The poll asked voters to rate the importance of a series of issues to their 2004 White House vote. Here are the top six issues (with the percent saying "very important" in parentheses): economy and jobs (83 percent), health care (75 percent), education (74 percent), terrorism and homeland security (70 percent), the situation in Iraq (70 percent), and Social Security/Medicare (69 percent).

Then, pollsters asked voters who selected a given issue as "very important" whether they thought a Democratic president would do a better job than Bush on that issue. Here are the same issues with the percentage point lead or deficit for a Democratic president among these voters: economy and jobs (+22), health care (+34), education (+22), terrorism and homeland security (-18), the situation in Iraq (dead even), and Social Security/Medicare (+32).

Pretty interesting! Despite how much Bush dwelt on terrorism and Iraq in his SOTU address, his lead on the former—his area of greatest strength—is actually less than the Democratic leads on the four domestic issues. And he has no lead whatsoever on Iraq, the front line, according to him, of the war against terror.

It's also worth noting that a Democratic president leads Bush on every other issue tested in this poll: the environment (+46), the federal budget deficit (+40), U.S. relations with major European allies (+20), appointing new Supreme Court and federal judges (+12), foreign policy (+10), and even taxes (+8).

Turning to various proposals and decisions Bush referred to in his speech, it is striking that none of them elicit an approval rating above the mid-50s, except for "giving government funding to churches and other religious groups that provide social services" (65 percent). And Public Opinion Watch was fascinated to note that "a constitutional amendment, if necessary, to ban gay marriage in all states" got only a 46 percent approval rating, with equally high disapproval.

Finally, how about this one: "Do you think going to war with Iraq has made Americans safer from terrorism?" Yes: 44 percent. No: 53 percent. Since this is exactly the case Bush was trying to make in the SOTU, disagreement here is a particularly telling indicator that his speech should be considered "mission not accomplished." (link via Demagogue)

Bush is in deep trouble. I really think the bottom is about to drop out of his support and he is going to go down, down, down to defeat like Daddy.

BUSH IS IN DEEP TROUBLE: I'd say something else. The huge turn-out in New Hampshire; the electability factor for Kerry; the passion of the Dean people: all this shows how thoroughly energized the Democrats are to win back the White House. Bush is in the Rove-Cheney cocoon right now. From the SOTU, it looks like he's going to run on 9/11. Bad, backward-looking idea. His coalition is fracturing; his reach out to Hispanics seems to have hurt him more with the base than won him new votes; his spending has independents deeply concerned; Iraq is still a wild card; prescription drugs pandering hasn't swayed any seniors; the religious right wants him to attack gay couples in the Constitution - which will lose him the center. More worrying: I'm not sure he even knows he's in trouble. (via Very Very Happy)

For Aurora businessman Jim Oberweis it's President Bush's immigration reform proposal, an idea Oberweis calls "absolutely dead stone cold wrong."

For former investment banker Jack Ryan, it's government spending he says outpaces the Democrats.

For state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger it's shortcomings in the No Child Left Behind program, too many people cut out of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and deficit spending.

"Any government that makes its children pay the bills for what it wants to consume today is almost on its face immoral," Rauschenberger said. "It's one thing to experience short-term deficits in a time when you have both a recession and a war, but the Congress and the president both need to face up to financial discipline."

Debates marked by criticism of the president have become commonplace this year, but the amazing thing Thursday was that it was Republican Senate candidates voicing disagreements with Bush policies.

For a week, the computer whizzes laid abuse - both high- and low-tech - on the six new briefcase-sized electronic voting machines sent over by the state.

One guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another figured out how to vote more than once - and get away with it. Still another launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software. Once inside, he could easily change vote totals that come in on Election Day.

"My guess is we've only scratched the surface," said Michael A. Wertheimer, who spent 21 years as a cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency.

He is now a director at RABA Technologies in Columbia, the firm that the state hired for about $75,000 to look at Maryland's new touch-screen voting machines scheduled to be unveiled in nearly every precinct in Maryland for the March 2 primary.

The state has no choice but to use its $55 million worth of AccuVote-TS machines made by Diebold Election Systems for the primary. The old optical scanners are gone.

Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.

In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, both in preserving constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception in leading us to war on phony intelligence overshadows those scandals based on greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding administration, or those aimed at political opponents, such as Watergate. And the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to speak the truth.

Can anyone name any veteran who has been a major candidate for the presidency in the past half-century who has not released his military records?

This list, it must be remembered, includes John McCain, Robert Dole, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Barry Goldwater, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not to mention John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Lyndon Baines Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Harry Truman.

The answer, as near as I can determine: One. George W. Bush. (via The Sideshow)

What the hell is a "weapons of mass destruction-related program activity?" And what is its relationship to statements like these:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
-Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
-George W. Bush Speech to U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
-Ari Fleischer Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now."
-Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters, May 4, 2003

Alterman's correspondent Don Dougherty writes:

If the bill collector calls, I will inform him that I have a checkbook which is evidence of "possible intent to develop bill-paying programs." That should satisfy him.

Alterman also cites Siva Vaidhyanathan, who observes:

A cheese-food product is closer [to] real cheese than "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" are to real weapons.

Try this at work during your annual review: "Well no, I have not finished that project and have no results. But my desk has some evidence of dozens of project-related program activities."

Alterman also reminds us of another famous presidential quote: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." He quickly realizes the difference between the quotes, though: "one was about a private affair and one was about taking the nation to war under false pretenses. Silly me." (link via The Sideshow)

US combat deaths in Iraq have risen sharply during January despite a drop in the number of attacks and the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein over a month ago.

As of Thursday, 33 American soldiers and one civilian had been killed by hostile fire during the month. That compares with 24 US combat deaths in December, and a total of 32 coalition combat deaths.

The figures appear to show that the security situation in Iraq is not improving, contrary to earlier claims from the US military and politicians.

The US casualties are also mounting [in] Afghanistan, where seven US soldiers were killed on Thursday in an explosion near an ammunition dump in the south of the country.

Remember when everyone jumped on Howard Dean for having the temerity to say that Saddam's capture made us no safer? (via Atrios)

[Tax relief] helps us in our deficit problem. We are getting more revenue now into the government than if we had not cut taxes.

Well, Mr. Leader, just how much would you have to cut taxes in order to balance the budget?

DeLay dodged the question, and Dobbs, bulldog that he is, did not return to the subject. Here on Earth, of course, Bush's tax cuts are primarily responsible for creating the deficit, not for solving it. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the deficit will be $477 billion this year, smashing last year's record, a $375 billion deficit.

After our earlier popular endeavors like The Besides That® Syndrome we are proud to introduce:

The Real Scandal Pronouncement!® Inspired by many of our conservative friends, the object of the game is to trivialize something important (ideally criminal) and then announce that the more serious issue is this other, rather unsurprising and fairly minor development. Let's take today's Wall Street Journal to get things started.

Forget the fact that Republican Senate staffers illegally accessed opposition memos for several months, the real scandal® is that Democrats tried to block a few of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Ever so reliable InstaHack offered this gem last year:

Forget the fact that the Bush administration included a claim it had every reason to know was bogus in the 2003 State of the Union speech, the real scandal is that Joe Wilson doesn't completely agree with Richard Perle's views.

Random conservative pundit on the intelligence used to justify the war:

Forget that the US has spent $200bn war on a war of aggression that's killed hundreds of coalition soldiers and thousands of Iraqis, the real scandal is that Bill Clinton also thought Iraq had WMD.

And now... add your own version in the comments. Winner gets a shrink wrapped copy of Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons.

It's great fun! Go over there and try your hand at it!

The president was fantasizing again this afternoon about the circumstances that led to war -- and if his remarks at his press conference with the Polish president are to be taken seriously, he also seems badly confused about his Iraqi timeline. This was Bush's first attempt to answer the damning findings of David Kay, departing director of the Iraq Survey Group. It didn't go well, although almost everyone in the White House press corps pretended not to notice.

So removed from reality is the president that it seems worthwhile to unpack two exchanges with reporters who asked about Kay's admission that he expects no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq.

"Question: Mr. President, a year ago you said the dictator of Iraq has got weapons of mass destruction. Are you still confident that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, given what Dr. Kay has said?

"President Bush: Let me first compliment Dr. Kay for his work. I appreciate his willingness to go to Iraq and I appreciate his willingness to gather facts. And the Iraq Survey Group will continue to gather facts.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat to America and others. That's what we know. We know from years of intelligence -- not only our own intelligence services, but other intelligence-gathering organizations -- that he had weapons -- after all, he used them. He had deep hatred in his heart for people who love freedom. We know he was a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world. We know that he defied the United Nations year after year after year. And given the events of September the 11th, we know we could not trust the good intentions of Saddam Hussein, because he didn't have any.

"There is no doubt in my mind the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. America is more secure, the world is safer, and the people of Iraq are free."

There is no doubt in Bush's mind -- but please note that he didn't answer the question. Instead, he asserted that we "know ... he had weapons" because Saddam "used them" -- presumably meaning the poison gas deployed more than a decade ago. After driving the nation to war because of the WMD threat, Bush won't say whether those weapons will ever be found. So another reporter pushed again minutes later:

"Question: Mr. President, but how do you describe and account for the difference between what you claimed prior to the war about what he possessed and what he was capable of, and what the intelligence said he possessed and was capable of in terms of a nuclear weapon within the decade, and the fact that David Kay says the intelligence was inaccurate and wrong, and nothing has been found? Don't you owe the American people an explanation?

"President Bush: Well, I think the Iraq Survey Group must do its work. Again, I appreciate David Kay's contribution. I said in the run-up to the war against Iraq that -- first of all, I hoped the international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United Nations would enforce its resolutions, one of many. And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.

"I said in the run-up that Saddam was a grave and gathering danger, that's what I said. And I believed it then, and I know it was true now. And as Mr. Kay said, that Iraq was a dangerous place. And given the circumstances of September the 11th, given the fact that we're vulnerable to attack, this nation had to act for our security."

Leaving aside those incoherent references to "programs" and what the world obviously "felt," what is most notable in Bush's answer is that he again said Saddam "did not let us in." This is the second time he has made this weird statement, as if Hans Blix and UNMOVIC had never existed, nor conducted the most intrusive weapons inspections ever done in Iraq. (The first time was last July, when Bush said, in the presence of an astonished Kofi Annan: "And we gave [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in.")

