Not Much to Say

It's been a surprisingly quiet news day, no more great revelations of Republican miscreancy, no foot-in-mouth moments from the Obfusticator in Chief. There was bloviation in both houses of Government, the Senate said to those of us demanding better oversight of our lawmakers, "suck it", there were more distortions and false claims on immigration and there was another revelation that the Warmonger in Chief's decision to go to war was made long before advertised. Just another routine day in the shining beacon of democracy and freedom - the interests of the people were, once again, ignored.

I filled the tank on my '97 Taurus while hearing that the Bush Administration had made a bold stroke against oil dependence and carbon emissions by upping the required fuel economy for SUVs by, ready for this, less than two miles per gallon. They had the gall to crow about the billions of barrels of oil this would save using math so transparent - they simply extended the number of years the savings would have to be realized to get a really big number! You can get a Prius whose actual mileage is in the mid to high forties or a Hummer H3 with an actual fuel economy, not the made-up number on the sticker, in the low teens. Here's the kicker about the whole thing: The required mileage is based on length. Remember that SUVs are excepted from CAFE standard economies because they're trucks. It was this exception that led to the pickup and the SUV becoming larger and larger and more powerful and more powerful family vehicles instead of the working vehicles they were in the '80s. Now we have a rule that says longer vehicles can get lower mileages. Anyone want to guess where that's going?

I wouldn't plan on having to navigate around a number of over-long, over-powered vehicles because the market itself is limiting them. Ford, GM and Chrysler are all having their problems due to the higher cost of gas and the lower willingness of the public to pay for it. Fewer SUV sales mean by default fewer sales of U. S. made vehicles - the Big Three just didn't anticipate that people would want smaller, more efficent vehicles. Even those that attempted to implement hybrid technology implemented it to increase vehicle power instead of optimizing efficiency. This has led to another interesting Washington impasse: Republicans now refuse to pass pension reform legislation including tougher contribution standards for companies in financial difficulty because it would hurt our auto makers. How it could hurt them more than their own decisions is beyond me but it would. We can delay legislation because it could hurt companies crippled by bad decision making run by men making millions to screw them up further.

While we are stuck at around $27,000 per year and have been for years. I guess I did have something to say today after all. Apparently, not even a slow day in the news is good for our friends on the right side of the aisle.

Maybe It's the Drugs

Excuse me, I'm a little out of it, courtesy of a Vicodin taken to dull the pain of a pulled tooth but how is a man who has been in jail nearly three years completely incommunicado as is the wont of the Bush administration responsible for all the things the Shrub fucked up in Iraq? In his latest "mea non culpa", the Shrub is now blaming Saddam Hussein for the instability in Iraq. Maybe it's the drugs but wasn't Iraq stable before we broke it?

It was the latest Bush attempt to divert attention from the true cause of the problems in Iraq, Bush. Interestingly, it never occurs to him to look back at all the predictions of exactly what would happen, predictions that occurred without the advantage of the Administration's myopic, astigmatic hindsight. The administration underestimated the cost of the war, the number of troops that would be needed and the time it would take to stabilize Iraq. They underestimated the casualties, the oil revenue, the will of the Iraqi people to resist what they believe to be an occupation. They overestimated the welcome we'd be greeted with and the will of sects who have been feuding since the time of Muhammad to work together to unite a country. Like a drunk blaming its binge on anything but their own choices, the Bush administration continues to look for someone they can pin their dismal failure and incompetence on.

Meanwhile, Delay, accused of money laundering and conspiracy, is lauded by a Sugarland minister as a man God appointed to represent righteousness in Government, several of the ten commandments they want posted everywhere for us to see aside. Delay believes there's a war on Christianity going on. Wait a minute, isn't the majority of the nation Christian or has athiesim finally won out? It's not me, the agnostic, declaring war on the Christian faith, it's them declaring that I can't watch immoral (by their definition) television. I don't care where you post the Ten Commandments, what you teach your children, how you teach them, what you believe or how you choose to practice it, Christians, just grant me the same freedom. Since you have the more restrictive moral code, it's my values that win. You don't like TV? Turn it off or switch channels. You don't like a product? Vote with your dollars. You don't want your daughters using contraception? Live with their unwanted pregnancies. Just don't try to impose your moral code and your religion on me. I grew up in it and want no part of it.

If that's a war on Christianity, where's my sword? Besides, coming from Mr. Ethics (twice reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee before he got his buddy Hastert to gut it), any talk of morality, of being the Chosen One, of ethics rings hollow. Looks like a ploy for donations and votes to me, just like Tancredo's posturing against illegal aliens while they build the houses and mow the lawns for his Arapahoe County constituents. What I see in Delay's war against Christianity is a second-rate holy man trying to make a name for himself and a crooked politician trying to sanitize his image.

Meanwhile, his friend and contributor Abramoff got six years for fraud.

Have the Republicans Found Their Cover?

Immigration. It stirs strong emotions. Many more people turned out to protest immigration reform, particularly Telediagnosis Frist's draconian measures to stop 'em at the border and ship 'em back across. The Republican measure would have made it a crime to teach an illegal immigrant child, to provide her social services, to feed her unless she were starving. I could go to jail for helping someone change their tire. And the debate comes at a most opportune time to steer attention away from the many failures of Republican rule.

Take ethics. The party that brought you K-Street, Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay today voted to reject an office of public ethics for the Senate, stating they can police themselves. We've seen how well that works. Since they gutted the existing ethics committee to take pressure off Senate Republican leaders, they seem to think that independent oversight of the Senate is something so plebian, so common, so beneath our elected lords and masters. So we, under the cover of immigration reform, are going to receive a gutless reform bill that does little to stem the sale of the Republican congress to the highest bidder.

