., rushed a delivery of bombs to the region, hoping to accelerate the apocalypse. He forgot that Armageddon, if it comes, will be on God’s clock and not his. But George W. stands on the White House lawn nonetheless, face turned skyward, waiting for the warm glow – waiting to be beamed up to Heaven, like in Star Trek, while the rest of us sinners remain on earth to suffer the worst parts of the Book of Revelations.
Similar thinking is mirrored on the other side of the planet....
The Crime Against Lebanon and Palestine. Iran and Syria Next?
, Stephen Lendman
By any interpretation of international law, Israel today is committing massive and egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity against the defenseless people of Palestine and Lebanon. It's doing it with the full support and encouragement of the US and willful compliance of the West, most of the Arab world, the UN and the dominant corporate media worldwide acting as cheerleaders for the mass killing, crippling destruction, and immiseration of innocent civilians in Lebanon and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Israel falsely claims its duel assaults are in response to Hamas' capture of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier near Kerem Shalom crossing, southeast of Rafah, on June 25 and Hezbollah's cross-border incursion on July 12, killing eight IDF soldiers in the exchange that followed and taking two others prisoner. ...
"It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here [Senegal] to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America. America is what it is today because of what went on in the past. Yet when I looked out over the sea, it reminded me that we've always got to keep history in mind. And one of the things that we've always got to know about America is that we love freedom, that we love people to be free, that freedom is God's gift to each and every individual. That's what we believe in our country. I'm here to spread that message of freedom and peace. Where we see suffering, America will act. Where we find the hungry, we will act. We're here not only on a mission of mercy, we're also here on a mission of alliance. And I want to thank you all for helping make that come true." --George W. Bush, July 8, 2003, Whitehouse.gov
Say what??? "History" is clear - until the Emancipation Proclamation, America loved slavery more than freedom. And African slaves didn't "leave" to "go to America" - they were shackled in chains and hauled to America on slave ships. Dan Quayle must have had W in mind when he said: "what a waste it is to lose one's mind." --Dems.com.
George W. Bush is shocked, shocked, I tell you, when anyone accuses him of being a racist. In Bush's world, he doesn't screw blacks because of the color of their skin, he screws them because they're not rich. But one thing's for certain, "the nasty racial roots of the G.O.P.’s triumph live on in public policy and election strategy," according to Paul Krugman in the excerpts that follow. Bush is responsible for those public poliies and those election strategies, and those actions are racist. When Bush was Texas Governor, he appointed a wealthy black friend to a high ranking state post, but he never attended the swearing in, which was held early on a Saturday morning, the media's death valley. Yet, Bush is angry, angry, I tell you, when someone calls the Bush family racist. But, as Krugman reminds us, "The Supreme Court probably wouldn’t have been able to put Mr. Bush in the White House in 2000 if the administration of his brother, the governor of Florida, hadn’t misidentified large numbers of African-Americans as felons ineligible to vote." When Bush policies keep screwing blacks and rewarding whites, his actions are racist, no matter what he claims is in his "heart." --Politex, July 24, 2006
Bush's Racism: Actions Speak Louder Than Hollow Words (excerpts) Paul Krugman
...G.O.P. policies consistently help those who are already doing extremely well, not those lagging behind — a group that includes the vast majority of African-Americans. And both the relative and absolute economic status of blacks, after improving substantially during the Clinton years, have worsened since 2000. The G.O.P. obsession with helping the haves and have-mores, and lack of concern for everyone else, was evident even in Mr. Bush’s speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Mr. Bush never mentioned wages, which have been falling behind inflation for most workers. And he certainly didn’t mention the minimum wage, which disproportionately affects African-American workers, and which he has allowed to fall to its lowest real level since 1955.
Mr. Bush also never used the word “poverty,” a condition that afflicts almost one in four blacks. But he found time to call for repeal of the estate tax, even though African-Americans are more than a thousand times as likely to live below the poverty line as they are to be rich enough to leave a taxable estate. Economic issues alone, then, partially explain African-American disdain for the G.O.P. But even more important is the way Republicans win elections. The problem with policies that favor the economic elite is that by themselves they’re not a winning electoral strategy, because there aren’t enough elite voters. So how did the Republicans rise to their current position of political dominance? It’s hard to deny that barely concealed appeals to racism, which drove a wedge between blacks and relatively poor whites who share the same economic interests, played a crucial role.