How dare the press mock Howard Dean when they listen respectfully to this arrant lunacy? (link via Atrios)

Conason concludes by briefly addressing the argument that the war was justified on humanitarian grounds. He links to this report by Human Rights Watch, which rejects the argument. The report is well worth reading in full. In brief, it concludes that the war is not justified on humanitarian grounds because:

• "Brutal as Saddam Hussein’s reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention." Intervention would have been justified in 1991 when Hussein brutally slaughtered Iraqis who rose up against them while the U.S., which had encouraged the uprising, did nothing.
• War was not the last reasonable option. The U.S. should have sought criminal prosecution, but never did so.
• A humanitarian purpose was not the principal reason the U.S. went to war, but at best a secondary consideration.
• The U.S. took insufficient measures to avoid civilian casualties, dropping bombs indiscriminately on targets it suspected might harbor Hussein or other Iraqi leaders, and using cluster munitions in populated areas, inevitably resulting in civilian casualties.
• The U.S. acted without U.N. approval.

UPDATE 1/28/04: Sadly, No! explores Press Secretary Scott McClellan's utter inability to give a straight answer about whether he expects that we will ever find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This is a war. Yes, I know Kerry was in Vietnam, but if he were good at this kind of war, wouldn't we have noticed by now? We've heard more from Sen. Byrd, and he's a lot older than Kerry.

All we have is Kerry's word for it that he can take on George Bush. Has he done it anytime in the past few years? I'd like to see that. If so, why was he so quiet when he did it? Is there any fire in his belly for anything other than winning? Because I don't see it. Howard Dean did it when it counted, when it wasn't safe.

Hell, the Dixie Chicks showed more balls than John Kerry.

It comes down to this: Some of us believe there's a minor problem in the White House and all we need is a some nice well-behaved, middle-of-the-road Democrat in there to fix it.

And some of us believe we're living under a right-wing corporate regime that staged a coup and stole the country. You can see the problem. Because I'm not looking for gravitas, suitable for marketing to the same upper West Side intellectuals who ripped Clinton.

I'm looking for Buffy the Vampire Killer, someone to go boldly into the Hellmouth and save the world. Someone to kick neocon ass.

Someone who will put a stake through the Boy King's heart.

And smile.

 

The Washington Post reports that the Virginia legislature is no fan of Dubya's underfunded No Child Left Behind program:

RICHMOND, Jan. 23 -- The Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates sharply criticized President Bush's signature education program Friday, calling the No Child Left Behind Act an unfunded mandate that threatens to undermine the state's own efforts to improve students' performance. By a vote of 98 to 1, the House passed a resolution calling on Congress to exempt states like Virginia from the program's requirements. The law "represents the most sweeping intrusions into state and local control of education in the history of the United States," the resolution says, and will cost "literally millions of dollars that Virginia does not have."

The federal law aims to improve the performance of students, teachers and schools with yearly tests and serious penalties for failure. In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, Bush said that "the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America's children."

Officials in other states also have complained about the effects of the act, signed into law in 2002. But Friday's action in the Virginia House represents one of the strongest formal criticisms to date from a legislative chamber controlled by the president's own party.

The House action came after months of complaints from local and state educators that the federal law conflicts with Virginia's Standards of Learning testing program, in place since 1998 and considered one of the toughest in the nation.

No Republicans voted against the resolution, a fact that House Education Committee Chairman James H. Dillard II (R-Fairfax) said is proof that "the damn law is ludicrous."

"I'm all in favor of accountability and higher standards, but Virginia already has a system in place," said Republican House Caucus Chairman R. Steven Landes (R-Augusta). "This could cost us more money than the money coming in from the federal government."

Eugene W. Hickok, the acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said his agency is working to provide states with more flexibility, but he added that money is not the issue. According to his agency, Virginia has $170 million in unspent federal education funds available, dating to 2000.

"The resolution essentially says that if states feel like they have been doing a good job, we should give them the money and leave them alone. What state wouldn't say that?" he said. "This law is perhaps a challenge for us to implement, but it is the first comprehensive attempt to make sure that every child everywhere counts. To say no to that is a typical thing for the states to do."

But the resolution reflects a growing concern among Republicans about the program.

As a result of a Republican legislative initiative in Ohio, the state commissioned a study released this month that found the federal government had significantly underfunded No Child Left Behind.

In North Dakota, a resolution sponsored by Democrats that stated the "cost to states of implementing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is as yet unclear" was passed by both the Republican-controlled House and Senate. And the Republican legislature in Utah is considering legislation to forgo the federal money and opt out of the program entirely.

"The Virginia resolution is the strongest-worded Republican-sponsored initiative to pass," said Scott Young, an education policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

He also said that "there is definitely a bipartisan backlash in the states."

There's more. (via Just a Bump in the Beltway)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government's budget outlook deteriorated further on Monday as the Congressional Budget Office projected nearly $2.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade, providing new fuel for an election-year battle over soaring federal shortfalls.

Along with the forecast, almost $1 trillion worse than estimated in August, Congress' nonpartisan fiscal watchdog said this year's deficit would hit $477 billion. That would be a record in dollar terms.

Although the report envisioned red ink ebbing to $362 billion next year and receding thereafter, it stirred up Democrats, who blame President Bush for squandering the unprecedented surpluses of just three years ago; and conservative Republicans, who say he has let the budget spin out of control.

``He's been completely irresponsible,'' presidential hopeful Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said in New Hampshire, underscoring Democrats' hopes that the issue is catching on. ``We can't afford four more years of the right-wing Republican administration,'' candidate Howard Dean said. ``Republicans don't balance budgets; Democrats do.''

``These budget deficits as far as the eye can see are the predictable result of a president and Congress spending taxpayer dollars with reckless abandon,'' said Brian Riedl, who studies the budget for the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The highest deficit ever was last year's $375 billion.

Bush sends Congress his $2.3 trillion budget for 2005 next Monday. It will propose holding nondefense, nondomestic security spending to about 0.5 percent growth, with a goal of halving deficits by 2009.

``The president has a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years, and that's what we intend to do,'' said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Critics from both parties say the actual shortfalls could be even worse than projected because the budget office excluded the cost of extending tax cuts and other items that are set to expire in coming years. Lawmakers are considered likely eventually to enact such extensions.

In addition, the report's numbers do not extend far enough to catch the brunt of the retirement of the baby boom generation, which will foist huge costs on Social Security, Medicare and other income-support programs.

``Even if economic growth turns out to be greater than projected, however, significant long-term strains on the budget will start to intensify within the next decade'' from the mass retirements, the report said.

. . . .

Highlighting Bush's problems on Capitol Hill, the conservative chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees -- Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla. -- issued cautious statements stressing the need to control spending and red ink.

The national debt, the running total the government owes its debt holders, is more than $7 trillion, including money it owes its own Social Security and other trust funds.

Monday's report, as required by law, assumed lawmakers will not change tax or spending laws over the next decade, a farfetched scenario. That is because the numbers are not predictions but a neutral measure of current policy to judge the budgetary effect of legislation.

The budget office projected that for the decade ending in 2013, the red ink will total $2.38 trillion. That was $986 billion worse than it projected in August and $3.7 trillion deeper than it projected only a year ago.

As Bush took office in January 2001, the budget office projected surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion for the decade ending in 2011.

The worsening since August was because of the costs of legislation enacted since then, including bills creating Medicare prescription drug benefits and paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report also projects lower federal revenue, partly because of lower inflation that the budget office now expects.

The report assumed that the $87.5 billion enacted in November for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be approved anew annually -- an unlikely scenario.

But more than offsetting that were expected and potential expenses the budget office excluded.

These included the costs of making tax cuts enacted under Bush permanent; easing the alternative minimum tax on higher-earning Americans so it doesn't gradually hit middle-income people; paying for unforeseen wars and disasters; sending people to Mars, as the president has proposed; boosting spending for highways and other popular programs; and overhauling Social Security.

After the 2002 election debacle, I said that there was only one silver lining:  with the Republicans in control of the entire government, if the country went to hell in a handbasket, all the blame would fall squarely on the Republicans. I'm afraid the Republicans have "succeeded" in fucking up the country beyond my wildest expectations. If the Democrats can't at least beat Dubya this year, we ought to give up.

I couldn't make it to Ashcroft's address, not even on the tube. But a British friend of mine -- a committed lefty with a caustic wit -- did, and was still steaming about it several days later.

It seems Preacher John used the occasion to lecture the audience on corruption -- bad corruption, that is, the kind that foreigners indulge in. But irony of it certainly wasn't lost on my friend, even if it was on Ashcroft. Some choice excerpts from his sermon:

Corruption provides sanctuary to the forces of terror (and) saps the legitimacy of democratic governments. In it's extreme forms, corruption even threatens democracy itself, because democracy lives on trust, and corruption destroys trust."

Indeed.

When governments play favorites, when they award contracts and make decisions based on corruption that favors the connected, rather than competition that favors the citizenry, freedom is stymied."

I'm sure the guys at Haliburton and Bechtel would agree.

Billmon also has good, snarky stuff on Tom Friedman ("Seeing Tom Friedman at Davos this year was to see the Peter Principle in its late stages -- when the inadequacy and egotistical overreaching have become obvious to all but the victim.") and the participants' view of the United States' economy (American economists' "complacency most definitely is not shared by the Europeans, who are watching the rising euro with the same sinking feeling that King Midas must have felt when he realized that everything he touched, including his food, was turning to gold."). Check it out.

Despite the fact that this is a global war that requires broad support over long timescales, George Bush has not tried to gain Democratic support; he has not engaged seriously with the international community; he has not asked the American public for any kind of sacrifice; he has continued to push a divisive domestic agenda; he has shown little interest in funding anti-proliferation efforts; he has declined to put adequate resources into Afghanistan; he has done nothing to fix an intelligence operation that's quite obvously broken; and he has stonewalled every investigation into the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen.

In light of this, just how seriously do you think George Bush takes the fight against terrorism? I'd say, not very.

Jennings’ performance in last night’s debate perfectly captured the corps’ endless avoidance of this topic. Our news orgs have avoided this topic like a plague; as a result, "the facts" are completely unclear. By the end of Campaign 2000, the Boston Globe was still insisting that Bush almost surely failed to serve. But after November 2000, the press corps dropped this topic like a rock. In reality, there is virtually nowhere Clark could have gone to "look at the facts" about Bush and the Guard. Sadly, Jennings was willing to go on TV and scold him as if this were possible.

