BUSH: MORE EVIL FOR CHRISTMAS

W and his handlers take no break for the holidays: the evil goes on unabated.

Yesterday's post was just the tip of the iceberg. Today we present a potpourri of articles from around the world to keep you abreast of Bushite treason.

First, on the issue of coopting the press, check out this link from the Boston Globe:

Globe: Bushites Try to Broadcast Propaganda

And an excerpt:

News executives of most Boston television stations are decidedly unenthusiastic about a Bush administration plan to transmit news footage from Iraq for local TV outlets in an attempt to supplement media coverage from that war-torn country.

The satellite link, dubbed "C-SPAN Baghdad," is designed to put a more positive spin on events and circumvent the major networks by making it possible for press conferences, interviews with troops and dignitaries, and even footage from the field to be transmitted from Iraq for use by regional and local media outlets, according to news accounts.

"I'm kind of appalled by it. I think it's very troubling," said Charles Kravetz, vice president of news at the regional cable news outlet NECN. "I think the government has no business being in the news business."

"We have no interest in this," said WBZ-TV (Channel 4) news director Peter Brown. "The Fourth Estate is independent and should remain so. As news providers, we should go there and see for ourselves."

But there's more! Yesterday, the three Republican members of the FCC Committee gave the go-ahead for Rupert Murdoch to span the whole world with his ultra-conservative FOX all-propaganda-all-the-time network. These are the same three Republicans, including Michael Powell, who earlier this year passed the rule allowing media corporations to own multiple different types of media outlets in the same geographical area--an act so blatantly corrupt that Congress stepped in right away to try to cut off implementation of the rule. But such setbacks mean nothing to conservatives, who just get even more blatantly corrupt when they've been slapped down. Here is the link (subscription required):

LA Times: Murdoch Overwhelms World

And an excerpt:

When many in Britain thought it foolhardy to challenge the state-owned BBC, Murdoch ignored them and launched the nation's first pay-TV service, eventually turning it into a roaring success. Then, as media barons in the U.S. shied away from trying to undo the 30-year stranglehold of the three broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — Murdoch's News Corp. established Fox as a viable alternative....

Now, the 72-year-old Murdoch is at it again, betting that he can pull off a feat nobody else has managed: to turn satellite television, which currently is watched by just 20% of American households, into a medium as common as cable, which is in 70% of homes.

On Friday, federal regulators approved News Corp.'s $6.6-billion takeover of satellite television leader DirecTV from General Motors Corp., although they imposed conditions that aim to limit Murdoch's ability to gain an unfair advantage over competitors.

Critics of the deal say those conditions don't go far enough, and some point to Murdoch's reputation for doing more than just breaking with convention; the Australian-born entrepreneur also has a history of breaking the backs of his rivals....

"He'll have an army, an air force and a navy when everyone else has at best one or two of those things," said Blair Levin, an analyst at Legg Mason. "He could drive a bunch of consolidation in the industry."

For "consolidation" read "monstrous conservative media control."

On yesterday's issue of the Bushite lies concerning the "capture" of Saddam Hussein, here is a link to the Sydney Morning Herald, which reports on who ACTUALLY got Saddam:

SMH: Kurds, Not US, Captured Saddam

And an excerpt:

Washington's claims that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam Hussein are being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish media claiming that its militia set the circumstances in which the US merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president.

The first media account of the December 13 arrest was aired by a Tehran-based news agency.

American forces took Saddam into custody around 8.30pm local time, but sat on the news until 3pm the next day.

However, in the early hours of Sunday, a Kurdish language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace.

"Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day; but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"

The head of the PUK, Jalal Talabani, was in the Iranian capital en route to Europe.

The Western media in Baghdad were electrified by the Iranian agency's revelation, but as reports of the arrest built, they relied almost exclusively on accounts from US military and intelligence organisations, starting with the words of the US-appointed administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer: "Ladies and gentlemen: we got 'im".

US officials said that they had extracted the vital piece of information on Saddam's whereabouts from one of the 20 suspects around 5.30pm on December 13 and had immediately assembled a 600-strong force to surround the farm on which he was captured at al-Dwar, south of Tikrit.