Another Smoking Gun

Anyone want to bet that today's revelation in the New York Times that Bush never wanted anything but war with Iraq gets swept under the rug by his Republican syncophants in Congress? There will be nary a peep from the Right, the Left will duck and cover at the first "weak on terrorism" claim and the Press will adopt whatever Scotty the Mouthpiece says as gospel. You know they're already denying it. Here's the story:

Bush made it clear to Tony Blair in January of 2003 that he was going to war. There's a five-page memorandum, not an e-mail but a physical piece of paper, that says exactly that. Bush the Conqueror was ready to go to war even if the U. N. said no instead of their half-assed well, maybe and even if there were no WMD's to be found in the country. And no, they didn't bury them or send them to Syria. There were none. Their existence was a ruse. We were going to war anyway. The proper term for such a leader is warmonger. The proper charge would be around thirty-three thousand counts of murder.

Even the date, March 10th, was set in the memo. The predetermined outcome, flowers under the tank treads, a rapid new government, peace and oil and such, was also foreseen in the memo. Bush's incompetence is not a new thing, it's just a shame he drug Tony Blair down with him. I just wish the Times would post the memo. It should be good reading for the hawks of the Right.

"The use of force was the last option," Scotty the Mouthpiece says in direct contradiction to the memo. I guess if you deny it often enough it makes it go away. Scotty thinks their statements and the memo are consistent. It's called denial. It also fails at first contact with reality, as have a majority of this Administration's policies. Incompetent, inept, arrogant and bullyish. Unfortunately these adjectives are now applied to the U. S. as a whole, not just the incompetent, inept, arrogant and bullyish Republicans ruling us.

A Fractious Debate

Bush may finally have found an issue the Republicans can use to divert some attention from their self-engineered debacle in Iraq, immigration. Two hundred thousand protested reform in Los Angeles. Here in Denver we had some thousands protesting the new plan to reform immigration.

They want to make it a criminal offense to help an illegal alien. Shall doctors, then, or first responders ask for a green card before helping an accident victim? If I help someone change their tires on the side of the interstate, should I be put in prison, adding to the ten percent of Americans under some form of state control (in prison or on parole). Is it then illegal to help an immigrant baby medically because her parents brought her across the border? This is Republicanism at its best: There's a simple answer for everything, few of which survive contact with reality. Criminalizing giving aid cheapens us as a nation, besides, there are a number of illegals here without their own consent, children. Will we let them starve? Will we let them die without medical care? Will we deny them education? We may as well machine gun them at the border.

Which is not the Bush plan. Bush does not want to stop cheap labor cleaning hotel rooms or keeping greens immaculate nor does he want to stop downward pressure on American wages. Frist wants to stop the flow of cheap labor to build houses and to criminalize those already in the country. Again, Republicanism would say they're here illegally, they should be criminals. Again, this doesn't survive contact with reality: There are too many for us to round up, about twelve million, they came within a system that encourages them to come and they are providing labor for jobs that few Americans would take, at least, not at the wages offered the illegals. Frist's bill includes no guest worker program nor way to legalize the status of those already here. It's short-sightedness, the same pride that led to his erroneous telediagnosis of Terri Schaivo's condition.

Of course, our own Tommy Tancredo is among the voices that would establish machine gun nests at the border and concentration camps as a prelude to deportation. Tom, you're consistent. Consistently wrong and consistently narrow-minded but consistent. Without an amnesty program and more importantly, without helping the economies of the countries providing us cheap labor at home, immigration reform will only serve to divert national attention from Iraq.

Which just may be the Republican strategy behind it.

You're On Your Own

"Progress" is now being clarified: We've reached a point where we can tell the Iraqis, despite the savage destruction we rained down on their country and the insurgency we caused has perpetuated, you're on your own.

Apparently we aren't getting enough of the oil wealth the White House promised us three years ago. Not enough flowers were thrown under our tank treads and not enough soldiers were kissed (or more) by almond-eyed, black haired women in veils. Instead of exported oil wealth flowing into American SUVs, the Iraqis are now having to import oil despite their vast reserves. We've donated $21 billion to Halliburton and others in this failed reconstruction effort, another tribute to the incompetence of the Bush administration.

We leave the Iraqis with an insurgency, a destroyed infrastructure, an oil economy that can't be sustained and a load of half-assed American projects half completed for the Iraqis to tear down. They generate less electricity now than before the war and that isn't because the up to 100,000 casualties requiring less energy. It's because War CEO Bush screwed up the reconstruction of Iraq as badly as he screwed up the few companies he tried to run and for the same reason: As long as he had the power, as long has he had competent men bowing to him, as long as his comfortable lifestyle wasn't compromised he didn't want to be bothered with the details. He wanted to follow in his buddy Ken Lay's steps, build a company from nothing based on nothing with no accountability. That killed the Bush companies and sports teams and it has killed his reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Iraq needs an estimated $100 billion to rebuild. That's about 1.7 billion barrels at today's prices assuming all sixty dollars of the price goes back to Iraq. They'd better get pumping. We seem to be pulling out, at least financially. All this while our own ambassador reports that more Iraqis are dying from Iraqi militias than from terrorists. That sounds like civil war to me, even though we're not lining up armies to face one another. That isn't the kind of civil war we'll have in Iraq. It will be a slow burn, a few dozen casualties here, a few more dozen there. There may even be a national unity government but that won't stop the killing. It will be years, even decades, before the killing there stops, long after an American president has realized what our current one won't admit: The war in Iraq wasn't worth it. Not even for 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

Ridicule the Ridiculous

To Vice President Cheney: I wish you were singing on American Idol. You'd be just as bad but not as dangerous and we could vote to be rid of you every week. America, you have spoken. The Bush administration sucks.

But seriously, are we taking the Bush-Cheney roadshow too seriously? According to Michael Waller, an expert on communication, "Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and prestige. Ridicule erodes the enemy's claim to justice. Ridicule eliminates the enemy's image of invincibility. Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse than death." Not too good a fate for the jokes we have running the country. According to Waller, we'd be better off mocking the Republican corruption culture club than demonizing them. God knows there's no better straight man than Cheney. But it's not about jokes, it's about Bushisms and pseudo-Bushisms. See Gary Trudeau's "Doonsbury" for a prime example of ridiculing the Shrub by using his own forms of speech.