I e-mailed Somerby, asking what he thought about the documentation at awolbush.com. He responded, "They have some of the docs, but not all. Only a news org with investigative capabilities will be able to sort it all out." What zany ideas that man has!

UPDATE 1/26/04: Orcinus, as always, has a thorough analysis. (via Atrios) 

John DiIulio. Valerie Plame. Paul O'Neill. Senate spying. WMD lies. I don't know if the American people will ever connect these dots. It won't be easy: The mainstream media seem determined not to notice the larger pattern, even when it's staring them in the face. But maybe, just maybe, there's a catalyst -- like a grand jury indictment -- that will force people to look at the big picture.

Or maybe not. This kind of scandal may not produce the kind of catalyst -- such as a semen-stained dress -- needed to make an impression on our tabloid-trained national audience.

Fucking the Constitution isn't like oral sex -- it doesn't leave any DNA evidence behind.

a helpful list of things Dean can do to remove the image that he is a bumbling, inexperienced, lackluster example of leadership:

• Announce proudly that no president has ever done as much as him for human rights.
• Dress up in a crotch-accentuating flight suit and land a jet on an aircraft carrier.
• Brag repeatedly about a sub-standard college grade point average.
• Get arrested for public rowdiness at a football game.
• Attempt to recite a cliché adage at a press conference and promptly forget how it goes in the middle of saying it.
• Mount, and promptly fall off, an unpowered Segway scooter.
• Drop his dog in front of cameras.
• Consistently mispronounce the word "nuclear."
• Condescendingly mock the upcoming execution of a death row inmate.
• Trade away Sammy Sosa.
• Choke on pretzel bits to the point of losing balance and bruising his head.
• Attend a public event in which Stevie Wonder is performing and wave to him from the balcony.

Atrios also links to your complete source for Dean yamp remixes.

Columbia Journalism Review's excellent Campaign Desk explores how the media's treatment of Dean's Iowa concession speech evolved from balanced coverage into a smear job (via Atrios). Campaign Desk is also rightly unimpressed with Diane Sawyer's conduct of her interview with the Deans.

Meanwhile, Kos reports that polls show that the New Hampshire race is tightening up, with Kerry (who had been leading handily after Dean's alleged "meltdown" in Iowa) now holding only a slim lead over Dean. Kos attributes Dean's resurgence to the Sawyer interview, Dean's appearance on David Letterman's show, and the last debate. A lot can happen before the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. Hold on to your hats.

Dear Dr. E.,
I have been a soldier both on Active Duty and in the National Guard for fifteen years.  I am a lifelong Democrat, but I have voted for Republicans before, in the past when I thought he or she was the better person for the job.  I love my country and I’ll die before I’d do something against her interests.  I know this all sounds corny, but I’ve got tears running down my face as I type this.

Many have heard about the reservists on medical hold at Fort Stewart, GA.  Medical Hold Soldiers of the National Guard and Army Reserve were kept in Barracks at Fort Carson, CO that were scheduled for demolition.  Many soldiers got sicker during our stay there.  The toilet facilities were mostly broken, and mold covered everything.  Soldiers that could not stand or walk had to live on the upper floors.  Nothing was done about the problem, regardless of who we complained to.  I, like others, simply left at the first opportunity to come home.  Many of us did not ever get our problems taken care of.  Although I am now healthy (relatively speaking) I know of several soldiers of my state who are still sick at home.  They cannot work, but have not been paid by the Army for their Active Duty Medical Extensions.  The paperwork has either not been done, or has been lost, or something.  There are stories like this from all over the country.

My unit served in Iraq.  We were originally deployed to provide security in Kuwait.  We had trained for the security mission, essentially guard duty, for several months, without doing any offensive operations, convoy ops, or any other training.  Shortly after our forces secured Baghdad airport, my unit was put on planes to Baghdad, and we began convoy security operations.  We also undertook offensive operations against guerrillas in the Sunni Triangle.  Please understand that these are bread-and-butter operations for infantry like us, but you need to keep training to keep the edge.  We never had the Interceptor body armor, and at times we were low on ammunition, food, and water.  We had several contacts.  I am so proud of my soldiers.  You should’ve seen them.  They performed brilliantly, but God alone knows how we didn’t loose anybody.  I never will.

Since returning to the States, many of the middle-career NCOs have decided they are getting out.  I tried to talk a couple of them into staying, because we need good leaders, especially those with combat experience.  Both of them said that they were getting out and the war had decided it for them.  “They almost got us all killed for no good reason,” said one.  Two of my junior enlisted soldiers refuse to come to drill anymore.  I haven’t been able to talk them into coming.  They will soon be referred for further action at higher levels.  That could mean their arrest and prosecution, or simply administrative discharge.

This year, my unit’s only training objective is MOUT—Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain.  In other words, city warfare.  Where normally we would train to attack and defend in various environments, we are only doing urban ops this year.  No one will say it, but there’s only one place that leads, probably when the next troop rotation to Iraq takes place in the January-March, 2005 timeframe.

Training for this probable deployment will be difficult without weapons, however.  We have one rifle, one machine gun and one pistol for our whole unit, for basic familiarization training ("This is a rifle—the bullets come out this end…").  This is for an Infantry company with over 100 men.  All the other weapons have been transferred to another state for their impending deployment to Iraq.  We have been told that we will get at least a few rifles and a couple of machine guns to train with by Annual Training in June.  Hopefully we will get new stuff before the end of the year, but the CO just gave me a blank stare when I asked about it.  It seems that we will only have enough weapons to train one platoon at a time at AT.  So that means that two thirds of the company will not be training at any given time during the only extended training period we will get all year.  May God help us all.

I take no joy at all in what I have told you.  I fear for the future of the Army, this organization that gave me a home and fed me for so long, and that continues to be a huge part of my life.  Please know that for all of this, I love the Army, and the National Guard, and I cannot escape the nagging feeling that I have broken faith with my chain of command.  I would’ve volunteered to go to Afghanistan when one of our sister units from our state deployed (with proper equipment), if I’d been healthy in time to go. 

Afghanistan is a justifiable mission.  There’s a good reason for U.S. forces to be there.  Iraq, on the other hand, felt wrong to me from the get-go.  Liberating an oppressed people is something I will always be proud of, but that’s not the reason Bush gave us for going to war, is it?  He and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, of all people, claimed that we were under some kind of Sword of Damocles with all of the chemical and bio weapons that were supposedly aimed at us.  That it was a matter of time until Al Queda used Saddam’s gas on us.  He lied to us, plain and simple.  He also did incalculable damage to the UN and our alliances with Europe, two international structures that have served my country so well for so long.  But I want to ask—with the Army either broken, or about to be broken, what the hell are we supposed to do if Korea goes up?  What if something happens in South America?

The reason I contacted you is that you seem like a reasonable man.  I read Altercation, and I agree with most of what I see there.  I also know that Eric Alterman probably has resources that I do not have.  I need people to know just how bad things are, but if my career crashes into my idealism, then I won’t be able to take care of my soldiers the next time my unit deploys.

Please do not use my name or state.  Other than that, use what you can.  It was reading those two articles on Early Bird, right after reading Altercation, that I decided I needed to say something.  For the record, I am a Clark supporter, having served under the General in the past.  I am also very comfortable with Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards.  In any event, I would vote for the rotting carcass of a dead rat before I vote for the Texas AWOL.

The Electoral College (the stupidest thing ever, with roots in slavery and racism) and the polarization of America have combined in an interesting way. As Larry Sabato pointed out over at Crystal Ball, most of the states will go Dem or Rep regardless of who the nominee is. No Republican will win California, and no Democrat can win in Alabama. So, the election is not truly national. The presidency will be decided by about 8 or 9 swing states (Iowa, WV, Penn., Wisconsin, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, Arkansas). So, the proper question is not who is the best national candidate, but who can win a majority of these particular states. Karl Rove knows this better than anyone. It's no accident that Bush enacted steel tariffs (protecting workers in WV, Ohio and Penn) or is pushing for immigration reform (Florida, Arizona and New Mex), or passed a prescription drug benefit (old folks in Florida). The Bush administration has systematically passed legislation to favor these particular swing states. And they should - there's no need to do anything for Kentucky because it's a safe Bush state. Ah, to be the median voter.

So this is the problem that Kerry faces. A lot of these states are blue collar, socially conservative states with no fondness of the Northeast. Kerry is a great guy and a war hero, but the question is whether that will be enough to get coal miners in WV to vote for someone from Massachusetts. So, I'm not sure Rove is sweating Kerry (and he was salivating for Dean for the same reason - in spades). Rove probably is worried about Edwards and Clark though. Edwards not only picks off North Carolina (net 30 point different - which is HUGE), but he plays well among the working classes in the swing states. Clark is more of an unknown, but he at least picks off Arkansas, which would be enough for the presidency if everything else stays the same as 2000. [NOTE: This is incorrect. As you can see here, because of census-based changes in the number of electoral votes each state has, winning Arkansas plus the Gore states would result in a 266-272 electoral vote loss for the Democrat.]

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

This is absolutely mind-boggling. It is at the very least a gross ethical breach. It is very likely also a crime. Eric Brunner at Wampum, and The Boulder Inquisition both argue that this violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is codified at Title 18, section 1030 of the United States Code.  That statute reads, in pertinent part:

§ 1030. Fraud and related activity in connection with computers

(a) Whoever ... (2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains ... (B) information from any department or agency of the United States; or ... (3) intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer of a department or agency of the United States, accesses such a computer of that department or agency that is exclusively for the use of the Government of the United States or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, is used by or for the Government of the United States and such conduct affects that use by or for the Government of the United States; ... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section [a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both]

(e) As used in this section ... (6) the term "exceeds authorized access" means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter; and (7) the term "department of the United States" means the legislative or judicial branch of the Government or one of the executive departments enumerated in section 101 of title 5....

I agree. It sure looks to me like Republican staffers "intentionally . . . exceed[ed] authorized access" and thereby "obtain[ed] . . . information in the computer that the accesser[s] [were] not entitled so to obtain" from the "legislative . . . branch of the Government." And what was the role of Republican senators in this? It strains credulity that their staffers were stealing and leaking this information for a year while they remained blissfully ignorant.

