Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, all these are an abomination before the Lord, just as gays are an abomination. Why stop at protesting gay marriage? Bring all of God's law unto the heathens and the sodomites. We call upon all Christians to join the crusade against Long John Silver's and Red Lobster. Yea, even Popeye's shall be cleansed. The name of Bubba shall be anathema. We must stop the unbelievers from destroying the sanctity of our restaurants.

Leviticus 11:9-12 says:
⁹ These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.
¹⁰ And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
¹¹ They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
¹² Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

Deuteronomy 14:9-11 says:
⁹ These ye shall eat of all that are in the waters: all that have fins and scales shall ye eat:
¹⁰ And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you.
¹¹ Of all clean birds ye shall eat.

Questions remain about President Bush's long-ago service in the Texas Air National Guard. But the basic outline of his Guard service is not in dispute: After a year in flight school, Bush spent five months learning how to fly an F-102 fighter-interceptor and then 22 months as a part-time pilot. He stopped flying in April 1972 -- 30 months before his formal commitment would normally have ended.

Nonetheless, the biography of Bush on the US State Department's website credits him with almost six years in the F-102's cockpit -- two years on active duty flying the plane and nearly four more years of part-time service as an F-102 pilot. The websites of at least five American embassies -- those in Germany, Italy, Pakistan, Vietnam, and South Korea -- use the identical language, even though Bush spent barely two years flying the airplane.

. . . .

The State Department site -- http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/presbush/bio -- says that before Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, "he went to the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his father had done during World War II." It continues: "George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock alert."

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, asked yesterday about that language, said: "It does not reflect the facts of his service. It will be corrected." (link via Sisyphus Shrugged)

The catchphrase du jour is Donald Trump's snappy, "You're fired." But no one has lost a job over the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 or the war that was trumped up and velcroed to 9/11. In fact, the only people the president and vice president are trying to put out of business are the members of the commission charged with figuring out how 9/11 happened and how to prevent another one.

The White House seems more worried about the public's finding out how much it knew and how little it did before 9/11 than it does about identifying and fixing security weaknesses.

After trying to kill the commission and then trying to put Dr. Strangelove-Kissinger in charge, President Bush and Dick Cheney have done their best to hamper the panel that's the best hope of the 9/11 widows, widowers and orphans to get justice.

"This is not no-fault government," said Lorie Van Auken, a 9/11 widow. "You don't just let people go on doing what they're doing wrong."

It is a triumph of chutzpah for Mr. Bush to thwart the investigation into 9/11 at the same time he seeks re-election by promoting his handling of 9/11 and scaring us with the specter of more terrorism. He's even using 9/11 memorials as the backdrop for his convention in New York.

Last week, the president played it sly, acting as though he was willing to extend the commission's deadline to finish the work that was taking longer because the administration was stonewalling. But the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, was clearly helping out the White House, answering the "who will rid me of this meddlesome panel?" call.

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, who helped create the commission, played hardball, threatening highway funds and federal jobs if the commission didn't get two extra months. Mr. Hastert caved.

Mr. McCain said he's expecting the same administration "obfuscation and delay" when he sits on Mr. Bush's hand-picked intelligence review board. "That's why I made sure I got subpoena power," he said. "No bureaucracy will willingly give you information that may be embarrassing to them."

Especially not such a secretive, paranoid and high-handed administration. Bush officials act as though they own 9/11, even while refusing to own up to any 9/11 mistakes.

Because of 9/11, they think they can suspend the Constitution, blow off investigators, attack nations pre-emptively, and keep Americans afraid by waging a war against terrorism that can never be won.

As Bob Kerrey, a frustrated member of the 9/11 commission, told Chris Matthews, the U.S. should have declared war on Osama as soon as it became apparent that he had an army with a "tremendous, sophisticated capability" and an ideology that dictated killing Americans.

"To declare war on terrorism, it seems to me to have the target wrong," he said. "It would be like after the 7th of December, 1941, declaring war on Japanese planes. We declared war on Japan. We didn't declare war on their tactic. . . . Terrorism is a tactic."

UPDATE: Norbizness has a useful history of the 9/11 Commission and the Bush administration's efforts to obstruct it. Elsewhere, he links to this story explaining that Bush gave more access to secret government papers to reporter Bob Woodward, when Woodward was writing the book "Bush at War," than he did to the 9/11 Commission. Of course, Woodward was writing a fawning book portraying Bush as a brilliant wartime leader, while the 9/11 Commission was only a government commission investigating perhaps the worst intelligence failure in our history.

Look who's preaching to Israel: Last Wednesday, the U.S. State Department released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. The chapter devoted to Israel makes the usual detailed and gloomy reading. Washington is critical of all the ills of the occupation, about which the human rights organizations and [ed. note: in?] Israel have long since raised a hue and cry.

 

. . . . 

 

The policeman of the world is naked, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, when security in the United States became - as it is in Israel - a supreme value above all others. In the United States, exactly as in Israel, human rights have become a nuisance, an obstacle to security. According to the organization Human Rights Watch, the United States arrested about 1,000 people after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, crassly violating their legal rights.

A country that is holding 660 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo without trial and depriving them of basic rights is in no position to criticize administrative detentions carried out by other countries. A country that is holding members of the Iraqi political leadership in detention without trial, far from view, is in no position to complain about the conditions of detention in the prisons of other countries. And a country that is maintaining a tough military occupation regime in Iraq doesn't have the right to fulminate against a different occupation regime, however cruel it may be, in the Palestinian territories.

Before drawing up the report on the state of human rights around the world, those responsible for the document should have taken action to bring about the immediate dismantlement of the prison at Guantanamo and the release or bringing to trial of the detainees who have been held there for well over two years in disgraceful conditions. Where did the authors of the report find the brazenness to declare that conditions in the detention camps of the Israel Defense Forces don't meet international standards? Do they meet such standards at Guantanamo? The conditions in our detention camps are, indeed, disgraceful, but the United States is not the one to say so. If Israel were to publish a report on the state of human rights in the world, the document would generate bitter scorn. The only thing separating Israel's moral right to issue such a report from the right of the United States to do so is the power of the latter - it has no moral primacy. (link and title via Billmon)

the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.

 

Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher.

 

. . . .

 

The total jobs lost in January was the most since November 2002, when 240,171 workers were let go in groups of 50 or more. Manufacturing workers, particularly in transportation, food processing and retail jobs, were hardest hit. The large layoffs also included 10,876 government workers, most at the state and local levels. (link via Daily Kos)

I heard Stern the morning of program that led to his removal. In the segment leading up to [the] one that got him in trouble he was on a brillant satirical riff on the Janet Jackson "crisis" that ended with him telling the audience that Bush had to go and that he was a one-termer just like his father. It was overtly anti-bush in tone and he built up to it with the JJ thing and telling the government to start worrying about real problems like Iraq. He was pulled the next day.

Stern also said he fears his "suspension" last Wednesday by radio behemoth Clear Channel has turned into a firing.

"I might be taken off all the stations very soon, and my last words to you are 'G.W.B.,' " Stern told listeners yesterday.

"Get him out of office. I'm tellin' you, man, he's in dangerous territory [with] a religious agenda and you gotta vote him out - anyone but Bush," Stern railed. (link via Oliver Willis)

Stern may be uncouth, but he's not stupid.

FURTHER UPDATE: What Would Dick Think? makes a strong argument that Clear Channel's firing of Stern was politically motivated (link via Fried Green al-Qaedas)

Like [Mel] Gibson [in his movie, "The Passion of the Christ"], Mr. Bush is whipping up intolerance but calling it a sacred cause.

At first, the preacher-in-chief resisted conservative calls for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He felt, as Jesus put it in the Gibson script (otherwise known as the Gospels), "If it is possible, let this chalice pass from me."

But under pressure from the Christian right, he grabbed the chalice with both hands and swigged — seeking to set a precedent in codifying discrimination in the Constitution, a document that in the past has been amended to correct discrimination by giving fuller citizenship rights to blacks, women and young people.

If the president is truly concerned about preserving the sanctity of marriage, as one of my readers suggested, why not make divorce illegal and stone adulterers?

Our soldiers are being killed in Iraq; Osama's still on the loose; jobs are being exported all over the world; the deficit has reached biblical proportions.

And our president is worrying about Mars and marriage?

When reporters tried to pin down White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday on why gay marriage is threatening, he spouted a bunch of gobbledygook about "the fabric of society" and civilization.

The pols keep arguing that institutions can't be changed when, in fact, they change all the time. Haven't they ever heard of the institution of slavery?

The government should not be trying to legislate what's sacred.

When Bushes get in trouble, they look around for a politically advantageous bogeyman. Lee Atwater tried to make Americans shudder over the prospect of Willie Horton arriving on their doorstep; and now Karl Rove wants Americans to shudder at the prospect of a lesbian — Dick Cheney's daughter Mary, say — setting up housekeeping next door with her "wife."

When it comes to the Bushes' willingness to stir up base instincts of the base, it is as it was.

As the Max von Sydow character said in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," while watching a TV evangelist appealing for money: "If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

Cartoonist Mike Luckovich depicts the Bush version of the Constitution:

BUSH MISLEADING ON SOCIAL SECURITY BEGINS

Yesterday, President Bush implicitly acknowledged for the first time that his Administration could attempt to reduce Social Security benefits for workers - a reversal from one of his core campaign pledges in 2000.

Specifically, the president was asked his opinion on Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's assertion that, in order to balance the budget, Social Security benefits should be cut. Bush responded, "My position on Social Security benefits is this: those benefits should not be changed for people at or near retirement." However, the president specifically refused to say he opposed cutting future guaranteed benefits for younger and middle-aged workers.

The president's refusal to discuss younger workers was a departure from his very clear position in 2000 in which he said he did not support cuts in future Social Security benefits for anyone - young or old. Less than two months before the 2000 election, then-Governor Bush said in Florida that people were saying, "'You know, if George W. becomes the president, he's going to take away your Social Security check.'" To which Bush added, "Don't believe it. Here's my pledge to the people of Florida: A promise made by our government will be a promise kept when I become the president of the United States."

Certainly, President Bush has talked about his plan to privatize Social Security. However, he has obscured the fact that the plan could result in cuts to guaranteed benefits for younger workers. He has also declined to openly discuss the fact that, at a time of record deficits, his "own economic team estimates that a move to private accounts would add an additional $4.7 trillion to the debt". And, most importantly, Bush refused to fully disassociate himself with Greenspan's call to reduce benefits.

• Go Nader!! We love you.
  
• Run, Ralph, run!
  
• God Speed Ralph Nader!
  
• Since he's running as an independent, he may gain more of that vote. FREEPERS who live in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia must get him on the ballot.
  
• Oh Yeah! GO RALPH GO!
  
• YAHOO!!!!!!!!!!!
  
• THERE IS A GOD!!!! WHOOOO HOOOOO!!!
  
• Is it possible that Nader is a closet Republican? LOL
  
• What a LOSER ! But, THANKS, Ralphie !! (via The Sideshow)

So here we are. And actually, it feels better in a weird way -- more honest. Gay Republicans have suddenly stopped spinning in their dervishes of denial, at least momentarily. Groups like the Log Cabin Republicans deluded themselves for more than three years, backing Bush even as he promoted abstinence-only programs at the expense of AIDS-education ones that work, supported Senator Rick Santorum after the Pennsylvania Republican's vile statements about gays, and pushed hard for discriminatory faith-based programs. They stood by him -- making an occasional tepid criticism, but still backing him -- as Bush nominated individuals like Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, who compared homosexuality to "necrophilia" and fought against repealing sodomy laws. (Last weekend, in another slap, Bush brazenly installed Pryor in a recess appointment after the guy had been filibustered by the Democrats because of his extremism.)

After three years of calling Bush's critics members of a traitorous "fifth column," you have to admit that it's rather delicious seeing Andrew Sullivan deciding that Bush has declared "war" on him, and admitting, "I guess I really was naive."

In this way, I feel bizarrely thankful to Bush for finally drawing the battle lines more clearly so that apologists like Sullivan can't deny any longer the sham of "compassionate conservatism."

Risking the loss of the apologists -- and perhaps many independents, moderate Republicans, and some Democrats -- couldn't have been an easy decision for the Bush camp. Karl Rove is hoping that the Christian right's devotion and turnout will now outweigh anything that counteracts it. But he shouldn't be so sure. For gays and lesbians, this amendment is equivalent to the Stonewall Rebellion, to Anita Bryant's crusade, and to the government's negligence at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, at least in terms of enraging people and moving them to action.

Already there have been rallies in the streets of Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and more are on the way. And the alliances that have been built among gays and the larger progressive movement today can't be underestimated. It was gays and young progressives of every stripe, after all, who catapulted Howard Dean and now need a place to funnel their energy. And for many progressives the marriage amendment is less about same-sex marriage than about government control and the reshaping of the laws of our country-- a further extension of the USA PATRIOT Act and projects like Total Information Awareness.

Bush's speech might one day be looked back upon as a turning point, much like Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican convention or Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" -- the beginning of the end. The White House is either so arrogant that it doesn't see that or so desperate that it simply believes it doesn't have a choice. Either way, it could be a stellar moment for the Democrats -- if they take up the challenge rather than go on the run. (link via Atrios)

Go read the whole thing.

Paul exhorted the members of the church in Rome that "God had given them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves ... and God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly ..."Romans 1:24, 26, 27

The actions of these people were listed along with other practices that are still considered sin: fornication, wickedness, covetousness, murder, backbiters, haters of God, proud, despiteful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, unmerciful...

"Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." Romans 1:32.

That also seems crystal clear. Those who do such things, and those who think they are amusing - or innocent - are worthy of death.

Doesn't seem as if the Lord is accepting of the sin of homosexuality at all.

And Christians had better put on the breastplate of righteousness and the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The battle for souls has begun. (link via Atrios)

So homosexuals, and those who consider them amusing or innocent, "are worthy of death." And so, apparently, are fornicators, backbiters, haters of God, proud people, those who disobey their parents, and yes, even those who are "without natural affection, unmerciful." I wonder if the author considers herself to fall into either of those categories?