We need to extend this: There's a place in the language for "As accurate as a Frist telediagnosis," "a slog of Rumsfeldian proportions", "The Delay center for advancement of ethics," or "The Bush school of unification." Instead of stating that personal bankrupcies, despite the draconian measures implemented by the credit card lobbyists, excuse me, the Congress, are up 30 percent, state that since the Congress gave the credit card business its long-desired welfare package, business among bankrupcy lawyers is up by thirty percent! Bush takes this as a sign the economy is cooking along. Instead of carping about the illegality of Bush's domestic spying program, ask if we can have the conversations between Delay and his legal team caught by the program published. Nobody cares about lawyer-client privilege but tell a joke: Did you hear the one about the lawyer talking to his client? The NSA did....

Joke about them, progressives. Continue to describe the sad truth about Republican Washington and Bush rule in humorous terms, preferably denigrating terms. "How many Republicans does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only one but it'll cost you a hundred thousand." "Bush said the terrorists believe we are weak, flaccid. I don't know Laura well enough to ask her that..." And I bet it was that turbulence on the TV screen that kept his own hands off his joystick during that "mission accomplished" landing he faked. Keep joking about them, even if mine aren't that good. They're ridiculous, they've earned ridicule.

Unfortunately, for three more years, the joke's on us. Understaffing Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq left an opening for sharia law, making converting to Christianity a slightly more serious crime than teaching evolution in Arkansas (You can't handle the truth, children! You can't!). At least the Republicans have finally publicly declared that being offensive is better than being defensive.

Newsflash: Bus is in Iraq...

...or apparently was, thanks to one of his famous grammatical slips, on Monday. How many times are we going to hear minor variations on "If I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there." Someone tell Crawford's absentee idiot that all of us know the U. S. Armed Forces can do the job provided they have a winning strategy, political backup and the troops and equipment needed. At this point in the Iraq war, they have neither. And, Mr. President, you, who evaded service in a Guard unit you joined to evade service in Vietnam, have no right to put yourself on the same plane with our men and women in uniform. You desecrated yours and it turns my stomach every time you attempt to render your half-assed imitation of a salute.

Today it's fun to watch the White House in damage control mode. Bush's latest desperate attempt to save his presidency resulted in him running his mouth a little too freely, stating indirectly that U. S. troops will be in Iraq in 2009: It will be decided by future Presidents and future Iraqi governments." Today Rummy "clarified" the President's statements, the troops in 2009 will be trainers. Mission accomplished again, George? In its last throes, Dick? Not brain-dead, Bill? The administration and the Congress have lost any shred of competence they may once have had, the polls show it and the desperate maneuvers of the White House prove beyond a doubt, the Republicans have failed at leading this country.

Another prime example: Operation Swarmer. This high-priced photo op had no purpose whatsoever other than to give the NASCAR and CNN crowd some pretty pictures of helicopters loaded with Iraqi troops. Billed as the largest air operation since Schlock and Awwww, Swarmer turned out to be nothing other than a training exercise for sluggish-looking Iraqi security forces and a chance to show the military in action here at home. Bush, in desperation, has always turned to the military and to terrorism to bolster his ratings among the Department of Homeland Paranoia fans. This time I doubt it gains him two percent.

It's also fun to watch them split over immigration. Bush wants cheap labor sent home when we're done with them. Frist just wants to keep them out because everyone knows it's illegal immigrants that are the cause of America's drug problems. Just like he refuses to clean up Congress in favor of slapping the suppliers of political payola around, he blames an American social ill on those who serve it. Bush just wants cheap maid service at hotels and cheap groundskeepers for that high-end retirement community where he touts his prescription drug fiasco. Frist wants to bypass Senate committees to get his bill to the floor. Harry Reid has promised to filibuster the bill if Frist does so. So this time, Dems, let's not leave the hero out on his own as you did Feingold and his censure motion. Get behind him when the time comes - you're filibuster-proof if you stick together - and get out in front of the issue now by explaining why Frist's immigration bill is just as bad an idea as letting him diagnose your brain condition after watching ten minutes of carefully selected video.

Hypocrisy

How many soldiers died to establish Sharia law in Afghanistan? That outrages me and that's the war I supported. This country is holding a man on a death penalty offense. His crime? Being a Christian....

Wait, aren't we holding men indefinitely without trial or access to counsel because they're Moslem, they either had a Casio watch, wore olive green clothing, were somewhere near a battle or someone sold them to us for bounty? How can the Hypocrite in Chief ask the Afghanis to release this man when we're holding their citizens without even charging them with a crime? Regardless of how offensive the crime is to us, the man is getting a trial. That's more than we can say for the captives we're holding at Guantanamo. So far as we know, the man isn't being tortured, as were Moslem prisoners rendered to other countries. He has the right to counsel, a right denied to U. S. citizens accused of crimes against the state.

In short, even though we may find the crime Mr. Rahman is accused of ridiculous, he is being treated as the law of the land requires. We are not doing the same for our prisoners, detainees, whatever you call them.

Also of interest is one who brooks no dissent, who refers to those of a different opinion as traitors, who ran as a uniter then proceeded to marginalize the other party calling for a unity government in Iraq. The Hypocrite in Chief has never consulted with opposition lawmakers, instead has pursued a policy that dictates the slimmest of majorities can ignore the remainder and do whatever it wishes. To tell the Shiites, the vast majority in Iraq's parliament, that they must share power with the slim minority Sunnis is not only hypocritical, it is asking the impossible. And where are the Kurds? Ready to declare a free and independent Kurdistan? Is that the criterion we're waiting for before we call the deaths of fifty Iraqis per day at Iraqi hands a civil war?

