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This page last updated October 15, 2006.

Washington Watch

  • Conservative Lies about 9/11
    • ABC's "The Path to 9/11" so-called "docudrama" is nothing more than a propaganda piece written by right-wing writers/producers working from within Hollywood, backed by far right activist David Horowitz working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham (the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission's auxiliary group called The Film Institute). They claim it is based on the 9/11 Commission Report, but Commission Report members point out this is not true. The Clinton administration did everything they could to stop Osama bin Laden. The Bush administration was briefed about the al Queda threat and did nothing, with 9/11 being the result. How can these conservative "Christians" call themselves godly when they spread vicious lies and call it "entertainment"? And right before an election, too. This garbage is sickening, these right-wing extremists are sickening.
  • Is George W. Bush telling us the truth about anything?
    • In early March, the Associated Press obtained video footage of briefings before Hurricane Katrina struck that showed Mr. Bush being informed that the New Orleans levees may be breached, that this hurricane could be a major catastrophe (Globe, 3/1; WP, 3/1; WP, 3/2a; WP, 3/2b). Mr. Bush KNEW the levees may fail. Yet, days after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Mr. Bush said that no one anticipated the levees would be breached. I have seen the video. Our president clearly LIED. He lied about the levees. He lied about the cost of the medicare drug benefit. If he has lied about these things, how can we trust him about ANYTHING ELSE? Is he lying when he says he isn't spying on Americans with his NSA wiretap program? Is he lying when he says the Dubai ports deal won't jeapordize national security? (It will.) Is he lying when he says he is doing everything he can to protect America? (He isn't.) Is he lying about the reasons for invading Iraq? (Yes; according to Kevin Phillips and others, it was to take over Iraq's oil reserves.) Is he lying when he says he is going after Osama bin Laden? (Yes.) Can we even believe him when he says he is a Christian? Everything I've seen tells me we cannot believe him. What greater sin is there than deceiving believers with a false confession of faith? I feel betrayed by this man. I feel he has betrayed the nation, betrayed all Americans.
    • There are plans ready to build large detention facilities in the United States. Not "illegal immigrant relocation centers," not "emergency housing facilities." Detention centers. This at a time when the government seems bent on probing and prying into the lives of Americans -- while feeling no obligation to let citizens in on what's going on. Just who are these detention centers for? The Americans Mr. Bush is illegally spying on?
    • In spite of Mr. Bush's public promises to bring our troops home, he has no such plans. He has designs to keep our military in Iraq forever. We can't believe Mr. Bush when he says the abuse of Iraqi prisoners "was just the work of a few rotten apples" (it was much more pervasive than that, going all the way up to the highest levels in Washington). Mr. Bush says he wants a democratic government in Iraq, yet he dictates to the Iraqis who their leader can be. These are the actions of an unchristian dictator, not a Christian freedom lover. It sounds like Mr. Bush says one thing in public, and the opposite in private. When it comes to Iraq, just like all other subjects, you can't believe a thing the Bush administration says.
      • During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, George W. Bush made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second U.N. resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times (3/27). The reasons Mr. Bush gave for invading Iraq were a sham -- he had made up his mind long before Saddam Hussein had given him any excuse to invade. How can we believe what Mr. Bush says any more? About anything?
    • Mr. Bush's strategy for the mid-term elections is to hammer Democrats on national security and the economy. If the Democrats are smart, they will hammer back on the president and GOP on these very same topics. Mr. Bush and the Republicans in Congress talk tough about national security but take actions which actually weaken our national security, and their increase-spending-while-cutting-revenue fiscal policies have ballooned our debt and are sending this great country into national bankruptcy. While they talk up a big talk about national security, Mr. Bush and the Republicans are failing miserably at keeping us safe.
    • As the 2006 mid-term elections approach, Bush administration officials, including Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, are spitting out hatred, fear, and misinformation equating Iraq with the war on terrorism every day. Frank Rich: "Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists," said the congressman John Murtha in succinct rebuttal to the president's speech. "It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis." And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the Bush administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11.
    • Leonard Pitts: The Bush administration has an obsessive need to control what, when, how and why we learn about its activities. From its 18-hour blackout of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on anything that doesn't move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what's going on. An informed electorate is the lifeblood of democracy, the ultimate check on despotic ambitions. Apparently, some of us don't understand the stakes here. It's not just information they're trying to control.
    • Conservative John Dean: I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.
  • Bush Administration betraying national security
    • A Letter To My Congressmen and Congresswomen
      • Dear Senator/Congressman:
      • President George W. Bush promised the American people that he would protect us from future terrorist attacks. He pledged that he would do everything in his power to prevent the terrorists from striking again. So why is he deliberately doing business with Middle Eastern interests who have sanctioned the very terrorists who attacked us? Why is he turning over operations at major U.S. ports to a company based in an Arab country, operations that could impact crucial security-related activities? Two of the Al Qaeda terrorists who struck us September 11, 2001 came from the United Arab Emirates, the UAE royal family had ties with Osama bin Laden and was the only arab country having relations with the Taliban, the UAE was involved with transferring nuclear weapons and nuclear technology to two of the axis of evil countries (Iran and North Korea), and the UAE blocked our investigation of the financial trail of Al Qaeda whose money passed through UAE banks. And Mr. Bush wants to let a company controlled by such a country run loose in our seaports?
      • I do NOT want an arab company or arab country involved in ANY WAY with running our American seaports. I do NOT want ANY foreign company or country involved in the operations of our seaports. I DEMAND that only AMERICAN companies owned by Americans and based on U.S. soil manage the activities at our seaports. This is a security issue, not a profit issue.
      • The president is NOT making us safer. By turning over operations at our seaports to an arab-controlled company, Mr. Bush is giving terrorists a foothold on American soil. He is giving them a direct pipeline into the heart of our nation. It doesn't matter what the UAE and Dubai Ports World say, it doesn't matter what they promise; by turning over seaport operations to an arab entity the president is virtually INVITING the terrorists to strike again. He is deliberately creating a gaping hole in our national security. This is beyond belief.
      • I don't care WHAT "assurances" the Bush administration gives Congress that the Dubai Ports World deal is safe and secure. I want you, as my elected representative in Congress, to oppose this deal. I want it canceled, nullified, sunk. It infuriates me that this president would threaten a veto -- his first and only veto -- of any legislation nullifying this insane deal. Tom Ridge, former secretary of homeland security, has expressed confidence that American officials would not have approved the port deal if it put national security at risk. Well, I have no confidence in Mr. Ridge or in any Bush administration official when it comes to our national security. The Katrina disaster has proven that the Department of Homeland Security is not keeping our country safe.
      • Mr. Bush has emphasized the importance of national security. But he is lying every time he speaks about how he is protecting us. This multi-billion dollar SECURITY-WEAKENING Dubai Ports World business deal proves that beyond any doubt. Mr. Bush is behaving as if he WANTS the terrorists to strike us again. This is not the action of a true disciple of Jesus. This is the attitude of a Judas.
      • Senator/Congressman, I trust you far more than I trust the Bush administration. If Al Qaeda strikes us again, maybe this time with a nuclear bomb easily smuggled into the country through our ports run by an arab country employing arab nationals on the docks, then the president would be directly responsible. If you let this deal go through and an arab company or country ends up controlling operations at our seaports, then you would ALSO be responsible as an accomplice. Do you really want to face the voters knowing you helped open a hole in our national security? Could you face yourself?
      • Do everything in your power to cancel this Dubai Ports World deal and put seaport operations in the hands of American companies. Please, for the sake of our country.
      • Sincerely yours, (signed)
    • NYT, 02/16; NYT, 02/17; NYT, 02/18; NYT, 02/20; WP, 02/20; AP, 02/21; NYT, 02/21; NYT, 02/27; WP, 03/2; WP, 03/8; NYT, 03/8; NYT, 03/10; WP, 03/10
    • Is the Republican-controlled Congress backing down on opposing this inexcusable ports deal threat to our national security? (WP, 02/24) If they do make a despicable deal with the White House to let this horrific transaction go through, we can expect a lot of new Congressmen to be elected in November.
    • The Bush administration went ahead with the Dubai ports deal in spite of the fact that Coast Guard analysts were worried about the backgrounds of employees of the company, Dubai Ports World, and the potential for foreign countries to have influence over the ports and their use for terrorist operations. Now the Bush administration is using fancy words and explanations to gloss over the Coast Guard report. (NYT, 02/28; WP, 02/27)
    • The Bush family and friends have close business connections with Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates ... could this be dictating the president's actions regarding Dubai Ports World? Is Mr. Bush betraying America's security for 30 pieces of silver? (LD, 02/22; CW, 02/26)
    • Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the nation's aviation system remains "the No. 1 target" for terrorists, and he warned that his agency may have to cut spending on security at airports if Congress rejects a fee increase for some passengers. This is a red herring distracting us from the true garbage: the truth is that our national security is suffering because Mr. Bush would rather cut taxes for the rich and NOT provide the government with the funds it NEEDS to protect us. These are the acts of a Judas Iscariot, not a true Christian.
    • A foreign country (the United Arab Emirates), through the company the foreign country controls (Dubai Ports World), is trying to influence (control?) U.S. government policy (LD, 02/22). This is absolutely and incontrovertibly wrong, even against the law!
    • What is the real relationship between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden?
  • Did George W. Bush commit an impeachable offense as president?
    • A Letter to Our Congressmen and Congresswomen (8/6/06) (this is why we need a Democratic Congress):
      • Dear Senator/Congressman:
      • Based on what we have read, last week the Senate held hearings on a proposed bill from the Bush administration to create commissions of U.S. military personnel to try American citizens who have been accused of terrorism. Not just al-Queda or Taliban terrorists, but ordinary American citizens. Some of the proposals in the bill are shocking and are a direct affront on the Bill of Rights.
      • For example, the commissions could impose a penalty of life imprisonment or death based on evidence never disclosed to the accused. WHAT? WE WON'T KNOW WHAT WE ARE BEING ACCUSED OF? Military judges could also exclude defendants from their trials whenever "necessary to protect the national security." WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE RIGHT TO FACE YOUR ACCUSER? Hearsay information is admissible as evidence. HEARSAY EVIDENCE????