What does it tell you when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) isn't sure he wants to be as reckless, extreme and divisive on gay rights as President Bush? This from a late story on the Associated Press newswire ...

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he appreciated Bush's "moral leadership" on the issue, but expressed caution about moving too quickly toward a constitutional solution, and never directly supported one. "This is so important we're not going to take a knee-jerk reaction to this," DeLay said. "We are going to look at our options and we are going to be deliberative about what solutions we may suggest."

Atrios and Josh (again) have some thoughts on why DeLay and other congressional Republicans are going to be a lot less excited about this than Bush is. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is shocked, shocked that his beloved Dubya would do such a thing.

Here's another perspective on the issue:

The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say you get to live free and you don't. That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's no one's business in terms of regulating behavior in that regard. The next step then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction of the relationships or if they should be treated the same as a traditional marriage. That's a tougher problem. That's not a slam dunk. The fact of the matter is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area. I try to be open minded about it as much as I can and tolerant of those relationships. And like Joe, I'm also wrestling with the extent to which there ought to be legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.

Who said that -- Kerry? Edwards? Dean? No, that would be Dick Cheney at the vice presidential debate in 2000. But now he's jumped on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, gay activists have issued a missing-person bulletin.

P.S. I've always been amused by this. Lynne Cheney, Dick's wife and Mary's mother, is an author:

"Sisters", her 1981 novel, is set, as the cover says, in the 19th century American West, 'when men were men, and women were property.' "Sisters" includes accounts of a marital rape, a tender love affair between two women, and arrogant male doctor...A love letter in the book from a woman to her female lover reads: "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitching by the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl." New York Times, 2/6/01

Who is the author of "Sisters" this "masterpiece" of lesbian literature? Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, our Republican Vice President. When asked by the New York Times why she wrote about a lesbian love affair she said she couldn't remember.

Lynne Cheney seems to have developed amnesia about this book, which is not mentioned in her official biography. When she was asked about the book in 2001, she claimed she couldn't even remember the plot. Timothy Noah of Slate awarded her the "Whopper of the Week" for that one.

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job.

A depression is when you lose your job.

A recovery is when Bush loses his job.

EASILY SPUN: How easily are New York Times writers spun? Here is Jim Rutenberg, hopelessly bull-roared in a Sunday “Week in Review” report:

RUTENBERG: It was a sharp video attack, jarring in a political season that has been unusually short on negative advertising. A woman, sitting at a keyboard, seeks information about Senator John Kerry on the Internet. She unearths all sorts of scandalizing tidbits.
“More special interest money than any other senator. How much?” she says.

The answer flashes on the screen: $640,000. “Ooh, for what?” she says, typing out “Paybacks?” and then reading aloud from the screen, she says, “Millions from executives at HMO’s, telecoms, drug companies.” She add, “Ka-Ching!”

She can only come to one damning conclusion: Mr. Kerry, she says, is “Unprincipled.”

The one-minute spot, introduced a week ago, did not appear on television, but on President Bush's campaign Web site. And so a new bare-knuckled political use of the World Wide Web showed its head: the Internet attack ad.

Rutenberg repeats the content of this ad, and brightly notes that it’s an “attack.” But he is too inept to let readers know that this ad’s attack is utterly false. Does Kerry take “more special interest money than any other senator?” No, and the (hapless) Washington Post piece which led to this ad never made such an assertion. According to Peter Beinart, Kerry ranks ninety-second among U.S. senators when it comes to special interest money. Meanwhile, at his Annenberg “FactCheck” site, Brooks Jackson shot down this ad’s bogus claim too. (He shot it down ten days ago!) Is Kerry first among senators in special interest dough, raising $640,000 in the last fifteen years? Please. “So far, for example, Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist reported $1,022,063 in PAC donations for his 2004 campaign alone,” Jackson notes. The Bush ad’s claim is utterly bogus. Rutenberg, typing hard, failed to say so.

But then, the New York Times deals in the factesque. The RNC send out a fake claim, so Rutenberg sat right down and typed it! Meanwhile, one last note, from the Annals of Clowning: When Rutenberg went on to discuss last week’s rumor from Drudge, he applauded the press for “not tak[ing] the bait.” But he’d been yanked from the water himself, ten grafs earlier! This year it matters, Gail Collins has said. But at the Times, hopeless habits die hard.

Rutenberg's article is amusingly titled, "In Politics, the Web Is a Parallel World With Its Own Rules." The New York Times has its own rules too - thou shalt not fact check the RNC.

President Bush last week caused a stir when he declined to endorse a projection, made by his own Council of Economic Advisers, that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year. But that forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years.

Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for fiscal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit for this year is on course to be $521 billion.

These are not isolated cases. Over three years, the administration has repeatedly and significantly overstated the government's fiscal health and the number of jobs the economy would create, but economists and politicians disagree about why.

. . . .

Bush has since said that his optimism about budget deficits was based on the assumption that the economy would not hit a "trifecta" of trouble: recession, national emergency and war. But in February 2002 -- after the recession was declared, the terrorist attacks had occurred and war had begun in Afghanistan -- the administration continued to have upbeat predictions. Although it forecast a $106 billion deficit in 2002, it saw the deficit shrinking to $80 billion in 2003, $14 billion in 2004, and becoming a surplus of $61 billion in 2005. Those figures, too, quickly became seen as overly optimistic, as tax receipts continued to come in lower than expected. A year later, in 2003, the administration predicted a deficit of $304 billion for 2003 and $307 billion for 2004. In reality, the 2003 deficit was $375 billion, and the White House now expects a deficit of $521 billion for 2004. (via Daily Kos)

HOW DID HE DO IT?....Why do I dislike George Bush? Because of his policies, obviously, and also because of temperament and personality characteristics that rub me the wrong way. But there's more. Whenever I think about this, one of the things that always settles into my mind is that he just doesn't deserve to be president. He never paid his dues.

It's not just that he got the job based partly on his family name. You could say the same thing about FDR, JFK, Bush Sr, and Al Gore, and it doesn't especially bother me about any of them. It's more that I just can't figure out how he managed to become a consensus party choice for president after a mere single term as governor of Texas.

Compare this to every other president since FDR. Here are the number of years of political experience each one had before he became president: 22, 23, 0, 14, 26, 18, 26, 14, 14, 22, 16.

With the specialized exception of Eisenhower, every single other president has had at least 14 years between first winning political office and becoming president. George Bush had six.

I just don't get it. Sure, he's a Bush, but even so how did he manage to convince the vast majority of the Republican party apparatus that he should be their favored candidate? After all, he had minimal experience, he obviously didn't have any special intellectual or personality characteristics that make you sit up and take notice, and his father wasn't even that popular with most Republicans after his dismal loss in 1992.

So how did he do it? It remains, to me, the most mysterious of questions.

Kevin Phillips in his new book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (p. 49) offers a partial explanation:

By 1997, a considerable number of the big donors, business and financial magnates, powerful lobbyists, and Republican hierarchs who had supported his father were concluding that with a George W. Bush matured by six years as governor of Texas, they could preempt the Republican nomination in 2000. Then, by tapping the public's moral hunger and Clinton fatigue, they could win the presidential election and govern the United States farther to the right than George H.W. Bush would have imagined. Finance, oil, the military-industrial complex, and the national security-intelligence community would return to the nation's highest councils.

Dubya's presidency certainly has been a boon to the folks Phillips mentions, albeit a nightmare for the rest of us.

UPDATE: Legal Fiction offers another answer to Kevin's question:

I think the answer traces back to the internal dynamics of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is in reality a coalition of at least two major blocs - rural/Southern social conservatives and urban libertarian Wall Street types. The former go along with Republican economic policies (even though they run counter to rural America's economic self-interest) because they have an intense preference for Republican positions on cultural issues. The Wall Street Republicans - who tend to be socially liberal or libertarian - put up with Jerry Falwell because they have an intense preference for Republican economic policies. The problem is that it's very hard to find a candidate who can straddle the line.

Think of the GOP as a corporation with two huge, well-financed, well-informed groups of shareholders. The CEO needs to be someone who is acceptable to both camps, which is difficult because the camps have such different views on cultural issues. Most potential CEOs (or presidential candidates) cannot satisfy both camps. Pat Robertson and most of the other cultural warriors are simply too scary and too backwards for the Wall Street types. Similarly, people like Dole and Bush I smell too much like a socially liberal country club for the Buchananites.

That's why Bush II was perfect, even though he had no experience. In fact, his inexperience may have allowed both GOP blocs to think they could manipulate him. In 2000, Bush II seemed to be sufficiently religious to be acceptable to a large bloc of evangelicals. Bush II was also a Texas good ol' boy businessman. With the Bush name and the East Coast education, the Wall Street types knew that they weren't handing the party over to Jerry Falwell. Bush's cloudy vague campaign slogans gave both camps reason to believe that not only was he one of them, but that he would be acceptable to the other camp too. Remember too that both sides hated Clinton, so both blocs might have given Bush II the benefit of the doubt. And it's possible that his inexperience allowed both sides to read what they wanted to read into the ambiguous meaningless platitudes he uttered.

[W]e're offering $10,000 cash! Yours to either spend or invest in job creation. All you have to do is definitively prove that George W. Bush fulfilled his duty to country.

So don't let the smear artists define the president. If you personally witnessed George W. Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base between the months of May and November of 1972 we want to hear about it. Help Mr. Bush put this partisan assault on his character behind him, so he can focus on more serious issues like jobs, the deficit and the coming civil war in Iraq. Just contact us below with the salient details. If we think you're a possible winner, we'll get back to you pronto. Good luck to all contestants!

INSTEAD OF ADMITTING ECONOMIC TRUTH, BUSH RESORTS TO STATISTICAL MANIPULATION

President Bush, attempting to obscure his record as the worst economic steward since Herbert Hoover, has become so desperate that he is exploring ways to manipulate statistics. Just days after Bush reneged on his pledge to create 2.6 million jobs and said with a straight face that "5.6% unemployment is a good national number," the New York Times uncovered a White House report showing that the president is considering re-classifying low-paid fast food jobs as "manufacturing jobs" as a way to hide the massive manufacturing job losses that have occurred during his term.

As CBS News reports, "Since the month President Bush was inaugurated, the economy has lost about 2.7 million manufacturing jobs." But if the president enacts the statistical change he is considering, this number would be purposely obscured because lower-paying fast-food jobs would be added to make the real manufacturing losses look smaller. Of course, fast-food jobs typically pay much less and have fewer benefits than real manufacturing jobs, meaning the statistical change would also obscure the fact that, under Bush, "in 48 of the 50 states, jobs in higher-paying industries have given way to jobs in lower-paying industries." All told, jobs in growing industries like lower-paid service sector/fast food jobs are paying 21% less than contracting industries like real manufacturing.

The president's efforts to manipulate statistics and mislead Americans is also getting a boost from his allies on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles (R-OK) was pointing to an optimistic "household" jobs survey as proof that "we're at an all-time high in employment" and that "the employment situation has improved rather substantially.'' The problem is that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said definitively that "payroll data" - not the household survey - "is the series which you have to follow" in order to be accurate. The payroll data shows "a loss of more than two million jobs since 2001."

Congressman John Dingell has a hilarious open letter to the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers regarding the proposed redefinition of manufacturing jobs (link via Atrios).

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has more.

WASHINGTON - Fighting back against a barrage of Democratic criticism, President Bush is unveiling a new stump speech that paints his opponents as politicians who want to raise taxes and put America on an uncertain path in the war on terrorism.

Bush's speech Monday night at the Republican Governors Association reception in Washington marks a "new period of engagement" for the president and a "tactical shift" for Bush-Cheney '04, campaign manager Ken Mehlman said Sunday night.

The Monday speech will be a preview of Bush's campaign themes and the election choice Americans will have to make, Mehlman said.

"There will be a very clear choice and it will be a choice between keeping tax relief that is helping move the economy forward versus higher taxes on the American people that will move us backward," Mehlman said. "In a dangerous world, it's a choice between a policy of strength and confidence versus a policy of uncertainty."

That's impressive. The horrible Democratic candidate won't engage in massive deficit spending and won't embark on pointless wars. Bush will continue to do so! Bring it on, Bozo.

The president has instructed members of the White House staff (everyone in the Executive Office of the President) to cooperate fully with the Plame investigation. Does that order to cooperate amount to a bar on White House employees taking the fifth with investigators?

Does the president find it acceptable for members of his staff to invoke their fifth amendment rights in a criminal investigation and still remain on the payroll?

Does the president know whether members of his staff have invoked their right against self-incrimination in the Plame investigation?

an enemy of progressive change in this country and a cat's paw of the Republican party.

If anything, calling him a 'cat's paw' is too generous since a dupe at least doesn't know he's being used.

Josh also quotes New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's assessment:

“It’s his personal vanity because he has no movement. Nobody’s backing him,” New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson said Sunday in advance of Nader’s announcement.

“The Greens aren’t backing him. His friends urge him not to do it. It’s all about himself,” Richardson told “Fox News Sunday.”

“Now, Ralph’s made some great contributions to consumer issues over the years, but clearly it’s not going to help us,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll have a sizable impact, but it’s terrible if he goes ahead because it’s about him. It’s about his ego. It’s about his vanity and not about a movement that supposedly he headed for many years very effectively.”

They're both right.

• Then: favored a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget every year. Now: 2004 budget deficit will be well over $500 billion. Last year, beat record annual budget deficit set by Daddy in just 10 months. Will destroy his own record this year. Wants to "make the tax cuts permanent," which would blow another $250 billion annual hole in the budget. Cheney, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, brushed aside O'Neill's concerns about growing deficits by saying "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
• Then: claimed he would cut national debt by $2 trillion over 10 years. Now: will have added over $1.8 trillion to national debt in just 4 years.
• Then: "I am worried about over-committing our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. I don't think nation-building missions are worthwhile."  Now: invaded Iraq, deposed its leader, installed puppet government, is spending tens of billions of dollars rebuilding the country.
• Then: favored a "humble" foreign policy so other nations will "respect us." Now: waged aggressive war in Iraq, in violation of international law, against the will of most countries of the world.
• Then: promised to "restore honor and dignity to the White House." Now: has lied like a rug.