Kos says the Republicans "may also have violated the Patriot Act's cyberterrorism clauses," although he hasn't provided any analysis as yet.

What's the media's reaction to this? Paul Krugman briefly mentions the story in a column primarily about voting machines. Other than the Globe, and Krugman's passing mention, it doesn't appear that any of the print or broadcast media have even picked up this story. The blogosphere is going nuts, as it should. Josh Marshall says the story "should knock everything else off the front page. It's an amazing story, a huge scandal." Atrios calls this "bigger than the Watergate break-in" and says, "This really is absolutely incredible, and the goddamn media is just sleeping. Imagine if Democrats had done this. Really-just try." Intelligence failure says, "I want outrage. Maybe our dear media will stop the 24/7 coverage of Dean's crazy yelp and cover this. I'm not holding my breath." Indeed. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: The New York Times has an amazingly flaccid story entitled, "Senate Inquiry Into Memos That Went Astray Nears End." "Went astray?!" Sounds like they're talking a lost puppy that was returned to its Democratic owner by the helpful Republicans. Josh Marshall remarks, "The further decline of a great paper." Sad but true.

Unfortunately, the post-9-11 intellectual climate in the United States has prevented any serious discussion of the terrorists' goals and their strategies for achieving them.

In the post-9-11 chill, even conceding that the terrorist leaders are intelligent people with rational goals seemed somehow disloyal to America's dead. Instead, it was assumed that their fanaticism made them too blind or stupid for purposeful action at the strategic level. Even terrorist groups as marginal and self-deluded as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Weathermen had a more or less coherent analysis, political goals and some notion of how their attacks moved them toward those goals, but the public debate in the U.S. grants none of that to al-Qaida.

Yet the Islamist radicals have always been completely open about their goals. They want to take power in the Muslim countries (phase one of the project), and then unite the entire Muslim world in a final struggle to overthrow the power of the West (phase two). They are still stuck in phase one, with little to show for it despite 30 years of trying, so in the early 1990s Osama bin Laden and his colleagues switched from head-on assaults on the regimes in Muslim countries to direct attacks on Western targets. Yet their first-phase goal remains seizing power in the Muslim world, not some fantasy about "bringing the West to its knees."

 
Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about their strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then how does attacking the West help? Well, the U.S. in particular may be goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries -- and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes finally get off the ground.

Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was the principal motive for the 9-11 attack. They would add that by giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaida's attacks have paid off handsomely. U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power.

It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States. I know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point that al-Qaida wants Bush to win next November's presidential election and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for another four years, and will act to save Bush from defeat if necessary.

It probably would not do so unless Bush's number were slipping badly, for any terrorist attack on U.S. soil carries the risk of stimulating resentment against the current administration for failing to prevent it.

Certainly another attack on the scale of 9-11 would risk producing that result, even if al-Qaida had the resources for it. But a simple truck bomb in some U.S. city center a few months before the election, killing just a couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Bush's arms and turn a tight election around. Al-Qaida is clever enough for that. (via Just a Bump in the Beltway)

Well, damn, man, it's pretty soon gonna be president election time again, and that means we gotta start thinkin' about who's gonna be the one we want to be president. That's some important stuff, who's president, because whoever's president will be in charge of the whole dang shootin' match. And, if y'all are like me, you know America's president needs to be the kind of old boy who, in the first place, kicks him some damn ass, and in the second place, don't listen to all that bitchin' about how he shouldn't be kickin' so much ass. And, if you ain't like me, guess what? My vote cancels out y'all's!

. . . .

So maybe you ain't a patriot like I am. Now, when I say patriot, I'm talkin' about most of our athletes, country-music stars, and guys like me what agree with them. So, say you ain't a patriot, and you're fixin' to vote up a candidate what's some limpo what'll give in to the crybaby liberals, the damn screechin' women, the commies at the United Nations, and the other America-haters. Fine by me! I got a vote here that does just as much good as yours, and mine's marked "No Limpos!"

Or say you wanna take away the money we need for our Army tanks and rifles and fightin' planes what let us keep our eternal vigilance of freedom by invadin' other countries. And say you want to give it to the damn schoolteachers, which let me tell you never done old Duane any damn good, and still, they most times drive a newer car than I do. I learned all I got from my daddy—another guy without any fancy book smarts, by the way. If he didn't need them books, then why do anybody else? Well, hey, I might not be educated, but I do got me a big ol' flag, $300 from the government, and a president that, like I told you before, kicked him some ass. It's things like that what make me happy my vote gonna meet y'all's toe-to-toe and take it down!

Plus, what's more, I got to see Saddam get his ass throwed in jail. That's a big ol' switch-a-dilly from a few years ago, when Saddam was runnin' around free while Duane was in the tank, let me tell you.

So maybe you think what we got here is one a them Mexican pissin' matches, what with my vote and your vote both bein' worth the exact same. But I tell you what! There's all the guys workin' down here at the budget-transmission shop with me, and the guys at the body shop across the way, and the car-battery dismantlin' yard. Plus, there's all our pals at the Dew Drop off 78, and all our other pals at the County Dragaway, and our big ol' families, and our wives, for those what have 'em. Read me? In this next election, whenever they set it to come around, we gonna go up agin' all you guys at the coffee shop and the library. Now, if you ain't noticed, we got a lot more parkin' lot space down at the racetrack and the Farm & Fleet store than y'all do out in front of your bookstores and muffin shops. All of us add up real quick, and our votes do a damn bunch more than just cancel out all y'all's!

Dear Mary
An open letter to the veep’s gay daughter.

Excuse me for being blunt, but my rights are at stake at the moment, as our born-again president has told his theocratic mentors that he’d sell us——you, me and millions of other homos——down the river. So let’s get to the point: What the hell happened to you? Are you just another spoiled rich brat——the lesbian Paris Hilton——worried about getting a chunk of those 30 million Halliburton bucks should Dad’s heart conk out? I mean, this is one of those moments of truth, Mary, one in which the fundamentalist forces of darkness either march into the White House——enshrining antigay discrimination into the U.S. Constitution——or are beaten back. And so far, you’ve been working for the enemy, darling.

. . . .

Quite frankly, you owe us, Mary. Big time. And you better believe that people——including many a gay Republican, at least if my e-mail inbox is any indication——will be coming to get you, demanding that you fork over that debt, pronto. Unless you speak out now, every time your father or the president or Karl Rove stokes antigay hatred in the coming campaign, folks will be pointing fingers at you and asking, "What the fuck, Mary?!" Perhaps you don’t have a conscience and none of this will affect you. But the next time you walk into a gay public place, be prepared for a chorus calling you everything from a quisling and a betrayer to a selfish, fiendish, nasty example of a human being. (Via En Banc)

You expect a salesman to emphasize the positive attributes of whatever he's peddling and to downplay the downside. But even by extreme standards of political salesmanship, the rhetoric-reality gap on display in President Bush's State of the Union shows the White House has taken cynicism to impressive new levels.

Indeed, it's hard to pick the single area in which the president's shading of reality departs most cynically from the facts - the competition is so fierce!

USA Today provides a good "reality check" on Bush's statements (via Atrios)

The Daily Mis-Lead reports that Bush has previously cut, or is currently advocating cutting, funds from a number of the programs that he advocated increasing funding for in the SOTU.

Right-winger Andrew Sullivan says, "If you're a fiscal conservative or a social liberal, this was a speech that succeeded in making you take a second look at the Democrats. I sure am." (Link via Obsidian Wings)

Over at Daily Kos, Meteor Blades links to some more honest assessments than Dubya's of the state of the Union.

UPDATE 3:25 A.M. 1/22/04: Roger Ailes has a wickedly funny review of the SOTU:

Illegal drug use? Prescription drug abuse? STDs? Disrespect for marriage?

Sounds like your family reunion, fuckhead.

"Each year, about three million teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases that can harm them, or kill them, or prevent them from ever becoming parents.

However, they can still get lucrative consulting contracts from foreign interests seeking to buy influence with their siblings who hold government office.

"In my budget, I propose a grassroots campaign to help inform families about these medical risks. We will double Federal funding for abstinence programs, so schools can teach this fact of life."

Screw doubled federal funding -- just send Neilsie's diseased dick on a national tour of the nation's junior high schools.

Brad DeLong speculates how the Bushies came up with the "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" locution:

A transcription of a tape from the Oval Office, January 18, 2004:

Karl Rove: We'll have him say that the Kay Report showed that we were right in claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Karen Hughes: Ummm... No.

Karl Rove: No?

Karen Hughes: No. We'd make him look like an idiot.

Karl Rove: How about if we have him say, "the Kay Report has identified Iraq's program to build Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"?

Richard Cheney: I'm afraid not.

Karl Rove: No?

Richard Cheney: He'll look like an idiot. The Kay Report did not identify weapons of mass destruction programs.

Karl Rove: Say it anyway. No one will challenge it. It will get by.

Dan Bartlett: In a normal year it would, but...

Karl Rove: But?

Dan Bartlett: Remember last year's State of the Union? The Niger uranium disaster? Usually we can fool the press with no problem. But this time they're lying in wait for us. We dare not have him say anything in the SOTU address that is false.

Karl Rove: Nothing?

Dan Bartlett: Nothing.

Karl Rove: So we can't have him say "weapons of mass destruction"?

Karen Hughes: Nope.

Karl Rove: And we can't have him say "weapons of mass destruction programs"?

Richard Cheney: Nope.

Karl Rove: How about if we have him say "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"?

Richard Cheney: Works for me.

(Link to DeLong via Just a Bump in the Beltway)

UPDATE 6:50 P.M. 1/21/04: Looks like Atrios has the real scoop on the origin of this phrase.

Working (Poor) in America

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine there is a terrific essay, “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” by David K. Shipler, offering the compelling story of Caroline Payne‘s struggle to overcome the inexorable rut and relenting challenges that define the lives of the working poor. It’s a profound and moving look at a life shaped by dead-end jobs, debt, bad teeth, picking up cans, and relying on the kindness of family and friends.

I tried to keep the excerpts down to a minimum, but there’s just too much in Shipler’s piece to hold back much more. (When you’re done here, go read the article in its entirety.)