      • This is so shocking that we have to repeat it. Defendants would be denied many protections guaranteed by the civilian and traditional military criminal justice systems. Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors. Nothing in the draft law prohibits using evidence obtained through cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that falls short of torture. THIS IS INSANE. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN NAZI GERMANY DURING THE RISE OF HITLER.
      • With this bill the Bush administration is demonstrating in their most blatant terms yet that they aren't interested in fighting terrorism, what they are really wanting to do is take away our rights and steer the country toward dictatorship. We urge you in the strongest terms to, with all of your might, oppose this bill as it is proposed. Don't let Mr. Bush take away our constitutional rights.
    • In December of 2005, President Bush went before the American people and admitted that he was violating the law, committing an impeachable offense by disregarding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and said that he would continue to do so.
      • Mr. Bush says court approval is needed for wiretaps and search warrants (4/19/04).
      • Mr. Bush says, with regard to getting court orders for conducting surveillence on Americans, his administration is following that law, "Nothing has changed" (4/20/04).
      • In December 2005, Mr. Bush admitted before the American people that he violated the FISA law and ordered warrantless spying on Americans "in the weeks following the terrorist attacks", which is well before April 2004 when he said his administration wasn't conducting warrantless spying (12/17/05).
      • Two days later, Mr. Bush said that he would continue to violate the FISA law by monitoring Americans without a court order (12/19/05).
      • It is clear that the courts did not have any role in reviewing this assertion of executive authority. Instead of going to a judge on the secret court that was specifically established to authorize foreign intelligence surveillance inside the United States, we are told that an NSA shift supervisor was able to sign off on the warrantless surveillance of Americans. That's neither a check nor a balance (WP, 12/25/05). It's apparent that Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power. In their conduct of the war on terror, they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it (CT, 12/25/05). The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance (WP, 12/27/05).
      • The Bush administration was publicly admonished by a senate committee, and a special surveillance court, in two separate instances for repeatedly trying to skirt the law in obtaining top-secret warrants to spy on American citizens suspected of having ties to terrorists (SPI, 12/24). A similar program of illegal spying on Americans was shut down by Congress in 2003.
    • An analysis of Mr. Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants was analyzed by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress. Their analysis shows that his actions rest on questionable legal ground, and that Congress had not given him the authority to order the surveillance (NYT, 1/7/06). Two presiding judges of the FISA court expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional (WP, 2/9/06).
    • A point-by-point examination at what the president said, versus what the facts are---they're not the same (Did the president break the law?, 1/18/06).
    • Reports from intelligence officers involved in the illegal Bush surveillance program indicate that it is not helping in the fight against terrorism, contrary to the president's arguments.
    • The Bush administration thumbed its nose at Congress once again when it rejected a Democratic call for a special counsel to investigate the administration's illegal eavesdropping program. And now Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to suggest yesterday that the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance operations may extend beyond the outlines that the president acknowledged in mid-December -- he's spying on us more than he says he is.
    • On January 16, former Vice President Al Gore gave a speech about President Bush's admission that he's wiretapping American citizens without the warrants required by law. In the speech--which was sponsored by a coalition of progressive and conservative groups--Gore said it plainly: "What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compells the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and persistently." (Eli Pariser, 1/18/06)
    • This is a frightening abuse of power, bordering on the exercise of dictatorial power (NYO, 12/28/05; WP, 2/14/06).
      • Our president and his advisers have some remedial lessons to learn about abuse of power (ACT, 12/25/05). This nation was not meant to have an aristocracy, whether their names would be Kennedy, Roosevelt or Bush.
      • 1984's Big Brother is here now.
    • Documents cited in federal court by a defunct Islamic charity may provide the first detailed evidence of U.S. residents being spied upon by President Bush's secret eavesdropping program (WP 3/1). Frightening.
    • Republican calls for an investigation in Congress are nothing but a smokescreen (NYT 2/8, NYT 2/9, WP 2/9, WP 2/14, NYT 2/17a, NYT 2/17b, WP 2/17, WP 2/19, NYT 2/20), as evidenced by the March deal made between the White House and Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans (NYT 3/8, WP 3/8, WP 3/12) and the Senate Republican cover up of the president's illegal spying with whitewash legislation (WP 3/16). But, Congress must hold hearings into this abuse of power, with the goal of taking remedial action (NYT, 12/25/05; my 1/2/06 letter to my Congressmen).
      • The Republican Congress is complicit in the Bush administration's violation of the Constitution and the FISA law. By giving legislative sanction to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, Senate Republicans are making themselves accomplices to the president's trashing of America's civil liberties (NYT, 3/9/06; NYT-b, 3/9/06, WP 3/12).
    • Instead of providing the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years, the Bush administration has given us the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies. The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant (NYT, 1/29/06).
    • "Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war."
    • These actions on the part of Mr. Bush are nearly an impeachable offense, much more so than the impeachment farce launched against his predecessor (The Progressive 12/27/05, The Nation 12/27/05, San Francisco Bay View 12/29/05).
    • Senator Feingold's motion to censure President Bush
      • Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) is proposing that the Senate censure President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping, saying the White House misled Americans about its legality (WP 3/13, WP 3/14). "The president has broken the law, and, in some way, he must be held accountable," Sen. Feingold said. Bush, he said, "authorized an illegal program to spy on American citizens on American soil, and then misled Congress and the public about the existence and legality of that program." As expected, Republican senators, demonstrating their complicity in Mr. Bush's crime, plan to block Sen. Feingold's proposal. They are mounting a smear campaign against Sen. Feingold, saying how "wrong" and "political" and "dangerous" the censure motion is, and calling him "unpatriotic", and accusing him of siding with the terrorists. They are wrong, it's just more Republican propaganda and lies. I say it's about time someone takes Mr. Bush to task for his illegal activities. It's about time someone tried to restore our country's constitutional system of checks and balances. It's obvious that the Republicans in Congress will block any effort to carry out their duty of congressional oversight and bring justice back to this government. But the real question is: Will the Democrats show any backbone and rally behind Mr. Feingold? Or are they simply wimps? (WP 3/14, WP 3/15)
      • Senator Feingold's censure resolution
      • Senator Feingold's Senate speech introducing the censure resolution
  • The President's Record
  • Are Presidential "Signing Statements" Constitutional, or an(other) Impeachable Offense?
    • By using signing statements to sign laws passed by Congress and tell the American people that he will obey certain parts of the laws and ignore other parts of these laws, Mr. Bush is telling us that he is refusing to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution clearly states that the president has the responsibility to see that all laws are faithfully executed, not just the parts of laws that he deems worthy. He did this with the anti-torture legislation passed by Congress last year, and again with the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 just this month (Sen. Leahy 3/15, BG 3/24, BG 4/30). Mr. Bush's "signing statements" are causing a constitutional crisis (SLT 7/30).
    • Text of all of Mr. Bush's notoriously difficult-to-locate signing statements: http://www.coherentbabble.com/signingstatements/about.htm
    • American Bar Association investigation: Mr. Bush's "signing statements" are "a serious assault on the constitutional system of checks and balances" (report).
  • What REALLY Happened on September 11?
    • F.B.I. Agent Testifies Superiors Didn't Pursue Moussaoui Case (NYT 03/21, NYT 03/25, WP 03/21). FBI field agents knew about a potential Al Qaeda terrorist plot before Sept. 11 and they informed their superiors in Washington, who blocked efforts to investigate it further. So who is responsible for letting the terrorist attack happen? The evidence is pointing to Washington, D.C. Why did FBI supervisors in Washington block agent Harry Samit's (and Coleen Rowley's) efforts to stop a terrorist attack they thought was imminent in the days before September 11? Was it really "to protect their careers"? Or was there a more sinister reason? I know this topic has been raised before. But what we need is a REAL investigation, not another whitewash coverup by the Bush/Republican White House/Congress and their allies.
  • Is This Sound Foreign Policy?
    • According to The Nation and Time magazine, the Bush administration is planning on invading Iran or at least mining the Persian Gulf. With our military already strained to the breaking point occupying Iraq in an unjust invasion, how does the president think he is going to fight Iran? And mining the Persian Gulf? The bulk of the U.S. (and global) oil supply comes from Saudi Arabia, through the Gulf. Mining that supply route is going to create an economic disaster for our country and for the world. If you think gas/heating oil prices have been high, the price will skyrocket and supply will plummet if Mr. Bush carries out his "October surprise" military venture.
    • If the president's goal is to destabilize the world and create a nuclear crisis, and to make General Musharraf more vulnerable to being overthrown by Muslim fundamentalist fanatics, and to push Pakistan into the hands of the terrorists and thus give the terrorists nuclear weapons, then Mr. Bush succeeded in his March 2006 overseas mission to India and Pakistan: "Mission Accomplished".
    • Mr. Bush's Iraq war has destabilized the Middle East with the possibility of an Iraqi civil war which threatens to destroy our troops there. Our American generals are now openly talking about Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq now leading to civil war there. Not only would our troops be threatened by the collapse of Iraq into civil war, but the entire global oil economy would be disrupted. Our injured troops are being abandoned and left to fend for themselves on the battlefield in Iraq. And there is one man who is the cause of this crisis: George W. Bush.
    • Even Mr. Bush's conservative allies have realized that the president's decision to invade Iraq was wrong. The patrician conservative columnist George Will has concluded that all three members of the original "axis of evil" - not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq - now "are more dangerous than when that term was coined in 2002". According to Francis Fukuyama, the neocon legacy is fatally poisoned; "By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."
    • With our military drained and depleted fighting an uncessary war in Iraq, our president and vice-president are now threatening to launch an attack against Iran? What insanity is this? Mr. Bush lets North Korea develop nuclear weapons, he destabilizes the nuclear balance between Pakistan and India, and now he is threatening Iran? Is Mr. Bush deliberately trying to start a nuclear war in the region?
    • Mr. Bush announced that he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy in Iran. Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents. In fact, Iran's theocratic government has already started arresting and interrogating Iranian activists. Does Mr. Bush really want to promote democracy in Iran? Or is his goal all along to strengthen the hand of the Iranian theocrats under the guise of promoting democracy?
    • Iraq: The Downing Street Memo
      • During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, George W. Bush made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second U.N. resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times (3/27). The reasons Mr. Bush gave for invading Iraq were a sham -- he had made up his mind long before Saddam Hussein had given him any excuse to invade.
    • The reasons Mr. Bush has given for invading Iraq were a smokescreen, a lie: it really was about the oil.