Bush's policies have failed because Bush is a failure. He, his cabinet and the Republican majority in Congress are fanatics, men who fail to allow mere facts to sway their beliefs. They're in denial, their policies aren't working, their grand scheme of the American century is crumbling under the harsh reality that just because you say it's so doesn't mean it is. Democrats would do well to sieze the opportunity and at every chance distance themselves from the Shrub and his forest, to present a vision of an America once again respected in the world. Americans are not hypocrites, our government is.

Bush's Defense

He's in trouble again. How can you tell? He's holding speeches before "unscreened" audiences, evading "unrehearsed" questions from citizens and attempting to blame his failures on the media. He's got Cheney out in the attack dog mode again but no, the poll numbers don't matter.

What really doesn't matter is what he says. Even if the current charm-and-slime offensive does sway the polls by a couple of points, it's swaying the wanna-be believers back into the fold. At thirty-three percent, he's only got eight points more to fall to be in Nixonian territory. Watching Bush attempt to be candid is about as tragic as it was watching Nixon trying to be believeable.

Here's a synopsis of his statements: Democrats want to take away his authority to spy on Americans and the Media are responsible for the debacle in Iraq. Furthermore, it's Democrats who believe the war in Iraq can't be won. The Iraqis aren't shooting at each other with tanks and planes so it isn't a civil war. He isn't going to withdraw our troops. He's optimistic he'll succeed.

In short, more of the same, more Rovian slime-the-opposition tactics to make them the bad guys and more playing the American public for a fool. Point by point, Democrats do not want surveillance of terrorists stopped. None have ever said so, not even Russ Feingold. What we want is for the President to follow the FISE law and for judicial safeguards, however meaningless, to be in place before someone at Buckley listens in on my phone calls. The media are not responsible for the failure of Bush's policy, Bush is. It's a typical alcoholic behavior: Blame failure on someone else. Regardless of the media's coverage, Bush is the commander in chief. If the strategy is failing, it's his fault. Of course, in his mind the strategy isn't failing, Iraq, despite the statement of its former prime minister, is not in a civil war because civil war involves tanks, brigades, people with different flags shooting each other. Can you tell the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni? Neither can I but they're executing each other in the dozens every day.

The Commander in Chief is blaming failure in Iraq on reporters. Over a thousand are dead since the bombing of the mosque and it isn't civil war. 2,300 Americans have died for no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, no peace and security, no oil. The war has cost over 200 billion dollars and has not paid for itself. Three of four of us believe Iraq is heading into a civil war but not Bush.

There are promising signs that Congress is ready to reassert its power over the Executive. There's now an independent, bipartisan panel to study fresh approaches to the war, knowing that we broke it so we own it. Congress has also seemed to discover that the Bush administration is believing its own press releases, always a problem because the propaganda never becomes the truth.

The sad part is that it took Bush's poll numbers to fall into critical range during an election year to make majority Republicans finally look up and see that we needed a different approach. Even sadder, Democrats didn't rally to Feingold's censure motion. Were it not for the prospect of President Cheney, we need impeachment more than censure. Under the circumstances, if the Democrats could grow a collective backbone, censure might be the best course. Maybe if we can take Congress back in the fall....

Collateral Damage.

Today, as President Bush once again attempted to deceive Americans with polyanna statements as to "progress" (buzz word of the day) in Iraq, twelve Marines are under investigation for possible war crimes. Here's the link. It reads like a bad movie plot. A roadside bomb goes off and Marines start shooting. They round up civilians in a house and keep shooting. When the shooting, exclusively Marine shooting, ends, there are fifteen Iraqi civilians dead, including a three-year-old girl. They shot civilians in two houses, in the streets, without regard to sex or age. They threw a grenade into a boy's room.

The military calls it collateral damage. The event was first shown to the military in January. The attack happened November 19th. We are just now learning about it via a tape given to Time magazine by a journalism student. The tape shows the dead still in their nightclothes.

The worst collateral damage of the Iraq war is that it is completely believable that the Marines carried out executions in revenge for the roadside bomb attack that killed one of theirs. Thanks to the Republicans' unjustified war, the following atrocities are now believable:

- Secret torture chambers in foreign countries away from the scrutiny of the Press or Congress.

- Overt torture chambers on foreign soil where the Government claims American law and values do not apply.

- Indefinite detention of American citizens without trial, without accusation, without the right to a lawyer and without hope of release.

- A domestic spying program to rival the best of the KGB. Search engine subpoenas are next.

- A campaign to discredit the judiciary that the greatest totalitarian regimes of the last century would be proud of.

- Preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us, had no weapons of mass destructions or ties to terrorists, then a three-year campaign of prevarication to justify just one more time why we did it.

- Ethical scandals the Roman republic would have been proud of.

And the list goes on. In short, we have earned the disgust and distrust with which our one-time allies view us and the disdain the new democracies in Latin America have for us. We are no longer the shining light of liberty, rather another roadmap to totalitarianism. Security now means more to us than liberty, appearance means more than substance, Homeland Security trumps freedom of the press, religious dogma trumps scientific fact. At the Air Force Academy, religious indoctrination comes alongside leadership and military tactics and why not? It's much easier to get someone to die if you convince them that they're going to receive an immediate reward in the hereafter and that they're carrying out God's plan. Besides, in a military setting, if the Colonel says let's pray, the cadet bows.

It's a great way to convince yourself you're Right. You make yourself an element of prophesy, a part of God's plan for the world then anything you do, regardless of whether God's son would approve, becomes Right. You can now kill heathen moslems because it's part of God's Plan that you smite the infidel. Preemptive war is now permissible because the United States is God's country, the land of the Christian Soldier - hear the choir warming up in the background?

Then you not only believe your own sermons, you believe your own press. Then you massacre Moslems in the name of God and Country, just because they happen to live near the site of a roadside bomb.

Exercises

Something rang false about Operation Swarmer from the start, some tickling in the back of my mind from my days in the Air Force. Today, as reports of no resistance and forty insurgents captured, many of which had been released, only served to strengthen my unease, my rottenness in Denmark feeling about what looked to be too easy. I read quotes about how it represents a change, marks an evolution. It's a very big exercise to capture thirty insurgents....