BEACHWOOD, Ohio — In the 2000 presidential election, Bill Flanagan a semiretired newspaper worker, happily voted for George W. Bush. But now, shaking his head, he vows, "Never again."

"The combination of lies and boys coming home in body bags is just too awful," Mr. Flanagan said, drinking coffee and reading newspapers at the local mall. "I could vote for Kerry. I could vote for any Democrat unless he's a real dummy."

Mr. Flanagan is hardly alone, even though polls show that the overwhelming majority of Republicans who supported Mr. Bush in 2000 will do so again in November. In dozens of random interviews around the country, independents and Republicans who said they voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 say they intend to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate this year. Some polls are beginning to bolster the idea of those kind of stirrings among Republicans and independents.

That could change, of course, once the Bush campaign begins pumping millions of dollars into advertising and making the case for his re-election.

But even as Democratic and Republican strategists and pollsters warned that a shift could be transitory, they also said it could prove to be extraordinarily consequential in a year when each side is focused on turning out its most loyal voters.

"The strong Republicans are with him," a senior aide to Senator John Kerry said of Mr. Bush. "But there are independent-minded Republicans among whom he is having serious problems."

"With the nation so polarized," he added, "the defections of a few can make a big difference."

In the interviews, many of those potential "crossover" voters said they supported the invasion of Iraq but had come to see the continuing involvement there as too costly and without clear objectives.

Many also said they believed that the Bush administration had not been honest about its reasons for invading Iraq and were concerned about the failure to find unconventional weapons. Some of these people described themselves as fiscal conservatives who were alarmed by deficit spending, combined with job losses at home. Many are shocked to find themselves switching sides.

While sharing a sandwich at the stylish Beachwood Mall in this Cleveland suburb, one older couple — a judge and a teacher — reluctantly divulged their secret: though they are stalwarts in the local Republican Party, they are planning to vote Democratic this year.

"I feel like a complete traitor, and if you'd asked me four months ago, the answer would have been different," said the judge, after assurances of anonymity. "But we are really disgusted. It's the lies, the war, the economy. We have very good friends who are staunch Republicans, who don't even want to hear the name George Bush anymore."

In 2000, Mr. Bush won here in Ohio with 50 percent of the popular vote, as against 46.5 percent for Al Gore.

George Meagher, a Republican who founded and now runs the American Military Museum in Charleston, S.C., said he threw his "heart and soul" into the Bush campaign four years ago. He organized veterans to attend campaign events, including the campaign's kickoff speech at the Citadel. He even has photographs of himself and his wife with Mr. Bush.

"Given the outcome and how dissatisfied I am with the administration, it's hard to think about now," he said. "People like me, we're all choking a bit at not supporting the president. But when I think about 500 people killed and what we've done to Iraq. And what we've done to our country. I mean, we're already $2 trillion in debt again."

A nationwide CBS News poll released Feb. 16 found that 11 percent of people who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 now say they will vote for the Democratic candidate this fall. But there was some falloff among those who voted against him as well. Five percent of people who said they voted for Mr. Gore in 2000 say this time they will back Mr. Bush.

On individual issues, the poll found some discontent among Republicans but substantial discontent among independents. For instance, on handling the nation's economy, 19 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of independents said they disapproved of the job Mr. Bush was doing.

"As the president's job rating has fallen, his Democratic supporters have pulled away first, then the independents and now we're starting to see a bit of erosion among the Republicans, who used to support him pretty unanimously," said Evans Witt, the chief executive of Princeton Survey Research Associates. "If 10 to 15 percent of Republicans do not support him anymore, that is not trivial for Bush's re-election."

But Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign's chief strategist, suggested that no one in the White House was worried about Mr. Bush's losing much of his base. He said polls continued to show that the president was enjoying the support of 90 percent of Republicans.

Many of those interviewed said that they had experienced a growing disenchantment with the conflict in Iraq over many months, but that only recently had they decided to change their votes.

A number said they had been deeply disturbed by recent statements of David A. Kay, the former United Nations weapons inspector, who said he was skeptical about administration claims that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons.

"The lack of evidence on Iraq has really hurt him, and the economy here is bad — there's a lot of unemployment in the mills," said Phyllis Pierce, who is in the steel business in Cleveland and recently decided not to vote for Mr. Bush again.

John Scarnado, a sales manager from Austin, Tex., who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, said he would vote for Mr. Kerry if the senator won the Democratic nomination.

"I'm upset about Iraq and the vice president and his affiliation with Halliburton," said Mr. Scarnado, a registered Republican who said that he had not always voted along party lines. "I think the Bush administration is coming out to look like old boy politics, and I don't have a good feel about that."

Many of those wavering in their loyalty to Mr. Bush were middle-class voters who said that his tax relief programs had disproportionately helped the wealthy.

"I voted for him, but it seems like he's just taking care of his rich buddies now," said Mike Cross, a farmer from Londonderry, N.H., adding, "I'm not a great fan of John Kerry, but I've had enough of President Bush." (link via BuzzFlash)

And the Los Angeles Times reports that the Republican faithful are enraged about Bush's immigration plan:

BURLINGAME, Calif. — An uproar over illegal immigration roiled the state Republican convention on Saturday as party leaders struggled to keep the rank and file united behind Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Bush.

Hundreds of GOP loyalists booed the president at a rally where U.S. Senate hopeful Howard Kaloogian and his allies denounced Bush's plan to give temporary legal status to undocumented workers.

"Enough is enough!" the crowd shouted. "Enough is enough!"

A Kaloogian supporter, Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, told the crowd he knew a gynecologist who surveyed patients about the plan and found it rated "right below genital herpes." (link via Pandagon)

UPDATE: Billmon notes that the "right below genital herpes" quote, and other endearing lines that he mentions, are just the sort of thing Republicans need to win over the key Hispanic vote.  

In Arizona, Judy Donovan says she feels desperate for a new president. In Tennessee, Robert Wilson says he finds the president revolting. In Washington state, Maria Yurasek says she'd vote for a dog if it could beat President Bush.

A subtext to this year's presidential campaign is the intense anger that many Democrats are directing toward Bush, an attitude that has been growing in recent months.

"I've never seen anything like it," says Ted Jelen, a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "There are people who just really, really hate this person."

Fully a quarter of Americans mostly Democrats tell pollsters they have a very unfavorable opinion of the president, more than double the number from last April. When only Democrats are polled, more than half report they feel that way.

Further, in exit polls conducted during Democratic primaries, a sizable chunk of voters have been describing themselves as not just dissatisfied with Bush but outright angry 51 percent in Delaware, 46 percent in Arizona and New Hampshire, 44 percent in Virginia and Wisconsin.

"They really have a head of steam up against Bush," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. He said the level of political polarization surrounding Bush, the division between Republicans who favor him and Democrats who don't, exceeds even that for President Clinton in September 1998 during the impeachment battle.

A substantial number of independents who voted in the Democratic primaries expressed anger at Bush as well, exit polls found. For example, almost half of independents in the Delaware primary said they were angry, and about four in 10 in Virginia, Arizona, Iowa and New Hampshire. In Wisconsin, one in 10 of the Republicans who voted in the primaries said they were angry at Bush, and more than twice that many said they were dissatisfied.

Plenty of presidents have generated intense feelings, of course, but Democrats and even some Republicans think the phenomenon is outsized this year.

"I've never seen a Democratic Party more unified and more focused, and the anger helps do just that," said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. "The intensity level is just so high. They're using four-letter words to describe him."

Similarly, from another AP article:

The presidential primary season has been good for Democrats and tough on President Bush, according to a national poll released Thursday.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the public's impression of the Democratic field has been improving as the candidates have battled for their party's nomination -- with 45 percent now viewing the field positively, compared to 31 percent a month earlier. Bush's overall favorability rating, meanwhile, still is positive at 53 percent, but that compares with 72 percent last April, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, and is the low point of his presidency.

Likewise, Bush's job-approval rating has dropped to 48 percent, the first time in his presidency that it has fallen below 50 percent, according to the poll.

"I'm a little surprised by how negative people are toward Bush personally," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew poll. He said the negative views of Bush might be linked to the high number of people who are paying attention to the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Three-fourths of Americans say they are following the issue very or fairly closely.

When the pollsters asked people for a one-word description of Bush, equal shares gave positive and negative responses, a stark shift from last May, when positive answers outnumbered negative ones 2-to-1. The most frequently used negative word this time was "liar," which never came up last May. The most frequently used positive description this time was "honest," the same as last May.

The shifting perceptions of Bush and the Democrats have been accompanied by changing expectations for the outcome of the general election this fall -- 51 percent now think Bush will win, compared with 61 percent a month earlier. Among Democrats, 25 percent now think Bush will win, compared with 38 percent in January.

Kohut said Republicans didn't enjoy a similar boost in 1996, the last time there was a contested primary to determine who would take on an incumbent president, Bill Clinton.

"When Bob Dole seemed likely to be the nominee, there wasn't this big bounce for him," Kohut said. "This has been a surprise how much attention the public's paid and how favorably they've responded to the Democrats generally."

Public impressions of the leading Democratic candidates this time are generally positive. Two-thirds of those who are familiar with front-runner John Kerry have a favorable view of him. John Edwards, Kerry's closest challenger, has a 63 percent favorable rating among the smaller group of people who are familiar with him.

You've read the story countless times: An American convoy in Baghdad or Fallujah or Tikrit is attacked; a GI is killed and others are wounded. Nearly all those convoys include the all-purpose Humvee, which, it is becoming clear, lacks sufficient armor. Many feature no more than canvas roofs and doors. "We're kind of sitting ducks in the vehicles we have," one lieutenant colonel told Newsday.

The Army has acknowledged that it miscalculated the intensity of the guerrilla war in Iraq and subsequently goofed on the number of armored Humvees it needed. "We do not have as many armored Humvees as we would like," the Army's vice chief of staff testified before Congress in late September.

So how is the White House proposing to deal with this? By underfunding the program to armor Humvees. (via Cosmic Iguana)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Since the beginning of 2004, President Bush has suffered one political misfire after another, prompting some Republicans to wonder anxiously when the White House political machine will get in gear.

"This may have been the worst six weeks of Bush's political career," said Rick Davis, who managed the 2000 presidential bid by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain which lost to Bush.

In the latest embarrassment to hit the White House, the administration on Wednesday distanced itself from its own buoyant employment forecast that had predicted 2.6 million new jobs this year.

That followed red faces over a statement by Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who described the process by which hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs are migrating overseas as both natural and good.

With many Americans extremely anxious over their job security, that statement seemed particularly callous and politically ill-judged.

"For whatever reason, the White House has hit a rough patch and can't seem to get its political machinery in motion," said Keith Appell, a Republican political consultant.

. . . .

Bush's State of the Union Address was not well received and neither was his budget. Major policy initiatives on sending humans to Mars and reforming immigration law had a mixed reception at best. An interview with NBC's Tim Russert, a rare such appearance for Bush, failed to quieten the criticism.

The White House allowed a controversy over Bush's service in the National Guard to grab headlines for two weeks. And the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush's main justification for last year's war, promises to be a continuing embarrassment. (via Pandagon)

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations.

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies."

. . . .

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University who signed the statement and spoke in the conference call, said the administration had "engaged in practices that are in conflict with the spirit of science and the scientific method." Dr. Gottfried asserted that what he called "the cavalier attitude toward science" could place at risk the basis for the nation's long-term prosperity, health and military prowess.

. . . .

"I don't see it as a partisan issue at all," said Russell Train, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, and who spoke in the conference call in support of the statement. "If it becomes that way I think it's because the White House chooses to make it a partisan issue," Mr. Train said.

The full report, and an executive summary of it, are available as PDF files here. This report deserves to be huge news, but in a country where only 28% of the population believes in evolution, it probably won't be.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum gives examples of what he calls "conservative Lysenkoism."

PRINCETON, NJ -- In a hypothetical presidential contest, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry leads President George W. Bush by 12 percentage points among likely voters, 55% to 43%, while North Carolina Sen. John Edwards leads Bush by 10 points, 54% to 44%. According to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, these figures represent a significant improvement in the Democratic candidates' strength from 10 days ago, when Bush had a one-point lead over Kerry and a four-point lead over Edwards. At the end of January, Kerry enjoyed a seven-point lead and Edwards a one-point lead.

Back at the previous page, Gallup writes:

Among registered voters, Bush fares better, trailing Kerry by five points and Edwards by one point -- essentially a tie. The higher margins among likely voters reflect the especially high interest in the campaign among Democrats, stimulated by media coverage of the primaries.

This year is going to see a huge turnout by Democrats, as well as disaffected independents and even Republicans, who are itching to throw this incompetent, corrupt buffoon out of office.

PRESIDENT'S "DISGRACEFUL" TREATMENT OF TROOPS/VETS

Yesterday at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, President Bush thanked American soldiers for their service, saying, "In the war, America depends on our military to meet the dangers abroad and to keep our country safe. The American people appreciate this sacrifice." And while this tribute is heartwarming, it has not been matched with the kind of resources that show appreciation. On the contrary, President Bush has refused to adequately fund some of the most important priorities to soldiers, veterans and their families.

Last year, while troops were at war, the president proposed slashing $1.5 billion from military family housing and tried to "roll back recent modest increases" in bonuses paid to soldiers serving in combat zones. Meanwhile, the president refused to extend the child tax credit to one million children living in military and veteran families.

And this year the misleading is only getting worse. While the president rambles on about how much he appreciates troops and veterans, Congressional Quarterly reported on February 4th that Bush's own Secretary for Veterans Affairs told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the president rejected a desperate request for $1.2 billion in funding needed for veterans' health care. Many lawmakers said the president's decision "only proved the administration's disinterest in supporting veterans' programs." The Veterans of Foreign Wars issued a statement after receiving the White House's budget, calling it "disgraceful" and saying it was a "disgrace and a sham."