  • Can Dick Cheney be trusted?
    • The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Vice President Cheney warned the president that a "specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.
    • The "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" -- Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, described the full dimensions of how "dysfunctional" (his word) was (and is) the national security apparatus of the Bush administration. Wilkerson predicted that if there were a major terrorist attack on a U.S. city, "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government."
      • Lawrence Wilkerson: "The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."
    • Was Vice-President Cheney involved in the outing of the CIA agent?
    • Vice-President Cheney Shoots Fellow Hunter
      • Mr. Cheney went to Fox News, a Republican media organ, for the interview apparently in order to control the questions. He said he delayed making the news public because "this was a complicated story" ... could that be because he had consumed "a beer at lunch" on Saturday under an old oak tree? Could that be why local law enforcement authorities were at first turned away? Katharine Armstrong, whose family owns the ranch, had said in interviews that Dr Pepper was served at lunch and that no one was drinking, yet Mr. Cheney admits that he had a drink during lunch. If Ms. Armstrong was wrong about the drinking, could she be wrong about other details? Mr. Cheney's 4-day delay in saying anything about the incident is simply inexcusable. Finally, Mr. Cheney took full responsibility for the incident, but did he apologize? Did he say he was sorry? No. No expression of compassion ... from this so-called "compassionate conservative" administration (interview transcript). Mr. Cheney's behavior demonstrates that he's either emotionally devastated by what he's done or so arrogant that he believes he doesn't have to face the public. Or both.
  • This Isn't the Real America
    • Former President Jimmy Carter: "I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights. Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility." Read more: This Isn't the Real America.
    • College Republicans leader uses Nazi tactics -- A former leader of the UCLA College Republicans is offering students money to get them to spy on their professors, those "who just can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party." This is exactly the kind of tactic employed by the Nazis in Hitler's Germany and by Stalin in the USSR, and I find it outrageous ... further proof that the Republican Party wants to turn this country into a fascist dictatorship.
    • Republican congressional extremists fuel threat to democracy in the U.S.
  • Bush Administration Environmental Policy
    • Dr. Richard Fireman: Perpetual war, destruction of all ecosystems, the threat of global catastrophe with rapidly accelerating climate change, all fueled by a violence to the earth in which the carbon that had been sequestered over the past 400 million years deep within the earth, has been used to fuel our lifestyle, the product of the industrial revolution. It is now causing rising atmospheric temperatures that will destroy 10,000 years of relative climate stability. If we open our hearts to our common moral sense we would begin to look more deeply and see how our overvaluation of material progress is poisoning not only our souls, but our world. We are addicted to a nonsustainable culture. Already we are using more than our earth can provide and regenerate itself adequately for the next generation. The fossil fuel age will come to an end sometime within the next generation or two, and yet we are gearing up on a national level not for an energy policy that makes sense in terms of health for people and ecosystems, not for one that makes sense for peace, justice and security at home and the rest of the world, but for a policy that will require an international war machine based on nuclear armaments, and an internal economy fueled by coal and a network of nuclear plants that will require a police state to protect it.
  • Bush Administration and Congress Corruption of Scientific Issues
  • Bush Administration and the new Inquisition
  • This administration has employed Orwellian doublespeak to an unprecedented degree. The "Clear Skies Initiative" makes our air dirtier. The "Healthy Forests Initiative" makes our forests less healthy. "No Child Left Behind" and many other initiatives are woefully underfunded. This administration talks about doing things to help American families, yet what it does creates more harm than good. The examples are endless.
  • The corporate record of George W. Bush: Mr. Bush has left behind him a string of failed corporations. And as the companies he led went bankrupt, so too is the United States under his presidency headed toward fiscal disaster. There are fewer more effective ways to destroy a country economically than to cut revenues through unwise tax cuts while increasing expenses, leading to year after year of record deficits, launch an unnecessary war to further indebt the country, and rack up year after year of worsening trade deficits (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). (Our economy's international debt position began compounding ferociously in the last five years. Our net foreign indebtedness is now more than 25 percent of gross domestic product and at the current pace will reach 50 percent in four or five years.) (It turns out the eventual cost of the war in Iraq will not be several hundred billion, but according to a new study at least a thousand billion dollars - US$1 trillion, in other words. This figure dwarfs any previous estimate by orders of magnitude.)
    • Pres. Bush is bankrupting the country. Put another way, Mr. Bush has managed to rack up more new debt during his five years in office than the entire debt amassed by the United States through 1988. And there is more to come: The president's budget envisions the debt rising to $11.5 trillion by 2011. This means that an increasing share of an increasingly tight budget must be devoted simply to paying interest -- an estimated $220 billion this fiscal year alone. Remember: This is the president who entered office promising to pay off $2 trillion in debt held by the public over the next decade. Far from being paid down, the debt held by the public has grown, from $3.3 trillion in 2001 to $5 trillion this year. It's time to pause and consider the unabashed recklessness of the Bush administration's fiscal policies and its unwillingness to alter its tax-cutting course to accommodate new budgetary realities. "Future generations shouldn't be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed," Mr. Bush said in March 2001. "We owe this kind of responsibility to our children and grandchildren." Where is that responsibility now?
    • Mr. Bush is bankrupting the country. If he were really serious about a balanced budget, here is what would happen, this is the budget and these are the cuts that he would propose if he really wanted to balance the budget after reducing taxes for the rich: (overview, budget (1.7 MB file)).
  • Corporate corruption of the Bush Administration ... the corruption is more widespread than previously known. -- As noted by Jim Hightower (Hightower Lowdown Jan and Feb 2005 issues), corporate control of the Bush Administration has made this the most corrupt corporate presidency in nearly a century, rivaled only by the corrupt administrations of McKinley and Harding (McKinley administration corruption, Harding administration corruption, corruption in Republican administrations).
    • Using the excuse of "improving industry ties" as a smokescreen, the Bush administration is reducing the safety of the nation's mines, putting our miners at risk of injury and death, by decreasing major fines for mine safety violations and, in nearly half the cases, not even collecting the fines.
    • On August 18, the Federal Election Commission fined Westar Energy Inc., two former corporate officers and the firm's lobbyist a total of $40,500 for their roles in channeling contributions to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other Republicans. The company and corporate officers are guilty of the crimes, but the fines from the Republican-controlled FEC are miniscule, not even a slap on the wrist.
    • In the first whistle-blower case to emerge from Iraq, a federal jury found a U.S. contractor guilty of defrauding the federal government by inflating invoices for services in Iraq in the chaotic year after the invasion, to the tune of $3 million. This is only the tip of the iceberg of contractor corruption under the Republican hegemony in Washington (NYT 3/10).
    • Administration ties to the Jack Abramoff scandal (NYT 1/29, WP 2/10).
      • GOP Lobbying Scandal -- Even with Jack Abramoff fingering Republican lawmakers in the worst GOP lobbying scandal in generations, even with the spotlight searing Republicans on Capitol Hill, they are throwing roadblock after roadblock on the road to reform. It is clear that nothing will be done about corruption as long as Republicans are in control of the government (NYT 2/9). With the election of John Boehner as the new House Republican leader, nothing will really change. Mr. Boehner is just as corrupt as DeLay ever was, and has just as many K Street connections. He's just talking up reform, you can bet meaningful reform will not happen (NW 2/13).
    • Army Contract Official Critical of Halliburton Pact Is Demoted -- A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday. Ms. Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq. Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings, Mr. Kohn said. But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown and Root, he said. Dick Cheney led Halliburton, which is based in Texas, before he became vice president. "She is being demoted because of her strict adherence to procurement requirements and the Army's preference to sidestep them when it suits their needs," Mr. Kohn said Sunday in an interview. He also said the Army had violated a commitment to delay Ms. Greenhouse's dismissal until the completion of an inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general. (MI, 3/5)
    • Destroying Truth-Sayers -- The Bush administration is making no secret of its determination to punish whistle-blowers and other federal workers who object to the doctoring of facts that clash with policy and spin. The blatant retaliation includes the Army general sidelined for questioning the administration's projections about needed troop strength in Iraq, the Medicare expert muted when he tried to inform Congress about the true cost of the new prescription subsidies and the White House specialist on climate change who was booted after complaining that global warming statistics were being massaged by political tacticians. Damage control is a political hallmark of any administration. But the Bush team is taking it to the most destructive extreme.
    • Killed by Contempt -- The federal government's lethal ineptitude in responding to the Katrina disaster wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming? The undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs. But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor. Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale (1).
    • Enron: The Bush Administration's First Scandal
    • ExpectMore.gov: The Bush administration has set up a web page where the public can follow which programs are "performing well" and which ones aren't. But by whose standards? This is where the Bush administration decides which programs are performing well (most likely the ones they support), and which ones aren't (probbly the ones they've been trying to close down for the last 5 years). From an initial scan, it looks like lots of social programs for the needy are "performing poorly". This sounds like an excuse to shut down undesireable programs. ExpectMore.gov
    • The Bush administration and Republican Congress support of the credit card industry borders on the criminal. Here are two examples where the Republicans in Washington will provide consumers with no relief from the ruthless practices that credit card issuers engage in: According to ABC News, some credit card agreements contain a no-balance fee -- you can be charged a fee when your balance reaches zero; some credit card issuers actually charge a $15 monthly fee if your card remains inactive for more than six months.
    • George Deutsch was a Bush appointee and science censor at NASA who lied about graduating from Texas A and M University. Nick Anthis: "How did this guy, who already had dubious qualifications, make it into NASA with such an obvious lie on his resume? To work for a federal agency, including NASA, extensive background checks are usually required. If I was able to uncover the truth about Deutsch in one phone call, then he must have been placed in his current position without any investigation, due to his loyal service on the Bush presidential campaign. For a president that paints himself as a champion of national security, the NASA incident is a major blow to Bush's credibility. This isn't the first time either. The NASA censorship scandal was originally about partisan figures compromising the science, and it still is, but now it's also about something much deeper and much more troubling." It's about Mr. Bush's total incompetence when it comes to national security.