It's an exercise. That was the thought that was tickling me all day. It's a demonstration - I used to watch them all the time. Gather a bunch of guys up, drop them out of an airplane, add a little smoke and a lot of noise and you get a military demonstration, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, signifying nothing. We have proven that Iraqi dress-up soldiers can fly in U. S. helicopters and can hold a weapon. The pictures I've seen of Iraqi troops show one thing: They aren't sharp. Their movements are slow, sloppy, imprecise. These aren't soldiers, they're men dressed up as soldiers carrying weapons.

Want to bet the insurgents they rounded up were dressed in olive drab clothing and wore cheap Casio watches? That was your ticket to Guantanamo if you were found with that contraband in Afghanistan. Those "battlefield fighters" and those "insurgents" have one thing in common, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were picked up for the wrong reason.

The highly publicized weapons cachets yesterday? There were six and by one of our generals' own admission, they weren't huge. A couple of AK-47's maybe.

This appeal to the NASCAR and Nintendo crowd comes at a time when our rhetoric against Iran starts to sound more and more like our rhetoric against Iraq. Whether Bush is readying another invasion to make us look even more like our enemies in the second world war and the cold war, I don't know. It sounds like it, although I rather doubt even his Republican syncophants in Congress would approve a war declaration or even a resolution of support under the current situation. Every poll has a lower number. Bush's Presidency has failed and he knows it. His only chance of rescue is another attack or another war and he knows that.

We've lost the moral high ground. We keep men whose only crime was owning a plastic digital watch for years without access to counsel, the right to confront their accusers or even having their families notified that they're alive. We deny our own citizens the right to trial, resorting to legal maneuvering to keep them jailed for just a few days longer. We invade countries for no reason other than the belief that they may some day do us harm and maintain that it's our good and proper right to do so again in the future. We rob from our poor to enrich our rich. Our Congress is for sale to the highest bidder. We openly approve of rape of the environment and sale of our public lands to pay for obligations while our leaders have frittered our riches away. We are unable to police ourselves in Congress yet one in ten of us are either in prison or on parole. Under Republican Rule, we are no longer the shining beacon of freedom and liberty, rather we've become our enemies.

Operation Swarmer - Coverup?

The AP slugline just about sums it up best: "In a well-publicized (emphasis mine) show of force, U.S. and Iraqi forces swept into the countryside north of the capital in 50 helicopters Thursday looking for insurgents in what the American military called its "largest air assault" in nearly three years." Turns out the aircraft haven't dropped a bomb and the 1500-man force have rounded up about forty insurgents. On NPR I heard a general talking about finding cachets (based on pronounciation of the word cache) of weapons. Is two a cachet?

My slugline was going to read: In a move designed to appeal to his flagging support among Nascar and Lee Greenwood fans, Bush launched an offensive using fifty aircraft and fifteen hundred troops in a repeat of his smash-hit, shock and awwww. In all seriousness, what are the pictures of helicopters and explosions, rounded-up insurgents and burning cars designed to do?

First, they're designed to stop the bleeding in the polls. Bush claims he doesn't care about them but in some amazing synchronicity, he launches an assault, releases documents classified but untranslated for years pertaining to Iraq before the war and begins a major round of SSDD (same speech, different days) messages that we should stay the course. It is purely a coincidence that the Iraqi brigade capable of combat is leading the charge to capture the estimated 100 insurgents in the city. Given those odds, I'd even bet on the French. Iraq's parliament was also sworn in today in a session lasting nearly thirty minutes. A unifying force? The raid covered up the fact that they can't hold together long enough to debate anything.

What else was covered up in the unidimensional coverage of the raid? The Republicans in the Senate voted to raise the amount you're in debt to $30,000 today by raising the ceiling on the National debt to just under nine trillion dollars. They had to, otherwise we would have defaulted on our existing debt and China would have foreclosed on the U. S. Government. They also approved $92 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising the cost for the wars that oil should have paid for to over $400 billion. We're staying the course for a trillion on this one - we've already paid more than for Korea in inflation-adjusted dollars. But bless their hearts, the Republicans did manage to take $39 billion from the poor last year in what's billed as a deficit reduction plan. Apparently the greatest deficit in Republican Washington is wisdom.

Also overwhelmed by the underwhelming news from the Iraq action was that in two weeks the gaps in Medicare coverage will once again be in the news. The ninety-day bandaid applied to stop the bleeding expires April 1 then private insurance companies, one of the beneficiaries of the Drug Plan, won't have to cover medications. This while Bush touted the plan in an upscale retirement community in suburban Virginia. I bet no one goes without their drugs, lies in their own feces or dies of neglect there. Having helped my mother sign up, I know what confusion seniors, particularly those not computer savvy or without a high speed internet connection, have with the plan. And Bush doesn't favor another extension - he's staying the course on May 15th as a deadline for seniors to enroll without penalty. This is properly called compassionate conservatism.

They're still planning to sell off 250,000 acres of our National Forests to support rural programs. I suppose that supports the Republican value of shrinking government: Sell off the part the people benefit from. Of course, the parcels are going to be those the national forest service no longer needs, those with stunning views or trout streams. The primary criteria for sale, according to an NPR interview, is to sell those that will make the most money. So some day when I'm atop Vail looking at the Mount of the Holy Cross, I can marvel at the McMansions on its flanks and think, there are my tax dollars at work.

Finally the raid covered up the nomination of a pro-development Republican who wants to drill and log the remaining public lands to the post of interior secretary. The man watching over the national forests will be one who wants them for their resources. He supports the Senate Republicans' stealth attempt to sneak ANWAR drilling back into the budget, this time in a filibuster-proof budget resolution. The record of Bush's nominee is mixed but it's a good bet he'll favor development over conservation.