On the same subject, check out the great "Army of One" flash video from Symbolman at Take Back the Media if you haven't done so before.

BUSH: SPECIAL INTEREST PROTECTOR-IN-CHIEF

Coming under increasing fire for his failure to clarify his National Guard record, fix the economy, bring down the cost of health care, and secure post-war Iraq, President Bush has resorted to attacking his political opponents as "beholden to special interests and out of touch with regular Americans." But a look at the more than $320 million that Bush has raised since 2000 shows that he is the man with the most special interest connections in American history - and that he has rewarded those special interests in kind.

Specifically, while the president attacks Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for accepting money from lobbyists, a new study shows "the president accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in one year than Kerry did in the past 15 years." All told, Bush collected at least $6.5 million in "bundled" contributions from lobbyists last year alone.

But that has not stopped Bush from his ad hominem attacks on opponents for "special interest" connections. Yesterday, for instance, Bush attacked the US Senate for being beholden to "special interests" for holding up an insurance industry-backed bill to restrict medical patients from seeking legal redress in the event of malpractice. Yet, it was Bush who accepted more than $3 million from the insurance industry before he wrote the bill.

On the campaign trail last year, Bush said, "We can't let the special interests of Washington prevent us from doing what is necessary to protect the biggest interest we have, which is the American people." Yet it was Bush who did the bidding of his friends in the meat processing/meat packing industries by refusing to protect the American people from Mad Cow disease.

Specifically, Bush refused to enact stringent meat inspection regulations and delayed country-of-origin labeling laws at the urging of the agribusiness industry which has given him $5.5 million. To make extra sure that the agribusiness special interests were protected, Bush also packed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with agribusiness executives.

Even on issues of war and peace, Bush has put special interests before almost anything else. As the Center for Public Integrity reported, the more than 70 companies and individuals that Bush awarded up to $8 billion in Iraq/Afghanistan contracts have "donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush - a little over $500,000 - than to any other politician over the last dozen years."

Activist rocker Moby raised Republican hackles last week when he advised President Bush's enemies to engage in political mischief.

Moby told my fellow gossips Rush & Molloy: "For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion."

Now the incorrigible Larry Flynt says he plans to market a Bush abortion story as genuine - in a book to be published this summer by Kensington Press.

"This story has got to come out," the wheelchair-bound Hustler magazine honcho told the Daily News' Corky Siemaszko. "There's a lot of hypocrisy in the White House about this whole abortion issue."

Flynt claimed that Bush arranged for the procedure in the early '70s.

"I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt said. "I've tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I tracked down the Bush people who arranged for the abortion," Flynt said. "I got the story nailed."

Flynt wouldn't disclose whether he plans to name the woman.

Atrios, from whom I got this story, writes:

I'm sure the media, who spent the past week reporting on BS scandal-mongering from Drudge, will universally condemn Flynt for daring to do such a thing, as they did when he rightly thought that the hypocritical behavior by certain Republicans during the impeachment fiasco was newsworthy.

. . . .

I'd also like the media to consider one thing - compare Flynt's batting average with Drudge's. While the media will jump to condemn Flynt, they should recognize that Flynt has higher journalistic standards than any of them for this kind of thing. He doesn't run with things until he has multiple sources. This story may or may not be true, but frankly I have a lot more faith in the accuracy of Flynt’s reporting than I do in a lot of the mainstream press. The recent week has only re-confirmed that.

Atrios also prints the transcript of Flynt's appearance on Crossfire in 2000, where he discussed this story and said that he had the sources to prove it. Atrios says that Bob Novak responded by yelling at Flynt, and that CNN removed the transcript from its website.

there are "good arguments" that no computer fraud law was violated. Still, [Hatch] has noted that the "improper" computer security lapses have strained staff and senator relationships on the Judiciary Committee.

"This inquiry," Hatch said, "will likely have significant repercussions for this committee and perhaps the full Senate for months and years to come." (links via Pandagon)

When the president came into office the budget surplus was over $200 billion. Now the deficit is over $500 billion.

Even my frail grasp of mathematics tells me that's a deterioration in the nation's fiscal health of roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in the three years he's been in office. And for almost all of that time the president's party controlled both houses of congress.

And he says the Democrats are a danger to the nation's fiscal health?

This is the arsonist in your house telling you that stranger outside with the hose can't be trusted.

Trade deficit highest ever in 2003

February 14, 2004

BY JEANNINE AVERSA

WASHINGTON -- America's trade deficit ballooned to an all-time high in 2003, reflecting the hearty U.S. appetite for foreign-made cars, clothing and TVs.

The total deficit was $489.4 billion, 17.1 percent larger than the previous record, set in 2002, the Commerce Department reported Friday. The deficit with China alone was close to $124 billion, also a record.

I'm a hypertense, death-dealing fiasco

I am a deathless deafening hypocrite

I am a tone-deaf, highly-paid erectness

I'm the fanatic, grandiose sleepyhead.

Oafishly indecent pig's ear meathead

Slimy, cheapish deafening toadeater

Oedipean cheating defames trashily.

Flag hype, eh? Administration decease (Jeffrey Kramer) (link via Atrios)

I wonder if Lambert tried looking for anagrams with "deficit" or "deficits." My all time favorite political anagram is "Ronald Wilson Reagan" = "Insane Anglo Warlord." "George Herbert Walker Bush" = "Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog" is also cute.

I realized today just how angry I remain at Ralph Nader, former hero of mine, while listening to him on NPR today. Apparently, Mr. Nader is considering another run for president. When pressed quite effectively by Melissa Block to respond to the many many many who are begging him not to run, including the Nation, Mr. Nader responded that such a request was “censorship.”

This man is truly outrageous. The only thing a Nader candidacy would do is increase the chance that Bush will be reelected. This man has become unsafe — to himself, and to the nation. If he has friends, they should be his friend and stop him from this.

Which got me thinking: If you believe that but for Nader’s not withdrawing in the last moments before the 2000 election, Bush would not have been elected (which is true), and you believe that a Bush presidency has caused great harm — to the nation, to the environment, and to the families of soldiers lost in Iraq (which is also true), then which has been more harmful to society: The Corvair or its enemy?

Professor Lessig's further thoughts on Nader are here, here, and here.

UPDATE: The Seattle Times reports that "Nader is poised to declare that he will seek the presidency again this year, this time as an independent and despite a vigorous effort by the left to dissuade him, according to friends and associates." (via Political Wire) What a flaming egomaniacal asshole.

Give George W. Bush credit. Who would have dreamed that he could get by with a political maneuver so brazen as putting Laurence Silberman in charge of an "independent" commission to investigate the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war? The country should be boiling with outrage but hardly a whimper was heard.

Putting Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the inquiry would have been too transparent, but even they do not have Silberman's record of protecting the Bushes from scandal and punishing their critics. Whitewater aficionados on both sides will recall Silberman's role in the campaign to destroy Bill Clinton. When the commission's work is done - long after the election - Silberman will see to it that much of the blame for anything requiring blame will be borne by, who else?, Bill Clinton. Silberman's co-chair is former U. S. Sen. Chuck Robb, picked for his reputation as a malleable man who never rocks the boat.

Silberman is a federal judge but he has never let the black robes or the code of judicial conduct stand in the way of getting dirty when he needed to. He has been a political loyalist first and a judge fifth.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — The White House is declining to make public the financial histories of the commissioners President Bush appointed to investigate American intelligence failures.

Administration officials say the arrangement has helped to attract the best-qualified people for the panel, but critics say the White House's refusal to disclose financial information raises questions about potential conflicts of interest that could cloud the commission's work.

Citing an exemption to federal ethics regulations, the White House says the financial disclosure statements filed by the commission's nine members will remain confidential because they are not being paid for their work.

. . . .

But experts said the White House's refusal to make public the commission's business links may fuel questions about its independence and taint its investigation into one of the Bush administration's biggest potential political vulnerabilities: the quality of intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and other issues involving unconventional weapons.

The issue mirrors some of the concerns raised in 2002 when a commission was appointed to investigate the Sept. 11 terror attacks, only to have its original chairman and vice chairman step down, in part because of private business interests.

After initially resisting calls for a commission to study intelligence failures surrounding the Iraqi war buildup, Mr. Bush created the intelligence commission on Feb. 6 and gave it a broad mandate to look at intelligence on unconventional weapons around the globe. But before the commission has even begun its work, some critics are already suggesting that political as well as financial conflicts could influence its findings.

Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative judge who is one of the commission's two chairmen, has drawn particular criticism from liberal groups because of his judicial record and close ties to the Bush administration. Several other commissioners also have financial links to groups in the Middle East and the defense industry that could become involved in the inquiry.

"This is a critical commission, and if the White House is going to withhold basic information about its members that should be made public, that's a shame," said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks government ethics issues.

"The point of a financial disclosure form is that it's supposed to be disclosed," Mr. Allison said. "This completely defeats the purpose. You're starting from a position of bad faith."

. . . .

One commissioner, William O. Studeman, for instance, was a former official at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and is now a senior executive at Northrop Grumman, a military contractor that does work in weaponry and in planning and detection for unconventional weapons, among many other areas.

Also on the panel is Lloyd M. Cutler, a prominent Washington lawyer who has served in several Democratic administrations. The firm he founded, Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, has done work for the Carlyle Group, a large Washington equity firm that has used former President George Bush and other well-connected Republicans to advance its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Mr. Cutler said in an interview, however, that he had not personally represented the Carlyle Group.

Clearly the most scrutiny has fallen on Judge Silberman, a senior part-time judge on the United States Court of Appeals in Washington.

Conservatives hail Judge Silberman as a well-respected and savvy leader who has had a long and diverse career as a diplomat, law enforcement official and jurist. But several liberal groups and Democratic lawmakers have attacked what they call his severe partisanship on and off the bench in episodes including the Iran-contra affair, the Whitewater investigation and accusations of sexual misconduct against President Bill Clinton.

In a lengthy attack on Judge Silberman delivered on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, charged that "the canons of judicial ethics meant nothing" to the judge and that he should be replaced on the panel.

Judge Silberman, Mr. Reid said, was on the panel "to protect the president, not to get fair information." As long as Judge Silberman is associated with the panel, he said, "it is smeared with partisan prejudice."

Judge Silberman, in an interview, dismissed such charges as "fabrications" and said he did not believe they would distract from the commission's work. (NYT link via Tena at Eschaton)

I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed managed to wangle slots in the Army Reserve and National Guard units... Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.

- Colin Powell, "My American Journey" (via Media Whores Online)

THE beauty said to have had a fling with presidential hopeful John Kerry has recorded a bombshell tell-all interview.

Journalist Alex Polier taped a talk with a US TV network at Christmas.

The former Washington intern, 27, told all about an alleged fling with the 60-year-old super-rich senator in spring 2001.

The channel is sitting on the tape until it has enough evidence to back her story.

If the sex claims are true, they would shatter his White House hopes.

Kerry, a married dad of two, has denied the fling. But Alex told pals she fled to Kenya on his suggestion.

One TV source said: “She wants to tell her story. She has talked at length about her relationship with Kerry. But no one is believing her.” (via Hesiod)

8 minutes. But that was with a lot of fussing and hesitation, some of it having to do with that I was setting up the blog for a third party.

I tried it again, setting up yet another blog from scratch for yet another person and cut that time to 3:23.

Neither person has yet used his new blog, but I'll update that part of the story next week.

Files released by the White House last night from President Bush's Vietnam War-era service in the National Guard show that the future president was an exemplary pilot whose military record contains numerous gaps in the last two years of his six-year commitment.

The White House, seeking to quell a revived controversy over Bush's Guard service, released hundreds of pages of records that were previously withheld. The documents include what the White House describes as all the non-medical elements of Bush's military personnel file, including performance evaluations, documentation of his honorable discharge, and a thick bureaucratic paper trail of applications, promotions and transfers.

The records show Bush was an eager fighter pilot who said he wanted to spend a lifetime in aviation. But they provide no evidence that he did any military service in Alabama, to which he had requested a transfer in May 1972 to work on a Senate campaign that ended in November 1972.

And the records show officials from Bush's home base in Texas declining to provide details of his activities between May 1972 to April 1973, even though such documentation was requested by National Guard headquarters.

. . . .

[T]he tone of Bush's military file changed abruptly, and with no documented explanation, in May 1972, when Bush sought to transfer to Alabama. That began a period of months in which, the documents suggest, Bush did not actively pursue Guard service and the Guard did not actively pursue him.

For Bush's fifth year in the Guard, May 1972 to May 1973, Bush earned a total of 41 "points" for his service and was granted another 15 "gratuitous" points by his superiors, bringing him above the 50-point minimum requirement for the year. There are no records showing he participated in any Guard activities from May 1972 through the end of October 1972.

On May 24, 1972, Bush sought to transfer from his Houston Guard unit to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron for an unpaid assignment. Two days later, the unit's commander accepted him but added: "The continuation of this type unit is uncertain at this time and we may last 3 months, 6 months, a year or who knows! With this in mind, if you are willing to accept assignment under these circumstances, welcome! We're glad to have you."

There is no evidence Bush reported to the reserve unit. Retired Lt. Col. Reese Bricken, the commander who wrote Bush's acceptance, told the Birmingham News that Bush never showed up. "He was looking for a place to hang his hat, but he never came by," Bricken said.

On July 31, 1972, the Air Force Reserve Personnel Center overruled Bricken and returned Bush's application, calling him "ineligible for assignment to an Air Reserve Squadron."

The next move from Bush apparently came in a letter on Sept. 5, in which he requested permission to perform "equivalent duty" with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery, Ala.

The request was immediately approved, and on Sept. 15 the Alabama Guard approved Bush and directed him to report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed. Turnipseed has said he has never met Bush, and the only documentation that Bush was at a Guard facility in Alabama was a one-page dental exam from January 1973 that was previously released by the White House.

