"I saw President Bush on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday. Incidentally, that's the closest he's ever got to the War in Vietnam."

- Sen. Fritz Hollings

Administration counting on climate of fear to pave way for re-election.

By: Bill Berkowitz  

President George W. Bush's re-election to a second term will not depend on Florida re-counts, hanging chads, the United States Supreme Court, or the state of the economy. The Republican Party will retain control of the White House if the President continues to persuade the majority of the American people that the war on terrorism must be pursued at all cost - both at home and abroad - and the mainstream media continues to uncritically parrot this line.

The Bush administration claims that the U.S. is well on its way toward winning the war against terrorism. But, despite highly trumpeted "victories" - the routing of the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and the overthrow Saddam Hussein's Baath regime - it is cautioning that success in the war against terrorism will be measured in years or decades, not months.

By: Knut Royce  

In an apparent acknowledgment that postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq are floundering, the White House plans to name a politically astute career diplomat to replace Jay Garner as the civilian administrator of the country, sources said Thursday.

L. Paul Bremer, ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the Reagan administration, will report directly to the White House, sources said.

During his career with the State Department, Bremer was an assistant to six different Secretaries of State, including Henry Kissinger. After retiring he joined Kissinger Associates as managing director.

From:  

Former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, both of whom have denied wrongdoing have yet to be charged.

"If you're Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling, yesterday was a good day for you, because it signals that those beneath them are holding a unified front", said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice at McCarter & English.

Among the top executives indicted were two close associates of Skilling, former Enron Broadband Services chief Kenneth Rice and Fastow. Both were part of the small fraternity of executives around Skilling, which he called his "Mighty Man Force".

Ought the gun industry, of all businesses, be the only one to be exempted from exercising reasonable care to prevent injury to others?

By: Anna Quindlen  

If a hospital leaves a sponge in your midsection, you can sue. If a car dealer sells you a clunker it hadn't properly inspected, you can sue. Of course, it may be that your suit will get nowhere. Witness the jurist who threw out the action by parents who argued that fast food made their kids fat, and who did it faster than you can say: "Do you want fries with that?"

But judges and juries and responsible litigants will be out of the loop and out of luck if what the National Rifle Association likes to call the "Reckless Lawsuit Pre-emption Legislation" passes the Senate. The people whose loved ones were allegedly shot by the DC snipers can forget about holding responsible the gun shop that was the chief enabler. Even though both the sniper suspects were legally banned from buying guns. Even though they had a Bushmaster rifle that came from a store in Tacoma, WA. Even though federal agents couldn't find required sales records for the rifle. Even though the store is run in such a haphazard fashion that an audit can't account for more than 200 guns that were supposed to be on the premises.

Because you just know it's not all toxic war and BushCo. and homophobic Senators, right?

By: Mark Morford  

Here is the basic formula: The more 'They' get you to ignore and detach from and hurl sticks of dismissive ignorance at that divine interconnectedness, the more you feed the common tyranny of fear, the collective cultural moan, and the easier it is for corporations and the government and the masters of televised dread to convince you to buy into, say, a noxious war. Or toxic fast food. Or ultraviolent entertainment. Or Celine Dion.

Conversely, the more you work to feel nature, imbibe it, soak up that juicy interconnectedness like wine into a mattress, suck up that vibrational hum and awe and kiss, the more you realize the value of protecting and preserving and treading lightly, actually taking the time to taste your food, integrate with those objects, feel that breath of your lover. Simple, really.

And, hence, the less you require of the material world. This is what scares 'Them' the most. This is why 'They' don't want you to notice, to feel, to remember, or to question their motives.

By: David E. Rosenbaum  

The analysis by the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution found, for example, that taxpayers with incomes of more than $1 million would get an average tax cut this year of $105,636 under the plan outlined on Thursday by Representative Bill Thomas of California, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Under the Bush proposal, the average cut for these people would be $89,509.

By the same token, taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 would get an average tax cut this year of $734 under the the Bush plan and $712 under the Thomas plan; those with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 would get an average cut of $482 under the Bush plan and $456 under the Thomas version. Similar disparities exist with the smaller tax cuts at lower income levels. 84% of all taxpayers have incomes of less than $75,000.

By: Molly Ivins  

Don't worry about a thing! The Texas Legislature is riding to the rescue. Oh, sure, we still have a $10 billion deficit, but the House just outlawed gay marriage. At last, we're safe from the hideous threat of gay marriage, which would have directly ruined our entire lives.

You'll be happy to know that Bill Zedler (R-Tarrant) has introduced a bill concerning pubic hair (about which I cannot say more, since the rest of the bill is totally unprintable). Zedler's against pubic hair. We still have a $10 billion deficit. I love living under Republican governance.

"Grace News Network will be reporting the current secular news, along with aggressive proclamations that will 'change the news' to reflect the Kingdom of God and its purposes."

- GNN proclamation

By: Tom Anderson  

Meanwhile, hundreds of anti-war protesters and dozens of Bush supporters were making a similar trip to the same mall.

Both groups wanted to greet President Bush during a brief stop at defense contractor United Defense in Santa Clara. They saw convoys of black-and-white vans, but no Bush.