So there's the results of today's raid, cover for a number of programs designed to strip us of our money, of our benefits and of our public land. But we caught forty-one insurgents and those Apaches sure make for some good news footage. Meanwhile the globe warms and hurricane season edges nearer.

Signs of Decline

Guantantmo Bay transcripts released recently tell just how far our standards have declined. We are holding men as terrorists whose only known crime was possession of a Casio digital watch or wearing olive drab clothing. The majority of the men there were brought in for bounty, not captured on any battlefield. We have tortured farmers and aid workers in the name of freedom and justice. We rounded up a bunch of bystanders in Afghanistan and put them in prison without access to counsel or the right to confront their accusers. Our Government considers this right and just.

Strangely absent from the transcripts are mention of any of the "big fish". Those have been "rendered" to other facilities such as the prison on Diego Garcia or third countries who believe torture is right and proper in the name of peace and security.

We edge toward dictatorship in the constant shrill cry against an "activist judiciary." I don't hear anyone complaining when they uphold the new dictatorial powers such as warrantless espionage or repeal of habeas corpus but let them uphold a woman's right to abortion and they're legislating from the bench. Sandra Day O'Connor, not the most liberal of women, recently compared the outcry against an independent judiciary favorably to some of the last century's most infamous dictators. That's the first order of business, get the judges on your side. Once there's no independent judiciary, there's no one to stand in the way of the majority party and its rise, or decline, into absolute power. Leaders of the Republican party are infamous in their threats against judges who do not rule in their favor, witness Tom Delay's outcry against judges in the Terri Schaivo case. Delay called for impeachment of judges who ruled, correctly, that the Government had no business in the Schaivo family's affairs. This edging toward totalitarianism is another sign of the decline of our country.

While we violate our own principles and become the enemy we are fighting, our Congress debates raising our national debt ceiling to 9 trillion dollars. That's thirty thousand dollars, the cost of a new car, for everyone in America, man, woman, child, citizen or illegal alien. Even as they debate the must-pass resolution - the effect of not passing it would be a default on our debt and probably a foreclosure by China - they debate cutting taxes for their core supporters, the rich and powerful. Thus Republican Washington supports the American dream, by putting each of us further in debt while making their constituents richer. And still they spend.

Even as he calls for tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush goes to his pet retirement home, a gated community in Virginia, to tout his drug company welfare program, the prescription drug benefit. He should go to Maple Manor where patients lie in their own feces due to short staffing or talk with Claire Morgan (name changed), whose drug bills went from zero to four hundred dollars a month under the byzantine regulations and pitfalls of the Bush drug plan. The architect of this monstrosity wants to reform social security to a plan that would enrich his investment banker buddies as a captive audience of the entire nation pays into a securities fraud. So we value our citizens in the era of Republican control of government.

Republican Washington is owned by those who made it, the wealthy contributors to their campaigns and the lobbyists who line their pockets. Yet the Republicans are unable to govern themselves as witnessed by the case of Tom Delay. Censured twice for ethics violations, he got his friends to change the rules, essentially pulling the teeth of the weak ethics commission. As a result, there have been no efforts on the part of Congress to police itself. Only the indictments of Jack Abramoff and others have shed light on the corruption that is our Congress under Republican rule. Yet they take no meaningful action. There is no talk of publically funding elections or of eliminating corporate donations from elections. There are token offerings such as no free lunches or keeping lobbyists out of the Congressional gym. The Republicans got into power on the back of this system and they have no incentive to change it. It feeds their campaigns and their fortunes. The people it doesn't serve is us, the people of the country.

These are signs of the decline of the American republic.

Google's Loss: The Privacy Wars

Today a Federal judge stopped short of giving the Bush Administration carte blanche to see anything searched using Internet search engines. He granted the Administration's request to mine data from Google to support an anti-pornography law in Federal court but did not grant the request to view a random sampling of searches. For now, your searches are safe....

But only for now. It's only a matter of time before someone in the Shrub's unfortunately named Justice Department decides it's important to know who is entering searches for "dirty bomb" or "terrorism" or even "progressive politics". These are enemies of the state in Bush's eyes: Remember that possession of a Casio wrist watch or wearing olive drab clothing in Afghanistan was enough to get you sent to Guantanamo. Today the judge said he didn't want to do anything to create the perception that internet search engines are Government surveillance tools. Today. Remember, Bush is appointing more judges all the time and he's radicalized the Supreme Court. Soon, to match sneak-and-peak searches, secret warrantless surveillance, inability to learn if you're the subject of a search and repeal of Habeas Corpus, we'll have the Internet search engines as tools to determine whether you're a Democrat or a terrorist, a homosexual or a libertarian, a thespian or a masticator.

Talk about a roadblock on the information superhighway. Not since Al Gore invented it has there been a greater threat to information flow on the Internet. And remember, Microsoft and Yahoo didn't even bother to fight the good fight. They just gave the Government what it asked for.

This obsession with domestic spying is typical of a dictator wannabe. Nixon did it (and maintained a 25 percent approval rating until the day he left office). Stalin and Hitler were masters at it. In fact, domestic espionage is one of the first steps to establishing absolute power. You either intimidate those who wouldn't support you or identify your enemies for later arrest under the guise of national security. Then, when you claim the throne, you simply use the information gathered. And yes, I truely believe Bush is power-mad. And Congress abdicated its responsibility to rein him in long ago.

Whether the Patriot Act, the warrantless espionage program or the subpoena of search engines, domestic espionage is out of control. Congress must act to place limits on the Executive or we risk rendering the Internet useless as people no longer search. Unlimited domestic espionage is the enemy of democracy, the little we have remaining to us.

SSDD (Same Speech, Different Day)

Today Bush offered nothing new in his attempt to shore up support for his failed Iraq policy unless you count some nebulous tie to Iran. Doubtlessly Iran would love to have a Shiite Islamic republic next door. With the same foresight that brought us the Dubai ports deal, no one in the Bush administration seems to have foreseen this. Meanwhile, support for this radical Republican administration has ebbed to its lowest level yet so Bush resorts to his favorite tactic, appearance over substance. He's learned to say nothing in twenty minutes or more and he's sticking to that tactic. Meanwhile, the same 25 percent who supported Nixon in the last days of his failed Presidency form about 70 percent of the current failed Presidency's support.