Little attention was paid to a line in Pentagon briefings that some of the Kurdish militia might have been in on what was described as a "joint operation"; or to a statement by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraq National Congress, which said that Qusrat and his PUK forces had provided vital information and more.

A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald, quoted from an interview aired on the PUK's al-Hurriyah radio station last Wednesday, in which Adil Murad, a member of the PUK's political bureau,

said that the day before Saddam's capture he was tipped off by a PUK general - Thamir al-Sultan - that Saddam would be arrested within the next 72 hours.

An unnamed Western intelligence source in the Middle East was quoted in the British Sunday Express yesterday: "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time."

In case you are wondering just how far back the evil in the Bushite junta goes, check out this story from the Washington Post on Donald Rumsfeld's role in making Saddam the vicious mass killer that he was:

Dana Priest: Rumsfeld Let Saddam Get Weapons of Mass Destruction

And here is an excerpt:

Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.


Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, "was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs," according to a cable to Rumsfeld from then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

The statement, the cable said, was not intended to imply a shift in policy, and the U.S. desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq's choosing," remained "undiminished." "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."

The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, provide new, behind-the-scenes details of U.S. efforts to court Iraq as an ally even as it used chemical weapons in its war with Iran.

And, of course, the Bushites continue to do evil around the world. Dick Cheney alone is a one-man evil machine, and he's starting to come under legal scrutiny after all these years. Here's a link to an article reporting that Cheney may be facing prosecution for stealing money during his time at Halliburton:

The Age: Cheney to be Prosecuted for Shell Game in Nigeria?

And here is an excerpt:

A French official is examining whether to prosecute US Vice President Dick Cheney over alleged complicity in the abuse of corporate assets dating from the time he was head of the services company Halliburton, the French newspaper Le Figaro said.

The case stems from a contract by a consortium including the American company Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a Halliburton subsidiary, and a French company, Technip, to supply a gas complex to Nigeria, the newspaper reported.

A Paris investigating magistrate has been conducting investigations since October into allegations that $US180 million ($A243.18 million) was paid in secret commissions during the late 1990s up to 2002 from funds established by the consortium in Madeira, the report said.

Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive between 1995 and 2000.

And Cheney's Halliburton learned well how to scam everyone under his tutelage. As you probably know, they were recently caught by the Pentagon overcharging the government for gas from Kuwait. Here is an article from Smartmoney.com detailing Halliburton's con game to bilk the government:

Smartmoney.com: Halliburton Withholds Vital Papers

And an excerpt:

Pentagon auditors have accused Halliburton Co. (HAL) of refusing to turn over documents that show the company was aware of "significant internal control weaknesses" in an Iraq fuel contract that has allegedly overcharged taxpayers nearly $100 million.

The dispute is laid out in a previously undisclosed Dec. 10 letter from the Defense Contract Audit Agency to a top official at Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary handling more than $5 billion of work in Iraq. The letter says that KBR's refusal to turn over the internal audit "is not in the spirit of open communication, trust and cooperation."

Vice President Dick Cheney ran the company until 2000, and it won both of its two contracts in Iraq without competition.

Defense officials say a DCAA auditor stumbled upon the audit last month while looking through unrelated KBR files in Kuwait. The government auditor took notes but wasn't allowed to keep a copy of the internal report, an official said.

And finally, you probably already heard that John Ashcroft's last unsuccessful campaign for the Senate was slapped by the FCC last week for illegal campaign finance finagling. Of course, the unbelievably partisan commission just couldn't say a bad word about Ashcroft--it would taint the image of the Bushite junta too much. So they never even asked him a single question during the whole investigation, despite the fact that he, one would think, would have been ultimately responsible for the work of his campaign finance people.