Michael Lee, a Fremont musician, held a sign that read: "Donors needed: Cheney needs a heart and Bush needs a brain." He had a message for the President. "I want to tell Bush that I'm sick and tired of this endless war", Lee said. "I think it's perfect that he's speaking at a company that has lined its pockets with defense contracts."

By: Scott Lindlaw  

President Bush didn't have to make a dramatic tailhook landing on this aircraft carrier. He could have flown here on a helicopter as Presidents normally would, the White House said Friday.

Officials also acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the vast sea as his background instead of the very visible San Diego coastline.

Fleischer had said last week that Bush would have to fly out to the carrier by plane because the Lincoln would be hundreds of miles offshore, making helicopter travel impractical. As it turned out, the ship was just 39 miles from the coast when Bush scored a presidential first by landing on the flight deck in a small S-3B Viking jet that was snared by a restraining wire. He climbed out of the cockpit wearing a flight suit and carrying a helmet under his arm, and was swarmed by crew members. The scene was captured on live television and replayed again and again.

"He could have helicoptered, but the plan was already in place", Fleischer said. "Plus, he wanted to see a landing the way aviators see a landing."

By: Robert Kuttner  

The states are facing their worst budget crisis since the Great Depression. They face a collective deficit of about $100 billion during the coming months, a gap that must be closed by cuts in public services, hikes in taxes, or both. Two things are remarkable about this crisis. First, the national government, which is substantially implicated, is getting away almost scot-free. The fallout is hitting mainly governors, mayors, and state legislators, while the cuts are hitting citizens. Washington is AWOL.

Second, the cause of the state fiscal crisis is widely misunderstood. To read the conservative press, you would think that states had gone on a spending spree in the 1990's. One of Bush's close allies, conservative political strategist Grover Norquist, has positively gloated about the states' plight. "I hope a state goes bankrupt", he told the New York Times, suggesting an object lesson to other states to rein in their big-spending ways.

This conservative claim is malarkey.

During the 1990's, state spending adjusted for inflation and population was basically flat. The slight net state spending increase over a decade - from 8.0% to 8.4% of personal income - was more than accounted for by net cuts in federal aid and state increases in Medicaid costs. Other net outlay declined.

Bush's "Top Gun" get-up wasn't just tacky, it was a reminder of one of the most stunning lies ever committed to print by a presidential candidate.

By: Joe Conason  

Watching the President emerge onto the flight deck of the USS Lincoln yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that memory is the strongest antidote to propaganda. With the cooperation of the Pentagon (and at the expense of the taxpayers), Karl Rove had arranged one of the tackiest, most expensive campaign photo ops in history, but my recollections kept me from becoming absorbed in the macho atmospherics, let alone the President's anticlimactic speech about Iraq.

Rather than determination and grit, what the occasion evoked was Bush's strange Vietnam-era stint as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. And although Rove no doubt intended that we should all recall Bush's military service, he must have assumed that almost nobody would remember the actual details - only the "Top Gun" style.

By: punpirate  

Lot of people in the United States frothing at the mouth these days. To our friends offshore, we look a lot like Orwell's Animal Farm invaded by rabid dogs. Lots of frothing about the chops. One on the outside looking in could be forgiven for thinking that the entire country is certifiable.

And, yet, our country, despite being run by Flatlanders, hasn't yet fallen off the edge of the earth. In a strictly democratic sense, about half the people in this country who bother to vote are feeling more empathy with those beyond our borders than sympathy for our leaders and their shills. We don't hate France for disagreeing with our leaders (even if there was a certain amount of self-interest involved), nor Germany for doing the same. We're a little perplexed, however, by the Netherlands, which ought to know better than to trust such people as our leaders, but we don't hold it against them. We're certainly not attacking the British people, who dissented from their own leaders in numbers proportionally exceeding our own protests of the policies of ours.

By: Eric Lichtblau and James Risen  

The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought yesterday to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.

The proposal would give the CIA and the military the authority to issue administrative subpoenas - known as "national security letters" - requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries, and a variety of other groups to produce such things as phone records, bank transactions, and e-mail logs. That authority now rests largely with the FBI, and the subpoenas do not require court approval.

Bush Aides Possibly Altered National Guard Records to Conceal Grounding and Missed Duty

By: Bob Fertik  

Bill Burkett, a Lt. Colonel who was the State Plans Officer of the Texas National Guard at the time, said Bush operative Dan Bartlett headed a high-level operation to "scrub" Bush's Air National Guard record, to make sure it was in synch with the biography that the campaign was preparing.

In A Charge to Keep, Bush briefly mentioned his National Guard service. After completing flight training in June 1970, Bush wrote: "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years."

In fact, according to reports by the Boston Globe, Democrats.com and TomPaine.com, Bush stopped flying only 22 months later in April 1972. He was subsequently grounded from flight on August 1, 1972 because he "failed to accomplish his annual physical".

There is no mention of the grounding in Bush's biography, which falsely implies that Bush continued flying until he left the National Guard.