But who in their right mind would support impeachment of the President? Then we'd have President Cheney. Stupid and incompetent are one thing but in Cheney we'd have evil and competent, a much worse combination than our current one. Russ Feingold's effort to censure the President is misplaced, as well. For one, the Democrats don't have the collective backbone to support it in defiance of all logic, which probably is a good indicator of why they don't win elections. For another, it's meaningless. The Shrub doesn't care that his approval rating is lower than Clinton's ever was and he won't care that the Congress he leads by the balls should say naughty boy. Wasting time on censuring Bush, regardless of the fact that he fully deserves it, is exactly that.

I'm forced to agree with Liebermann: Solve the problem, Congress. Deny funding for Bush's warrantless domestic espionage program. Reform the Patriot Act in a meaningful manner. Make sure our money goes to those who need it, not the No Billionaire Left Behind programs of the Administration and its K-street friends. Make sure the Abramoff scandal leads to meaningful reform of lobbying and of elections. Censure is a meaningless scolding of a frat boy who thinks he's perfectly within his rights to ignore every rule and law. Meaningful legislation would be far more effective at containing and yes, Russ, bearding the Frat Boy President.

Cheney, of course, mischaracterized the resolution as an attempt to protect the speech of those who would conspire against us. First, we'll never know who was tapped: This administration operates under such secrecy that it has reclassified fifty thousand pages of information previously declassified. I highly doubt that it will ever declassify who was spied on or what information was gained by the program. Second, no one wants to limit the power of the President to spy on terrorists, we simply want it overseen by even such a weak oversight agency as the FISE court as required by law.

So grow a backbone, Democrats, not to support Feingold's well-meant but misplaced resolution to censure one with no conscience, but to pass legislation to eliminate the threat Crawford's village idiot poses to our civil liberties and our way of life.

The Wisdom of the American People

Today's poll numbers on abortion pose a stark contrast between the American people and the Republicans who claim to represent them. A solid majority of Americans believe Roe v. Wade should be upheld while also believing there should be restrictions on abortion. This pretty much describes this progressive's viewpoint on the issue with one great caveat: Unlike the Christian Mullahs, I do not claim to posess the wisdom to decide when circumstances are right for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. See, I, being male, can never become pregnant so am emminently unqualified to make such a decision.

Do I think partial birth abortion to be immoral? Immaterial. See, I'll never be faced with the choice. What if the baby were mine? At any state where it is not legally murder to terminate the baby's life, it isn't. I might be the father but I can't carry the child. If you want my personal line, I believe the fetus should be legally alive at the point where it, with medical help, could live on its own. A blastocyte is not a human being even if it is composed of human cells and contains human DNA. At that stage in its life, a flatworm has a more developed nervous system and can survive in a dirty pond. A blastocyte would die immediately. From the blastocyte could be harvested embryonic stem cells, cells with the promise of curing diseases such as alzheimer's and type 1 diabetes. The blastocyte itself is nothing but an unfeeling ball of cells.

Now to the important question, do I want to limit abortion. Most certainly; however, not in the way the Christian Ayatollah's want to limit it. To limit abortion, I'd result to the most sensible way, the way Europeans have proven to work over several decades. We should have mandatory sex education classes that tell the truth about sex, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy and we should provide access to contraception for all, including the Morning-After pill. Yes, Deacon, I also mean your fourteen year old daughter and she shouldn't have to tell you about it. In the sex-ed class, I'd teach abstinance because it's the only proven preventative against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases but I'd go a step beyond the fundamentalist asprin-between-the-knees lessons and teach the children what to do when abstinance fails, as it does in a vast majority of cases and as it has throughout our history.

See, Deacon, our intelligent designer, evolution, made us like sex. It made us like it a lot, hence a population of over six billion on this planet. We did not attain that number through abstinance. It didn't work for the Quakers, who preached abstinance even in marriage and who had an out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate of over 70 percent. It won't work now, I don't care how much you delude yourself and threaten hellfire to the young man who defiled your daughter (as if she didn't participate). I would have your daughter have options when abstinance fails that don't include abortion.

See, she would have to make that decision, Deacon. The only difference between my position and that of the great majority of Americans is that I don't claim the wisdom to make it for her through the legislature of my state. The difference between my position and yours, Deacon, is I believe in a God that forgives sins and who gave us the intelligence to prevent a great number of our problems. The means to reduce or even eliminate abortion are there and are called contraception.

McCain vs Clinton?

Hello again. It was a good week away, three days of which spent teaching skiing to Texans and all of which spent far away from news. I only had to hit a couple links before the latest disaster waiting to befall the Democratic party came to light.

John McCain, despite his defense of Bush's failed policies, will beat Hillary Clinton in 2008.

McCain comes across as a man of principle even in his defense of the stupidest President since, well, perhaps ever. Hillary comes across as a poll-chasing vote monger, waving whichever way the wind blows. McCain is demonstratedly a moderate within his party. Who knows where Hillary is this week. McCain will win that challenge.

We should run John Murtha instead. Then it's a battle of principle vs. principle, of veteran vs. veteran, of integrity vs, well, McCain isn't perfect.

Either would be a far better choice than our current would-be emperor. In a way I'm reminded of Rome, of valliant emperors following Neros, of men of good character trying to repair what the weak minded and immoral have frittered away. Today on NPR I heard of Britain's attempt at Guantanamo around three hundred thirty years ago. After the Puritans revolted against the British government (yes, they weren't the turkey-eating, good-natured, back-to-basics religious men and women our history books portray, rather anarchist rebels against Britain's monarchy), they were deported to an island out of crown jurisdiction. The resulting uproar resulted in impeachment of the then-equivalent of Prime Minister and enactment of a law that Habeas Corpus was a right not limited by location. It is an almost spooky parallel that should teach us that if expediency causes us to violate our principles, we don't have principles. Maybe we will choose right over easy.