Futility has nagged at Caroline for a long time. Four years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, she sat at her kitchen table in Claremont, N.H., and added up her life. It was the height of the economic boom. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline was not one of them. She had achieved two of her three goals. She had earned a college diploma (a two-year associate’s degree), and she had gone from a homeless shelter into her own house (owned mostly by a bank). The third objective, “a good paying job,” as she put it, still eluded her. Back in the mid-70’s, she earned $6 an hour in a Vermont factory that made plastic cigarette lighters and cases for Gillette razors. A quarter century later, she earned $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working cash registers at a vast Wal-Mart superstore.

“And that’s sad,” she declared. “I’m only making 80 cents more than I did more than 20 years ago.” Or less, taking into account the rise in the cost of living. […]

Again and again, she applied to manage one sales department or another at Wal-Mart, and again and again she was passed over in favor of men -- or, she observed wryly, women who were younger and slimmer. [...]

Trying to get ahead, she always made herself available to change hours and fill in, even during evenings when she had to leave her 14-year-old [retarded and epileptic] daughter, Amber, home alone. Without a car, Caroline had a 20-minute walk each way, trekking back and forth at odd times of night in all kinds of weather. One cold February day, walking gingerly along icy streets, worried about her temperamental back, she trudged from her house to her job at her normal time of 10 a.m., only to be told to come for a shift beginning at 1 p.m. instead. So she made her way home and then returned to the store: three trips consuming one hour before earning her first dime of the day.

The people who received promotions tended to have something that Caroline did not. They had teeth. Caroline’s teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when she could not afford a dentist. […]

Probably no employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. . . . Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel. She was turned down for a teller’s position with the Claremont Savings Bank, which then hired her for back-room filing and eventually fired her from that. Wal-Mart considered her for customer-service manager and then promoted someone else, someone with teeth.

Caroline’s is the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution. If she were not poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor. […]

[S]he moved with her children into a small apartment and bounced between welfare and dead-end jobs, supplementing her income by scavenging for cans. “We’d go and watch a ballgame at school, and I’d take bags and stuff them in my pocketbook,” she recalled. “After the ballgame I’d be going around poring through the garbage cans picking out 5-cent cans.” Her first daughter would ride her bike as far ahead of her mother as possible to avoid any hint of association. “I figured that a few cents buys some milk, buys some bread, things that you need, you know what I’m saying? It all helps. But it embarrassed her. She hated it as she got older.” […]

Anyone who walked all the way around the outside of the Wal-Mart superstore on Route 103 would walk a mile, Caroline said. The place was immense. But it didn’t seem to have room for Caroline to progress. She bounced from one department to another, from one shift to another, while her pay stayed within a narrow range, beginning at $6.15 an hour, going to $6.80, sometimes up to $7.50 if she worked at night. So unpredictable were her hours that she couldn’t work a second job to help her cash flow. She kept applying for higher positions and kept hearing that she needed a bit more experience. […]

Unwittingly, [after leaving Wal-Mart] Caroline . . . stepped into the vortex that drags numbers of low-wage single mothers down into the great chasm between decent work and decent parenting, a place where a child’s safety has to be balanced against survival in the labor market.

After a month at the wallpaper plant, the temp agency offered Caroline a job back at the Tampax factory for $10 an hour, the most she had ever earned. She took it, but there was a problem: Procter & Gamble had organized the factory on rotating shifts. One week she left the house at 5:30 a.m. and got home at 2:30 p.m., the next week she was gone from 1:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., and the third from 9:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. Putting aside the question of sleep, stamina[,] and the basic requirements of an orderly life, the swing shifts raised havoc with Caroline’s arrangements for Amber. Unable to find care, she very reluctantly left the girl home alone during her evening and nighttime shifts.

While Caroline was running machines that put packages of tampons into boxes, she was worrying about Amber, and with good cause. At 14, Amber could barely read and write, could not easily tell time from clocks with hands, and was unable to understand that she had enough money if she gave a storekeeper $10 to buy something for $4. . . . She also had epilepsy, and the risk of a seizure prompted doctors to advise that she not be left alone for long. The logistical maze of arranging care for Amber around constantly shifting hours of work had Caroline tangled in anxiety.

Amber happened to tell her teacher how scary it was being home alone after dark. The teacher was alarmed and threatened to report Caroline for neglect. [...]

Faced with the threat of being reported to the state’s child protection agency, Caroline stopped going to work, started working the phones trying to find care for Amber and came up empty-handed. […]

Perhaps the most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody’s failure to pursue the most obvious solution: if the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared. She asked a supervisor and got brushed off, but nobody else -- not the school principal, not the doctor, not the myriad agencies she contacted -- nobody in the profession of helping thought to pick up the phone and appeal to the factory manager or the foreman or anybody else in authority at her workplace.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable and beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law permeates the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. The most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing[,] and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents’ employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. Wages and hours are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal. […]

She sent Amber to live temporarily with her daughter-in-law in Muncie, Ind., where the schools were reputedly better. By September, Amber was in higher-level special-ed classes in Muncie; on the phone, she sounded ecstatic, so Caroline decided to follow.

To leave, however, she had to sell her precious house, for she could not comfortably rent it out from a distance. . . . In the end, she made nothing, not a penny, she said sadly. “I gave it away.”

She had maintained and improved the house sensibly for the long term, but she spent more on it than it was worth in the end. She still owed $34,000 on the first mortgage, and the second mortgage of $19,000 carried a prepayment penalty, which forced her to pay just over $20,000 to get out of it. The federal grants of $17,000 required prorated reimbursement of $16,000 because she hadn’t lived in the house long enough. After adding the agent’s fee, taxes[,] and other closing costs, she ended up short $300, which the agent kindly absorbed. Five and a half years of mortgage and interest payments had yielded nothing, and one of her dreams was gone.

As the New Hampshire winter arrived after Thanksgiving, Caroline left with pockets nearly empty. To escape from $10,000 to $12,000 in credit-card debt, she had declared bankruptcy earlier that year, much to her shame. She could not even afford to rent a truck without a $700 loan from her older daughter. A couple of friends donated their vacation time to drive the truck and Caroline to Indiana, by way of a slashing blizzard in upstate New York. She was on the move again, as she had been since childhood, but she was happy to see a little of the country.

On the move and getting nowhere.

Why so many Americans are hell-bent on making sure people like Caroline Payne can’t earn a decent, living wage is beyond me.

Damn good question. The above is only a small part of Jim's post. Go read the whole thing here. (Via Just a Bump in the Beltway) 

Jim is a great writer. Read his award-winning piece "Al Gore and the Alpha Girls: The Enduring Power of Cliques in a Post-High-School World" for further proof of this. Unfortunately, Jim has himself been unemployed for quite a while and is hurting financially. If you can afford it, go to his site and use PayPal to send him a few bucks.

Here's a fact I couldn't find anywhere in George W. Bush's $1.5-billion plan to prop up American marriage.

The pro-Bush red states, especially those in the rural South, have a far higher divorce rate than Al Gore's blue states.

This is the Bible Belt?

Actually, it's more like the Divorce Belt, where the pro-marriage president's staunchest supporters tend to congregate.

For this little nugget, we are indebted to the insightful research of George Barna, who is probably America's leading pollster of religious attitudes. The Barna Research Group of Ventura, Calif., has spent the past 18 years tracking various church and cultural trends.

Trends like Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) getting divorced more frequently than do atheists/agnostics (21 percent).

Forget all that family-values talk from the Religious Right.

"Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups," Barna says flatly.

And to think: I'd always heard that godless relativists in places like New York were undermining marriage.

Well, not so you'd notice on the marital-political map.

The five states with the highest rates of divorce - 50 percent more divorce than the national average - all went for Bush in 2000. There's the quickie-divorce capital of Nevada, of course. But Nevada is joined as a Bust-Up Champ by pro-Bush Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.

These people will soon be telling us how to run our marriages?

Twenty-seven percent of adults are divorced across the legendarily devout South, pollster Barna found. As for the liberal Northeast? That's the region with the lowest divorce rate, 19 percent. (via The Sideshow)

National leaders of six conservative organizations yesterday broke with the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, accusing them of spending like "drunken sailors," and had some strong words for President Bush as well.

"The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton, and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, said at a news briefing with the other five leaders. "I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years but never thought I'd have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress."

Warning of adverse consequences in the November elections, the leaders said the Senate must reject the latest House-passed omnibus spending bill or Mr. Bush should veto the measure.

"The whole purpose of having a Republican president is to lead the Republican Congress," said Paul Beckner, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy, whose co-chairman is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. "The Constitution gives the president the power to veto legislation, and if Congress won't act in a fiscally responsible way, the president has to step in —— but he hasn't done that."

"If the president doesn't take a stand on this, there's a real chance the Republicans' voter base will not be enthusiastic about turning out in November, no matter who the Democrats nominate," Mr. Beckner said.
Mr. Weyrich warned that if the Senate passes the omnibus bill and the president fails to veto it, "in all probability the party's conservative-activist core voters aren't going to work to help win the election for Bush and the Republicans, and they may well not even vote."

The Heritage Foundation has projected that passage of the bill would "mark the third consecutive year of massive discretionary spending growth" following increases of 13 percent and 12 percent in the previous two years.

"Congress' continued fiscal irresponsibility is clearly exhibited in the thousands of pork projects contained in the bill," the Heritage report noted.

The Heritage report says the omnibus bill will set the stage for discretionary spending to increase by 9 percent in 2004 to $900 billion, not the 3 percent claimed by Congress.

There's more.

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.

. . . .

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness —— shared, we now know, by General Clark —— to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" —— as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents —— a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless —— but optimistic! —— Moon-base program.)

But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration —— a much larger group than you might think —— are afraid to give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical —— which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical —— and that Mr. Bush is.

As for an example of a candidate who doesn't get it:

August 25, 2003 -  Dick Gephardt today called on Iowans to help him find the tastiest, flakiest, fruitiest, creamiest, most scrumptious slices of pie in Iowa. In unveiling "The Great Gephardt Iowa Pie Challenge," Gephardt takes an early lead in the pie primary with the deep-dish support he enjoys among all Iowans, but especially those who make and love Iowa pies.