    • Scandal strikes another Bush administration high official. Top Bush domestic policy adviser Claude Allen was arrested and is awaiting trial on felony theft charges. His allegedly swindling Target and Hecht's stores out of more than $5,000 in a refund scheme, a trivial amount considering his salary was well over $100,000 annually, indicates this was not a crime of need, but rather there may be psychological problems or something wrong with his character (WP 3/10). Claude Allen often said it was his religious upbringing kept him on the straight and narrow: he said his salvation was the Roman Catholic education "that taught me discipline, taught me hard work, that taught me values that were carried throughout life" (NYT 3/13). Is that so? Then why did he apparently commit such value-less crimes as felony theft? How can we believe Republicans' claims of God and family when things like this happen?
  • The Hurricane Katrina Catastrophe:
    • Multiple Layers Of Contractors Drive Up Cost of Katrina Cleanup (WP, 3/20) -- under the old corrupt Republican corporate way of doing things, the cost is dozens of times more expensive than it should be, and the work actually doesn't get done or doesn't get done right. We need a new more efficient way of doing things in Washington, and across this great country.
    • Former FEMA chief Michael Brown Blames Superiors For Response to Katrina (WP, 2/10; NYT, 2/16/06).
    • Lack of Disaster Leadership is a National Disgrace (ACT, 9/4; NYT, 9/2a; NYT, 9/2b; NYT, 9/2c; WP, 9/3; NYT, 2/16/06) -- We may never know how many Americans died — are still dying — from incompetence. For days we witnessed what may be the most appalling lack of leadership in the history of this nation. We were warned this was coming a week ago. People knew the New Orleans levees couldn't handle a storm as powerful as Katrina. Mr. Bush was told to his face that the levees were in danger of collapsing. Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a FEMA official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m., and the White House itself at midnight, the day before President Bush said that possibility was expected by no one. (Either he has his head in the sand, which is unlikely, or this is a bald face CYA falsehood, which is probably the case.) (WP, 9/2c; NYT, 9/3a; NYT, 9/4; NYT, 2/10/06) People died waiting for leadership from the people paid to deliver just that. Whatever the heavily staffed and richly funded bureaucracy designed to anticipate and deal with disasters has been doing since Sept. 11, 2001, it apparently hasn’t had much to do with common sense. These people are paid to anticipate the worst-case scenario and respond to it. They were not up to the job. The search ought to begin right now for people who are.
    • Waiting for a Leader (NYT, 9/1) -- Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic (Oct 2004) have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end. Nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis. (NYT, 9/3b)
    • A Can't-Do Government (NYT, 9/2) -- At a fundamental level our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice. Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk. In fact, President Bush repeatedly requested less money for programs to guard against catastrophic storms in New Orleans than many federal and state officials requested, reflecting a warped sense of priorities -- or is it more, is the Bush administration deliberately trying to sabotage our government's ability to respond to catastrophes? (WP, 9/2b; NYT, 9/3c; NYT, 9/3d) And when the spotlight shines on the guilty Bush administration, they try to deflect blame to state and local officials. That's just what a guilty party would do. (WP, 9/5)
      • Mr. Bush said: "If it's not going exactly right, we're going to make it go exactly right. If there's problems, we're going to address the problems. And that's what I've come down to assure people of." (WP, 9/3) What hypocrisy! What garbage! The changes in the government implemented by Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress ARE the reason it's not going right. The attitude that this administration and Congress have toward government is the SOURCE of the problems. Nothing is going to be fixed while Mr. Bush and the Republicans control Washington. "The government's lethal ineptitude in the Katrina disaster was a consequence of Republican right-wing ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good." (NYT, 9/5) "We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore." (NYT, 9/4)
      • Under Republican leadership in the Congress and White House, the disasters of Katrina and Rita are only opening the door for further price gouging, with the oil companies continuing to manipulate energy markets to enhance profits. (WP, 9/3) That's what having two former oil company executives in the White House gets us.
      • "President Bush's performance during the Katrina disaster will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration." ((NYT, 9/5))
  • According to Congressional Quarterly, the Department of Homeland Security prepared an internal list of threats to the nation's security which includes adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups. The list also targets left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements (such as the radical anti-abortion group Army of God), which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. This speaks volumes about who is really running the federal government. The parallels with Weimar Germany of the 1930s are frightening (barnsdle, 1930s takeover by Nazi Party, 1930s rise of the Third Reich, Christian Dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism).
    • While the federal government cracks down on the free speech rights of domestic groups it doesn't agree with, it is not doing all it can to prevent foreign terrorists from striking again on American soil (Administration Hinders Investigation, 8/7/05, NYT 8/10, WP 8/10, CIA: Administration let Bin Laden escape, 8/15, NYT 8/23).
      • An example: "The Air Force wants to retire aging aircraft from many Guard units, close or consolidate some of their bases and give some units new missions, like flying remotely piloted Predator aircraft, that are better suited to today's national security environment, Air Force officials say. But doing that would leave more than two dozen states without emergency aircraft to fight fires, recover from hurricanes and cope with other natural disasters, lawmakers say. ... the Pentagon's plan to relocate an F-16 fighter unit in Springfield (IL) could imperil the safety of the state's 11 nuclear power plants and 28 locks and dams." (8/11/05) ... This administration's plans to consolidate or realign military bases across the nation is a disaster for national security. The Air Force plan to close Air National Guard bases will leave more than two dozen states without emergency aircraft to respond to natural emergencies and possible terrorist attacks. The Bush administration says it is making the U.S. safer from terrorist attack, yet it proposes actions that will actually make us MORE VULNERABLE to terrorist attacks. What they are doing is insane.
      • Another example: "An obscure provision of the energy bill signed into law this week by President George W. Bush demonstrates how, even in this era of heightened concern about terrorism, narrow commercial considerations can trump national security at the behest of one senator. Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the Energy Committee, included an amendment that guts restrictions on the export of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb. If terrorists obtained enough such uranium they could fashion a full-fledged nuclear weapon, not merely a 'dirty bomb' that would scatter radioactive waste." (8/11/05) ... This is a deliberate attempt by one senator to purposefully make the U.S. MORE VULNERABLE to terrorist attack, simply for money. Both the administration and the U.S. Congress are LYING when they say they are doing everything they can to make us safe from terrorists. This kind of garbage must stop. During the next election, we must REMOVE these liars from the Congress and the White House and REPLACE them with TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOTS.
  • Cindy Sheehan -- A Mother Who Speaks for America
    • Sheehan Arrested Before Bush State of Union Speech -- We know for a fact that at the spectator's gallery of the House of Representatives, Cindy Sheehan was wearing a T-shirt that gave the number of U.S. war dead. We were told by the U.S. Capitol Police that she was also vocal, but now we know that was a lie. What I DO know for sure is that a person can't even wear a T-shirt with a number on it to a speech by this president. Under this Bush administration, our right of free speech is being taken away. (WP 2/1)
    • It's now a well-known fact that America was duped into attacking Iraq under false pretenses. There was nothing noble about fixing the intelligence and lying to the American people to launch a war against a country that did not attack us, had nothing to do with the September 11 attack, and which was not a threat to the U.S.; there is nothing noble about the administration refusing to give the troops the support they need to win the war. Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney continue to speak about his war as a "noble cause." Cindy Sheehan is a mother who lost a son in this unnecessary war. She wants to ask the President what was so noble about the Iraq War. And the President refuses to see her, treating her the way he treats everyone who disagrees with him -- like dirt. Mr. Bush's Republican political operatives are doing everything they can to discredit her -- character assassination, lies, innuendo, smear campaign. This is not the way a true Christian president would behave. Other families with loved ones lost fighting in Iraq are speaking out, including the Palmers who want Mr. Bush to either fight the war right by sending more troops, or get out of Iraq. (8/8/05, 8/9, inhumane humanitarianism 8/10, 8/12, 8/17, Rosmary Palmer, 8/16, Rosmary Palmer, 8/17, AP, 8/25, 8/28, Cindy, "the conscience" of the nation, 8/29)
    • It looks like neither one will happen, the troops are there to stay and fight a continuing war. Bob Herbert: The whole point of the Iraq war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history." It's the oil, stupid. Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war.
    • Rallying the Troops and Avoiding Reality. Colbert King: President Bush is out selling a vision of victory in Iraq while U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad are resigned to settling for less. George Bush can't make good on his original promise, and they know it. They also know that more Americans are going to die in Iraq for what may end up as a theocracy-tinged spoils system. While Bush is out rallying the troops and reassuring their families that their sacrifices won't be in vain, administration officials in Washington are quietly playing down expectations of what can really be achieved in Iraq. What's the value of Americans giving their lives so that cleric-dominated Shiites and northern Kurds can get their hands on political power and oil revenue? Why are American women and men sacrificing lives and limbs in a country where women may have to settle for less? Stay the course. What course? So religious-based militia can divvy up the northern and southern portions of the country? So Islam can be enshrined as a principal source of new Iraqi legislation? Are any of those things worth dying for? Do any of those likely outcomes represent an American victory? They certainly aren't why Bush said we went over there.
    • President Bush on Tuesday cast the war in Iraq as the modern-day moral equivalent of the struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism in World War II. This is pure garbage. The American people know the difference between the war in Iraq and the completely separate and different war against terrorism. The war against terrorism is a just war, but even this war is not being fought as well as it could be. But the war in Iraq is not related to terrorism, it was launched as President Bush's personal act of aggression. For Mr. Bush to relate the Iraq war to the fight against tyranny in WWII is misleading and dishonest, it's unpatriotic and un-American and un-Christian.
    • More misleading garbage: Mr. Bush compared Baghdad in 2005 to Philadelphia in 1787. This is more smoke and mirrors. In fact, there is no comparison, the two constitutional conventions are completely different.
    • Mr. Bush's policies are not keeping America safe, they are weakening us. Even the nation's governors, of both parties, are saying that deployment to Iraq is weakening the National Guard.
  • The Bush Administration's Role in the Plamegate Scandal
    • President George W. Bush: Leaker-in-Chief
    • Was Vice-President Cheney involved in the outing of the CIA agent? -- Yes.
      • Lewis Libby Jr. told a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq's weapons capability in June and July 2003, according to a document filed by a federal prosecutor. In other words, Bush administration "superiors" (including the vice president) ordered Mr. Libby to leak classified data, which leaking is technically against the law.
      • Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq. Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Mr. Cheney and his mob are sick ... just completely sick.
    • Just What Role Did Karl Rove Play in this Crime?
