By: Joan Chittister, OSB  

First, they said they wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive". But they didn't get him. So now they tell us that it doesn't matter. Our mission is greater than one man.

Then they said they wanted Saddam Hussein, "dead or alive". He's apparently alive but we haven't got him yet, either. However, President Bush told reporters recently: "It doesn't matter. Our mission is greater than one man."

Finally, they told us that we were invading Iraq to destroy their weapons of mass destruction. Now they say those weapons probably don't exist. Maybe never existed. Apparently that doesn't matter either.

Except that it does matter.

By: Arianna Huffington  

After all, the problem isn't that Democrats are on the wrong side of the issues. It's that they are afraid to make an issue of being on the right side - not to mention smack dab in the middle of the American mainstream.

For example, only one out of four Americans believe the latest round of tax cuts will significantly reduce their taxes, and just 29% think the cuts are the best way to help stimulate the economy. Yet Democrats seem congenitally incapable of challenging a President whose entire domestic agenda consists of more and more tax cuts for the wealthy.

The numbers also favor the Democrats on the foreign policy front. According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 57% of Americans are opposed to investing the time and money needed to rebuild Iraq. But the Democrats sit idly by, their thumbs otherwise engaged, while the administration's Iraqi tar baby grows stickier by the day.

And on and on it goes: On protecting the environment, safeguarding Social Security, greater access to affordable health care, gun control, and abortion, the majority of the American people are with the Democrats.

By: Robert B. Reich  

Now that the economy is the main issue on people's minds, here's what Dems should be saying: The economy suffers from two distinct problems, one short term and one long term. The immediate problem is too little demand for all the goods and services we can produce. Factories are running at only 73% capacity, the lowest in two decades; offices are empty, equipment is idle, unemployment is rising. We've lost more than 2.6 million private-sector jobs in the last two years.

Most Americans are more concerned about the economy than about terrorism. With Congress in Republican hands, Bush probably will get enough of a tax cut to claim victory. But his plan won't revive the economy and it won't deal with its long-term challenges. Democrats can win back the White House if they focus on what really needs to be done. Their one-two-three punch has to: (1) provide a real stimulus for working people's wallets, (2) offer a bubble-up of public investment, and (3) have the courage to call Bush's plan what it is - a sop to the rich at a time in our nation's history when the top 1% already claims a higher portion of national income and wealth than at any time in the last 80 years.

By: Paul Krugman  

An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else - including scandals involving administration officials - from the public's consciousness.

The 1997 movie Wag the Dog had quite a plot.

Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial.

By: Anita Ramasastry  

Soon after the terrorist acts of September 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which conferred broad new powers upon the federal government. Now John Ashcroft and his scribes at the Justice Department have been working secretly to create new, 120-page draft legislation that, if enacted, would expand greatly upon these already sweeping powers.

This daring sequel to the USA Patriot Act is known internally as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. It is also nicknamed Patriot II (the name by which I'll refer to it here), or Son of Patriot. On February 7 of this year, a January 9 draft of Patriot II was revealed to the public - but not by the government. It was made public only through a leak.

Even Congress itself, strikingly, appears to have played little or no part in Patriot II's drafting (though it seems that Speaker of the House Hastert was, at least, given the opportunity to review the draft last month, as was Vice President Cheney).

By: Robert Scheer  

Last week, this column reported the findings of a British Broadcasting Corp. special report that accused the U.S. military and media of inaccurately and manipulatively hyping the story of U.S. Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her rescue from an Iraq hospital. The column was also informed by similar and independently reported articles and statements in the Toronto Star, the Washington Post and other reputable publications.

Calling the column a "tirade", Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke wrote in a letter to the Times that "Scheer's claims are outrageous, patently false, and unsupported by the facts".

"Official spokespeople in Qatar and in Washington, as well as the footage released, reflected the events accurately", the Pentagon letter continued. "To suggest otherwise is an insult and does a grave disservice to the brave men and women involved."

Actually, what is a grave disservice is manipulating a gullible media with leaked distortions from unnamed official sources about Lynch's heroics in battle. That aside, it would have been easier to rebut the Pentagon if its spokeswoman had actually questioned any of the facts the BBC or this column reported. In particular, the Pentagon turned down the request by the BBC and other media to view the full, unedited footage of the rescue.

By: Peronet Despeignes  

The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the U.S. currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current U.S. dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the U.S. government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the "baby boom" generation's future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the U.S. is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66% across-the-board income tax increase.

By: Molly Ivins  

What you get when you privatize and outsource is something like the Department of Defense and the military-industrial complex. We spend $399 billion a year on defense, and if you think that money is well spent because much of it gets run through defense contractors, you have not been paying attention. DOD is the happy home of the $700 hammer, the endless cost overrun, and the revolving door, with accompanying conflicts of interest and dubious contracts. It's a fiscal nightmare. The Pentagon once had to announce that it couldn't account for $17 billion.