Don’t forget that in 1980, the sainted Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign with a speech on states’ rights in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. These days the racist appeals have been toned down....But the nasty racial roots of the G.O.P.’s triumph live on in public policy and election strategy. A revelatory article in yesterday’s Boston Globe described how the Bush administration has politicized the Justice Department’s civil rights division, “filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights.” Not surprisingly, there has been a shift in priorities: “The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.” Above all, there’s the continuing effort of the G.O.P. to suppress black voting. In 2004, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state tried to impose a ludicrous rule on the paper weight of voter registration applications; last year, Georgia Republicans tried to impose an onerous “voter ID” rule. In each case, the obvious intent was to disenfranchise blacks....
Faith-Based Cupidity: Eight Degrees of Evangelical Hypocrisy (excerpts) Frank Rich
[Bush to Reed:] ...While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.
[...to Mendelson to Enron:}...Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell “compromise” could make “more than 60” cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board’s audit committee....No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush’s veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been “adopted.” As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.
[...to Robertson to Abramoff:]...Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry — older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn’t some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right’s most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed’s smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing “the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century.” Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.
[...to Rove to Lieberman:]...By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn’t be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed’s unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president’s men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters. It’s possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right’s Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he’s surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed “inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours” by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.
Sunday Funnies, Bell, Tomorrow, etc.
Israel's Gloved Greeting
(By Martin Rowson)
G-8 Views ME Conflagration
(By Martin Rowson)
This Modern World: Gloomy Gus and Perky Pete Read the News
(By Tom Tomorrow)
Sutton Impact: Global Warming? Keep Laffin'!
(By Ward Sutton)
Everybody knows just what the *!@?! they must do
(By Mark Fiore)
Gore vs Kerry: Who's Your Favorite Shoulda-Been?(By Ward Sutton)
Republicans Advise Dems: Vote Lieberman!
(By Tom Tomorrow)
Wishing for Peace
(By Mr. Fish)
Bush Lies to NAACP: Can't we all just learn to get along? Greg Palast
God lost this time. I counted: Bush mentioned God only six times in his speech to the NAACP today. The winner was ‘faith’ — which got seven mentions, though if you count “The Creator” as God, well, then the Lord tied it.
Coming in right behind God and Faith, other big mentions in the First Home Boy’s rap included: The Voting Rights Act, his family’s “commitment to civil rights,” the “death tax,” rebuilding New Orleans and “public school choice” and “soft bigotry.”
As the philosopher Aretha Franklin once said, “Who’s zoomin’ who?”
Let’s take it one point at a time.
Death and Taxes — Inheritance taxes apply only to those who leave assets exceeding $2 million. Mr. Bush realized how crucial this issue was to the NAACP. He said, “The [current] ‘death tax’ will prevent future African American entrepreneurs from being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next.” His heart went out to the families of Gulf Coast flood victims who discovered that they could collect only the first two million bucks of their inheritance tax-free. Apparently, Mr. Bush heard that, among the 2,000 folk drowned in New Orleans, there were several millionaires. Luckily, the rumor proved false.
School Choice — Our Voucher Salesman-in-Chief offered the Black folk a truly exciting deal:“When we find schools that are not teaching and will not change, our parents should have a different option… charter schools and public school choice and opportunity scholarships to be able to enable parents to move their child out of a school that’s not teaching.”
What he meant in this statement that was nearly in English (“to be able to enable”?) was that his No Child Left Behind Act gives all parents the right to move their kids to better schools.
Indeed, the Behind Act does require school systems to offer that choice. In New York, for example, a third of a million students qualify under the law to escape poorly performing schools — but only 8,000 could do so. Mr. Bush forgot to include the money for the moves. But hey, his parents never asked for a handout to move him to Phillips Andover Academy.
Voting Rights Act — This was a big applause line. Bush gloated about his convincing the White Sheets Caucus of the Republican Party to go along with the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. But he forgot to mention the fine print. The Southern GOP only went along with renewing the law on the understanding that the law would never be enforced. Think I’m kidding? Check this: in July 2004, the US Civil Rights Commission voted to open a civil and criminal investigation of his brother’s Administration in Florida for knowingly renewing a racially-biased scrub of voter rolls. In April 2004, Governor Jeb Bush, of the “family committed to civil rights,” personally ordered this new purge of “felons” from voter rolls, despite promising never to repeat the infamous scrub of 2000. The new purge violated a settlement he signed with the, uh, NAACP.
It also violated the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Commission turned the case over to the US Justice Department which, two years on, has yet to begin the investigation. That’s not to say President Bush did nothing. He swiftly replaced every member of the Commission who voted to investigate his brother.