      • Just as the news broke Wednesday about Scott McClellan resigning as White House press secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove shedding some of his policy duties, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case and introduced additional evidence against Rove. The grand jury session in federal court in Washington, DC, sources close to the case said, was the first time this year that Fitzgerald told the jurors that he would soon present them with a list of criminal charges he intends to file against Rove in hopes of having the grand jury return a multi-count indictment against Rove.
    • Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald Probing Niger Forgeries, Possible Conspiracy in CIA Leak
    • The Bush Administration Fraudulence
    • Libby indicted, truth being hidden, Plamegate = Watergate reprised
      • For the first time since 1875, a special counsel has reached directly into the White House and, indicted an official who works there: the Vice President's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who was trying to suppress the truth about the Iraq war by punishing a truth-teller, Ambassador Joseph Wilson (The Nation, 11/21). Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was engaged in a broader web of deception than was previously known and repeatedly lied to conceal that he had been a key source for reporters about undercover operative Valerie Plame (WP, 2/3). Mr. Libby's layers and White House allies have repeatedly claimed, falsely it turns out, that Valerie Plame was not in covert status when she was outed. But the CIA maintains that she was (NW, 2/13).
    • Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was sent by the C.I.A. to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq. When he discovered that such claims were false, thus knocking out key arguments in President Bush's drive to declare war on Iraq, Mr. Wilson was retaliated against by someone revealing to reporters that his wife was a covert C.I.A. agent. And now we are learning that one of the people suspected of this criminal act is none other than Mr. Bush's key aid, Karl Rove. (NW 7/11, WP 7/11, NYT 7/12, WP 7/12, AP 7/14, NYT 7/15, WP 7/15, NYT 7/16, NYT 7/17, NW 7/18, NYT 7/18, WP 7/18b, WP 7/18c, WP 7/21, NYT 7/22, WP 7/23, WP 7/27, LAT 8/25) Another administration official guilty of this crime is Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. (WP 7/14, Bloomberg 7/22) Not only did they discuss a covert C.I.A. agent's identity with reporters, what Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby told the special prosecutor in this case conflicts with what the reporters have testified. Looks like these two White House officials are also guilty of perjury. Maybe Scott McClellan, and others, even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, might be implicated in the scandal, at least with an obstruction of justice charge (NYT 7/24, WP 7/25). Mr. Bush himself might even eventually be implicated (NYT 7/24).
      • Richard Cohen: Karlgate: (It encompasses so much -- the outing of Plame, the jailing of reporter Judith Miller, the moral collapse of the press, the preening of Wilson -- that it sorely needs a moniker.) The inspired exaggeration of the case against Iraq, the hype about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda's links to Hussein, makes everything else pale in comparison. It was to protect those lies, those exaggerations, that incredible train wreck of incompetence, ideologically induced optimism and, of course, contempt for the quaint working of the democratic process, that everything else stems from. Wilson was both armed and dangerous. He claimed the truth. The truth about that truth was contained in a Post story about the leaks. It quoted "a senior administration official" who said that the outing of Plame was "meant purely and simply for revenge." It also said that two -- not one -- "top White House officials" had called "at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." This response might be reprehensible, but it was routine for the town and, particularly, the vindictive Bush White House. Scandal -- speculation about Rove, about Bush, about Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby. Who leaked? Who may have lied? How did Novak slip the noose?
    • There is a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House. Some have said that Mr. Rove is the architect of the Republican machine -- a heartless political machine that lies about their opponents, deceives the public into supporting them, and finances everything with corporate (possibly ill-gotten) millions -- and that he orchestrated the slanders against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary and against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. That such a man would court the support of decent Christians while he devises and implements such evil and anti-Christian tactics is infuriating enough. But when he reveals the identity of covert C.I.A. agents, thus putting in danger the lives of people who are defending this country and putting at risk the security of this country, this makes me outraged. This is tantamount to treason!
      • Mr. Bush says he is a born again Christian, that he has Jesus in his heart. I question this claim. Nobody who is really a godly person would deliberately surround himself with so many ungodly people who behave in an unethical way and who implement such anti-Christian policies. (Asked about the leak, Mr. McClellan waxed indignant: "That is not the way this White House operates," he said. Or is it? - WP 7/15) Mr. Bush's behavior in private is far more profane than his scripted behavior in public. It is outrageous that so many of the Republican leaders in Washington are passing themselves off as Christians, yet do such anti-Christian things and behave in such an unspiritual way and pass laws that hurt so many of the American people. So many true god-fearing noble Christians have been duped by this crowd, it's shameful.
        • E. J. Dionne Jr.: As long ago as October 2002, when Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank wrote a memorable story under the headline "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable," the administration has been accused of distortions, exaggerations and falsehoods. The spectacle of McClellan's being unable to back up his previous denials -- he said in the fall of 2003 that Rove and two other administration officials "assured me they were not involved in this" -- brought this problem home as no catalogue of questionable administration statements ever could.
        • Jonathan Alter: Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn't plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn't pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn't tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he'd better make certain there's no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.
          We got in because we "cooked" the intelligence, then hyped it. That's why the "Downing Street Memo" is not a smoking gun but a big "duh." For two years we've known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, "fix" the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would "fix" him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
        • E. J. Dionne Jr.: If British troops fighting in Iraq did not stop the terrorists from striking London, then what is the logic for believing that American troops fighting in Iraq will stop terrorists from striking our country again? Intelligence reports -- and Townsend's own words -- suggest that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground since the American invasion. How, exactly, has that made us safer? What the President is saying, and doing in Iraq, makes no sense. In fact, what is happening is exactly the opposite of what he says is happening. How can we believe this man? The fact is, we can't.
      • Howard Fineman: In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political--and everyone is fair game.
        It didn't take Rove long in Texas to conclude that the state's tectonic plates were shifting in a Republican direction. The key was to combine the pro-business money of corporate Houston and Dallas with the conservative values--and the Bible-belt traditionalism--of rural (and, up to that point, Democratic) small-town Texas. How? By the early 1990s, Rove had his plan and his man: George W. Bush, whose incandescent personality and "compassionate conservatism" covered both flanks. Rove made it Bush's business to get right with the religious right, but not so much on theology as good works. The idea was to replace government-run welfare and education with church-based charity, saving money and souls at the same time, and not to run as a foe of government per se but as a "reformer" of it.
      • Joe Conason: The style Rove has developed ever since his youthful apprenticeship with the Nixon gang includes: false information, whispered and broadcast, designed to damage reputations of "enemies" and to divert attention from substance, to further partisan advantage and to exact personal vengeance.
    • The President should carry through with his original promise of firing anyone involved with this scandal, not back off and change his tune to save the criminal mastermind of his career. The President should fire Mr. Rove. He should be put in jail and they should throw away the key. But will the President keep his promise?
      • Jonathan Alter: A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like "I don't want to prejudge." Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct--talking casually to two reporters without security clearances about a CIA operative--was dangerous and wrong. As GOP congressman turned talk-show host Joe Scarborough puts it, if someone in his old congressional office did what Rove unquestionably did, that someone would have been promptly fired, just as the president promised in this case.
      • Howard Kurtz: The disclosure that Rove served as a source for Time's Matt Cooper and columnist Robert Novak looks like the slow unraveling of a scandal that has now reached the top level of the White House. Scott McClellan is cast in the Ron Ziegler role, refusing to answer a barrage of reporters' questions about Rove after his previous answers were rendered inoperative. Even the media's preferred narrative -- built around the sanctity of anonymous sources -- comes up short. Unlike Deep Throat, who was risking his FBI career by telling Woodward about the Nixon spying operation and cover-up, Rove and whoever else leaked Valerie Plame's CIA connection to Novak and other journalists were doing partisan dirty work, and some may have been committing a crime.
      • David Ignatius: This is an administration that rarely holds anyone accountable for anything, other than political disloyalty. That has been the problem on Iraq and Abu Ghraib. People who make mistakes, or worse, have had too many medals pinned on them. In place of accountability, the Bush White House has embraced the three-pronged strategy of attack, attack, attack.
      • During Congressional testimony, former U.S. intelligence officers criticized President Bush for not disciplining adviser Karl Rove in connection with the leak of the name of a CIA officer, saying Bush's lack of action has jeopardized national security (WP 7/23).
  • The Terri Schiavo Case: Choking the Nation's Life
    • Terri Schiavo suffered a horrible injury ... the brain damage she suffered is heartbreaking. The agony such a situation puts the family through is awful. My heart goes out to her husband, parents, and siblings. A tragedy like this strikes everyone in a very personal manner. Everyone involved needs to be comforted and supported. Is this what happened? No. Instead of keeping this a supportive private family affair, others intruded to make this into a very public and nasty fight.
    • When a man and woman marry, they form a new family unit. For either's parents to force their will upon the new family is unconscionable, unacceptable, intrusive, and ruthless. Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband-guardian, tried his best to care for her, to carry out Terri's wishes of not being kept alive artificially. To hear her siblings and parents and others rip into Michael and lie about him is heartbreaking, infuriating, outrageous.
    • But did it stop there? No. The Religious Right had to force their unwelcome will into the matter. And politicians had to get into the act. The Republican Religious Right's "pro-life" agenda is anything but pro life. Keeping a person physically alive, who is in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery, whose body would not survive without artificial means of support, and who beforehand expressed the wish NOT to be put into such a "state of the living dead" -- keeping a person physically alive under those conditions does not respect life. It makes a mockery out of pro-life.
    • And when the politicians got into the act, they did not have the best interests of the family at heart. (A GOP staffer was caught red-handed in this heartless plot.) What happened was a raw grab at power, a knife stabbing into the personal lives of each and every one of us. In 2003, Florida Governor Jeb Bush pushed through the Florida Legislature an unconstitutional measure giving him authority in the matter. Toward the end, Congress passed and President Bush signed a law that gave Ms. Schiavo's parents a personal right to sue in federal court. This was basically a law that created special rights for only one family. It's an abomination to our democratic system. The Schiavo case worked its way through the Florida state legislature and court system properly ... the system worked the way it is supposed to. But the Republican Right wasn't happy with the result. They passed a law which trampled on the state's autonomy and dignity ... on established state and federal constitutional precedents in "right to die" cases. And when the federal courts and even the Supreme Court did not give them the result they wanted (they were even mostly conservative courts), the Republican Congress threatens to "make them pay", with Republican House leader Rep. Tom DeLay even raising the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved. Rep. DeLay said, "We will look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president." Right-wing Christian groups are talking about eliminating judges and circuits that they disagree with, even making veiled threats at murdering them. But the judiciary is doing exactly what they are supposed to under the Constitution. It is these Christian groups and Congress that are arrogant and out-of-control. It is the Republican Congress and especially Tom DeLay that are abusing their power.