You get nightmare public policy consequences, as well. What happens if you privatize prisons is that you have a large industry with a vested interest in building ever-more prisons. The result is even more idiocy, like the three-strikes law and long terms for small-time drug possession.

One veteran lobbyist said of this session: "You look up and you suddenly realize that these people are playing a different game." They don't want to make government better. They don't want it to work well. They don't want it to help people.

By: Josh Marshall  

On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Tim Russert asked his panel about the growing list of revelations about the Texas Republican's efforts to enlist federal law enforcement - and other federal agencies - in helping him settle a political fight back home in Texas.

In response, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said: "I don't know enough to comment on that. I mean I just don't know what happened there. I'm just not qualified to comment." Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Pat Roberts (R-KS) cracked a couple of jokes and left it at that.

Either Biden is shamelessly indifferent to a possible abuse of office by the second-ranking Republican in the House or he was just terribly briefed...

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Police in Interrogation Case

By: Gina Holland  

A fractured Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a police officer did not violate the rights of a gravely wounded farm worker by interrogating him at the hospital without reading him his Miranda rights.

Martinez was shot five times by police and then subjected to a lengthy interrogation as he awaited medical treatment. He was never told of his rights, and he says a police sergeant kept questioning him even after he said he did not want to answer.

Martinez, who was never charged with a crime, was left blind and paralyzed.

By: Devin Murphy  

They lied - almost all of them: the President, his cabinet members, the newspapers, the pundits, and the 24-hour news shows. They told small lies and they told whoppers in order to sell a war on Iraq.

Most of the members of the media aren't reporters - they're mannikins. The only reason they're on TV is because no one's figured out how to put a good suit on Jar Jar Binks or teach bobble-head dolls how to read a teleprompter. Mainstream correspondents who do have experience in the Near East, like Thomas Freidman of the New York Times, had a postwar recipe that was 90% fantasy, cut with 10% wishful thinking. If only, they seemed to say, the Bush administration can balance the wisdom of sages, the probity of saints, and the judgement of Solomon, we will remake Iraq as a democratic paradise and example for the rest of the region.

Unfortunately for both Iraqis and Americans, the Bush administration is better endowed with platitudes than virtues. Now it is clear that the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq are in the hands of war profiteers, carpetbaggers, and incompetents.

By: James K. Galbraith  

Bush's new law will give a taste of Texas taxation to the whole country. Tax on dividends will go down to nothing - supposedly for only a few years, but that's a joke. Tax on capital gains will drop to 15%. The top rate on the income tax comes down to 35%. Add to this the in-progress reduction of the estate tax, and the pattern is clear. It will be great to be American - if you are very rich.

But suppose you actually want to live here? The tax bill throws peanuts at the fiscal crisis of the states. Sales taxes will keep going up. Poor people pay those. Property taxes will rise relentlessly, as they are doing down in Texas. Middle-class folk pay the property tax. Funds for schools, health care, transportation, and the environment will be cut. In Texas we are cutting almost 10% from state university budgets next year, just for starters. There is a tragic threat that vital mental health institutions here in Austin will be closed. Expect to see a lot like this coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Cutting taxes on corporate dividends might boost the price of stock a bit. But the capital gains cut - a bonanza for old money - is an incentive to sell...

By: David Firestone  

Because of the formula for calculating the credit, most families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625 will not benefit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, says those families include 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17.

Several centrist Senators worked hard to make the child credit fully refundable for all low income families, and the full Senate voted this month to include a provision that would have included the minimum-wage families. But the provision was dropped in the House-Senate conference, where tax writers spent days trying to cram many tax cuts - most prominently, cuts in the taxes on stock dividends and capital gains - into a bill that the Senate said could not be larger than $350 billion.

House Republicans, who acknowledged the gap on the child credit, blamed the Senate for insisting on its $350 billion cap, saying the low-income families could have been covered had the Senate been more flexible.

"In press accounts and Securities and Exchange Commission filings Halliburton and its subsidiaries have been linked to three nations known for their support of terrorism: Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Since at least the 1980's, federal laws have prohibited U.S. companies from doing business in one or more of these countries. Yet Halliburton appears to have sought to circumvent these restrictions by setting up subsidiaries in foreign countries and territories such as the Cayman Islands. These actions started as early as 1984. They appear to have continued during the period between 1995 and 2000 when Vice President Cheney headed the company, and they are apparently ongoing even today... Despite its apparent connections with terrorist states, Halliburton appears to be one of the main companies profiting from the war on terror. In May 2001, Brown & Root [a Halliburton subsidiary] was awarded a five-year, $300 million contract to provide logistical support to the Navy. As of August 2002, the Navy had reportedly given Brown & Root $53 million in work orders over the past 15 months, including $37 million to build detention cells at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where terrorist suspects captured in Afghanistan are being held."

- Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), in a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

By: Jim Hightower  

The latest example comes from the FCC, which is supposed to be our watchdog over the public airwaves. But Chairman Michael Powell is the lapdog of the big conglomerates that want to turn our airwaves into their private, for-profit plaything. He's now trying to ram through a rigging of FCC ownership rules that would let this handful of global media giants gain almost total control over mass-market news in your city... and throughout the country.

This isn't the marketplace at work, as the Bushites claim - it's forced monopolization, and it will destroy any democracy on our airwaves and in our news sources. This power grab is so outrageous that Powell allowed only one perfunctory public hearing on it and plans to ram it through in a rushed up vote.

This is Jim Hightower saying... To fight for a democratic media, call the Free Press Media Reform Network at 413-585-1533. Call now!"

By: Ted Rall  

Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham caught heat for calling the war on Iraq "a distraction" from the war on terrorism, but he was far too kind. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have replaced a real war on terrorism, and they've vastly increased the likelihood of future 9/11's. Bombing Afghanistan scattered bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their foot soldiers everywhere from Chechnya to Sudan to China's Xinjiang province; fleeing Talibs spread new anti-American seed cells while the Taliban and other radical groups retain their pre-9/11 Pakistani headquarters. With radical Shiite clerics like the Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim poised to fill the post-Saddam power vacuum, Iraq could become a Shia version of Taliban-era Afghanistan: an anarchic collection of fiefdoms run by extremist warlords happy to host training camps for terrorist organizations.

"We're much safer", Tom Ridge claims. If this is safety, give me danger. Taking over Iraq and Afghanistan didn't score us any new fans among Muslims. We could have won them over with carefully crafted occupations, but chose instead to allow the two states to disintegrate into chaos and civil war.

By: Pab Sungenis  

Now, with the Texas legislative crisis, many Americans are seeing for the first time exactly what Bush pushed through in 2001. The Department of Homeland Security - which was supposed to protect the average American from the threat of terrorism - quickly degenerated into Bush's own little Secret Police, ordered by political hacks in Texas to hunt down Democratic legislators who had committed no crime, but were using a parliamentary procedure as old as Robert's Rules of Order itself to keep the Republican-controlled legislature from redrawing Congressional districts under a heavily gerrymandered plan pushed by Tom DeLay and endorsed by Bush himself. Combine that with what we know about the USA PATRIOT act, and the message is clear: offend the Republicans, and they will get you even if they have to send Tom Ridge himself.

Overreacting? Maybe. But at best, the whole incident should leave a bad taste in the mouth of Americans. And to many it has. The problem is that the Democrats can't really be the ones to push the needed curtailing or dismantling of this "Homeland Security" force before it completely turns into Bush's Waffen SS.

By: Paul Starr  

The underlying strategy here is all too familiar: Instead of challenging popular liberal programs directly, the Republicans are creating fiscal conditions that make those programs unsustainable. In 1981 the Reagan administration slashed taxes, deliberately intending - as Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, later disclosed - to starve the federal government of funds, force reductions in domestic spending, and keep new liberal initiatives off the agenda. Republicans dominated national policy for a decade as a result. That the tax cuts plunged the country into a fiscal disaster was merely a side effect of a policy that conservatives continue to hold up as a model of presidential leadership.

It was a Democratic Congress that began to rectify the problem, forcing the elder George Bush in 1990 to accept a tax increase in a concession on his part to fiscal prudence widely thought on the right to be an unforgivable blunder. Bill Clinton followed the same politically thankless path, raising taxes and cutting expenditures in 1993 in the interests of long-term budget balance and suffering the consequences in the 1994 congressional elections. It took us a decade to work our way out of the fiscal hangover of the Reagan years - and here we are again, not so much with Bush II as with Reagan II, as the Republicans once again cut taxes while sharply raising military expenditures.

"I am the federal government."

- Tom 'Bug Spray' DeLay, the onerous House Majority Leader (R-TX)

By: Paul Krugman  

"The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. Indeed, the legislation is doubly absurd: the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises.

But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that "more extreme Republicans" actually want a fiscal train wreck: "Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door."

Good for the Financial Times. It seems that stating the obvious has now, finally, become respectable.

By: Mike Hudson  

Take the recent suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia that killed eight Americans. Last week, the Washington Post and just about every other news organization in the civilized world reported that most of the attackers were Saudi citizens, and that all of the small arms and explosives they used had been supplied by units of the Saudi National Guard.

Whoa. Aren't the Saudis supposed to be our trusted allies? Doesn't Saudi Crown Prince Bandar frequently weekend at George W.'s Texas ranch? Doesn't the President's father take money from a company that has significant interests in Saudi Arabia? Didn't Vice President Dick Cheney's company make millions there?

And yet it was Saudis who killed 19 Americans in the Khobar Towers attack on June 25, 1996. And it was Saudis who killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was Saudis, with weapons traced back to the Saudi government, who killed eight Americans on May 12.

This collaboration constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the American people by the President, and especially of the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces. At least the Iraqis only shoot at us when we're invading their country.

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