It will require a change in power in Washington for us to once again choose right over easy.

More Energy Bushit

Republican Washington has managed to grant its friends in the Energy Bidness another 9 billion dollars taken directly from our pocket for what amounts to a scam. I'm referring to production of synthetic oil.

For those of us old enough to remember the seventies, the time of one of only two Presidents with an approval rating less than our Shrub, we remember the oil shocks as U. S. domestic production finally lagged behind use. During that time, in an act of seeming foresight, it passed laws granting tax credits for development of synthetic fuels from coal. In a case of unintended consequences perhaps exceeded only by the Clean Air Act - I'll get to that one in a bit - companies that are now doing little more than spraying raw coal with diesel fuel or binding mining waste into briquettes are raking in massive subsidies under the law.

The law had a phase-out clause in case the price of oil rose to the point where companies could be profitable on their own, a price that has yet to be reached. So, friends and neighbors, we are collectively paying $9 billion for coal briquettes.

Do you think Republican Washington would eliminate such an obvious swindle in the face of huge deficits? This is the energy bidness we're talking about here. The Shrub and Shotgun Cheney both came from that milleu. Energy money finances a number of campaigns and we're talking about an administration and a congress that won't even mandate higher fuel efficiency, instead wait for some miracle to give us unlimited, clean, expensive energy. Indeed, the Republicans even buried an earmark into the Tax Relief Act of 2005 that set the required energy price to eliminate the subsidy to that prevalent in 2004. I doubt we'll ever see that oil price again. Efforts by Democrats to repeal the measure have met with Republican resistance as they scratch the backs of those who pay their bills. Want to know who put it in the bill?

Sen. Rick Santorem, R. Pa. Tax relief indeed. This bill expires in '07. That's another nine billion dollar reason for Democrats to take back at least one of the houses of government.

I promised a few words on the Clean Air Act. That's another one passed for good reason but perverted into something beyond the writers' worst nightmares. It was passed to clean up coal burning power plants. Utilities, faced with emissions standards they couldn't meet, switched to burning natural gas. Hence, today, you can't afford to heat your home.

It's called the Law of Unintended Consequences, the law of the land in Republican Washington.

Defending Bush vs Katrina

How do you take blatant proof of a lie, that the President was unaware of the devastation and loss of life Hurricane Katrina was to inflict on the Gulf coast, and spin it into some kind of a defense?

The videotape is out there. Bush knew full well what Katrina was capable of before she drowned New Orleans. It is on tape. Days after the tape, Bush said he had no idea that Katrina could have caused the level of devastation he observed. This leaves us with two possibilities. Either Bush was lying in an attempt to provide air cover for the White House in the wake of the botched response to the storm or he really didn't know. If the former is true, we know our Shrub's born-again front is just that: Thou shalt not lie, remember? If the latter is true, then Crawford really does need its idiot back and we need to be rid of him along with his entire cabal.

"President Bush participated in briefings, phone calls and conversations throughout this process, and his administration was focused on making sure that the federal assets were in place to help the people of New Orleans," said Bush spokesman Trent Duffy in an attempt at absolution. I'm surprised the "blame game" card hasn't been played. "We are fully prepared," Bush claimed at the end of the briefing. If that is the truth, we are well and royally screwed.

As all this is going on, another serious error in judgement is being committed. The Bush foreign policy is apparently to scrap the Nucular Nonproliferation Treaty (another worthless piece of paper, along with our Constitution) and allow anyone capable of fusing two pieces of enriched uranium into a critical mass entry into the club of legitimate nuclear weapon holding countries. Pakistan is certainly next on the Shrub's list of nucular wannabes. Will he extend the hand of nucular welcome to Iran or North Korea, two slightly less savory nucular powers? Or will he just give his best Alfred E. Neumann grin and refuse to take questions?

Anyone willing to bet Bush eventually goes lower than Nixon's twenty-five percent? While I doubt that, if the mainstream media ever plays the Bush briefing tape, I'd bet on thirty. That's nucular, excuse me, radioactive in an election year.

Nine to Go

One of my favorite statistics concerning politics is Richard Nixon's approval rating the day he resigned the Presidency, 25 percent. Even given the overwhelming evidence that the President was involved in illegal wiretapping, an extension of his attempted power grab, one quarter of our nation still approved of him. That puts Bush's latest number in stark perspective. Only 34 percent of us approve of him. That number must be all those who refuse to believe that corruption, ineptness, power-hunger and failed ideologies are trumped by the fact that fifty-two percent of us were fooled by the facade. Even more so, only nine percent separate the current President Bush from then President Nixon in approval.

Strange that a non-issue was the precipitating incident. The ports deal with a Dubai company, while not the best political move of the Bush presidency, is not a national security issue. At issue is Bush's ignorance of the process, his arrogance in pronouncing it right without even knowing what he was approving, and his foolishness at not briefing Congress. The latter is to be expected: This Administration is relying on security classification to keep it out of impeachment proceedings. The Bush administration is even re-classifying documents from the Clinton administration, an excess of secrecy and secrecy is the enemy of democracy.

In another blow to the Administration, a tape reveals that Bush, despite his claims to the contrary, knew full well what Hurricane Katrina was going to do to New Orleans. The videotape obtained by the Associated Press shows Bush and Chertoff being briefed in painful detail about the storm and its potential damage. Bush responds by saying "we are fully prepared." No wonder he has denied knowing about the potential of the storm for so long. He didn't recognize it even as Federal officials briefed him. I hope the video is posted on every news outlet in the Nation. It will be the end of the Bush presidency, the last blow to an administration staggering from punch after self-inflicted punch, that guards itself even as it runs into the turnbuckles.

I rather doubt you'll see the tape on Fox News, the prefered outlet of the 34 percent of believers.