    • It doesn't matter to the Right Wing Republicans that their intervention in this case was a violation of the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches which is so crucial to making our great country work and which guarantees our freedoms. One of the judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, to which Terri's parents appealed, rebuked President Bush and Congress for acting "in a manner demonstrably at odds with our founding fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people." This judge, Stanley F. Birch Jr., a consistently conservative judge appointed by the first President Bush in 1990, wrote that federal courts had no jurisdiction in the case and that the law enacted by Congress and President Bush allowing the Schindlers to seek a federal court review was unconstitutional. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has been sharply critical of Congressional efforts to interfere with judicial authority as a violation of the Constitution's separation of powers. In a recent report, Chief Justice Rehnquist called such Republican Congressional measures "unwarranted and ill-considered" and said "a judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment." This tyranical, unpatriotic and un-American behavior of the Republicans in Washington is absolutely sickening.
    • And now Senator Bill Frist participated in a right-wing fundamentalist "Christian" telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking the president's judicial nominees. This is sick. Leaders of several major Protestant denominations accused Senator Frist of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church by participating in the telecast. The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr. Frist is an active member, said, "Elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith." About 1,200 liberal Christians gathered at a rally at a Presbyterian church in Louisville to protest what one speaker, the evangelical Jim Wallis, called "a declaration of a religious war" and "an attempt to hijack religion." Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that the groups behind the telecast should "not to go down the road of saying that the Democratic senators are not people of faith or questioning their religious - that they're religious bigots. I don't think that helps the country, and I don't think that's fair." Democrats are not against people of faith, they are against Republicans ramming through corrupt biased potential judges. Democrats are people of faith too. Republicans are playing right into Satan's hands when they use religion for partisan ends. Our nation's founding fathers believed it crucial to have a strong solid separation between church and state, to insulate against exactly this kind of religious arrogance.
    • This is just another example of how the Religious Right, which has usurped control of the Republican party, has made a mockery out of what it means to be a Christian.
    • Senator Frist's effort to abolish the judicial filibuster is destroying the Senate. 050501 NYT: There is a very good chance that as the battle escalates, passions will surge, the tattered fabric of professionalism will dissolve, and public revulsion for both parties will explode. If you are leading one of the greatest democratic institutions in history, it's irresponsible to lead it into this bloody unknown if a deal on the table will give you much of what you want. Sen. Frist should have grabbed this offer because it's time for senators to re-establish the principle that they, not the outside interest groups, run the Senate. Right now, most senators want to avoid a meltdown. It's the (right-wing) outside interest groups that are goading them into the fight.
    • What is happening in the Republican Party and in the halls of Congress and the White House is a scandal that dwarfs any that have gone before. The "moral values" the Republicans are touting are merely a smokescreen to cover greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - these are the values that are permeating Washington now and they belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. I say this is a scandal that dwarfs any that have gone before because the Republican perpetrators have added a veneer of religious trappings, a cloak of supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that threatens far more damage to America than anything any Democrat has done before (scandal).
    • I'm sick and tired of the conservative Republicans and their so-called Christian fundamentalist allies creating a climate of fear to disrupt this country and force their belief system on the rest of us Americans. I'm sick and tired of their intimidation in the name of God and political intervention that undermines the rule of law. This has happened before -- the most extreme example being Germany of the 1930s. It must not be allowed to happen here.
  • The Republican Congress and the Bush Administration do not represent the American people and, in fact, are not even interested in what the people have to say. "Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record. What's going on? Actually, it's quite simple: Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns." (NYT)
    • "Rather than siding with the interests of the majority of Americans, the Republican Congress has repeatedly chosen to legislate relief for the wealthy as it shifts an increasing burden to the middle class. Conservative calls that awakened the country's moral strengths are not translating into humane policies despite how many claim to adhere to Judeo-Christian values of service unto others or compassion for the orphaned, imprisoned, widowed and weak. The hard work of Americans seems to result only in a loss of family and personal time as corporate profit margins increase." (ACT)
    • "The Congress of the United States is run today as a rampantly undemocratic fief. (The Democrats) don't see bills, they don't know when something's coming out, they don't know half the time what they're voting on. From Republicans emanate occasional public grumblings about how things are run -- grumblings that, wouldn't you know it, tend always to be recanted two days later.
      It's hardly as if those on the right have kept their agenda a secret. They've demonstrated many times that they have no patience for civic debate, and seek only to smash the opposition. They want virtually no government protection or regulation for regular people; they've passed virtually no major legislation that serves the public interest, and only legislation that serves corporate and far-right religious interests. In their desire to reintroduce the teaching of creationism in the schools, they want to go back to the 1920s; in their desire to merge state and church, their ideal America looks more like the 1720s.
      All these practices and goals, which DeLay has embodied more than any other single person, have been in plain view for some time. But somehow, a lot of people who ought to know better, who ought to have studied the record, have never quite believed that DeLay and his minions are quite that awful. Well, they're that awful. It's taken the disgraceful Terri Schiavo episode -- the most explicit step to date toward church-state merger, if this isn't stopped -- and the recent allegations about personal corruption for people to see it. But as usual, the worst corruption has been the legal kind." (TAP)
  • Feed The Goose
    • Several years ago, I attended a seminar by a well-known speaker who talked about a variety of issues. One was the U.S. government and the taxes we pay to support it. We live in a country that is unique in the history of the world. We have freedom of speech, we can worship any religion we want, we can have any job we want, and we can create any business we want. We have good roads, good schools, and government regulations that keep greedy corporations from taking advantage of you and me. These many liberties and this vibrant economy are possible only because we have a strong and free government. These liberties and economic prosperity are like golden eggs, and the U.S. government is the goose that lays these golden eggs. Like a goose, this government (ANY government) must be fed in order to survive, in order to maintain the environment that provides us with these liberties and freedoms and opportunities and prosperity. Governments are fed by taxes and other revenues. If you cut taxes and force the government to borrow heavily to meet its obligations, you are effectively starving the goose that lays the golden eggs. You could lose these precious golden eggs. Government is not the problem. The problem is our leaders' desire to starve the government. Please don't kill the goose that lays our country's golden eggs.
    • Governors have a real understanding of the importance of balancing expenses with revenue. Even Mitch Daniels, the revenue-cutting budget directory in George W. Bush's first term, now understands this. As the new governor of Indiana, Mr. Daniels has proposed a tax increase to meet the state's revenue needs, as have Republican governors of other states.
    • With their spend more and cut taxes budget disaster, the Republican Congress and Bush White House are destroying this country financially.
  • A Time to Weep
    • Ted Sorenson, a former aide to President John F. Kennedy, gave a commencement speech at the New School University in New York on May 21, 2004. In his speech, Mr. Sorenson spoke of America's greatness, of how we led the world by helping found the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and programs like Food for Peace, international human rights and international environmental standards. He spoke of how the world admired not only the bravery of our Marine Corps but also the idealism of our Peace Corps. He spoke of our moral authority, our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity. And he talks about how we have lost all of that, of how the damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us. Mr. Sorenson's speech was a lamentation for the loss of this country's goodness and therefore its greatness. It is a sad commentary on where we have gone, but it so precisely describes where we are as a nation. And it expresses so accurately what I feel in my heart. Read what he has to say: A Time to Weep.
  • A Lesson from Athens
    • The United States is a superpower ... a democratic superpower. But we aren't the first one. As explained by Nicholas Kristof, "we might want to recall what happened to ancient Athens, perhaps the greatest flowering of civilization. In just three generations, one small city - by today's standards, anyway - nurtured democracy, became a superpower and produced some of the greatest artists, writers, philosophers and historians the world has ever known. Yet Athens became too full of itself. It forgot to apply its humanity beyond its own borders, it bullied its neighbors, and it scoffed at the rising anti-Athenianism. To outsiders, it came to epitomize not democracy, but arrogance. The great humanists of the ancient world could be bafflingly inhumane abroad, as at Melos, the My Lai of its day. Athens's overweening military intervention abroad antagonized and alarmed its neighbors, eventually leading to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. It's not so much that Athens was defeated - it betrayed its own wonderful values, alienated its neighbors and destroyed itself." This sounds alarmingly familiar ... with the Iraq War and the current administration in Washington.
  • We need new leadership in Washington -- at the White House, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives. T.H.R.O. was a slogan used some years ago, and it is even more applicable today: "T.H.R.O. - Throw the Hypocritical Republicans Out".
  • I Pledge Allegiance

I Pledge Allegiance
  • Like all patriotic Americans, I have very strong feelings for my country. I pledge my allegiance to the U.S. flag and my country every morning at my home. And when I say, "one nation under God," I am not referring to the God of any particular denomination. Baptists don't own the God in "one nation under God." Methodists don't own Him. Catholics don't own Him. Lutherans don't own Him. Evangelicals don't own Him. Fundamentalists don't own Him. Republicans don't own Him. This is the God who created all of the universe, however and whenever it happened. The Pledge of Allegiance is for every American. It infuriates me when right wing Republicans claim they own "Freedom, Patriotism, Truth, and the USA" then proceed to trash and demonize and assassinate the character of anyone who disagrees with them. A similar kind of thing happened in Germany in the 1930s. These people were called Nazis back then.
  • Christian and Moral Values
    • George W. Bush and the extremist right-wing Republicans don't speak for evangelical Christians
    • Supreme Court Justices in pocket of religious extremists ... will our freedom of religion be the next thing to go? -- They can call it anything they want, but Justice Alito's so-called "note of thanks" is more than just an expression of appreciation, it is a clear indication that his judgements will not be unbiased or in the best interests of the nation or the people of this great country.
      • The judicial branch is a crucial leg of the tripartate government. A judiciary afraid to stand up to elected officials can lead to dictatorship, and the courts are a safeguard against oppressive government and stirred-up majorities. Former Justice O'Connor said that interference with an independent judiciary had allowed dictatorship to flourish in developing and Communist countries. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship," Justice O'Connor said, "but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." These lessons that we have learned in other parts of the world highlight the danger of a Republican Congress and White House gone wild.