Ownership Society — Our President was really excited recounting how he spoke to actual Black people in Mississippi, asking how many of them had 401(k) investment plans. Strangely, he didn’t ask them if they had health insurance. Since Mr. Bush took office, the number of African-American adults without it has grown to 7.3 million. That’s a kind of death tax, too, Mr. President. Our President completed the White-washing of his record by railing against, “the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you have low expectations,” he said, “you’re going to get lousy results.”
Well, the NAACP never expected much from this President, and the results have proved his point.
Bush and His Friends: Liars, Incompetents, or Incompetent Liars? , Politex
Paul Krugman recently gathered together a collection of before and after quotes which demonstrate the constant spin of Bush and his henchmen. As I have indicated in my latest book, Big Bush Lies, it's gotten to the point where neither Bush nor his friends can distinguish between lies and the truth. Here's what Krugman has collected to demonstrate this premise:
“The greatest thing to come out of [invading Iraq] for the world economy ... would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), February 2003
“Oil Touches Record $78 on Mideast Conflict.” Headline on www.foxnews.com, July 14, 2006
“The administration’s top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion,” saying that “earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high.” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2002
“According to C.B.O.’s estimates, from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, $290 billion has been allocated for activities in Iraq. ... Additional costs over the 2007-2016 period would total an estimated $202 billion under the first [optimistic] scenario, and $406 billion under the second one.” Congressional Budget Office, July 13, 2006
“Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There’s been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia.” Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and now president of the World Bank, Feb. 27, 2003
“West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighborhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.” The Times of London, July 14, 2006
“Earlier this week, I traveled to Baghdad to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq.” President Bush, June 17, 2006
“People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse. ... These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.” Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush’s choice as Iraq’s first post-Saddam prime minister, November 2005
“Iraq’s new government has another able leader in Speaker Mashhadani. ... He rejects the use of violence for political ends. And by agreeing to serve in a prominent role in this new unity government, he’s demonstrating leadership and courage.” President Bush, May 22, 2006
“Some people say ‘we saw you beheading, kidnappings and killing. In the end we even started kidnapping women who are our honor.’ These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew.” Mahmoud Mashhadani, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, July 13, 2006
“My fellow citizens, not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.” President Bush, Dec. 18, 2005
“I think I would answer that by telling you I don’t think we’re losing.” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, when asked whether we’re winning in Iraq, July 14, 2006
“Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits for the region. ...Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002
“Bush — The world is coming unglued before his eyes. His naïve dreams are a Wilsonian disaster.” Newsweek Conventional Wisdom Watch, July 24, 2006 edition
“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, Dec. 6, 2005
“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now.” Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, on the campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, April 28, 1999
The Latest from Politex, Uhler, Floyd (2), Bosworth, Ostroy, and Fisher
Bush Stem Cell Lie: Bush Vetoes Stem Cell Bill, Although Cells
"would be destroyed in any case"
, Politex
The photo-op following Bush's veto of the stem cell bill passed by Congress was attended by "scores of children born as a result of an embryo-adoption program and their parents," according to NYT reporter David Stout. Looking at the children, Bush said, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.” Yet, later in the article Stout reports, "the bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday, and earlier by the House, would apply to excess embryos harvested for in-vitro fertilization that would be destroyed in any case if not used in research." GOP Senate majority leader Bill Frist and GOP anti-abortion senator Orrin Hatch were among 19 Republicans who backed the bill and rejected Bush, apparently understanding the distinction between the specifics of the bill and Bush's use of the children to confuse the issue.
'Bring It On' Still Alive and Well
, Wm. Fisher
The punditocracy has lately been waxing eloquent about President Bush's softer, more conciliatory tone and less hysterical, more humble rhetoric, which many have trumpeted as "the end of cowboy diplomacy."
Not on your Nellie. If you believe our cowboy in the White House has somehow morphed into world statesman, have a look at Dubya's two most recent choices for big promotions....
WW III? Gingrich Rachets up the Fear Rhetoric as Middle East Implodes and Bush's Military and Diplomatic Failures are Glaring
, Andy Ostroy
"We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war...
I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you've been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you'd have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III." That was former House Speaker and 2008 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday discussing the escalating violence in the Middle East and its ripple effect throughout the world. Surprise, surprise. Fear and war-mongering is the new cornerstone of the Republican Party, and its leadership, Gingrich included, will masterfully uses such scare tactics to continue distracting Americans away from key domestic issues so they can keep winning elections....