Back in Houston, the Guard, in a Sept. 5, 1972, memo, announced Bush's "suspension from flying status" as of Aug. 1 because of a "failure to accomplish annual medical examination."

On May 2, 1973, Bush's evaluation form stated: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of report. A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to Montgomery, Alabama. He cleared this base on 15 May 1972 and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama."

But the evaluation was returned from National Guard headquarters to the Texas Guard in June 1973, with a "suspense date" of Aug. 6. "An AF Fm 77a should be requested from the training unit so that this officer can be rated in the position he held," it said. "The officer should have been reassigned in May 1972 since he no longer is training in his AFSC or with his unit of assignment."

The form requested, the 77a, was sent by the Texas Air National Guard personnel office on Nov. 12, 1973, and said simply: "Not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73. Report for this period not available for administrative reasons."

Records show sporadic Guard activity at unspecified locations between late October and May 1973, when Bush appeared to resume active participation back in Houston. On Sept. 5, Bush filed an "Application for Discharge" effective Oct. 1, seven months before his six years were up. "I am moving to Boston, Massachusetts to attend Harvard Business School as a full time student," he wrote. "I have enjoyed my association with the 111th Ftr Intcp Sq and the 147th Ftr Intcp Gp." The discharge was granted. (Link via Daily Kos)

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 13 — At Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors. The drinking water is contaminated. According to doctors, 80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived.

Doctors say they have been beaten up in the emergency room. Blood is in such short supply that physicians often donate their own to patients lying in front of them.

"The word `big' is not enough to express the disaster we are facing," said Ahmed A. Muhammad, the hospital's assistant manager.

To be sure, Iraq's hospitals were in bleak shape before the American-led invasion last year. International isolation and the sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had already shattered a public health care system that was once the jewel of the Middle East. Crucial machines stopped working. Drugs were in short supply.

Conditions eased a bit once the United Nations oil-for-food program started in 1996, but the country still suffered, especially the children.

But Iraqi doctors say the war has pushed them closer to disaster. Fighting and sabotage have destroyed crucial infrastructure and the fall of Saddam Hussein precipitated a breakdown in social order.

"It's definitely worse now than before the war," said Eman Asim, the Ministry of Health official who oversees the country's 185 public hospitals. "Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control."

The rest is here.

WASHINGTON — In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.

The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign.

The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate panel voted unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared ready to break from the Republican position.

The expansion was a victory for Democrats, who have argued for months that many of the claims made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were not backed up by the intelligence.

"We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused by reviewing statements by senior policymakers to determine if those statements were substantiated by the intelligence," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The change in scope was announced in a statement issued by Rockefeller and the chairman of the panel, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). The statement outlined a new course for an investigation that is already several months along, and has involved interviews with dozens of U.S. intelligence officials and reviews of thousands of pages of classified documents.

New areas of inquiry will include "whether any influence was brought to bear on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy objectives," the statement said. Sources involved in the investigation said they had turned up no evidence so far that there was such pressure, or that analysts shaded their assessments to please the White House.

The committee said it would examine the role played by a controversial intelligence unit set up secretly at the Pentagon to search for ties between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The unit in the so-called Office of Special Plans has been accused of cherry-picking data to help bolster White House claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that the CIA and other agencies viewed far more skeptically.

The committee also will focus new scrutiny on the intelligence community's use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group during Saddam Hussein's regime that lobbied for years for a U.S. effort to oust the Iraqi president, and whose leaders have ties to senior members of the Bush administration. Critics say the INC has served up a stream of Iraqi defectors with exaggerated or unfounded claims about Iraq's weapons programs and other activities.

But the most significant shift for the committee is its determination to now examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq" by administration figures were "substantiated by intelligence information." The statement said the committee would examine public comments  and claims made not only by the current administration but by officials in the Clinton administration.

The rest of the story is here (free registration required). (link via Tena at Eschaton)

History was made at 11:06 a.m. today at San Francisco City Hall when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon took their wedding vows, becoming the first same-sex couple to be officially married in the United States.

The couple, aged 83 and 79, will celebrate their 51st anniversary together on Saturday, Valentine's Day. A total of 87 same-sex marriages were performed Thursday in San Francisco. San Francisco issued the marriage licenses in an open challenge to an initiative passed by California's voters in 2000 that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Wingnut columnist Rebecca Hagelin asserts that allowing gay marriage may be "the beginning of the end for America" because doing so is "destroying the building block of society, and replacing it with nothing more than straw." Can anyone in his or her right mind believe this? Our society has survived Britney Spears and Jason Alexander's 55-hour heterosexual marriage. It is hard to see how allowing a couple of 50 years to marry (just as much less committed heterosexual couples are permitted to do) will cause Western civilization to crumble. (link to Hagelin via World O'Crap)

No poll has been friendlier to Bush than the Washington Post/ABC News affair. So these numbers will keep up Rove tonight:

2/10-11. MoE 3%. (1/18 in parentheses)

Bush Job Approval:

Approve: 50 (58)
Disapprove: 47 (40)

The situation in Iraq

Approve: 47 (55)
Disapprove: 52 (42)

If the 2004 presidential election were being held today, would you vote for:

Kerry: 52 (43)
Bush: 43 (52)

(Graph omitted; typo corrected) The graph of poll numbers over time that Kos has is a little hard to read, but shows that Bush's approval and disapproval ratings are both his worst ever in this poll, the latter by a big margin (because there are very few undecideds left) over his previous worst numbers (right before 9/11).

the Labor Department (news - web sites) said initial claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week by 6,000 to 363,000, confounding analysts, who had predicted an improving job market and expected a dip to 345,000 new claims.

The Commerce Department (news - web sites) said total retail sales -- a major component of U.S. consumer spending -- fell 0.3 percent to $322.87 billion in January from December levels. It was the first decline since September.

However, excluding autos, a frequently volatile number, retail sales rose a bigger-than-expected 0.9 percent from the previous month.

"All told, the report was a favorable one for consumer activity. The drop in vehicle sales was disappointing, but such volatility is common for this area. Sales elsewhere were generally strong," Mike Moran, chief economist with Daiwa Securities America Inc., said in a research note. (link via Hesiod)

BAGHDAD -- In the second devastating attack in two days, a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi army recruits Wednesday, killing at least 47 people and intensifying fears over a new and more lethal phase in the insurgency.

The assault wounded at least 50 others and mirrored the precision and power of Tuesday's strike on police recruits in nearby Iskandariyah. The two-day death toll of 100 is one of the bloodiest stretches yet for Iraqis cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation.

The Federal Communications Commission has received more than 200,000 complaints about the halftime show.

Meaning that 89,800,000 people thought it was "pretty cool to see a boob on TV" or just didn't care.

According to The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial on February 4, the ricin-laden envelope delivered to Senator Bill Frist's office this week justifies the Iraq war: "There's been a lot of talk lately that the failure to discover any stockpiles of [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq proves that the terror threat isn't 'imminent' and that we can return to our pre-9/11 way of countering it. Is ricin's arrival in a Senate mailroom imminent enough?" We're not sure who exactly believes terrorism isn't an imminent threat, nor do we understand what role the Journal thinks Saddam Hussein played in germing the Senate. But we're most confused by the implication that President Bush's security priorities are emblematic of post-September 11 thinking. The Journal's editors ought to read the president's new budget, which took a $779 million request from the U.S. Post Office for a new biohazard detection system--which, sniffing the air hundreds of times each hour, could detect a single granule of ricin--and cut it to $37 million. We're not sure Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction proves that there is an imminent terrorist threat to the United States, but we're quite certain the 2001 anthrax attacks did.

You read it here first: I predict that Howard Dean and Wesley Clark will be the next President and Vice President of the United States.

Senator Kerry has said that Bush "changed his story" yet again on Meet the Press, when he replaced WMD as a rationale for war with removal of Saddam Hussein, a bad man.

Senator Kerry is right.  Bush has been all over the map on Iraq, and has offered every possible combination of motive and intent in responding to various criticisms before, during, and after the unnecessary invasion that has taken the lives of over 500 US servicemen.

For example, here is Bush in January:

"The stated policy of my administration towards Saddam Hussein was very clear," Bush told reporters during an appearance with Mexican President Vicente Fox in Monterrey, Mexico. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."

Story

Here is Bush lying to Tim Russert yesterday, saying that when Congress passed the Iraq resolution it had done so after making a judgment that removing Saddam from power was necessary:

Congress saw the same intelligence I had, and they looked at exactly what I looked at, and they made an informed judgment based upon the information that I had.  The same information, by the way, that my predecessor had.  And all of us, you know, made this judgment that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed.

...and indicating that WMD or no WMD, he always intended to remove Saddam because Saddam was a "threat."

And the man was a threat, and we dealt with him, and we dealt with him because we cannot hope for the best.  We can't say, Let's don't deal with Saddam Hussein.  Let's hope he changes his stripes, or let's trust in the goodwill of Saddam Hussein.  Let's let us, kind of, try to contain him.  Containment doesn't work with a man who is a madman.

But here is Condi and Colin in October 2002, insisting that avenging Poppy by removing Saddam had nothing to do with Junior's attention to Iraq, and the only concern was disarmament.

Bush took this position at the time the concept of "regime change" by force was under fire by alarmed allies, and he was trying to deceive the world community into believing "regime change" wasn't an important part of his agenda:

Saddam Could Stay in Power
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Two top Bush administration officials said yesterday that America would accept the continuation of Saddam Hussein‘s regime if Iraq disarms, apparently backing away from the official U.S. policy of seeking the ouster of the dictator.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said in television interviews yesterday that a disarmed Saddam could remain in power, and Mr. Powell said that is now President Bush‘s position.

"Remember where regime change came from — it came from the previous administration," Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s "Meet the Press."

That demand, he said, "came out of the Congress in 1998, when it was thought the only way to get rid of weapons of mass destruction was to change the regime. We will see whether [the Iraqis] cooperate or not."

At that time, it was Tim Russert himself who asked Powell about Saddam remaining in power.  So why didn't he force Bush to defend that position yesterday, when Bush was attempting to shift his rationale once again?

"So [Saddam] can save himself, in effect, and remain in power?" host Tim Russert asked Mr. Powell.

"All we‘re interested in is getting rid of those weapons of mass destruction. We think the Iraqi people would be a lot better off with a different leader, a different regime. But the principal offense here are weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Powell said.

Contrary to what Bush said yesterday, Congress didn't make the judgment that "Saddam Hussein needed to be removed" when they passed the Iraq resolution.  It made the judgment that Saddam needed to be disarmed.  Furthermore, even Bush didn't argue that "Saddam Hussein needed to be removed" when faced with criticism over a policy of "regime change."

Why is this distinction important?  Again, because in the absence of WMD, Bush is now arguing that Congress and the American people agree that the deaths of over 500 US servicemen were justified on the basis of removing an unarmed leader of a third world country from power - and that all along he had made the fact that removal of Saddam was the purpose of the war "clear" to Congress, the American people, and the world.

Russert: Now looking back, in your mind, is it worth the loss of 530 American lives and 3,000 injuries and woundings simply to remove Saddam Hussein, even though there were no weapons of mass destruction?

Bush: Every life is precious.  Every person that is willing to sacrifice for this country deserves our praise, and yes.

---

Russert failed to ask the simple question of why Bush refused to "let the inspections work," which was the position of President Clinton and Democratic candidates at the time of the invasion:

Russert: In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?

Why didn't Russert go further and ask Bush about the urgency of halting inspections and invading Iraq instead of letting the inspections continue?  We know the reason is that Bush didn't want the inspections to go on long enough to show that no WMD existed, hence thwarting his opportunity to launch an unnecessary invasion.

But why didn't Russert force him to cite reasons for the "urgency" of an invasion at that time, particularly in light of the fact that Bush is now running away from saying Iraq presented an "imminent" threat?

BUSH ENDORSES U.S. JOBS MOVING OVERSEAS

On Labor Day, President Bush said, "I want people to understand that when somebody wants to work and can't find a job, it says we've got a problem in America that we're going to deal with. We want everybody in this country working." But yesterday, President Bush directly contradicted himself, releasing a report which "supports the shift of U.S. jobs overseas." When asked about the report and how it contradicts the president's supposed concern about job losses, the president's top economic adviser said, "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade."

With more than two million jobs lost since President Bush took office, newspaper headlines across the country told readers of the White House's new support for the practice of wealthy corporations eliminating U.S. jobs and shipping them to lower-wage countries. The Seattle Times headline read, "Bush report: Sending jobs overseas helps U.S." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said, "Bush Economic Report Praises 'Outsourcing' Jobs" and the Arizona Republic said, "Bush Report Lauds 'Outsourcing' Jobs."

And while this may be troubling to the millions in the United States who are out of work and suffering from stagnating wages, it was celebrated in India, where thousands of good paying, white-collar U.S. jobs have moved. The headlines in India read, "Bush Aides: Outsourcing win-win for India." The story said the Administration believes exporting jobs to India and other lower-wage countries "is a win-win for both exporter and importer" - failing to explain how this is a win for American workers who the president just months ago purported to care about.

If the Dems can't make some major hay out of this, they're more inept than I thought.

[I]ntelligent fiscal management is not what we have in Washington these days. Much has been written recently about the out-of-control federal budget. The tax base has been eroded at the very moment that a massive new entitlement program, prescription drugs for the elderly, has been added. Increased funding for security measures is inevitable and yet there is no effort to tighten nonsecurity spending. Congress is always irresponsible, but President Bush has not vetoed a single bill since he took office, the first president to show such laxity. He now beats all presidents but Lyndon Johnson at domestic spending. Journalist Mickey Kaus recently spoke with a senior federal official who said, "I've never seen an administration spend money like this... The money's flying out the door. I can barely keep up with it... They give money away on phone calls. No documents. No budget. It's the worst I've ever seen..."