    • Using Bible as a weapon profanes its most important messages
      • As people of faith, as people who believe the Bible, we need we need to stop trafficking in stereotypes and stop using the Bible as a weapon in support of causes that wound good people. We need to stop judging people, for when we judge, we are the guilty party: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things” (Romans 2:1).
    • Christian and American values aren't owned by either party.
    • Let's talk about "moral values".
    • Let's talk some more about "moral values".
    • Democratics who root their politics on faith in Jesus
    • Republican Party moral values
      • Mr. Bush's former adviser, Claude Allen, often said it was his religious upbringing kept him on the straight and narrow: he said his salvation was the Roman Catholic education "that taught me discipline, taught me hard work, that taught me values that were carried throughout life" (NYT 3/13). Is that so? Then why did he apparently commit such value-less crimes as felony theft? How can we believe Republicans' claims of God and family when things like this happen?
    • The vast majority of the media is run by conservatives and has a bias against Democrats.
    • "George W. Bush is a saint"
    • "7 Things That Are Worse Because of George W. Bush's Failed Leadership"
    • "America's Choice in 2006"
    • Conservative Christian churches are violating the law when they actively campaign for conservative Republican politicians (NYT 03/21), and the IRS does nothing about it. But if a liberal church so much as blinks, the IRS comes down on them hard. This is persecution BY fundamentalist Christian extremists of anyone who doesn't agree with them.
    • Christian activists claim there is a "war on Christians", but the reality is just the opposite. Non-christians in the U.S. are simply trying to get along with Christians, and it is the Christians who are persecuting everyone else who won't bow down to their will. Bottom line: it is a power play by fundamentalist Christian extremists to institute a new Inquisition.
    • Christian Reconstructionists are determined to deny Americans their constitutional rights, especially freedom of religion, in fact they are determined to destroy the Constitution. In their own words: "The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise," Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. "Those who refuse to submit publicly ... must be denied citizenship." These Christian fundamentalist extremists have sunk their claws into the Republican Party and, because they control the branches of the federal government, are responsible for the disasters and chaos that have befallen our country. They say they are carrying out God's Word, but in truth they are doing just the opposite. By wanting to base society on Old Testament laws, they are rejecting the New Testament Jesus established through the Cross. They want to go back to the Inquisition and the Crusades. God is punishing the United States because of their unholy goals. The postmillennial philosophy of Christian Reconstructionists shows that they are trying to create the one-world government that the Book of Revelation talks about, in essence, they are the spirit of the antichrist.
      • According to Kevin Phillips: On the far right is a rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth", and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine.
    • A politician -- indeed, any person -- who claims to have a personal relationship with Jesus must also have works that demonstrate this faith. A person whose actions are opposite to what Jesus taught cannot be telling the truth when they say they know Jesus. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the Republican Congressional leadership, and their Republican allies all claim to be conservative Christians, but their actions are demonstrating deception, arrogance, cruelty, malice ... they are behaving more like Pharisees than followers of Jesus. White House aides revealed that they are frantic about Mr. Bush's profane language in private and profane gestures, behavior that is radically different than his scripted behavior in public, and which hints at his true beliefs.
      • Pat Robertson's demand for murder is the latest example. Mr. Robertson is not a true Christian. A believer in the teachings of Jesus would never advocate killing another human being as Mr. Robertson has done, especially the leader of a country who was democratically elected by his people (AP 8/23, CT 8/23, EITB24 8/23, PET 8/23, NYT 8/24, WP 8/24a) ("Now, the Christian Coalition founder publicly advocated immoral and illegal action. What part of 'Thou shalt not kill' is it that he fails to grasp?" - USA Today 8/25) ("The Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, said it 'defies logic that a clergyman could so casually dismiss thousands of years of Judeo-Christian law, including the commandment that we are not to kill.'" - WP 8/24b). Mr. Robertson, like all of the right wing fundamentalist Christian leaders, has abandoned the New Testament that Jesus died to establish, choosing instead to resurrect Old Testament prohibitions and seeking to impose their will through arrogant antiChristian manipulation of the political process. I had a good respect 25 years ago for people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson, but no more. By their Pharisaic actions and their hostile antiChristian rhetoric, what we are seeing is power corrupting them as they become vicious, ruthless dictators full of their own self-worth who are determined to impose their will, not God's will, on the people. This is most evident in the "Christian Dominionism" movement, of which Mssrs. Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, and their cohorts are prime lieutenants. This movement espouses hate, intolerance, and terror, and it is a prime mechanism from which The Antichrist could erupt.
        • NYT 8/25: Two days later, President Bush and other senior officials had expressed no real criticism of Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of the president of Venezuela. Mr. Robertson - who once made headlines when he made the insane claim that liberal judges were a bigger threat to America than the 9/11 terrorists - is a member of the church-based right wing, which was indispensable in Mr. Bush's re-election and will be needed by the Republicans in 2006. That obviously makes things awkward for the president. But common decency, not to mention a rational sense of the national interest, demands that the President condemn his remarks.
        • There is one thing especially that Mr. Robertson (and others of his ilk) has said which I find especially heinous. He has sparked controversy in the past by, among other things, agreeing with Jerry Falwell that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were God's punishment for "pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way." (WP 8/24) In reality, the September 11 attacks were God's punishment for antiChristians like Mr. Falwell, Mr. Robertson, and other right wing fundamentalists abandoning the teachings of Jesus and trying to impose their own personal interpretation of Old Testament dictates upon the American people. They don't want to accept that the New Testament established by Jesus' death and resurrection replaces the Old Testament.
    • Jim Hightower said it best recently: Republican Party Moral Values consist of: Bashing gays - Lying about everything from your National Guard service to weapons of mass destruction - Taking from the poor to fatten the wealthiest - Launching a war that may have already killed 100,000 people - Assailing and jailing those who dissent - removing Christians from positions of authority when they speak out against right-wing Christian fundamentalist extremism - Helping polluters ravage God's green earth. Democratic Party Moral Values consist of: the morality upon which this great country was founded: a deeply spiritual commitment, still held in the hearts of America's mainstream, to fairness, justice and opportunity for all. These are the moral values of the Golden Rule, values that have long been preached in churches and taught in schools, values that have driven our people's historic pursuit of egalitarianism, values that can unite us today as we try to become red-white-and blue rather than red versus blue.
    • "Apart from confirming an unwholesome disrespect for traditional American values like checks and balances, the assault on judges is part of a wide-ranging and successful Republican campaign to breach the wall between church and state to advance a particular brand of religion. No theoretical exercise, the program is having a corrosive effect on policymaking and the lives of Americans. The result of this open espousal of one religious view is a censorious climate." That is from an article in The New York Times and it expresses the situation very accurately. Our Constitution, in fact our very COUNTRY, was founded to PREVENT exactly what the Republican extremists are trying to do -- force their religious views on the rest of the country. And going hand in hand with this Republican religious persecution is a wholesale sellout of our nation to corporate raiders. This is not the way to govern. Republicans are not the ones to govern.
    • From The American Prospect: "In the religious war now being waged by the Republican Party, battles are designed not to be won but to mobilize troops for larger battles to come. The ultimate goal is not to dismantle the wall between church and state, although this would be a byproduct. It is to bring the majority of Americans who consider themselves religious into the Republican Party, thereby securing the GOP's dominance for generations to come. ... the Republican goal is not so much to win a specific contest as to divide the nation between religious and secular and to force Americans to define themselves as one or the other. They may well succeed, but it's a dangerous gamble. Most Americans consider themselves religious, to be sure, but when it comes to politics they are decidedly secular -- they don't want politics to be dominated by religious belief."
      • From Molly Ivins (10/9/05): We are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square." This division as been in part created by and certainly aggravated by those seeking political advantage (right-wing conservative Republican extremists and religious leaders bordering on cultic). It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serous split in this country.
      • Even as the president helps pit faith against science in the classroom, popes and other clerics have long known that religion and evolution are not truly at odds. Long before Darwin, enlightened Christians understood that religion and science are best kept in separate realms.
      • Christian evangelical proselytizing at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs has reached such a severe level that it has crossed the line into harassment. This persecution by fundamentalist Christians of airmen who do not share their extremist views prompted the Air Force to issue new guidelines (WP, 8/30; NYT, 8/30) governing religious activities throughout the Air Force.
    • From The Progressive:
      Ordained Baptist minister, Tony Campolo, is aghast at the way the right captured the term "moral values" during the 2004 campaign. "It's horrible," he says. "Jesus refers to the poor over and over again. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor. And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate. They talk more about tax cuts for people who are wealthy than they do about helping poor people who are in desperate straits." He blames religious broadcasting. "The major factor influencing the evangelical vote was Christian radio and television," he says. "But they did not do what their charters tell them to do, namely preach the Gospel. What they were doing was becoming surrogates for the Republican Party." And this, he believes, is a treacherous path to take.
      The Democratic Party will not win elections until they open their eyes and retake the moral high ground: ----- Campolo faults the Democrats for doing a poor job of framing the issues in 2004. "When you deal with these issues that are plaguing this country," he asks, "do you frame them as moral issues, or as economic issues? The Democratic Party made a very serious mistake. All the issues were framed in economic terms: How many jobs are we going to create, how much money is it going to cost to do this, that, and the other thing. What they should have been saying is, 'This is what is right, and we're going to do it, because it's right.' When we begin to frame the issues, as liberals, in moral terms, talking about what is right and what is wrong, rather than what is pragmatically efficient, I think the American people, who are looking for moral leadership, will flock to the side of those who can give it."
      True Christians should be opposed to the consumerism embraced by the Republican Party and the Religious Right: ----- "Christianity is countercultural," he says. "If one embraces Jesus, one has to raise some serious questions about the American way of life, especially its consumerism." He opposes many of the positions of Right Wing America. "[Right Wing] America believes in capital punishment, and Jesus says, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.' [Right Wing] America says, 'Blessed are the rich.' Jesus said, 'Woe unto you who are rich, blessed are the poor.' [Right Wing] America says, 'Blessed are the powerful.' Jesus said, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'"
    • From The American Prospect: Jim Wallis:
      The separation of church and state does not mean the segregation of moral values from public life, or the banishing of religious language from the public debate.