Serpent's Egg: Bush Nurses Nazi Vipers in Iraq
, Chris Floyd
Over and over, the Bush Regime and its media apologists have peddled the same mendacious line in defense of their war crime in Iraq: "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." But in fact the brutal occupation is actually breeding a cadre of vicious terrorists intent on bringing death and destruction back home to America's streets, using the deadly skills they've learned – in the U.S. military. Hundreds, possibly thousands of neo-Nazis and "white power" extremists have infiltrated U.S. forces in a deliberate strategy to get training in weapons, urban warfare and covert operations, the Pentagon's own investigators report. These homegrown terrorists – avowed enemies of democracy, committed to sparking the same kind of horrific civil war in America that George W. Bush has spawned in Iraq – have wormed their way into some of most elite military units, as well as filling up the ordinary ranks with cretinous "race warriors." This infestation is being actively abetted by the Bush Regime. Who says? Well, Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield for one....
Diplomatic Deception: The Calm Before the Firestorm
, Chris Floyd
DK at Talking Points Memo has this exactly right: the new mainstream media meme of a "quieter, more diplomatic" Bush foreign policy is yet another steaming crock served up by Karl Rove and swallowed whole by the fat and sassy gluttons of the press. As DK and Kevin Drum point out, the Bush Administration's whimpering reactions to provocations by North Korea, to the alarming resurgence of the Taliban (who have essentially trapped the British Expeditionary Force in the south in a loose but deadly siege), to the horrific death spiral in the raging Iraqi civil war, to the continuing imbroglio with Iran, etc., don't stem from some deliberate choice of "letting diplomacy work" but are simply the result of the Bushists' own blithering incompetence and utter cluelessness about how to actually govern a country and conduct a coherent foreign policy.
Radical Islam and Iran
, Bosworth
Are the fundamentalist movements of Hamas (in Gaza) or Hezbollah (in Lebanon) really tied to Iran? Radical Islam emerged in the 1930s, in Cairo, with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has recently gained political influence in Egypt. Similar fundamentalist groups emerged around the Mideast for local reasons, and they were further stimulated and radicalized by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Mainstream Islam is compatible with modernism, science, and the steady empowerment of women – witness Turkey, for example, or Tunisia. But in places where western colonialism, class conflict or civil war was pronounced, people often adopted militant interpretations of the Koran. Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Coming Clash of Civilizations, once said something interesting about Islamic fundamentalism: that it was not an effort to modernize Islam but rather to Islamicize modernity. Radical Islam, therefore, became a vehicle of cultural resistance, even of preservation. The lower and middle classes thus moved towards radical Islam not only as a defense against the West but as a defense against the secularization of their societies by local elites – witness Egypt, for example.
Bush, Cheney and Rice: "MLAs"
, Walter C. Uhler
I request your indulgence, at the outset, for my usage of indiscreet Bush/Cheney-talk. But, when President Bush recommended Iraq's "democracy" to President Putin last Saturday, I was reminded of Bush's remark to Dick Cheney about New York Times writer, Adam Clymer. Bush said, "There's Adam Clymer - major league asshole - from the New York Times." Cheney responded, "Yeah, big time." [Jake Tapper, Salon.com, Sept. 04, 2000] Thanks to their indiscretion, the whole world knows that Bush and Cheney are not above labeling people as "MLAs."
Unfortunately, after five years of gross misrule by the Bush administration, we now know that - from the neocons and the former head of FEMA to our very top "leaders" - this administration has been overpopulated with MLAs. Events during this past weekend only reinforced the evidence....
"Prepubescent President": Bush grabs German Chancellor Angela Merkel from behind , video
BBC Transcript: Bush Language of Diplomacy: Speaking Ugly Words With A Mouthful , video
Note: This is an unbelievable video: Bush can be heard smacking his lips and pushing around a wad of bread in his cheek, while talking "shit" with Blair. (transcript below) Here, he's the epitome of the ugly American. For those of us who warned folks about the character of Bush years before he became president, we can only be saddened by the gullibility of the U.S. electorate. --Jerry Politex
Bush: And thanks for the sweaters - I know you picked em out yourself...
Blair: Oh yes absolutely - in fact I knitted it!!!
(laughter)
Bush: What about Kofi Annan - he seems all right. I don't like his ceasefire plan. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything sorts out.... But I think...
Blair: Yeah the only thing I think is really difficult is that we can't stop this without getting international presence agreed. I think what you guys have talked about which is the criticism of the [inaudible word]. I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.
Bush: Yeah I think Condi's [US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] gonna go soon.
Blair: Well that's all that matters but if you... You see at least it gets it going.