"Iowa has a long tradition of bringing great pies to our nation. From Stone's 'mile high pie' in Marshalltown to the apple pie at Cronk's Café in Denison, I've only begun to nibble away at the best of what Iowa has to offer - now I need your help in finding all of the great pies in this great state." (link via Pandagon)

• Bush's disapproval rating is his highest ever in this poll, and his approval rating ties his lowest ever;
• 43% would vote for Bush, 45% for an unnamed Democrat; 
• 51% now say the war in Iraq was not worth the costs;
• 45% say Bush's policies have caused the number of jobs to decrease, while only 19% say they have caused jobs to increase;
• 32% say their taxes have gone up as a result of Bush's policies, while only 19% say they have gone down;
• 41% (the lowest ever) have a favorable opinion of Bush as a person, while 38% have an unfavorable opinion; 
• both of his newly announced initiatives are busts, with a large majority  opposing temporary work permits for illegal immigrants, and a majority opposing a permanent space station on the moon;
• only 41% of Americans say Bush has the same priorities as they do;
• only 30% say Bush is more interested in protecting the interests of ordinary Americans than in protecting the interests of large corporations;
• only 39% have confidence in Bush's ability to make the right economic decisions.

This poll shows that Bush has lost the bounce he got from the capture of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Dubya's approval rating since taking office has been one long downward slide, except for three spikes; (1) a huge one after 9/11, when his approval rating soared about 40 points; (2) after the commencement of the Iraq war; and (3) after Saddam's capture. Let's hope Bush's normal slide continues and accelerates.

• In 1959, while a law student, he wrote an article explaining how Mississippi could rewrite its law against interracial marriage, which the state supreme court had struck down the previous year, and adocated that the state do so. The state legislature implemented his suggestion the following year. In 1990 and 2001 hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pickering was asked about this article, but never repudiated it;
• As a Mississippi state senator in the 1970's, Pickering voted to fund the notorious Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which resisted racial integration, and on numerous occasions supported legislation to undermine the federal Voting Rights Act;
• As a judge, he took extraordinary and unethical steps to try to reduce the sentence for a defendant who had been convicted of cross-burning, including threatening to hold a new trial even though the time for seeking one had expired and Pickering had no authority to grant one on his own motion, directly contacting a high-level Justice Department official to complain about the case, and instructing the prosecutor to inform the Attorney General of Pickering's concern about the sentence;
• In cases before him, he has repeatedly criticized civil right plaintiffs, and Supreme Court decisions upholding civil rights;
• As a district court judge, he has been repeatedly reversed by the (quite conservative) Fifth Circuit (the court on which he will now sit), often on the basis of well-settled precedent.

Bush's appointment of Pickering came just a day after he laid a wreath on Martin Luther King's grave, while 700 or so people protested across the street. Pickering's recess appointment will be effective until the new Senate takes office in January 2005.

Federal spending is out of control. Federal regulation continues its creep, weighing ever heavier on private enterprise. We have a new Cabinet department, the largest one ever established, and we were just handed the largest federal entitlement in 40 years.

A few of us had our taxes cut, but that hardly matters when government keeps spending the way it is. Sooner or later, the waiter will come by with the check, and it’s those of us under 30 who will be reaching for our wallets. As election 2004 nears, what’s a good limited-government soldier to do?

Vote for Howard Dean. Yes, that’s right. The only way to get Republicans to truly fight for the low-tax, reduced-spending principles they traditionally espouse is to give them an opponent in the White House to fight against. Consider that for all his flaws, Bill Clinton grew government at a rate more modest than most of his predecessors and most certainly at a rate slower than his successor — a distinction that is almost entirely the result of Clinton being forced to work with a hostile Congress for most of his two terms.

The early-rising president can get crabby and punchy if he doesn't hit the pillow by 10 or so at night. On Monday, Bush was not scheduled even to arrive at a dinner hosted by Mexican President Vicente Fox until 9:10 p.m. local time (10:10 Eastern).

Bush, who returned to the White House on Tuesday night, sounded tired and bored at the few public appearances during his 28-hour visit. His remarks had unusually long pauses. Cutaway television shots captured Bush glowering into space as other heads of state talked about "economic growth with equity to reduce poverty," "investing in people" and "democratic governance."

One of the million great things about being president is that you rarely have to listen to people who bore you. Dignitaries who introduce Bush are asked to limit their remarks to one minute. Bush praises those who are quicker, and his aides have been known to scold those who run over.

But "international summit" means "plenary session," and Bush had to sit through speech after speech by his detractors -- most notably Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had infuriated the Bush brigade over the weekend by describing national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is considered family by the Bushes, as "illiterate."

During the summit's inauguration ceremony Monday, Chavez was supposed to speak for three minutes, but he rambled on about his time in jail, his taste in economics books and supposed mischaracterizations of him. He referred to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a proposed hemisphere-wide, low-barrier trade zone strongly backed by the White House, as "an infernal machinery that, minute by minute, produces an impressive number of poor." (Link via Atrios)

Not surprising that Bush would get bored with all that talk about reducing poverty, investing in people, and democratic governance. Who needs that stuff?

The New York Times reports that the President "hastily planned" a visit to Dr. King's grave, and then will immediately go to "a $2,000-a-person fundraiser in Atlanta." Even though Bush may spend the majority of his time hobnobbing with donors at the fundraiser, because he will briefly visit Dr. King's grave, he is allowed to deem the entire trip "official" and then bill taxpayers for portions of the huge cost of hotel rooms, rental cars, security, and travel. And those are no small costs - the Washington Post notes that Air Force One alone costs $57,000 an hour to operate. [Footnotes omitted]

You know... sometimes I react with righteous anger, sometimes with bemused befuddlement, sometimes with a bit of hopeless frustration, and... I swear... sometimes I just want to fucking cry.

Joe Conason gives us the Shorter Paul O'Neill/Ron Suskind:

The White House believes that massive deficits don’t matter.

The White House serves the narrow interests of the wealthiest few.

The White House diligently heeds oil men and coal operators.

The White House willfully ignores scientists and environmentalists.

The President and his advisers care about politics rather than policy.

The President and his advisers prefer scripted consensus to candid debate.

The President and his advisers jump at the command of corporate donors.

The President won’t read any document longer than three pages.

The President can’t discuss substantive policy issues.

The Vice President is in charge.

(purloined from Just a Bump in the Beltway)

My law school classmate Matt Miller, now a journalist and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, adds:

Among O'Neill's revelations and conclusions:
 
- Deposing Saddam via an invasion was on the table from Bush's first National Security Council meeting days after he took office.
 
- In 2001, O'Neill and Alan Greenspan thought big tax cuts were "irresponsible" unless paired with "triggers" that would suspend them if projected budget surpluses eroded, but they got rolled.
 
- After the 2002 elections, when O'Neill objected that further tax cuts would compound the emerging fiscal crisis, Cheney barked, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." O'Neill knew the opposite was true: that it took two decades for government to dig out of the fiscal mess Reagan created.
 
- O'Neill came to believe that he, Colin Powell and Christine Whitman, the three GOP moderates in senior posts, were appointed to provide "cover" for an administration bent on an ideological agenda on the environment, tax cuts and foreign policy.

- White House deception in a State of the Union address actually preceded the infamous 18 words on uranium in Niger last year. In Bush's first State of the Union, O'Neill asserts, White House politicos overstated by $700 billion the amount of public debt that (for technical reasons) could not be paid down with projected budget surpluses, in order to help hype their case for massive tax cuts.

- Corporate governance reforms were watered down by Bush in a bow to industry pressure after Enron and related scandals broke - squandering what ex-CEO O'Neill judged to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the culture of the executive suite.

Beyond any specific outrage is the scary White House decision-making "process" O'Neill describes. "It seemed," O'Neill wonders at one point, "there were no let's-look-at-the-facts brokers in any of the key White House positions." O'Neill, who served earlier government stints under Presidents Nixon and Ford, clings quaintly to the notion that sound policy decisions should be made first, before you bring in the political types to help sell them.
 
Karl Rove must be having a good laugh over that one!

The CPA is a total mess, as should be pretty clear. It's actually kind of shocking. It's hard to even know where to start. You probably know all of this: the CPA is locked inside the Green Zone, this massive area in the heart of Baghdad that's protected by armed guards, tanks, and lots of big concrete walls. Most of the people in the Green Zone never leave, or only leave with massive army escort and then only to go directly to meetings in ministries. They call the area outside of the Green Zone, the Red Zone. In other words: all of Iraq is the Red Zone. So, very few people in the CPA have the slightest idea what's going through the minds of Iraqis. They either have brief conversations with people on the street, when they're surrounded by armed troops. Inevitably, the Iraqis tell them they are very happy with the US occupation. What else would they say? I never, ever meet Iraqis who are happy with the US occupation. Or they meet with their own Iraqi staff or staff at the ministries, who are similarly positive--sycophantic to their bosses. The ignorance is so great that I generally find when I meet with CPA officials they start interviewing me, because I know far more about Iraq than they do.

On top of it, living conditions in the Green Zone are unbearable. Since the Rashid bombing, many live in massive dorm rooms--200 or more to a room--with senior officials and soldiers crashing out on bunk beds. There aren't enough toilets or showers. Everyone is sick of the KBR cafeterias that offer a constant array of college cafeteria food: sloppy joes, burgers, limp salads. Nobody can eat in Iraqi restaurants. Most have never eaten Iraqi food. My friends in the CPA tell me they are truly depressed, truly miserable. People are leaving. People are forgetting Iraq and focusing on hooking up with each other.

The people of the CPA are a diverse group. Some are quite smart and well meaning and are depressed about the way things are going. Morale is extremely low. Some are Bush true-believers who refuse to hear a word against the occupation, as if everything is going well. There is open hostility between the career civil servants and the political appointees. The political types tend to have no experience in the Arab world, know no Arabic, have no experience outside of the US. The CPA people who have experience in the Arab world and have a better feel for what is going on in the street (only a vague idea because of their limited contact) are sidelined and don't have any power to affect CPA decisions. Those people tend to leave quickly out of frustration.

On top of all this, there is a shocking lack of communication within the CPA and between the CPA and the ministries they are supposed to oversee. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing, nobody knows what is happening in the ministries they are advising. It's total chaos.