Well the coalition who brought the suit in the first place are not sitting still for the slap on the wrist from the FCC. They are taking the whole matter to court. Here is the link:

National Voting Rights Institute: Ashcroft Penalty a Farce

And here is an excerpt:

The Federal Election Commission has issued a fine of $37,000 against United States Attorney General John Ashcroft’s 2000 campaign committee for the US Senate and his political action committee, the Spirit of America PAC, for violations of federal campaign finance law during the 2000 election. The FEC’s action, which occurred on December 11, 2003, and became public today, comes in the midst of a federal lawsuit brought by a coalition of campaign reform groups and Missouri voters that accused the FEC of excessive delay in investigating the violations. The FEC’s “conciliation agreement� with the Ashcroft committees, released today, reveals that John Ashcroft was directly involved in the circumstances leading to the violations.

The plaintiffs in the case, who had originally filed an administrative complaint against the agency alleging the violations by Ashcroft’s political committees, announced today that they will file a new federal lawsuit against the FEC for not adequately enforcing the law. They also said they are considering filing a complaint with the United States Justice Department for a criminal investigation of the matter.

“The Federal Election Commission’s action in this case is a farce,� says Bonnie Tenneriello, an attorney with the National Voting Rights Institute and co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “John Ashcroft’s political committees, and possibly John Ashcroft himself, engaged in serious violations of federal campaign finance law during the 2000 election. The FEC’s fine is merely a slap on the wrist.�

“No one is above the law,� says Tenneriello, “not even the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. We will pursue this matter further to ensure that the law is properly enforced against those who committed these violations.�

The allegations in the underlying case center on the disclosure, first reported on February 1, 2001, by The Washington Post, that the Spirit of America PAC had contributed a fundraising list of 100,000 donors to Ashcroft’s 2000 Senate campaign in Missouri. Federal campaign finance law prohibits political action committees from making campaign contributions to federal candidates that exceed the value of $10,000 in an election cycle (primary and general election included). The Washington Post article stated that the PAC developed the list between 1997 and 1999, “at a cost of more than $2 million.� The article appeared on the day of the U.S. Senate’s confirmation vote on Ashcroft to be United States Attorney General.

The federal lawsuit alleges that the donated fundraising list was an in-kind contribution to Ashcroft’s Senate campaign that far exceeded the federal campaign contribution limit. The lawsuit also alleges that the Spirit of America PAC and the campaign violated federal campaign disclosure laws by failing to report the contribution to the FEC.

So here is our Christmas potpourri of evildoing from the ever active Bushite junta. They are all amoral, selfish, and utterly unconcerned with the effects their actions have on others. They have been harming the whole world for decades and getting away with it. And they expect to get away with it forever.

And as they drove out of sight, they issued their mean-spirited Christmas farewell: "Merry Christmas to all -- SUCKERS!"

BUSH: HOW EVIL SPENDS CHRISTMAS

W and his handlers are working overtime during the holidays to ensure that America continues its headlong descent into hell.

The Bushite attack on civil rights continues to charge ahead unabated. They have now started using their unprecedented stranglehold over travel through their Gestapo-like "Homeland Security" agency to prevent journalists from entering the county. Here is a link from the Toledo Blade on this topic:

Toledo Blade: A repressive embarrassment

And here is an excerpt:

Anyone who thinks the administration and its law enforcement chief, Attorney General John Ashcroft, aren’t out to impede a free press need only hear how the federal government is treating foreign journalists coming to this country on assignment.

Without notification to foreign media outlets, the immigration and customs people are arresting, detaining, and deporting journalists arriving here without special visas. This is so even when they come from nations whose citizens can stay for up to 90 days without a visa if they are arriving as tourists or on business.

If that threatening form of registration is not enough, members of the press arriving without the visas, which no one told them they needed, are treated like criminals, handcuffed as they’re marched through airports, photographed, fingerprinted, and their DNA taken....

The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists is about to launch a global campaign against the absurd and repressive rule that casts suspicion on working journalists who come to this country on business as valid as any other traveler’s.

A U.S. embassy official in Vienna said visas have always been required. If that requirement existed, it was more honored in its breach and ought to be rescinded.

It should not take a world media outcry to address this problem. It’s a policy that puts these United States in the ranks of Third World dictatorships.

Members of Congress, regardless of party, who understand the absurdity of it all, even in these troubled times, should demand an end to this repressive embarrassment.

It’s not likely President Bush ever will.