Bush: I agree it's a process...I told her your offer too.
Blair: Well it's only if she needs the ground prepared as it were. If she goes out she HAS to succeed whereas I can just go and...
Bush: You see the irony is what they need to is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over...
Blair: Dunno... Syria....
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing...
Bush: (with mouth full of bread) Yeah
Blair: Look - what does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine. If you get a solution in Israel and Palestine. Iraq goes in the right way
Bush: Yeah - he's [indistinct]
Blair: Yeah.... He's had it. That's what all this is about - it's the same with Iran
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.
Blair: Yeah
Bush: [indistinct] blaming Israel and [indistinct] blaming the Lebanese government....
Letters: Where is the Rage? , Shogg, Politex, Payne
Sometimes, when I read a sentence like Bob Herbert's-- "the American public doesn't seem to care that...," --well, just how is the "American public" supposed to show its distaste or dislike or whatever for Bush? I've voted against him, been more active in working against him and for others than I've ever done in my life--and I'm not alone. I'm one of many. Just what is it we're supposed to do? I sure as hell don't have the power to get MY thoughts or analysis published as Mr. Herbert does....
Most of us who strongly dislike and detest Bush and his cronies and his policies feel choked off and frustrated. The media barely covers most negative stuff about Bush and continues to cut Bush as much slack as you'd give a severely mentally impaired 8 year old boy w/behavioral problems who's trying to participate in Little League-- probably more. Despite MSN saying, oh pity poor Bush (an incredible op-ed article by Joan Vennochi not long ago) he has been successful in getting just about everything he (or Cheney, or the energy industry et al) wants, and it sounds as though the GOP is gearing up for another shot against Social Security, as opposed to doing anything constructive for the US public. I've written letters to the editor to the hilt....
I'd like to ask Mr. Herbert, just what is it we're supposed to be doing that we're not?... Is he planning on leading the march? But really, just what the hell is it the apparently monolithic public is supposed to be doing? --Shogg
Thanks, Shogg. I suppose Herbert would respond by saying if there were more folks like you, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. What follows are excerpts from Michael Payne's piece in Online Journal, 'Where is the rage? Where is the outrage?' Like Herbert, Payne does not answer your question, but what is implied is that we need a more organized effort to wake people up, and we need more people to do it, and we need to frame the issue in terms that would galvanize people to action. The recent pro-immigration marches and rallies have demonstrated that people will express their will when it comes to their personal interests. --Jerry Politex
We are all part of an American society that continues to silently watch as our government pursues a foreign policy that threatens the very future of our democracy. A large segment of this society is currently in a state of conditioned silence. It watches as America is undergoing radical changes that are transforming this nation into an instrument of world domination with the objective of controlling this planet's energy resources. The overriding question is: what will bring this society out of this state of conditioned silence -- does it have the will or any desire to say, "Enough is enough, we will accept no more?" Or have the American people completely lost their will to dissent?
It seems that we have become a society that no longer may know what is right versus what is just plain wrong....The senseless deaths of our military and Iraqi civilians continue each and every day; this is complete madness! Is Big Brother wiretapping you and me? Does anyone care? America remains in a state of conditioned silence. Where is the rage? Where is the outrage? National opinion polls have determined that there is dissatisfaction, uneasiness, and a tiredness in the American people. The public now feels the Iraq war was a mistake and not worth it. Is America disillusioned simply because we are not winning? God, I hope not. Is there anything at all that can reach the American mind so that so many of us who profess "family values" can just get real damned mad when we witness our foreign policy going berserk? Yes, there is only silence, only a weary acceptance of these travesties foisted upon the American people, only the passive condoning of this insidious wrongheaded direction that those in control of our government are taking. Americans seem to have lost the will to question and challenge. Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest patriots said, "Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism" and truer words were never spoken. If we completely lose our ability to question, to challenge and to dissent when our democracy is in jeopardy, then we will have become nothing more than passive sheep.
We in America are so very content with our lifestyles, our gas-guzzling SUV's, Hummers, huge pickup trucks, bigger and bigger homes that many cannot really afford, interest-only loans; and now, believe it or not, 50-years mortgages. We see the price of gasoline rapidly escalating and we watch as our government, the auto companies and the energy corporations have no plan or any desire whatsoever to try to solve the energy problems that are endangering our very future. It seems that the American mind is so fixed upon personal gain, the accumulation of wealth and material possessions that this fixation has negated and wiped out the former great influence of moral values in our society. It appears we have become slaves of consumerism and that this addiction has virtually wiped out the will, incentive and courage to dissent....