 

The real problem is that America cannot afford this orgy as it approaches the retirement of the baby-boom generation. When he was Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill asked two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland to estimate what changes it would take to actually be able to pay for the government's commitments, including Social Security and Medicare. Their answer: either increase income taxes by 69 percent, increase payroll taxes by 95 percent or cut Social Security and Medicare by 56 percent. No wonder O'Neill was skeptical about tax cuts.

Many things about the future are uncertain. But demographics are not. The baby boomers will age and these bills will come due starting in 2008, four years from now. In fact, it's a puzzle as to why the bond market has not reacted to this deep and certain crisis. [Historian Niall] Ferguson says the only possible answer is that "the magnitude of the problem is such that most Americans find it quite literally incredible. The main reason why America's crisis remains latent is precisely because people refuse to believe its existence."

A tragic and sad fire has destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. Both of his books have been lost. The president is reportedly devastated -- apparently, he had not finished coloring the second one.

In the annual Economic Report of the President, the White House said the number of workers on U.S. non-farm payrolls was likely to rise to an average to 132.7 million this year from a 2003 average it thought would come in at 130.1 million.

According to the latest jobs figures released by the Labor Department Friday, which incorporated data revisions, payroll employment averaged just 129.9 million last year.

How accurate have the Bushies' previous predictions of employment growth been, you ask? From the same article: 

Last year, the Bush administration was looking for the creation of about 1.7 million jobs. But the economy actually lost 53,000 jobs, bringing the total number of jobs lost since Bush took office to 2.2 million.

Woops! Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong explains just how fanciful (to put it politely) the current projection is:

At the moment we stand at a January 2004 estimate of 130.115 million Americans on nonfarm payrolls. The 2004 average is just that: an average, an average of the January 2004 number and the February number and the March number and so on up to the December number. That means that--if you believe that employment is going to grow steadily over the year--the only way to reach an average of 132.7 million payroll jobs this year is if come December 2004 you hit 135.3 million payroll jobs. 2004 will average 132.7 million only if payroll job growth from December 2003 to December 2004 hits 5.3 million.

The U.S. economy has never added 5.3 million jobs in any twelve-month period. The closest it ever came was between July 1940 and July 1941, as armament for World War II began and employment grew by 5.2 million. Otherwise--unless I've made some stupid math error--3.9 million from December 1993 to December 1994 was the best we did in the 1990s, 4.5 million from June 1983 and June 1984.

To average 132.7 million payroll jobs this year, the administration Troika [the Treasury Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Council of Economic Advisers] has implicitly forecast that during the rest of 2004 the U.S. economy will gain 470,000 payroll jobs a month. 470,000 payroll jobs a month. The U.S. economy has only gained 200,000 payroll jobs since last June.

Billmon helpfully summarizes:

So the Council of Economic Advisors -- the president's economic brain trust -- is officially predicting that the U.S. economy will gain more jobs than it did in either America's first year in World War II, or during the fastest part of the recovery from the deep, deep 1981-82 recession.

Even by Washington standards, this is a remarkable piece of intellectual chicanery. It's simply amazing to think that a presumably reputable group of economists would put their signatures under such garbage.

As Stanley Collander, a long-time budget watcher, said recently, if this gang were operating in the private sector, Elliot Spritzer would be preparing their indictments about now.

At the very least, I think the truth in advertising laws would require the administration to rename the CEA the Council of Economic Whores.

(Links via Atrios)

UPDATE: Dr. DeLong discovered some errors in his assumptions and calculations, which he has now corrected. With those corrections, rather than job growth of not 470,000 a month, but 320,000 per month (which DeLong still regards as ludicrous, but not quite so inconceivable as the previous number) would be required to fulfill the government's predictions. DeLong's further thought on the matter are here and here.

if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in [Bush's] understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean. (Sullivan link via Atrios)

By ruling gay marriage constitutional and declaring the less contentious option of civil unions unconstitutional, the Massachusetts Supreme Court made the perfect the enemy of the good. The decision set in motion a chain of events that could have disastrous consequences for the Democrats in November.

Reacting to the High Court's 4-3 decision, a Democratic strategist quipped, "I wonder if they're taking money from the Republican National Committee. The timing is devastating. It's really going to hurt."

With Massachusetts Senator John Kerry seemingly poised to become the Democratic nominee, the ruling is a gift for the White House. The Bush campaign can use Massachusetts as shorthand for everything that is un-American. The Democrats are making it even easier by holding their convention in Boston.

Getting people worked up over gay marriage distracts from a war that isn't going well in Iraq and an economy that isn't producing jobs. . . .

The 2004 election is shaping up to be a contest of intensity—which side can get more of its hard-core supporters to the polls. The first President Bush lost his bid for reelection because he didn't tend sufficiently to the party's base, and social conservatives failed to turn out in the numbers he needed. The nightmare issue for Karl Rove is that the Democrats are far more energized than the Republicans. The turnout was substantially up in their recent primaries and caucuses. Here are some numbers: Delaware up 195 percent; New Hampshire up 42 percent; Oklahoma up 124 percent; Missouri up 58 percent; Arizona up 215 percent. The motivating factor for these voters is "ABB"— anybody but Bush—which means they'll be there in November.

At the same time, conservatives have been losing faith in George W. Bush. The rising budget deficit, an immigration reform plan that they see as rewarding law-breakers, more federal money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a prescription drug plan that will cost a third more than Bush promised top their list of grievances. But introduce the specter of gay marriage and all is forgiven. These same voters who might have sat out the election will be there for Bush.

. . . .

Ultimately high-voltage social issues like gay marriage matter less than the economy and the situation in Iraq. It's noise, but if the noise is loud enough, what we like to call the "real issues" get muted. The Democrats accuse Bush of being out of touch but on this one, the administration is on the side of the majority.

My feelings on this subject are a lot like Billmon's:

I do not disagree with the Massachusetts Supreme Court on any significant legal or moral point. I support equal rights for gays and lesbians as firmly and feverently as I support them for everybody else -- which is to say, I believe that when the Constitution guarantees everyone the equal protection of the laws, it means just that, even if the dead, white, heterosexual men who drafted and approved the 14th Amendment didn't understand the full implications of what they were doing.

And if Anton Scalia doesn't like it, he can stick it in his shotgun and fire it up Dick Cheney's keister.

But Christ on his cross why did the ruling have to come down now? I can practically see Karl Rove and his minions dancing a conga line in the White House mess after hearing the news, while the Devil and the spirit of Lee Atwater exchange high fives in the RNC's basement annex.

Who needs Willie Horton when you're soon going to have hours of digital footage of gay Bostonians kissing passionately at the altar? How many different ways can their ecstatic faces be morphed into those of John Kerry and his running mate?

I guess we're going to find out.

Heaven knows the Mayberry Machiavellis can't manage the economy or the budget; can't stay out of Middle Eastern quagmires; can't (dont want to) stop global warming; can't catch Osama bin Ladin. But they sure can push the cultural buttons of red-state America. In fact, it's their main job skill.

And sometimes it seems as if the left is determined to make it as easy as possible for them. It isn't enough that they want to shoot us all in the heart -- we have to go and draw a bulleye on it for them.

Please understand that I'm genuinely torn about this. I recognize the moral trap of trying to trim equal rights to what's politically acceptable. You end up sounding like those pathetic Southern moderates who admitted back in the '50s and '60s that segregation was wrong and immoral, but insisted it couldn't be dismantled until "popular opinion" would accept it.

By popular opinion, of course, these moral cowards meant white popular opinion. But if black Americans had waited passively for white Americans to "accept" the end of segregation, they'd still be riding in the back of the bus. Segregation had to be fought. Court rulings had to be won, and once won, enforced. In other words, civil rights had to be demanded, publically and loudly, no matter what kind of problems it created for white moderates -- even if it meant the destruction of New Deal coalition.

And yet ... And yet. The civil rights revolution did destroy the New Deal coalition, or at least accelerated its destruction. And three generations of working class whites turned their backs not only on racial equality, but on social justice and economic democracy as well.

Was it worth it? Yes. And not just because the alternative would have been racial violence even worse than what we actually saw in the late '60s. The civil rights movement finally ended the long unfinished battle of the Civil War -- and redeemed the promissory notes contained in the Constitution before they became too expensive to pay. It literally saved the country. How do you put a price on that?

Securing the full legal rights of America's gay and lesbian citizens would do more than just make good the promises of 225 years of U.S. constitutional history. It would overthrow almost 2000 years of senseless bigotry and injustice. I can't put a price on that, either. But if the Massachusetts marriage ruling helps advance the day when gays and lesbians are fully vested in 14th Amendment, then it's a price worth paying.

I fear, though, that it will have the opposite effect -- empowering the bigots, not the oppressed. For the first time in American history (or at least, for the first time since Prohibiition) we may see the passage -- and, God forbid, the ratification -- of a constitutional amendment that actually restricts human freedom, rather than extending it. And, of course, as the New York Times reminds us, the gay marriage issue could prove to be manna from heaven for a Republican propaganda machine in search of a hate object.

Given what's at the stake in this particular presidential election -- republic or empire, democracy or plutocracy, an endless war against terrorism or a determined struggle for peace? -- I can't celebrate the Massachusetts ruling, even though I know it's a victory for a cause I strongly support. And that's depressing.

Why, just for once, can't justice be easy?

In somewhat related news, the New York Times has an article, "Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name," about gay marriage and adoption -- among penguins and other animals. It ought to give pause to those who condemn homosexuality as "unnatural." (link via Pandagon)

Bush’s approval rating remains below the 50 percent mark, with just 48 percent approving of the president’s overall job performance (45 percent disapprove). In December, shortly after the capture of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, his approval rating was at 54 percent.

 

. . . .

 

Voter sentiment reflects [a] decline in Bush’s approval ratings, with 50 percent leaning against his reelection in November (compared to 45 percent in favor). A full 45 percent of voters feel strongly that Bush should not be reelected (up four points from the new year), compared with 37 percent who feel strongly that he should be reelected (down three points).

 

. . . .

 

If the election were held today, Kerry would take 50 percent of the vote to Bush’s 45 percent. Bush still leads in a race with Edwards by five points (49 percent to 44 percent), but that gap has been steadily closing since the end of last year when Bush’s lead was twice that (51 percent to 40 percent). Bush leads former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (who has been slipping in the polls since the Iowa caucus) with 50 percent of the vote to the Vermonter’s 44 percent. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark trails Bush by eight points (51 percent to 43 percent).

With Kerry for now having apparently tapped the mantle of most “electable” Democrat in the primary race, the senator is the first choice of 48 percent of registered Democrats, up three points over last week. Dean, the erstwhile frontrunner, is a distant second with 13 percent of them choosing him first, then comes Edwards with 10 percent, followed by Clark with 9 percent.

WASHINGTON - President Bush's public support dropped sharply over the past month, especially among older voters, political independents and people in the Midwest, an Associated Press poll found.

And for the first time, more voters in this poll's two years of tracking the question said they would definitely vote against Bush than said they would definitely vote for him.

Bush's approval rating stood at 47 percent in the AP-Ipsos poll taken in early February, down from 56 percent approval just a month ago. Half, or 50 percent, said they disapproved in the latest poll.

The poll findings marked a difficult month for Bush, as public attention focused on the Democratic presidential primary and the Democrats' daily bashing of the incumbent. The survey came at a time when the public is nervous about the economy and the chief adviser to the administration on Iraqi weapons, David Kay, said last month "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Bush's 47 percent approval rating is the same as his father's at this stage in his presidency 12 years ago before he lost to Bill Clinton.

Just under four in 10, 37 percent, said they would definitely vote to re-elect Bush as president, while 43 percent said they would definitely vote for someone else, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs. Another 18 percent said they would consider voting for someone else.

Other recent polls have shown Democratic front-runner John Kerry with an advantage over Bush in a head-to-head matchup.

A month ago, voters were more inclined to say they would re-elect Bush rather than definitely vote against him by a 41-33 margin.

. . . .

The public perception of Bush and of the nation's economy slumped in the early February poll. Just over four in 10 said the country is headed in the right direction, while just over half said the country was on the wrong track. People were about evenly split on this question in early January.

The AP poll says people were more pessimistic about the economy, with consumer confidence dragged down by increased nervousness about the economy's current and future conditions.

Public approval of Bush's handling of the economy dipped to 44 percent, down from 53 percent in early January.

The public's mood took a positive turn after the capture of Saddam Hussein in mid December, and the outlook about the economy is now settling back to levels in November. The drop in Bush's political standing was more dramatic.

Democrats are now as intensely opposed to Bush as Republicans are intensely supporting him. By a 2-1 margin, political independents were more likely to say they would definitely vote against him than definitely support him.

"I think he's run the country into the ground economically, and he comes out with these crazy ideas like going to Mars and going to the moon," said Richard Bidlack, a 78-year-old retiree from Boonton, N.J., who says he voted for Bush in 2000. "I'm so upset at Bush, I'll vote for a chimpanzee before I vote for him."

Exit polls in the Democratic primaries have suggested considerable voter anger at Bush, among both Democrats and independents.

. . . .

Bush saw a drop in support among most demographic and regional groups, but those were most pronounced among voters with a high school education or less, voters over age 65, political independents and voters in the Midwest.

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults was taken Feb. 2-4 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. (via Daily Kos, whose headline for this story is, "The Death Spiral")

 

(via Atrios)

STATEMENT OF SENATE DEMOCRATIC LEADER TOM DASCHLE ON PRESIDENT BUSH'S BUDGET

The document the White House has submitted this week cannot be taken seriously as a budget. As vast and extensive as this budget seems, the Administration has omitted essential facts and data that will have enormous consequences for our fiscal future and our economy. There is not a dime in this budget to cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that the CBO estimates the cost of these efforts in the coming years will exceed $200 billion. In addition, by stopping short and projecting five years ahead, the budget hides the full cost of the President's tax breaks. When you include the five years after the budget projections stop, the President's tax breaks will add trillions more to the national debt.