Here is another link on the same topic from LA Weekly:

LA Weekly: Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?

And here is an excerpt:

“It’s one of the things about my job that I absolutely love,� says the 30-year-old Australian, who works as an associate editor for the women’s magazine New Idea. She doesn’t even mind flying. “It’s one of the great pleasures of the world to be able to turn off your cell phone and be where no one can annoy you.�

But when her Qantas flight from Melbourne, Australia, touched down at LAX around 8 a.m. on Friday, November 14, Smethurst found herself nightmarishly annoyed — by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Smethurst was supposed to continue to New York and on Monday interview singer Olivia Newton-John....

“I want to say right off that I adore America and love Americans,� Smethurst says. Still, she remains perplexed and emotionally bruised by what followed in Terminal Four. The CBP agent who read Smethurst’s traveler’s questionnaire took her to a secondary inspection area 30 feet away and told her to wait, then left for half an hour. He returned with additional uniformed staff who, professionally and pleasantly enough, asked more questions.

What sort of stories did she write? What kind of magazine was New Idea?

Where was it published? What was its circulation? Does it print politically sensitive articles? When would her interview appear? Who would be reading it?

“I laughed,� Smethurst recalls, “because we’re a cross between Good Housekeeping and People magazine. The most political thing we’d likely print was Laura Bush’s horoscope.�

The polite interrogation continued. Who was her father? His occupation? Her mother’s maiden name and occupation? What were their dates of birth, where did they live?

The agents gravely nodded at Smethurst’s replies and left once more, promising to return. When they came back half an hour later, one of the officers offered Smethurst a cup of airport coffee.

“I thought at that stage something was quite wrong,� Smethurst says, “so I asked the man with the coffee if there was some problem.�

“I will tell you when there’s a problem,� he abruptly snapped, according to Smethurst. Then he pointed to a nearby sign:

Your Silence Is Appreciated

At about noon, CBP informed Smethurst she would be denied entrée into the United States: While Australian tourists visiting the United States are visa-waived for 90 days, working journalists need a special I-Visa, which Smethurst had not been aware of and did not possess. She had, after all, flown into LAX on the same passport eight times previously without incident. Now she was being asked to raise her right hand and swear that her answers had been truthful, then was fingerprinted and photographed — every time she comes to America, her swiped passport will bring up this documentation of her rejection. As Smethurst’s inked fingers were rolled onto the government form, she noticed its heading:

“Criminal.�

Why the Orwellian opression of foreign journalists? Because the Bushite junta fears them like the plague. They have control of American journalsim through conservative domination of both print and electronic media, as well as the ability to saturate the media with conservative propaganda through their obscenely over-financed "think thanks" and "research institutes." The consequence is that real investigative journalism is pretty much a thing of the past in the US.

But foreign journalists are not yet subject to the full force of conservative control. As a result, any one of them--even a features writer like Ms. Smethurst--might see the actual truth of what is going on in America and be unwilling to cover it up in the toadying fashion of American journalists. And the truth is not hard to see for anyone with eyes undimmed by media manipulation: not only does the emperor have no clothes, but neither do his handlers or the entire conservative movement. It's all a game of smoke and mirrors that create the illusion of popular government out of the reality of corporatist oligarchy.

On a different issue--Here is how they keep the sheeple complacent: with intermittent sideshows that prevent their horrendous misuse of government from becoming an issue with traction. The latest, of course, was the "capture" of Saddam Hussein. Now they can parade him around at will like some trophy of war, the whole point, of course, being to confuse the dimwitted public into thinking that catching Saddam justifies the war on Iraq, so that W's popularity will not continue tanking because of the horrible rapine and devastation he and his handlers are wreaking on America.

Today's Baltimore Sun carries a succint op/ed piece that demonstrates the proposition that Saddam's removal cannot and does not justify W's invasion of Iraq. Here is the link:

Pitts: Finding Hussein doesn't make a wrong war right

And here is an excerpt:

Howard Dean made headlines [this week] simply for affirming that he still thinks invading Iraq was a bad idea - a statement his fellow Democratic contenders for the presidency jumped on as a starving man does an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, for instance, suggested that Dr. Dean had "climbed into his own spider hole of denial."