Tyrant Bush: If Bush Gets His Way Our Democracy Will Be Toast (excerpts) , Bob Herbert
Congress is dithering and the American public doesn’t even seem particularly concerned as the administration of George W. Bush systematically trashes such fundamental American values as justice, due process, respect for human rights and submission to the rule of law. In the kangaroo courts that the administration concocted to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a defendant could be prevented from seeing the evidence against him, would not have the right to attend his own trial and would not have the right to appeal the sentence to a civilian court....
The Bush-Cheney regime believes it can do whatever outlandish things it wants, including torturing people and keeping them incarcerated for life without even the semblance of due process. And it’s not giving up. The administration now wants Congress to authorize what the Supreme Court has plainly said was wrong. White House lawyers, in a torturous (pun intended) interpretation of the court’s ruling, seem to be arguing that the kangaroo courts, otherwise known as military commissions, will be quite all right if only Congress will say so. They’re not all right. They’re an abomination (like the secret C.I.A. prisons and the practice of extraordinary rendition) that spits in the face of the idea that the United States is a great and civilized nation....
Mr. Bush has tried to scrap the very idea of checks and balances. The Republican-controlled Congress has, for the most part, rolled over like trained seals for the president. And Mr. Bush is trying mightily to pack the courts with right-wingers who will do the same. Under those circumstances, his will becomes law. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion in the Hamdan case, referred to a seminal quote from James Madison. The entire quote is as follows: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”...
There is every reason to be alarmed about the wretched road that Bush, Cheney et al. are speeding along. It is as if they were following a route deliberately designed to undermine a great nation. A lot of Americans are like spoiled rich kids who take their wealth for granted. Too many of us have forgotten — or never learned — the real value of the great American ideals. Too many are standing silently by as Mr. Bush and his cronies engage in the kind of tyrannical and uncivilized behavior that has brought so much misery — and ultimately ruin — to previous societies.
Axis Of Idiots: Six Years And Counting Of Bush Phony Baloney (excerpts) , Frank Rich
...Only if we remember that the core values of this White House are marketing and political expediency, not principle and substance, can we fully grasp its past errors and, more important, decipher the endgame to come. The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government....Like his father, George W. Bush always disdained the vision thing. He rode into office on the heels of a boom, preaching minimalist ambitions reminiscent of the 1920’s boom Republicanism of Harding and Coolidge. Mr. Bush’s most fervent missions were to cut taxes, pass a placebo patients’ bill of rights and institute the education program he sold as No Child Left Behind. His agenda was largely exhausted by the time of his fateful Crawford vacation in August 2001, so he talked vaguely of immigration reform and announced a stem-cell research “compromise.”
But he failed to seriously lead on either issue, both of which remain subjects of toxic debate today. To appear busy once he returned to Washington after Labor Day, he cooked up a typically alliterative “program” called Communities of Character, a grab bag of “values” initiatives inspired by polling data. That was forgotten after the Qaeda attacks. But the day that changed everything didn’t change the fundamental character of the Bush presidency. The so-called doctrine of pre-emption, a repackaging of the long-held Cheney-Rumsfeld post-cold-war mantra of unilateralism, was just another gaudy float in the propaganda parade ginned up to take America to war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. As the president’s chief of staff then, Andrew Card, famously said of the Iraq war just after Labor Day 2002, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” The Bush doctrine was rolled out officially two weeks later, just days after the administration’s brass had fanned out en masse on the Sunday-morning talk shows to warn that Saddam’s smoking gun would soon come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
The Bush doctrine was a doctrine in name only, a sales strategy contrived to dress up the single mission of regime change in Iraq with philosophical grandiosity worthy of F.D.R. There was never any serious intention of militarily pre-empting either Iran or North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions were as naked then as they are now, or of striking the countries that unlike Iraq were major enablers of Islamic terrorism. Axis of Evil was merely a clever brand name from the same sloganeering folks who gave us “compassionate conservatism” and “a uniter, not a divider” — so clever that the wife of a presidential speechwriter, David Frum, sent e-mails around Washington boasting that her husband was the “Axis of Evil” author....
Since then, the administration has fiddled in Iraq while Islamic radicalism has burned brighter and the rest of the Axis of Evil, not to mention Afghanistan and the Middle East, have grown into just the gathering threat that Saddam was not. And there’s still no policy. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution writes on his foreign-affairs blog, Mr. Bush isn’t pursuing diplomacy in his post-cowboy phase so much as “a foreign policy of empty gestures” consisting of “strong words here; a soothing telephone call and hasty meetings there.” The ambition is not to control events but “to kick the proverbial can down the road — far enough so the next president can deal with it.” There is no plan for victory in Iraq, only a wish and a prayer that the apocalypse won’t arrive before Mr. Bush retires to his ranch....