We can't predict every challenge our nation will face in the coming years, but you don't need a crystal ball to know that we have to commit resources to support our troops' efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. You don't need a crystal ball to know that when you ask to make tax breaks permanent, the costs will be with us for more than five years. And yet, the Administration has omitted trillions in spending and revenue shortfalls from their budget plan.

When we look closely at this budget, we learn something valuable about the Administration's choices and priorities. The Administration insists that even in the face of massive deficits, a jobs crisis, and our ongoing activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must continue their failed policies of tax cuts first, last and always. In addition to record deficits and debt, this means 2.4 million more children left behind because of underfunded education priorities; 210,000 more veterans without the health care they need; 1,200 fewer cops on our streets; and thousands of fire fighters and emergency medical personnel let go from local departments. These are choices the White House has made.

The President has chosen to provide huge windfalls for millionaires and giant corporations, and huge cutbacks for the programs that matter most to American families. If this budget passes, Americans face a future with poorer schools, higher crime, and less secure retirements. We can and must do better. (via Atrios)

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any pressure — after what happened to Valerie Plame, what would you do in their place? — but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top W.M.D. analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.

And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were willing to provide.

Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's handpicked "independent" commission won't investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain — who chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony — it will brush aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren't nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters. (Among those mentioned as possible members of the commission is James Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book.)

And if top political figures have their way, there will be further rewriting to come. You may remember that Saddam gave in to U.N. demands that he allow inspectors to roam Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may soon be invalid. Recently Mr. Bush said that war had been justified because Saddam "did not let us in." And this claim was repeated by Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?"

Now let's turn to the administration's other big embarrassment, the budget deficit.

The fiscal 2005 budget report admits that this year's expected $521 billion deficit belies the rosy forecasts of 2001. But the report offers an explanation: stuff happens. "Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable result of the revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began in early 2000, an economy recovering from recession and a nation confronting serious security threats." Sure, the administration was wrong — but so was everyone.

The trouble is that accepting that excuse requires forgetting a lot of recent history. By February 2002, when the administration released its fiscal 2003 budget, all of the bad news — the bursting of the bubble, the recession, and, yes, 9/11 — had already happened. Yet that budget projected only a $14 billion deficit this year, and a return to surpluses next year. Why did that forecast turn out so wrong? Because administration officials fudged the facts, as usual.

I'd like to think that the administration's crass efforts to rewrite history will backfire, that the media and the informed public won't let officials get away with this. Have we finally had enough?  

PATTERSON, La. — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia traveled as an official guest of Vice President Dick Cheney on a small government jet that served as Air Force Two when the pair came here last month to hunt ducks.

The revelation cast further doubts about whether Scalia can be an impartial judge in Cheney's upcoming case before the Supreme Court, legal ethics experts said. The hunting trip took place just weeks after the high court agreed to take up Cheney's bid to keep secret the details of his energy policy task force.

. . . .

Two military Black Hawk helicopters were brought in and hovered nearby as Cheney and Scalia were whisked away in a heavily guarded motorcade to a secluded, private hunting camp owned by an oil industry businessman.

The Times previously reported that the two men hunted ducks together while the case was pending, but it wasn't clear then that they had traveled together or that Scalia had accompanied Cheney on Air Force Two.

Several experts in legal ethics questioned whether Scalia should decide the case.

"In my view, this further ratchets it up. If the vice president is the source of generosity, it means Scalia is accepting a gift of some value from a litigant in a case before him," said New York University law professor Stephen Gillers.

"It is not just a trip with a litigant. It's a trip at the expense of the litigant. This is an easy case for stepping aside."

. . . .

. . . . Federal law says that "any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned."

When asked about the trip last month, Scalia confirmed that he had gone duck hunting with Cheney, but said he did not see a need to withdraw from the case.

"I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned," he said in a written response to The Times. He said "social contacts" between justices and high-level government officials have not been seen as improper, even when those officials have cases in the courts that concern "their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity."

"I expect that all of the Justices were invited to the Vice President's annual Christmas Party. The invitation was not improper, nor was the attendance," Scalia wrote.

This week, the justice was asked whether he had traveled to south Louisiana as Cheney's guest or paid for the trip. He refused to comment.
Two years ago, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch sued Cheney, seeking to learn whether the vice president and his staff had met behind closed doors with lobbyists and corporate officials from the oil, gas, coal and electric power industries.

A judge ordered Cheney to turn over documents detailing who met with his energy task force. Cheney appealed, and in September, Bush administration lawyers asked the Supreme Court to hear the case and reverse the judge's order.

It "would violate fundamental principles of separation of powers" to force the president or the vice president to disclose who they met with, said U.S. Solicitor Gen. Theodore B. Olson.

After considering the appeal behind closed doors on three occasions, the Supreme Court on Dec. 15 announced that the case of "in re Richard B. Cheney" would be heard in the spring.

It takes the votes of at least four justices to grant review of a case, but the court does not disclose which justices vote in favor of such appeals.

The hunting trip took place three weeks later.

Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet said a vacation trip with the vice president is not the same as attending a Christmas party.

"This is certainly a level of hospitality that most litigants are not able to extend to Supreme Court justices," he said. "It also reinforces the perception this was an exceptional event, not a run-of-the-mill social event or a White House dinner."

The Washington legal director for the Sierra Club said his group is considering filing a motion to ask Scalia to withdraw from the case.

"On the face of it, that makes things worse," said the Sierra Club's David Bookbinder, referring to the justice's trip aboard an Air Force jet. "The fact that the vice president is his host and, in effect, is paying for his vacation puts it in an even more awkward light for Justice Scalia."

The decision is likely to rest with Scalia himself. In a response to a recent inquiry from two Senate Democrats prompted by the hunting trip, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said the high court does not have a formal policy or rules for reviewing decisions by justices on whether to withdraw from a case.

Gillers said he found Rehnquist's response troubling as well.

"This has exposed a gap in the ethics rules. This is a federal law that applies to the justices, but in this instance, Scalia is the judge of his own case. I would think the full court has an interest in its institutional reputation and would want to review a decision like this."

. . . .

The camp is owned by Wallace Carline, the head of Diamond Services Corp., an oil services firm that is on 41 acres of waterfront property in Amelia, La. The company provides oil dredging, pile driving, salvage work, fabrication, pipe-rolling capability and general oilfield construction. (via Calpundit)

This reeks to high heaven. Cheney, who has lost in both lower courts, is fighting to keep the records of his energy task force, which included various bigwigs from the energy industry, secret. The Supreme Court decides to take the case (we don't know whether Scalia was among the justices who voted to take the case). Three weeks after the Court takes the case, Scalia travels, as Cheney's guest, to a hunting resort where he spends a week with Cheney. Their host is the head of an energy company. In other words, Scalia, shortly before he hears a case, enjoys a vacation paid for by a litigant (Cheney) and another person (oil services company president Carline) who has an interest in how the case turns out -- and for all we know may be a member of the energy task force. And Scalia claims that his impartiality can't reasonably be questioned?

Dwight Meredith of Wampum has more, as does Edward Lazarus at Findlaw (link via How Appealing). Every commentator I've seen agrees that this should be a "no-brainer" case for recusal.

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.

 

. . . . Stone played a pivotal role in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior campaigns. He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use his credit card to cover thousands in NAN costs—neither of which he could legally do for the campaign. . . .  

. . . .

Stone's Miami-based Fairbanks Limited also set up an e-mail service called Sharpton-at-the-beach, which has issued dozens of releases highlighting campaign achievements before news of them was posted on the campaign website. His impact on strategy even included giving Sharpton the ax handle he wielded at the July NAACP convention, which Sharpton used as a symbol of former Georgia Democratic governor Lester Maddox, who became famous in the '60s by chasing blacks from his restaurant with one. Sharpton stirred the crowd, yelling from the podium: "Anytime we can give a party 92 percent of our vote and have to still beg some people to come talk to us, there is still an ax-handle mentality among some in the Democratic Party." Sharpton said he doesn't remember whether Stone gave him the ax handle. Stone declined to comment, but has boasted to friends that he came up with the theatrics.

Recruited in 2000 by his friend James Baker, the former secretary of state, to spearhead the GOP street forces in Miami, Stone is apparently confident that he can use the Democrat-bashing preacher to damage the party's eventual nominee, just as Sharpton himself bragged he did in the New York mayoral campaign of 2001. In his 2002 book, Al on America, Sharpton wrote that he felt the city's Democratic Party "had to be taught a lesson" in 2001—insisting that Mark Green, who defeated the Sharpton-backed Fernando Ferrer in a bitter runoff, had disrespected him and minorities. Adding that the party "still has to be taught one nationally," he warned: "A lot of 2004 will be about what happened in New York in 2001. It's about dignity." In 2001, Sharpton engaged in a behind-the-scenes dialogue with campaign aides to Republican Mike Bloomberg while publicly disparaging Green.

Sharpton recently rebuffed an appeal by DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to join a post-primary March 25 event to support the nominee, sending a letter saying he would attend but would also "continue to campaign vigorously until the last day of the convention." He has also repeatedly vowed that he would speak on prime-time TV during the July convention, saying party leaders would decide "whether that's inside the hall or out in the parking lot," threatening demonstrations unless granted exposure guaranteed to turn off many voters. . . .

While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the Times that he "helped set the tone and direction" of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did it on the advice of a consultant who's worked in every GOP presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns. Asked if he'd ever been involved in a Democratic campaign before, Stone cited his 1981 support of Ed Koch, though he was quoted at the time as saying he only did it because Koch was also given the Republican ballot line.

The rest of the article is here (via Demagogue).

The world has a lot more pressing concerns right now than a bodice-ripping snafu during the Super Bowl halftime show. Want something really worth worrying about? Want to spend taxpayer dollars on something more important than a probe into Nipplegate? Here are a few concerns that top our list:

Osama bin Laden: Where the heck is he? The U.S. has been hunting for the mastermind of the September 11 attacks for more than two years now. Last week, the military said it was "sure" it would catch the six-foot, four-inch terrorist leader this year. But for now, all they have are those scratchy video and audio tapes he keeps putting out.

Jobs: Where the heck are they? Back in October, Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted the U.S. economy would create 200,000 jobs a month. Even at that rate, it would have been slow going to get the 3 million folks who lost their jobs in the downturn back to work. But it's not even close. In December, only 1,000 jobs were created. Ouch.

The Growing Deficit: Uncle Sam's sea of red ink for fiscal 2004 is now projected to be more than $500 billion and seems to growing by the day. When will the tide turn? And who's going to pay for it? Parents today should be a lot more worried about the monstrous debt being foisted on their children than Janet Jackson's burst bustier.

Health Care: Politicians pay nothing but lip service to the biggest problem that will face most Americans in their lifetimes: Access to quality medical care. The Medicare program is grossly underfunded, and with millions of baby boomers entering their Golden Years, companies are forcing existing retirees to pay full freight if they want to stay on corporate health plans. If nothing is done, wait until the children who watched that halftime show catch a glimpse of the cost of caring for their aging parents 30 years from now.

The 2004 Presidential Election: Doesn't matter if you want Bush in or out. What's really worrisome is how few people vote in this country: Only 50% of eligible voters cast ballots in the Presidential election in 2000, down from 63% in 1960. Pathetic -- and even worse when you consider that roughly half the adult population doesn't even register, which means only 25% of voting-age Americans decide who moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Iceland puts the U.S. to shame with a 87% turnout. C'mon folks, isn't this supposed to be the world's greatest democracy?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Regardless of whether Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons, Washington would probably have decided to invade Iraq anyway because of its "intent" and its weapons-making ability, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday.

"I think it was clear that this was a regime with intent, capability and it was a risk the president felt strongly we could not take and it was something we all agreed to and would probably agree to it again under any other set of circumstances," Powell told reporters.

. . . .

"[T]he bottom line is this: The president made the right decision. He made the right decision based on the history of this regime, the intention that this leader -- terrible, despotic leader -- had, and the capabilities at a variety of levels," Powell said.

So we had to invade Iraq even though it had, as Saddam told us, destroyed all of its WMD's, because Saddam was thinking bad thoughts? This is what the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive war has come to? I wonder how the families of our 520 dead soldiers feel about this. (link via Daily Kos)

UPDATE: A commenter at Daily Kos rightly observes that Powell in true Orwellian fashion is endorsing preemptive war for thoughtcrime. And MWO helpfully offers "Bush Doctrine v6.0":

Preemptive invasion of nuclear-armed armed unarmed third world countries that will could "would love to" attack the US immediately soon, with nuclear weapons with bio or chem WMD if only they were armed.

Q I can understand your rhetorical leap backward in view of the new events, from immediate threat taking us into war, or a gathering threat. But will you explain to me what is a gathering threat? What was it?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think Secretary Powell talked about that earlier today. He talked about how Saddam Hussein had the intent and he had the capability. And that equals a threat.

Q Everybody may have intentions --

MR. McCLELLAN: Let's look back at why Iraq was unique. Saddam Hussein had a history of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had a history of using --

Q He also destroyed them.

MR. McCLELLAN: Okay, well, I'm trying to answer your question. Saddam Hussein had a history of using chemical weapons on his own people and on people in Iran. Saddam Hussein had a history of defiance of his international obligations. He failed to account for his stockpiles.

Q And we defeated him in war --

MR. McCLELLAN: He had 17 resolutions to come clean. He was given one final opportunity to come clean.

Q No, the U.N. never gave him an ultimatum.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, no, you should go back and look at the United Nations Security Council resolution. It made very clear to Saddam Hussein's regime that this was one final opportunity --

Q They opposed going to war.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. That's what the resolution called for. The President believes it's important --

Q It did not call for war.

MR. McCLELLAN: The President believes it's important for us to follow through on our word. We did. Saddam Hussein chose continued defiance. It was his choice and the world is safer and better because he has been removed from power.

Q You had no U.N. support for the war.

. . . .