But it's Mr. Lieberman - and anyone else who thinks Mr. Hussein's humiliation validates the Iraq war - who's in denial.

You feel like an ant at a picnic for pointing this out. Indeed, the only thing that might feel more awkward than standing aside from the celebratory conga line would be to join it. Because joining it requires one to forget conveniently that the reason we went to war was not to find Mr. Hussein but to find weapons of mass destruction, which, we were told, represented a clear and present danger to our security.

Those weapons are yet to be found, and the suspicion is strong that they simply do not exist, that calamitous failures of intelligence led the nation to spend time, treasure and lives on a war that did not need to be fought.

From where I sit, the invasion of Iraq looks like a bigger and bloodier mistake every day. We have grabbed the proverbial tiger by the ears and can't let go. Meanwhile, our stated goal in doing so is unrealized and largely forgotten.

History being written by the winners, maybe that won't matter much 10 years from now. Maybe it will be accepted as fact that we went to war primarily to liberate the Iraqi people.

Forgive me if I find that possibility disturbing. This whole business of attack now, pick a justification later, squanders American prestige and undermines American moral authority. As does the tendency on the part of the nation and its leaders to claim Iraq as part of the "war on terrorism," though there is, as of yet, no proven connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of Sept. 11.

And finally, as many of us suspected, it seems that the Bushites were not really telling us the whole truth about the "capture" of Saddam. The gung-ho aura cast around the mission by the self-serving military commanders under the iron thumb of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, et al. turns out to have been somewhat overstated. Indeed, it now appears that Saddam was captured by Kurds, not by Americans.

Here is a news dispatch from Bloomsberg News dated today:

Bloomsberg: Hussein Was Held by Kurds Before U.S. Capture

And here is an excerpt:

Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. troops only after being held prisoner by Kurdish forces, who had had drugged and abandoned him, Agence France-Presse reported, citing a Sunday Express newspaper report.

The Kurdish Patriotic Front, which fought alongside U.S. forces during the Iraq war, held Hussien until it negotiated for more political advantage in the Middle East, AFP said, citing the paper, which quoted an unidentified Iraqi intelligence officer.

Of course, stories that break in the foreign press are seldom treated seriously in the American press. But that goes back to our first topic of the day: the Bushites have moved America closer to Amerika than it has every been before. And if we don't turn out and stop them at the next election (provided that Republican control of the voting machines can be blocked before then), it will be too late to save freedom in this once-great nation.

BUSH: STILL WRONG ABOUT IRAQ

While the media swoon over the sideshow of Saddam pulled from a hole, more evidence of the lies W. told to get us into Iraq came out yesterday.

It seems W. told 75 or so senators last fall that Saddam could hit the coasts of the US with biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Of course that was a lie, but it had the effect of scaring the senators into giving W the power to do anything he liked with our military.

Why any of them would trust W is beyond us. The creep utters more lies in an hour than Bill Clinton did during his whole presidency. But they were probably thinking more about politics than truth, or justice, or virtue.

Here is the link to an article describing the briefing given to senators last fall:

Florida Today: Bush Lied to Senate

And here is an excerpt:

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.

Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.

Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing.

The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.

Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said.

Nelson delivered the news during a half-hour conference call with reporters Monday afternoon. The senator, who is on a seven-nation trade mission to South America, was calling from an airport in Santiago, Chile.

"That's news," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this."

Like everything the moron-in-chief says, his prevarication to the senators was completely self-serving. Some are reluctant to call W's truth-challenged utterances "lies," because they think he might actually have believed what he said. O.K., even if that point is granted, one still has to ask, Why in God's name does he believe such falsehoods? Answer: being a profoundly thoughtless creature, he believes whatever pleases him.

We now know that the "intelligence" that W and his handlers kept citing last fall was at best inconclusive, and at worst cooked. And their excuse of palming off their judgments on the British is too ludicrous and self-interested to pass muster ever among thieves.