There are good stories happening. There are good things being done, as Bush tries to constantly tell us. But they're not effective. They don't affect the lives of Iraqis. For example, the sewage system is being seriously overhauled, but it will be years before an Iraqi can turn a tap and drink healthy water in their homes. There is serious work being done (some good, some bad) on revamping Iraqi laws, but nobody can see that happening. I see virtually nothing that would tell an average Iraqi that the US occupation is working hard to make their lives better. There are good people working hard, but it's all invisible for now. Who cares about revamping securities oversight laws when you're scared to go out at night.

Also, press relations are really bad. It's extremely difficult to find information, get interviews, make it through the press phalanx of true believers. It's almost impossible to get a usable quote other than "everything's going great."

The Army is a mixed-bag. Soldiers are on the street and get to meet Iraqis. Some do have the "hajis are all crazy" attitude, powerfully racist. Some are quite sensitive and thoughtful about their role. Some have made Iraqi friends, others have never talked to an Iraqi. I think the Marines are much better to deal with (both for us reporters and for Iraqis), they are more reasonable and flexible and kind. (via Atrios)

 

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that he was mapping preparations to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office.

Bush's comments came in response to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's contention in a new book that the chief executive was gunning for Saddam nine months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and two years before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Bush's comments appeared likely to stoke campaign claims by Democratic rivals for the White House that the president was planning to attack Iraq, possibly in retaliation for Saddam's attempted 1993 assassination of his father, former President Bush.

"The stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear -- like the previous administration, we were for regime change," Bush told a joint news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, with Mexican President Vicente Fox. "And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with (enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq) and so we were fashioning policy along those lines."

Bush said al-Qaida's surprise Sept. 11 attacks on the United States put him on a hair trigger to take pre-emptive action against Iraq rather than await evidence of a new threat to Americans.

"September the 11th made me realize that America was no longer protected by oceans and we had to take threats very seriously no matter where they may be materializing," Bush said.

A president's "most solemn obligation" is to protect the United States, Bush said, adding: "I took that duty very seriously."

Democratic presidential candidates seized upon O'Neill's comments. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said the accusation of a ready-to-go effort to oust Saddam "calls into question everything that the administration put in front of us."

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.

Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritcal goons ... priceless.

UPDATE 6:54 P.M. 1/13/04: Billmon documents the White House's lack of zeal in pursuing the Plame investigation. The Center for American Progress reminds us that Dubya had no problem furnishing Bob Woodward with classified information so Bush could write his fawning book "Bush at War":

NOW:
"The Treasury Department has asked for an investigation into how a possibly classified document appeared in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill."
- CNN, 1/12/04

THEN:
No investigation was requested after the Providence Journal reported that "Bob Woodward said the president gave reporters 90 minutes, often speaking candidly about classified information. 'Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him [about classified information] like that. Bush's father wouldn't allow it. Clinton wouldn't allow it."
- Providence Journal, 4/10/02

When I was a kid, my many Jewish elders had a short-hand phrase they'd use to explain their objections whenever some suggested legislation (censorship, for example) or discrimination against blacks or gays left them gasping in horror: "The Nazis did that." (Or sometimes just: "The Nazis....") These were people who remembered how it took place, with not too much disruption of everyday life, at first, and most people going unmolested and therefore not making much of it. Nothing to see here, just a few commies and Jews and a couple of queers, not any of us Normal people.... These were, you understand, people who would have been crushed if their son turned out to be gay or their daughter married "a Negro", but by god they knew better than to give an inch on these things. They didn't have to like pornography to know it shouldn't be illegal - they knew what censorship was about. They understood, with crystal clarity, that there are no good excuses for dismissing people's civil liberties.

With the carefully stage-managed "public" appearances of Bush to crowds from which all potential Bush detractors (i.e., the ordinary American public) have been removed to "First Amendment zones", a "free press" that is bought-and-paid for by the administration (doesn't have to be government-controlled, since they own it anyway), not to mention so many enormous lies that it's hard to pick which is the Big Lie, comparisons to Nazi Germany seem impossible to avoid. Bear a few things in mind: Hitler had to start somewhere; it wasn't Kristallnacht on the very first day. It creeps up on you, and then it's too late. If you wait until they really are putting people in gas chambers and making lampshades out of human skin, then eventually they will probably get around to that as well. Don't think, "It can't happen here"; the German people thought so, too. Even the Jewish ones. And Americans spoke with horror of "the camps" even as we were rounding up Japanese Americans and depriving them of both their property and their liberty.

People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.

But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College.

. . . .

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.

Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.

More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.

A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.

His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.

But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.

Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."

Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon."

Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda." But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army's premier academic institution.

In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism.

Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."

He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."

He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. "The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen," he states.

The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.

To read the full report, go to washingtonpost.com/nation [You can also get the report here.]

This is mind-blowing. It's easy for the administration to brush aside criticism of the Iraq war when it comes from Howard Dean ("he's a liberal peacenik" and all that). It's a good deal harder when the Army War College says the same thing. I commend this professor for his gutsiness.

Between this and Paul O'Neil's book and 60 Minutes interview, the stuff is really starting to hit the fan for the miserable failure. Soon Bush will be unelectable.

Here is a post on the Republicans for Dean website by a man who says, "I didn't leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me.":

My name is Robert Brooks. I voted in my first election in 1980 and proudly cast my vote for Ronald Reagan. I am not sure what has happened to the party in the two decades since that time but I do know it has managed to leave me behind. I don't have much use for unnecessary wars, corporate giveaways and laws which seem to gut the Bill of Rights. I believe in due process, the right to counsel, the right to trial and warrants that are only issued upon probable cause. I also believe that fiscal responsibility means that you pay your bills and don't pass the burden of paying for gifts you bestow upon yourself to others. I honestly believe that Ronald Regan would look at the extreme right and the empire building neocons of PNAC with a great deal of dismay. I also feel sure that President Reagan would not have restricted medical research into stem cells and his record of not actively interfering with abortion rights, all rhetoric to the contrary not withstanding, speaks for itself.

I had my doubts about the Iraq War from the very beginning. I was never convinced that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the security of the United States and I also knew, no thanks to Fox News, that he was not tied to the attacks of 9-11.

Originally I bought the spin on Howard Dean as some sort of lefty-left pacifist liberal. Then I decided to check for myself. Howard Dean is a lot of things but a flaming liberal he is not. I like balanced budgets and a tight fiscal hand. Dean is nothing if not tight. Have you seen his suits?

I also found that Dean is not a pacifist. I could never support a pacifist even if I do believe in Christ's instructions to turn the other cheek. Dean supported the war in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War. He just didn't support the Iraq War because it took resources away from the hunt for the real bad guys.

My conclusion after looking into Dr. Dean is that he is actually what used to pass for a moderate Republican. I like moderate Republicans. I thought George Bush was one. I was a fool. I won't be fooled again.

Mr. Brooks references an op-ed piece piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Daniel Lee entitled "This Republican has some doubts":

I have been a Republican my whole life and beliefs of liberty, small government, reverence for the Constitution and a fiscal discipline are typical among people who think like I do. But the politicians who said they believed in these concepts are nowhere to be seen. Above all, President Bush, who ran on the platform of "Not Believing in Nation Building," is currently building two, and no Republican seems to care.

We are in the midst of a media blitz that will last until the next election, and this Republican has some questions he would like answered.

I've been a Republican my whole life but when you pass a so-called Patriot Act that authorizes the government to hold American citizens suspected of terrorist acts in confinement, indefinitely, without legal representation ... how is this patriotic ... how does it ensure freedom and liberty ... how does this display reverence for the Constitution?

I've been a Republican my whole life but when the only thing you change about our airport security screeners is who pays their salary, how does this make us safer and how does this relate to our belief in smaller government?

I've been a Republican my whole life and I have heard radio commentators talk about how "those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security." Well, if this is so true when speaking of gun control, how is it so untrue when pushing our need for the Patriot Act and racial profiling?

I am an American, a veteran, the son of an immigrant and a former small business owner turned schoolteacher. Most recently, I think of myself as a father, and fatherhood has changed a few things about my thinking -- and not all of the changes make me proud.

I initially supported the war in Iraq, but now I must admit that if it were my son killed in that helicopter crash, patriotism is not the only feeling that I would be experiencing. The wars we have fought lately have not instilled in me a belief that these people are dying for their country as much as for their president's agenda -- and I wonder why I am so willing to support a war that is justifiable enough to risk the lives of other people's children, but nowhere near justifiable enough to risk the lives of my own.

We have to get more Republicans thinking like Messrs. Brooks and Lee.

The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported.

That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."

O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.

Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.

"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"

A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

. . . .

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.

. . . .

O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill is also quoted in the book as saying the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."

. . . .A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings he attended. And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening...It was mostly a monologue."

While in office, O'Neill issued a report that projected "a future of chronic budget deficits totaling at least $44 trillion in current U.S. dollars." Bush's reaction was to fire O'Neill, ignore the report, and get Congress to enact more tax cuts. Thank goodness for our fiscally responsible Republican leadership.

UPDATE 1:48 A.M. 1/11/03: Billmon has more:

There was nothing illegal about planning for a war with Iraq -- as a contigency. As I pointed out in this post -- in response to some foolishness from the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- the Pentagon has contigency plans for just about everything, and rightly so, which is why it was always absurd for Rumsfeld apologists to claim the post-invasion train wreck was the result of inadequate planning. There was a plan -- but the neocons decided to throw it out the window.

There are circumstances that could have justified a U.S. invasion of Iraq, such as aggressive action by Saddam against one of his neighbors; credible evidence that he was preparing to deploy nuclear or biological weapons, and the means to deliver them; or a UN mandate to free Iraq from his genocidal regime. That doesn't mean an invasion would have been the best option under those circumstances, but it would have been legal. And if it's permissible to plan for a legal war, then it's also permissible to plan for a post-war occupation. Indeed, it's almost mandatory, given an occupying power's duty under the Geneva Convention to prevent the kind of chaos we saw in the months immediately after the fall of Baghdad.

But when the Pentagon (the Pentagon!) is preparing for the disposition of Iraqi oil contracts, and the President of the United States is saying, "find me a way to invade Iraq" -- all this before 9/11/2001 -- then it seems to me the burden of proof should shift from the accuser to the accused, particularly when virtually every claim made by the administration to justify the invasion has since been shown to be false.