Q Scott, you expressed some outrage this morning that Democrats are questioning whether President Bush shirked his military duty with the Texas Air National Guard. Is the White House trying to come up with any records or any eye-witnesses to demonstrate that he did show up for his last two years in Alabama?

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, I would just say that it was a shame that this issue was brought up four years ago during the campaign, and it is a shame that it is being brought up again. The President fulfilled his duties. The President was honorably discharged.

Q Scott, can I follow that up?

MR. McCLELLAN: Do you have a follow-up?

Q Well, the question actually was whether or not you're trying to find any eye-witnesses or any records to prove --

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, this was addressed four years ago, and like I said, it was a shame that it came up then and it's a shame that some are bringing it up again.

. . . .

Q Scott, can I ask you about, again, the National Guard thing? As you know, the President was committed to a six-year term, and what's at issue is the last two years. And the commander of the Alabama unit in which Bush was assigned in 1972 said that Lt. Bush never showed. That is absent without leave, otherwise known as AWOL, which is the charge that the Democrats are making. Can you be specific then about those last two years which are in question --

MR. McCLELLAN: Norah, we already have been specific. We were specific four years ago when this shameful accusation was made. I think you need to go back and look at the facts. The President was honorably discharged. He fulfilled his duties. It is really sad that people are now stooping to this level once again. And people should condemn this.

Q So where was he, then, in that period when his commander says he did not appear?

MR. McCLELLAN: This has already been previously addressed four years ago. Yet some people continue to stoop to the level that they are now stooping to --

Q You're not addressing the substance of the charge --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, we already have --

Q So the White House position is that the honorable discharge answers the question, that as far as the President's commanding officers were concerned, he preformed his duties honorably, and that's it?

MR. McCLELLAN: People that are discharged honorably are people that have fulfilled their duties. And we appreciate the service of all those people who are currently in the Guard and all those that were previously in the National Guard. We welcome all that they do to help make this country safer and better. (via Holden Caulfield commenting at Atrios)

Who the hell are we trying to fool here? What is the Super Bowl if not a four-hour parade of visual titillation? Violence titilliation. Greed titillation. Power titillation. And of course, sexual titillation.

How many obnoxious beer ad campaigns have been born at the Super Bowl? How many Swedish bikini teams, mud-wrestling underwear models, pneumatic fantasy dates just dying for a name-brand light beer? How many close ups have we seen of wriggling cheerleaders just one button away from completely popping out of their "uniforms"?

We could reasonably rename it the T&A Bowl.

But let a real, unairbrushed breast actually wave free for one shuddering moment of unscripted exhibitionism, and suddenly we've got a full-blown Puritan hissy fit on our hands. Oh, to think of all those tender young viewers out there in NFL America, exposed to such filth at such an early age! Where's Cotton Mather when you really need him?

Can't you just imagine all those 26-year old guys squatting in front of their big screen TVs, their eyes screwed up in prim disgust at the sheer vulgar fleshiness of Janet Jackson's right mammary? Can't you see their frantic fingers reaching for the speed dial, and hear their raspy post-adolescent voices begging their therapists for an emergency appointment? "It's the nipple, Doc. I just can't deal with the nipple!" Can't you picture it?

I can't either.

But Michael Powell, our great bureaucratic eunuch of the airwaves, apparently can:

FCC Chief Michael Powell, the agency's chief federal regulator, said he was outraged by what he saw at intermission and said there would be "an immediate investigation into last night's broadcast.

"I'm outraged by what I saw during the halftime show of the Super Bowl," he said in a statement issued Monday. "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the TV for the celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

Deserve better? Better than what? Better than the mindless dreck of commercialized sleaze that pours out over the airwaves 24/7? Better than the steadily tighting monopoly of Time-Warner-Capital-Cities-Disney-Viacom-Fox-Clear-Channel-General-Electric? Better than the quiet death of the Fairness Doctrine? Better than what the Gucci Gulch crowd buys and pays for every day from captive regulators like Powell?

No, of course not. Besides, those particular obscenities are kept hidden way behind locked doors, where the children can't see.

. . . .

By God, we may not know what happened to Saddam's disappearing WMDs, or whether the White House outed a covert CIA operative to score a few cheap political points, but we're gonna get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about "Titgate," and right quick. In fact the FCC is already on the case:

U.S. Watchdog Investigates Jackson Breast Incident

U.S. regulators on Monday vowed to investigate whether indecency rules were broken during the broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show when pop diva Janet Jackson's bodice was ripped to expose her right breast.

U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell promised a "thorough and swift'' investigation of the stunt aired during one of the year's most popular American television broadcasts, which draws a major worldwide audience.

I understand the Department of Agriculture has also opened a case file on the farting horse.

Not to pull a Charlie Krauthammer here, but there really are times when I think this entire fucking country is clinically insane.

UPDATE: Do not miss the "Official" statement by NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue furnished by Jim Henley. I couldn't stop laughing. (via Calpundit)

Well, whaddya know. Even as the Republican leadership strong-armed the Medicare drug bill through Congress, the administration was sitting on estimates showing that the plan would cost at least $134 billion more than it let on. But let's not make too much of the incident. After all, it's not as if our leaders make a habit of faking their budget projections. Oh, wait.

The budget released yesterday, which projects a $521 billion deficit for fiscal 2004, is no more credible than its predecessors. When the administration promises much lower deficits in future years, remember this: two years ago it projected a fiscal 2004 deficit of only $14 billion. What's new this time is that the administration has decided to pay lip service to conservative complaints about runaway spending.

Over the past few months, many pundits have obediently placed the onus for rising deficits on "a vast increase in discretionary domestic spending," or words to that effect. By the way, the Heritage Foundation, which has orchestrated this campaign, is cagier than those pundits; it covers itself by relying on innuendo, never saying outright that domestic discretionary spending is the source of the deficit.

To mollify these critics, the new budget purports to shrink real domestic discretionary spending. This won't happen; even if it did, it would have a negligible impact on the deficit. But it isn't just a fake solution — it's a response to a fake problem.

The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950. About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts. The rest reflects the end of the stock market bubble, the still-depressed economy and — probably — growing tax sheltering and evasion.

Think about that. Two years ago (after 9/11) the Bush "administration" projected a $14 billion budget deficit in 2004. And they were off by more than $500 billion. It's incredible that anyone (a) believes anything these clowns say and (b) wants to give them another four years to screw up the country.

UPDATE: Even the $521 billion number, obscene as it is, is dishonestly understated. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Critics say Bush would be much more credible with his goal if he had not left out some significant budget items, such as another emergency spending bill to fund the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president's budget director, Joshua Bolten, told reporters that the next spending measure to fund those operations would be no higher than $50 billion, but would not be introduced until after the November election.

. . . .

Also omitted is a long-term fix for the so-called alternative minimum tax, a levy designed years ago to prevent wealthy people from escaping taxes altogether. It is beginning to make taxes for many middle-class Americans go up. Bush has proposed enough funds to fix this problem for one year, but the 10-year cost is nearly $400 billion.

The president also wants to make his tax cuts permanent, which would drain the revenue side of the budget and make the deficit deeper. According to the Congressional Budget Office, making the tax cuts permanents would add $1.2 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Bush is proposing to end only one tax break, for businesses that install new equipment.

The proposed budget increases homeland security spending 10%, and the Pentagon's budget by 7%. What is Bush cutting? The WaPo explains:

the $247 million Even Start family literacy program would be eliminated. The Eisenhower regional math and science consortiums and the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Math and Science Education would be killed. HOPE VI, a $149 million program to revitalize blighted housing projects, would go.

Also gone: dropout-prevention efforts, elementary and secondary school counseling assistance, aid to migrant and seasonal farmworkers, the Smaller Learning Communities initiative, and a bevy of local law enforcement assistance programs.

Even as the economy fails to generate significant job growth, Bush would slice federal vocational and adult education funding by 35 percent, from $2.1 billion to $1.4 billion. Assistance for workers dislocated by the North American Free Trade Agreement would be eliminated. Rural development assistance would be cut, as would housing aid for Native Americans and the elderly. The foreign aid budget would dramatically boost funding to combat the spread of AIDS, but it would also slice $404 million from child-survival and child-disease programs.

Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin summarizes:

To please his right wing [Bush] is proposing cuts in a whole host of social programs which will actually add up to a comparatively small amount (less than one percent of the predicted budget deficit of 521 billion dollars) while at the same time accelerating military spending (read here defense contracting) and lowering taxes yet again for the wealthy. It's pure symbolic politics that has nothing to do with fiscal discipline. By selectively picking out and gutting programs that his conservative base identifies with a liberal social agenda, President Bush he appears to stand for budgetary restraint and for making tough decisions about government expenditures when in reality he is running enormous deficits and lining the pockets of his wealthiest supporters. (link via Atrios)

So much for "compassionate conservatism."

FURTHER UPDATE: Professor Brad DeLong has much more about the budget here, here, here, and here (via Sadly, No!). Daniel Gross at Slate (via Calpundit) says that with every new budget, the Bushies' revenue projections get more fanciful (and hence the deficits always end up being much bigger than projected). And here's an excerpt from what Forbes says of the budget cuts:

One day after proposing bigger budgets for defense and homeland security, the White House on Tuesday released a list of the 128 programs it wants gutted, from education equity for women to combating alcohol abuse, a problem President George W. Bush faced himself.

While calling on Congress to rein in domestic spending to address a record budget deficit, Bush has made education reform a key plank in his campaign for reelection in November and announced in last month's State of the Union address a $300 million program to help released prisoners re-integrate into society. His wife, Laura, has traveled the world promoting literacy.

But according to newly released details about his fiscal 2005 budget, Bush would scrap programs to improve writing skills, teach economics and foreign languages, and promote literacy in prison. (link via Atrios)

It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history.

. . . .

The Bush team's real vulnerability is its B.M.D. — Budgets of Mass Destruction, which have recklessly imperiled the nation's future, with crazy tax-cutting and out-of-control spending. The latest report from the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit is expected to total some $2.4 trillion over the next decade — almost $1 trillion more than the prediction of just five months ago. That is a failure of intelligence and common sense that threatens to make us all insecure — and people also feel that in their guts.

. . . .

[T]he Democrats should still . . . make this their campaign mantra: "Is your future better off now than it was four years ago?" That's what's on people's minds. It should be coupled with the bumper sticker: "Read My Lips: No New Services. Bush Gave All the Money Away." And it should be backed up with a responsible Democratic alternative on both taxes and spending.

That is the only way to expose what the shameful coalition of Karl Rove-led cynics, who care only about winning the next election; voodoo economists preaching supply-side economics; and libertarian nuts who think that by cutting tax revenues you'll shrink the government — when all you do is balloon the deficit — is doing to our future. And please don't tell me the tax cuts are working. Of course they're working! If you put this much stimulus into our economy — three tax cuts, loose monetary policy and out-of-control spending — it will produce a boom. Eat 10 chocolate bars at once and you'll also get a rush. But at what long-term cost?

"Quite simply," argues [former Nixon Secretary of Commerce Peter] Peterson, "those bell-bottomed young boomers of the 1960's have fully matured. The oldest of them, born in 1946, are only six years away from the median age of retirement on Social Security (63). As a result, our large pension and health care benefit programs will soon experience rapidly accelerating benefit outlays. . . . Thus, at a time when the federal government should be building up surpluses to prepare for the aging of the baby boom generation, it is engaged in another reckless experiment with large and permanent tax cuts. America cannot grow its way out of the kinds of long-term deficits we now face. . . . The odds are growing that today's ballooning trade and fiscal deficits, the so-called twin deficits, will someday trigger an explosion that causes the economy to sink – not rise."

The same Bush folks who assured us Saddam had W.M.D. now assure us these budgets of mass destruction don't matter. Sure. "During the Vietnam War," notes Mr. Peterson, "conservatives relentlessly pilloried Lyndon Johnson for his fiscal irresponsibility. But he only wanted guns and butter. Today, so-called conservatives are out-pandering L.B.J. They must have it all: guns, butter and tax cuts."

This is so irresponsible and it will end in tears. Remember, says Mr. Peterson, long-term tax cuts without long-term spending cuts are not tax cuts. They are "tax deferrals" — with the burden to be borne by your future or your kid's future.

If this isn't the election issue, I don't know what is.

This morning Post columnist James Hoagland endorses the 'CIA sold the president a bill of goods' defense. Hoagland is willing to concede that the president may have "inflated" the "flawed intelligence that [his] spy bosses and senior aides provided."

But still, he writes, "[c]redulity, not chicanery, would be the plea, your honor."

As I said, or rather as Hoagland says, the Agency sold the president a bill of goods.

Now, here I am at my favorite cafe, laptop on my knees, latte at the ready, trying to make sense of the world. And this all throws me, because Hoagland spent the last two years telling me that the president and his top aides had to bully the Agency and the rest of the career types in the Intelligence Community and the national security establishment into getting religion on the Iraq threat.

And now I hear it's just the opposite?

For instance, take Hoagland's October 20th, 2002 column ("CIA's New Old Iraq File"). That's where he said that the Agency's record of underestimating the Iraqi threat was so dire that "it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq."

The column -- which I really recommend you read -- describes how the president and his aides had bullied the analysts at the CIA into finally admitting what a threat Saddam posed. "As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that."

A cultural change, indeed.

In that column, and in the ones that followed, Hoagland praised the President's now-notorious October 7th Cincinnati speech as the kind of goods on Saddam that could be wrung from the Intelligence Community when the president asserted sufficient 'leadership.'

So, for instance, a couple weeks later on November 3rd, Hoagland asked where the president got his info about Saddam's ties to al Qaida in the Cincinnati speech? "Sez who?," asked Hoagland, "The answer: Sez the CIA, when pressed to the mat." (Itals added.)

Like so much else in this up-is-down, black-is-white world the president and his backers want us to live in, this new defense doesn't even hold up against the google test. And somehow I imagine that the folks on the inside have access to more evidence and examples than I'm able to track down with my wifi-enabled laptop and a nexis account.

Atrios has more here, here, and here, as does Kevin Drum.