So there can only be this conclusion: W and his handlers lied to everyone to get us into Iraq, or they duped themselves by being completely credulous and willing to believe whatever they wanted to hear.

The truth is probably a mix of the two: W probably is foolish enough to fall into the self-delusional camp; but Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and all the neo-cons have the twisted intelligence of Satan in Paradise Lost: they surely knew the truth and lied about it.

With such "leaders," who needs enemies?

BUSH: DEFICIT OF HONESTY

W's record of lies on the subject of the deficit is well documented, and shameful.

Here is a great piece from The Daily Mis-Lead that you can use to confound your mind-controlled conservative acquaintances:

Daily Mis-Lead: More Presidential Deficit Deceit

And here is whole piece:

President Bush yesterday deployed his budget director to write an op-ed claiming "We can cut the deficit in half"1. It was a direct attempt to regain his status as a supposed "fiscal conservative." The problem is that it is just one in a long line of empty reassurances and dishonest statements on the deficit issue.

In 2001, when he was pitching his tax cut, the President reassured the country that, "we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens."2 After his tax cuts passed and a deficit ensued, he promised, "Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term."3 When that proved not to be the case, he said "I remember campaigning in Chicago and one of the reporters said, 'Would you ever deficit spend?' I said, 'Only - only - in times of war, in times of economic insecurity as a result of a recession or in times of national emergency.' Never did I dream we'd have a trifecta."4 Even this statement proved to be a flat out lie: two days later on Meet the Press, Tim Russert said "We have checked everywhere and we've even called the White House as to when the president said [the trifecta caveat] when he was campaigning in Chicago, and it didn't happen."

Bush then tried to shift the blame for the deficit, saying, "This nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war."5 While that sounded good, he was contradicting his own budget director, who admitted just a few months before that "Even if we had never been attacked, and incurred no costs of war or recovery from September 11th…we still would have gone into deficit."6

Because the President has decided to focus on dishonest rhetoric - instead of action - the deficit now sits at $374 billion - the highest in history.7

Sources:

1. Wall Street Journal, 12/10/03
2. Remarks by the President, 03/27/2001.
3. State of the Union Address, 01/29/2002.
4. President Discusses Homeland Security Department, 06/07/2002.
5. President Discusses Plan for Economic Growth in Ohio, 04/23/2003.
6. Mitch Daniels, congressional testimony, 2/5/03
7. "Federal deficit hits record $374.2 billion", USA Today, 10/20/2003.


W tells so many lies that it's impossible to keep up with them. Let us all thank The Daily Mis-Lead for trying!

BUSH: ARROGANT DISDAIN FOR OTHERS

Today's Washington Post has an op-ed piece that explains the current state of the Democratic party better than anything we've seen since the 2000 election.

We urge everyone who wants to see democracy restored in the US to read Harold Myerson's column. Here's the link:

Myerson: Dean's Band of Outsiders

And here is an excerpt:

There are two kinds of Democrats in George W. Bush's America: those who are on the outside and know it, and those who are on the outside and don't. And the peculiar fascination of the Democratic presidential campaign is to watch the interplay between these two groups.

It is the Bush White House and the Republican Congress that set up this dynamic. By winning office with a negative 540,000-vote margin and then proceeding to govern in the most relentlessly partisan fashion from the right, the president has made unmistakably clear that the concerns of Democrats are of no interest to him. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the Republican leadership relies solely on Republican votes to get its measures passed, going so far as to exclude mainstream Democrats from conference committees. When America's new laws are to be negotiated, Republicans talk only to themselves.

Disastrously, it's been the Democrats in Congress who've been the slowest to pick up on their new marginality. Some of the Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war in October 2002 did so -- or say they did so -- in hopes of prodding Bush to embrace a more multilateral approach toward Iraq.

Call this the Tony Blair Fallacy -- both the prime minister and our own legislators failed to realize that Bush wanted only their permission, not their advice. And this year it was Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill -- who calculated that the Medicare bill would grow more palatable the longer it was deliberated. In any previous Congress, that could well have been the case. In this Congress, however, no Democrats are allowed into the deliberations that matter.