The Republicans, of course, will try to keep the focus squarely on O'Neill. I think the ex-Treasury Secretary is about to encounter the politics of personal destruction -- up close and personal. In a few days, it will be amusing to pull together some of the glowing remarks made about O'Neill by various GOP luminaries back when Bush picked him as Treasury Secretary, and contrast those quotes with what those same people are going to say about him now.

. . . .

It will be interesting to see how much play O'Neill's Iraq revelations get in the corporate-controlled media, which so far has been much more taken with his remarks about Bush's "disengagement" (more shades of the Gipper!) I mean, the "blind man in a room full of deaf people" is a great line, but is it really news that Bush is a few pints short of a full oil pan? Even the White House doesn't try all that hard to pretend he's on top of things any more:

Asked about Mr. O'Neill's comment about a disengaged president, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters on Friday: "I think it's well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Translation: You know how grumpy the boss gets when he misses his video game breaks.

You'd think this would be a big story -- former Treasury secretary drops dime on sitting president for planning and waging an aggressive war. But right now it's a little before midnight and neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post have managed to get bylined stories about it up on their web sites, even though the news broke late this afternoon. So far it's just wire copy. Then again, it's Saturday night -- the slowest time of the week in any newsroom -- on a NFL playoff weekend, no less. So maybe they just got caught off guard.

Or maybe I'm missing something. Personally, I think it's kind of a big deal when a president deliberately sets the wheels in motion to invade another country, before the events later used to justify the war have even taken place. To me that seems like a story worth pursuing.

But I realize my news judgment is rusty, and a little old fashioned. So I guess I'll just have to wait for Howie Kurtz and Fox News to explain how unimportant it is -- as unimportant, say, as a third-rate burglary at a Washington hotel.

I don't think I'll have to wait long.

UPDATE 3:28 P.M. 1/11/03: Time magazine has much more about O'Neill and his book, portraying a clueless president and a White House dominated by ideology, not facts, which was determined from the outset to find a way to sell war against Iraq to the American people. O'Neill also says that he opposed the 2003 tax cut, telling Cheney that growing budget deficits imperiled the American economy, Cheney responded, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." Go read the article.

For a while I've heard from some folks that the lack of major terror attacks since 9.11 shows what a good job President Bush is doing. In response, I often point out that several years elapsed between the WTC attacks so it would be folly to lapse into a false sense of security while the administration continues to underfund first-responders and makes other surface moves that don't confront terror within.

Then I found this exchange from the Simpsons, and it explains it much better than I:

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

Over the Christmas holiday, my brother left Atlanta for Louisiana with his two Catahoula hounds loaded in the back seat . . . . Ordinarily, he could reach the relative civilization of Covington before needing to refuel the diesel, but that’s without the dogs. Shortly after entering Alabama, he pulled over at a rest stop and followed the signs for pet owners. As he got out of the car, a redneck trucker parked close by began to heckle him. Less than a minute later, the rest stop attendant zipped up in a golf cart and told him to move. Not wanting a confrontation, he piled the dogs back in the car before they had a chance to "go", and headed down the road.

A few miles further, he pulled over on the side of the road to let the dogs out. As he got out of the car, he noticed a different trucker (but one he’d also seen at the rest stop), pull off the highway, onto the shoulder and head straight for his car. As he tried to pull the dogs away from the car, the trucker veered off at the last millisecond, just before hitting them.

A couple of hours later, while still in Alabama, but close to the Mississippi border, he stopped at a gas station for a drink. As he got out of the car, a team of three crackers approached him and tried to pick a fight. Seeing the large dogs, they backed off, but by this point he’d had enough. Before entering Mississippi, he pulled off the road and ripped the Dean sticker off his bumper. I can’t say as I blame him.

(via The Sideshow)

I swear, if I hear one more Democratic honcho say that Howard Dean is not electable, I'm going to do something crazy (maybe that's what happened to Britney in Vegas this weekend).

The contention is nothing short of idiotic.

Consider the source: the folks besmirching the Good Doctor's Election Day viability are the very people who have driven the Democratic Party into irrelevance. Who spearheaded the party's resounding 2002 midterm defeats. Who kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts, and an unprecedented deficit.

Dean is electable precisely because he's making a decisive break with the spinelessness and pussyfooting that have become the hallmark of the Democratic Party.

So, please, no more hand-wringing about Dean being "another Dukakis." And no more weepy flashbacks about having had your heart broken by George McGovern, whose 1972 annihilation haunts the 2004 Democratic primaries like a political Jacob Marley, shaking his chains and warning about the ghosts of landslides past.

There is a historical parallel to Dean's candidacy. But it's not McGovern in 1972, as the DLC paranoiacs would like us to believe -- it's Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Like Kennedy's, Dean's campaign was initially fueled by his antiwar outrage. Like Kennedy, Dean has found himself fighting not just to represent the Democratic Party but to remake it. Like Kennedy, Dean is offering an alternative moral vision for America, not just an alternative political platform.

And like Kennedy, Dean has come under withering attack from his critics for the very attributes that his supporters find most attractive.

"He could be intemperate and impulsive ... the image of wrath -- his forefinger pointing, his fist pounding his palm, his eyes ablaze." Sean Hannity on Howard Dean? No, Theodore White on Bobby Kennedy in "The Making of the President 1968."

It's the same ludicrous charge of being "too angry" that's being constantly leveled at Dean. Have his Democratic opponents -- and the notoriously decorous Washington press corps -- suddenly morphed into Miss Manners? Personally, I could never trust a man who does not occasionally get hot under the collar.

Of course Dean is angry. Take a look at what's happening in Iraq, with another 236 American soldiers killed or wounded since Saddam was dragged out of his spider hole. And take a look closer to home, where we have 12 million children living in poverty, six out of seven working poor families unable to afford quality child care, record levels of personal debt, and more and more U.S. jobs being "outsourced" overseas. If you still have a pulse -- are you listening, Joe Lieberman? -- you should be royally pissed.

. . . .

Kennedy was drawn into the '68 race by his indignation over the direction of America's foreign policy. "This nation," he said, "must adopt a foreign policy which says, clearly and distinctly, 'no more Vietnams'." Dean has been saying, clearly and distinctly, no more Iraqs, even when 70 percent of the public said they approved of Bush's policy. That's leadership -- and the kind of boldness the Democratic Party has been sorely lacking.

Far from Dean not being able to "compete" with Bush on foreign policy, he's the one viable Democrat who isn't trying to compete on the playing field that Bush and Karl Rove have laid out. No Democrat can win by playing "Whose swagger is swaggier?" or "Whose flight suit is tighter?" Instead Dean unambiguously asserts that "we are in danger of losing the war on terror because we are fighting it with the strategies of the past ... The Iraq war diverted critical intelligence and military resources, undermined diplomatic support for our fight against terror, and created a new rallying cry for terrorist recruits."

In the same way that Kennedy was able to take his outrage over Vietnam and expand it to include the outrages perpetrated at home, Dean has gone from railing against the war to offering a "New Social Contract for America's Working Families" that harks back to the core message of FDR: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

It's a message that Bobby Kennedy made central to his campaign but which the Democratic Party has since abandoned.

Howard Dean has resurrected it and made it his own because, as he says, 2004 "is not just about electing a president -- it's about changing America."

That is a big vision. But anything smaller guarantees the reelection of George Bush.

(via Steve Gilliard)

The Washington Post explains:

Of all Iraq's rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.

An engineering PhD known for outsized energy and gifts, Tamimi, 47, designed and built a new short-range missile during Iraq's four-year hiatus from United Nations arms inspections. Inspectors who returned in late 2002, enforcing Security Council limits, ruled that the Al Samoud missile's range was not quite short enough. The U.N. team crushed the missiles, bulldozed them into a pit and entombed the wreckage in concrete. In one of three interviews last month, Tamimi said "it was as if they were killing my sons."

But Tamimi had other brainchildren, and these stayed secret. Concealed at some remove from his Karama Co. factory here were concept drawings and computations for a family of much more capable missiles, designed to share parts and features with the openly declared Al Samoud. The largest was meant to fly six times as far.

. . . .

Tamimi's covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In March they fit in Tamimi's pocket, on two digital compact discs.

The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less advanced. Iraq's former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.

But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.

My daughter could draw as well as this guy when she was 5. For this we've spent $160 billion, and killed and maimed thousands of people? The Bush maladministration told us again and again that we knew for a fact that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction, not that they were a pipe dream of some Iraqi scientist.

Remember the statements? Bush: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Bill Frist: "We simply cannot live in fear of a ruthless dictator, aggressor and terrorist such as Saddam Hussein, who possesses the world’s most deadly weapons." Rumsfeld: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Colin Powell: "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Cheney: "We believe [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The conclusion is inescapable:  Bush and his henchmen are a pack of liars, or grossly incompetent, or both. Take your pick. Whichever it is, they are utterly unfit to hold office.

Phillips writes in the preface:

Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread -- not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism. . . . The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning.

BuzzFlash has a good interview with Phillips.

California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante (runner-up to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the October recall election) is not the family's only public figure. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in September, his sister Nao Bustamante, 39, is a prominent performance artist whose work includes (1) wearing a strap-on burrito for men to kneel before and bite in order to absolve themselves of "500 years of white man's guilt" and (2) sticking her head into a plastic bag filled with water and tying it around her neck to resemble a Houdini stunt, to create "an urgent situation to respond to."

The victim – and let there be no mistake that is the only word that fits here – is Marcus Dixon: a young man who was an ‘A’ student in high school, a member of the National Honor Society, one of the best defensive football players in the United States, who scored above a 1200 on his SAT, and had signed a letter of intent to attend Vanderbilt University as a student-athlete in the most complete sense of the word. And yet today, Marcus Dixon sits in a prison cell in Georgia, staring at a 10-year sentence, because – and let there be no mistake about this either – Marcus Dixon is black, and that makes all the difference.

Barring a reversal of his sentence by the state Supreme Court, Dixon, who lived in Rome, Georgia, about an hour northwest of Atlanta (but farther away than that, one suspects, in cultural terms), is going to spend the next decade of his life in prison for having consensual sex with a white girl. That is not a misprint and it is not a matter of opinion. That is ultimately why he was expelled from school, why his scholarship was rescinded, and why he may not see freedom until the age of 28.

Click here to read the rest of "Sex Across the Color Line: Marcus Dixon, Emmett Till and the New/Old South."