Sunday Funnies, Bell, Tomorrow, etc.
Jealousy: Bush Has New Dogfriend
(By Steve Bell)
The Afghanistan War Needs a New Publicist
(By Ward Sutton)
North Korea's Glorious Failure!
(By Mark Fiore)
A Right-Wing Guide to Summer Blockbusters
(By Tom Tomorrow)
Gore's Prediction: Corn Oil Fuel And...
(By Mr. Fish)
Bush Passive-Aggression: Bush "Clarifies Things" Between Israel And Its Enemies
,
Michael Shtender-Auerbach
As feverish international efforts are underway to halt the spiraling violence between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon has upped the ante by abducting two and killing eight Israeli Defense Force soldiers. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the raid as an “act of war” – raising the ominous specter of a 2006 Middle East War. This clash has the potential to reach as far as Tehran – the financial and logistical backers of Hezbollah – and most certainly Syria, who promptly announced that Israel “deserved the attack.” Calls for restraint from the United Nations and the European Union, urging Israel to recognize that military escalation will ultimately undermine its national interests, will predictably fall on deaf ears. And the intensification of the conflict will be all the more inexorable because of the conspicuous absence of an indispensable player in the region, the traditional guarantor of stability and essential intermediary for peace: the United States.
That fact that America has opted to watch this clash from the sidelines, rather than launching an effort to quell or avert it, represents a pronounced and deliberate change in policy, and an extraordinary transformation – and miniaturization – of America’s role in the Middle East. Through three decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, Washington has played a vital role in tempering the military response that Israel so often employs when besieged. The United States and Israel have always operated within the “good cop – bad cop” paradigm, with America’s role as “good cop” allowing it to maintain its status as an ‘honest broker’ for peace in the region. By tacitly approving Tel Aviv’s disproportionate response, Washington is unveiling a new paradigm -- “bad cop – worse cop”—and in doing so, compromising its role as fair interlocutor.
From the very first meeting of his National Security Council six years ago, President George W. Bush made it clear that he wanted the U.S. to reverse 35 years of consistent engagement, dating back to President Richard Nixon, by trying to manage the Israeli/Arab conflict. “I don't see much we can do over there at this point,” he announced. When Colin Powell expressed grave concerns over the implications of the disengagement Mr. Bush envisioned, the President replied: ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." Are things clear now?
While the U.S. steps back to let a new wave of violence “clarify things,” Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey have taken the lead as “honest brokers” in trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the current confrontation. But America is at risk from Presidential indifference. Even before Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly after, the fates of the United States and the Middle East are irrevocably intertwined. In an uncanny twist, the very act of sitting out this round and letting the conflict happen has ended up fueling the view in the Arab and Jewish worlds that some blame for the violence should be laid at Washington’s door. According to the Forward, a Jewish weekly paper, the White House “appears to have dropped any objections to Israeli efforts to topple the Palestinian Authority’s democratically elected Hamas government.”...Before the United States...tolerate[s] a full scale war between Israel and its neighbors in hopes that force can "clarify things," Americans should consider whether this might strengthen the extremists and their links to Iran and even Al Qaeda.... --July 13, 2006, CommonDreams. org
Bush Economy: Bush Needs Your Money For His Rich Friends (excerpts) , Paul Krugman
...Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.” Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”...Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth. Yet newly available data show that that’s exactly what happened in 2004.
Why talk about 2004, rather than more recent experience? Unfortunately, data on the distribution of income arrive with a substantial lag; the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available, and we won’t be able to tell the full story of what’s happening right now until the last year of the Bush administration. But it’s reasonably clear that what’s happening now is the same as what happened then: growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families. Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?
The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth. There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.
The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There’s a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004. In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport....
Sick Puppy Watch: Bush Wants Judgeship For His Torture Lawyer (excerpts) , Maureen Dowd
...As three female protesters in Abu Ghraib-style orange jumpsuits and black headscarves stood vigil in the back of the Senate Judiciary hearing room, like the supernatural chorus in “Macbeth,” William Haynes was grilled about his worthiness to ascend to the federal bench when his main claim to the promotion is complicity in letting Dick Cheney dance a jig on the Geneva Conventions.