Editorial from:  

The political dichotomy is breathtaking: as state and local politicians struggle with deepening deficits and rising taxes, President Bush plays the fiscal Nero, the virtuoso fiddler for ever more tax cuts. If the Washington wing of the GOP is deaf to the cries of pain from the nation's statehouses, surely it must hear the measured warning from Alan Greenspan, the nation's economic guru, that new tax cuts are definitely not needed now. They will probably harm the economy, not help it, he cautions, compounding the Republicans' feckless deficit spending while pushing up the national debt along with interest rates.

But, no, the detaxation mania continues apace as House and Senate leaders press toward a Memorial Day deadline that will be a rendezvous with foolhardiness. By then, they hope to enact a Bush tax cut and spending plan adding $2.7 trillion in deficits to a coming decade of red ink - this only two years after the first Bush tax cuts helped wipe out an anticipated $5 trillion surplus. Not so coincidentally, Congress will have to raise the $6.4 trillion debt ceiling immediately to help pay for borrowing that is likely to last even longer than the easy careers of our detaxation politicians.

From:  

The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 6% in April and companies slashed jobs for the third straight month - particularly in manufacturing, airlines, and retail - as the fragile economy continued to quash hiring prospects.

"War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."

- James Madison

Editorial from:  

As Congress returns to business this week, with leaders bent on pushing President Bush's tax cut up from its $350 billion floor toward the $550 billion ceiling, there is little talk about the vital programs that face future cutbacks in the budget plan. At least $168 billion across the decade is scheduled to be wrenched out of domestic spending as more than $2 trillion in deficits and borrowing is rung up under Mr. Bush's "growth" program.

These budget needs and more have barely been debated, let alone attended to. Obviously, asking the public whether it would rather see these needs met or have a cut in the dividends tax would produce an answer the Bush administration does not want to hear. The President and Republican leaders shamefully prefer to keep the national focus on the wrong ball.

By: Lisa Myers  

The Justice Department is investigating the allegations. So far, there has been no action against whoever took the globe.

But, for Turner, the consequences were immediate. Three weeks after blowing the whistle, she received a scathing evaluation, charging "she has tarnished the FBI's reputation" by telling prosecutors and another federal agency about the globe incident. The FBI took the position that by reporting that an FBI agent may have committed a crime, Turner was the person who actually tarnished the agency - not the person who may have stolen from Ground Zero.

Last fall, after 24 years on the job, Turner was put on leave and stripped of her badge and revolver. "The only thing they allowed me to keep was my 20-year ring", she said.

"We are living in neo-McCarthy, post-democratic times. Democracy is being criminalized. Democracy is being ignored." 

- Janeane Garofalo, in an interview with Elizabeth DiNovella, for The Progressive

Editorial from:  

One reason the Bush administration attracted less diplomatic support than it should have for the war in Iraq was the perception in many nations that President Bush had conducted foreign policy with an arrogance and unilateralism that made the United States appear threatening. After not just strategic adversaries, such as Russia and France, but also dependable friends, such as Chile and Mexico, failed to back the American position at the U.N. Security Council, the administration might have drawn a lesson that it should seek to repair its international relations after the war. Instead, there are signs that the White House has adopted the opposite approach: Rather than swallowing a dose of the humility that Mr. Bush once promised in foreign affairs, the administration is making a show of punishing countries that opposed the war. Senior policymakers met last week to consider a range of sanctions for France, brushing off President Jacques Chirac's phone call to Mr. Bush and his offer of "pragmatic" conciliation. Now officials have let it be known that Chile, a Latin American democracy and a rare success story in a troubled region, will have to suffer the delay of its free-trade agreement with the United States. This mean-spirited payback will only compound the damage to America's standing in the world.

The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?

By: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball  

Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.

At the center of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks - including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.

The report was completed last December; only a bare-bones list of "findings" with virtually no details was made public. But nearly six months later, a "working group" of Bush administration intelligence officials assigned to review the document has taken a hard line against further public disclosure...

By: Gene Lyons  

Conservative culture warriors conduct political debate like a corporate ad campaign. They're always on-message: same targets, same smarmy techniques. It's political journalism, Enron style. (They're also better paid. Democrats, alas, have no wacky tycoons to match Rev. Moon, Rupert Murdoch, and Richard Mellon-Scaife.)

Especially during wartime, political propaganda descends to the pro-wrestling level. They didn't think so under Bill Clinton, but because our glorious leader symbolizes the nation, questioning President Junior's sublime wisdom has become ipso facto anti-American. Like the sheep in Orwell's Animal Farm, true believers make up the majority of every strongman's chanting mob - from Julius Caesar to Saddam Hussein.

That doesn't make Bush a dictator. But right-wing pundits like Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and FOX News' Bill O'Reilly aren't stupid. They know exactly what they're doing when they argue that Iraq war opponents hate Bush, and therefore hate America. "[T]he real agenda of conservative media's overbearing pundits", editorializes Salon "is to drive everyone who disagrees with them out of the public arena. They're not interested in open debate; their goal is to intimidate and silence."

"I am sick and tired of people who call you unpatriotic if you debate this administration's policies. We are Americans. We have the right to participate and debate any administration."

- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Apr. 28, 2003

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