Today the Democrats finally have a legislative leader -- San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who heads the party in the House -- who understands that dealmaking with the likes of Tom DeLay is a chimera, and that the business of the Democrats is to oppose. The overwhelming vote of House Democrats against the Medicare bill is testimony to her success. Her tenure casts a cold light on that of her predecessor, Dick Gephardt, who, in his eight years as minority leader, never assembled a united opposition to the malignant follies of Gingrich and DeLay.

While the nation's Democratic leaders were unable to understand just how marginal they'd become, however, millions of rank-and-file Democrats and just plain disgruntled Bush-haters intuitively grasped what was going on. Bush was bent on repealing the New Deal and replacing the internationalist order that the United States had erected after World War II with a more nationalist vision of his own. If you weren't with him, you were against him. And he was against you.

Howard Dean's initial appeal has been to those Americans who always knew they were on the margins of George Bush's America. Not the socioeconomic margins, not the African American and Latino communities, but the political, cultural and existential margins -- the young, urban, white middle class in particular. Dean's are the people who were bowling alone -- not churchgoers, not union members. They shared a set of beliefs on which they'd never before had an opportunity to act collectively.

The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that....

Can a band of outsiders beat George W. Bush? Clearly, the congressional wing of the Democrats can only benefit from embracing its outsider status, but is the same true for the aspiring presidential wing? There are limits to the Meetup approach to building a presidential majority, but no one's ever tried it before, and we don't know what those limits are.

What are the limits? Let us hope they are vast! If Dean can energize two or three million individuals to give him $100 or $200 each, he will have more than enough to meet W and his plutocrat backers head-on. And he will be doing it, unlike W, with the backing of the American people, not propped up by wealthy capitalist, corporatist fat cats and ignorant, intolerant bigots.

BUSH: ANOTHER ROBBERY IN FLORIDA

On Lou Dobbs CNN news show the other night, he ran a poll asking whether voter-verifiable paper trails were necessary on the new electronic voting machines.

The results were overwhelming: 97% said YES. (Here is the link: Dobbs's Poll. It's near the bottom of the transcript; do a search for "97" on the page and you'll find it.)

So what do they do in Florida? Glenda Hood, the replacement for Katherine Harris as GOP shill election-rigger, has decided to REJECT the paper trail. Here is the link:

Florida Getting Ready to Steal Another Election

And here is an excerpt:

California will require that its touch-screen voting machines provide paper printouts for each ballot cast, but Florida's top elections official says she does not favor a similar standard here....

But Hood said making a paper trail a statewide requirement is not necessary because Florida has multiple safeguards to assure the accuracy and security of touch screens, which are used in Palm Beach County and 14 other counties.

"Florida has led the nation in providing security and certification," Hood said. "At this point in time, with the satisfaction that the supervisors continue to show... and the fact that we haven't had complaints from voters, I have a high confidence level."

Not to mention, it's a lot easier to corrupt the voting process if no one can trace the votes.

Combine this nonchalant attitude on the part of Hood with the truly devious behavior of the mostly Republican-owned voting-machine manufacturers, and one can only come to the conclusion that Republicans are not going to let the people get a chance to remove W by a fair election. (Check out the obvious undemocratic behavior of the voting-machine makers here: Black Box Voting.

The only thing that will save this nation is a massive turnout in November of 2004 by every last person who sees and understands the outrageous destruction of democracy that is being perpetrated by W's handlers and their corporate masters. There must be enough average people out there by now who have been betrayed by the Bushites to crush W in 2004--not only all the committed Democrats who are just waiting to take W down, but also steel workers, senior citizens, health-care workers, unionists, military families, unemployed manufacturing workers, and the millions of other Americans who have been short-changed, ignored, and insulted by the high-handed, plutocratic arrogance of the Bush junta.

The 2004 election is the last chance for the real PEOPLE of America to get our country back before the Bushites transform it into a fascist corporatocrary that will make 1984 look like the Garden of Eden. Don't let the Republicans steal the election with their rigged voting machines! Join the 97% who want action on this matter! Call 850-245-6500 (Florida Department of State, a long-distance number) and demand Voter Verifiable Paper Ballots in Florida!