“The State Department characterizes the use of dogs as an interrogation aid as torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,’’ Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said to the Pentagon general counsel. “We publicly condemned the countries of Libya and Burma for using dogs in interrogation. In November of 2002, you recommended that Secretary Rumsfeld approve the use of dogs to intimidate detainees at Guantánamo. The Department of Defense’s own investigation concluded that this technique migrated from Guantánamo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. At least two members of the armed forces have now been convicted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for using dogs to frighten detainees. It is striking that as these soldiers were prosecuted, you were being promoted. What message are we sending our troops? And what message are we sending the world, in light of your role in promulgating abusive interrogation techniques, like the use of dogs, stress positions and forced nudity. What message are we sending if we promote you to the second highest court in the land?" The senator added that the message would be terribly unfair: “Well, we’re going to dispatch a few privates, a few corporals, a sergeant, maybe it will get to a lieutenant, but it’ll never get upstairs. ... Apparently, upstairs there’s a promotion party. Downstairs people are being sent to prison.’’
Mr. Haynes, 48, lamely resorted to the argument that Abu Ghraib was simply a few bad apples, “the work of the night shift, without any authority whatsoever.” Even as the Bush administration was forced to concede, after being slapped back by the Supreme Court, that terrorism suspects must be accorded the rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, W. was trying to reward those who helped shred them. He nominated Mr. Haynes to sit on the Fourth Circuit court, the conservative Virginia go-to court for contentious cases on civil liberties and detention of foreign prisoners.
A group of 20 retired military officers sent a letter to Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, expressing “profound concern” about Mr. Haynes and arguing that he promoted policies that “compromised military values, ignored federal and international law, and damaged America’s reputation and world leadership.’’ If all the Democrats are opposed and even one Republican is willing to vote no, the nomination could stall on a 9-to-9 vote. Harry Reid, the minority leader, hinted that Democrats might try to filibuster it if it is reported to the full Senate....[Don't hold your breath. --Politex]
Op-Eds: The Latest from Hersh, Brasch, Clothier, Floyd, Bosworth, Weiner, Ostroy, Mickey Z., Pringle, Miller, and Fisher
The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy.
, Seymour Hersh
On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezz Rice announced what appeared to be a majo change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bus Administration, she said, would be willing t join Russia, China, and its European allies i direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program There was a condition, however: th negotiations would not begin until, as th President put it in a June 19th speech at th U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, “the Irania regime fully and verifiably suspends its uraniu enrichment and reprocessing activities.” Iran which has insisted on its right to enric uranium, was being asked to concede the mai point of the negotiations before they started The question was whether the Administratio expected the Iranians to agree, or was layin the diplomatic groundwork for future militar action. In his speech, Bush also talked about “freedom for the Iranian people,” and he added “Iran’s leaders have a clear choice.” There wa an unspoken threat: the U.S. Strategi Command, supported by the Air Force, ha been drawing up plans, at the President’ direction, for a major bombing campaign in Iran....
Making Sense Out of Dangerous Nonsense
, Bernard Weiner
...For both Israel and America, their occupations continue and appear to grow even worse. The very presence of these foreign troops on the ground, in Palestine and Iraq, is a large share of the problem, a running sore that creates a deepening infection in the local body politic, engendering a nationalistic resistance to throw the occupiers out. But the two military giants, each possessing overwhelming firepower, are caught in a quagmire of their own devising in trying to deal with shadowy, lightly-armed guerrillas who simply won't give up.
The End of Democracy Promotion in Iraq?
, William Fisher
"America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof." So spoke President George W. Bush in his second inaugural address last January, vowing to help build democratic institutions and strengthen civil society in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet today, the Bush administration is substantially reducing funding for the organizations that are traditionally mandated to transform the president's vision into reality....
Bush Brags About $296 Billion Deficit and Kool-aid Repugs Cheer.
, Andy Ostroy
With the new budget deficit numbers out, a reasonable expectation would be that President Bush would not only be sequestered at the Crawford ranch clearing brush, he'd be hiding in it too. Yet unlike any other president in history, this one believes a $296 billion deficit is actually something to brag about. It only goes to show that the Busheviks are so desperate for anything even remotely positive to tout that they'd use the deficit as something to be proud of. The performance bar is set so low for Bush that his operatives can now astonishingly point to a colossal failure and paint it as a success. In essence today, the 'good' news from Bush was that the news was not as horrifying as it could have been; that the previously projected $423 billion deficit for this year would be $127 billion smaller. Whoopee. Give the man a cookie. Is it too much to ask of this administration that they be measured against the Clinton days of record surpluses? Apparently so....