      Religion must be disciplined by democracy. Religious citizens must not enter the public square by saying this is a "Judeo-Christian nation" and suggesting that they should therefore win the public debate. Citizens who are religious are free to bring their religious convictions -- which motivate and mobilize their political concerns -- to the public square, just as secular citizens are free to bring their moral and political convictions to public life. But when religiously motivated citizens get to the public square, they must enter into a moral and political discussion, not a religious one. They must learn that bringing faith into public life isn't best facilitated by the takeover of the mechanisms of the state -- the school boards in Orange County, for example. We bring faith into the public square when our moral convictions demand it. But to influence a democratic society, you must win the public debate about why the policies you advocate are better for the common good. That's the democratic discipline that religion has to be under when it brings its faith to the public square.
      The Founders (of the United States) chose to not establish any religion in American public life ... By setting religion free from the shackles of the state, they protected the independence needed to keep faith healthy and strong. ... Any attempt to impose theocratic visions of morality is a threat to democratic politics.
      No one can say that there are only two moral issues in politics (hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage). When we find thousands of verses in the Bible on the poor, we must insist that overcoming poverty is also a moral issue. Protecting the environment (known to some of us as God's creation) is a moral and religious issue. And the ethics of war -- whether we go to war, when we go to war, and whether we tell the truth about going to war -- is a profoundly moral and religious matter. When Jesus has somehow become pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American, many of us feel that our faith has been stolen, and it's time to take it back.
    • "Christian Dominionism" -- Chris Hedges, Harper's Magazine: What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian "dominion" over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America's Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and "Christian values" form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and "homeland" security. Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay "tithes" to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of "moral crimes," including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced. (So much for our American freedoms and liberties and democracy.)
      The traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham's mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the Dominionists, who now control most of America's major evangelical organizations, from the NRB to the Southern Baptist Convention, and may already claim dominion over the Christian media outlets. But Christians who challenge Dominionists, even if they are fundamentalist or conservative or born-again, tend to be ruthlessly thrust aside.
      I have lunch with Luis Palau, a well-known evangelical preacher who is close to Billy Graham. He is an affable older man, an Argentine, who has a worldliness refreshing after even a short time among Dominionists. His focus is on personal salvation, not the achievement of political power. He refused to become involved in the referendum in Oregon, where his organization is based, to ban gay marriage. Like Graham, Palau is no supporter of gay rights, but he bristles at the coarseness of calls for absolute power by Christian leaders and at the anti-intellectualism that characterizes the new movement. He avoids the caustic humor used by many Dominionists to belittle homosexuals, "effete" intellectuals, and all those whom they lump into the category of "secular humanists." The use of abortion and gay marriage as rallying points worries him.
      "There are some Christians who have gone overboard," Palau says, choosing his words carefully. "The message has become a little distorted in states where they talk about change yet focus on only one issue. We need a fuller transformation. The great thing Billy Graham did was to bring intellectualism back to fundamentalism.
      "I don't think it is wrong to want to see political change, especially in places like Latin America," he says. "Something has to happen in politics. But it has to be based on convictions. We have to overcome the sense of despair. I worked in Latin America in the days when almost every country had a dictator. I dreamed, especially as a kid, of change, of freedom and justice. But I believe that change comes from personal conviction, from leading a more biblical lifestyle, not by Christianizing a nation. If we become called to Christ, we will build an effective nation through personal ethics. When you lead a life of purity, when you respect your wife and are good to your family, when you don't waste money gambling and womanizing, you begin to work for better schools, for more protection and safety from your community. All change, historically, comes from the bottom up."
    • In the battle for Social Security, the Republican Party will stop at nothing for force their way on the American people. America does face a real crisis -- but it's in health care, not Social Security. In spite of massive evidence that reliance on the private sector is the cause for the expensive failures of American health care, the Bush administration and Republican Congress are pushing for more privatization of the health care industry. The President's plan to privatize Social Security will not fix that problem, it will only make matters worse. The Republicans' latest attacks against the AARP are nothing but slander and lies. At the President's public speeches trying to convince people to accept his plans, his handlers throw out people they don't want in the crowds. Some people suspect this is part of a pattern of unlawfully silencing critics. And the Republicans call themselves moral and Christian? More lies. The GOP has pulled the greatest snow job over the American public in history.
      • The attempt to turn Social Security into a program for the poor is not driven by budget cuts but ideology: President Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. From Paul Krugman: "By now, every journalist should know that you have to carefully check out any scheme coming from the White House. You can't just accept the administration's version of what it's doing. Remember, these are the people who named a big giveaway to logging interests 'Healthy Forests.' Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for 'progressive price indexing' of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing."
      • Paul Krugman: "Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to 'reform' Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund. In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. He repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. Meanwhile, the administration politicized the Social Security Administration and used taxpayer money to promote a partisan agenda. Social Security officials participated in what were in effect taxpayer-financed political rallies, from which skeptical members of the public were excluded. The campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war."
    • One thing is certain: if President Bush and his Republican Congressional leaders want to deal responsibly with a historic disaster of this scale (Hurricane Katrina), they must finally try the path of honestly shared national sacrifice. If they respond by passing a few emergency measures and then falling back on their plans to enact more tax cuts, America will have to confront the fact that it is stuck with leaders who neither know, nor care, how to lead. The pre-Katrina plan for this Congressional season was to enact more upper-bracket tax cuts for the least needy, while cutting into the safety-net programs for sick and impoverished Americans. These are the very entitlement programs most needed by the sudden underclass of hundreds of thousands of hurricane refugees cast adrift like Dustbowl Okies. Will Congress dare to go forward with these retrogressive plans in the face of the suffering from Katrina? Its woeful track record suggests that, shockingly, the answer may be yes. (NYT, 9/3)
    • Less than a month before world leaders arrive in New York for a world summit on poverty and U.N. reform, the Bush administration has thrown the proceedings in turmoil with a call for drastic renegotiation of a draft agreement to be signed by presidents and prime ministers attending the event. The United States has only recently introduced more than 750 amendments that would eliminate new pledges of foreign aid to impoverished nations and scrap provisions that call for action to halt climate change, among many other things. In spite of all of its talk about compassionate Christian leadership, the Bush administration simply doesn't understand what it means to be compassionate, to be a leader, or to be Christian -- basically it doesn't understand how to be a responsible member of the world community.
    • Republican lawmakers are drafting proposals that would cut billions of dollars from the growth of Medicaid, slice into student loans just as students return to college, pare back food stamps and trim farm price supports in the midst of a midwestern drought. The proposed cuts are not the acts of a Republican Congress that cares for the people and that has Christian compassion in its heart. Sounds more like a political party in power that will say one thing just to get elected, then turn around and do the opposite.
    • House conservatives plan this week to propose an austere alternative spending plan that would pare more than $650 billion over five years, balance the budget and drastically shrink three cabinet agencies. Senior aides say the conservatives' plan would wring about $350 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs and save $300 billion partly through a major reorganization of the Education, Commerce and Energy Departments. So much for the "compassionate conservatives" caring for the American people. Their tax cuts prove that they care only for the rich.
  • Science and God
    • So often right wing fundamentalist Christians denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people. This behavior of so-called believers demonstrates that they, not the scientists, are being contemptuous. In fact, many scientists are firm believers in God. And there is no discrepancy between what God has truly said and true science. The conflict is entirely manufactured by right wing fundamentalists who have been corrupted by power and are seeking to force their own personal will -- not God's will -- upon others.
      • Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science: Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, "nonoverlapping magisteria," as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book "Rocks of Ages" (Ballantine, 1999). In Dr. Gould's view, science speaks with authority in the realm of "what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)" and religion holds sway over "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value."
        As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms, even bacteria, the similarities "are absolutely compelling," Dr. Collins said. "If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love God - what a horrible choice." Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination, but he is a Christian.
        About God: Most scientists Dr. Weinberg knows who do believe in God believe in "a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening."
        About Science: Dr. Miller says, "belief is never an issue in science." For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. "Faith is one thing, what you believe from the heart," said Joseph E. Murray, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation. But in scientific research, he said, "it's the results that count." Although they embrace religious faith, believing scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional - capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation.
  • Censorship of the media by the Republican Party (PBS), and their censorship of scientists and anyone who speaks the truth
    • The Bush administration hates the truth so much that they will vilify any reporter or news organization the speaks out. They will accuse them of treason when they are doing their patriotic duty to report the truth. The press isn't guilty of treason, it is the Bush administration and their Republican congressional lackeys who are the ones committing treason.
    • Bill Moyers (formerly of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) recently described those who are assaulting CPB, PBS, and free speech -- the Republican right wingers who are in power in Washington: "Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove's slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That's who I mean."
      • Television's PBS and radio's NPR are some of the few objective networks left in this country. Because they provide fair, balanced, and objective new reporting, they are targets of the extreme right. If they can't defund and kill the networks, then they intend to neutralize them. As noted by Frank Rich, "The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations - or thrilled to the 'journalism' of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies - you'll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio."
    • The Bush administration has sought to influence policy debate on climate change/global warming by muzzling the people who disagree with it or -- as was the case with two major reports from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and 2003 -- editing out inconvenient truths or censoring them entirely. A recent example is Dr. James Hansen, NASA's top climate specialist, who was threatened by Bush political appointee George Deutsch with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for aggressive action to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming. As Dr. Hansen observed, Mr. Deutsch, who lied about his educational background, was only a "bit player" in the administration's dishonest game of politicizing science on issues like warming, birth control, forest policy and clean air. This from a president who promised in his State of the Union address to improve American competitiveness by spending more on science.
    • Washington Post: Mr. Deutsch is only the latest example of the Bush administration running roughshod over scientists, saying scientific facts are just "opinions", and threatening scientists with "dire consequences" when they are doing their job of reporting scientific truth, all so that Mr. Deutsch can "make the president look good". The spectacle of a young political appointee with no college degree exerting crude political control over senior government scientists and civil servants with many decades of experience is deeply disturbing. More disturbing is the fact that Mr. Deutsch's attempts to manipulate science and scientists, although unusually blatant, were not unique. The White House has censored and manipulated scientific data and reports coming out of NASA, USDA, EPA, NOAA, and the Department of Health and Human Services, just to name a few. In every administration there will be spokesmen and public affairs officers who try to spin the news to make the president look good. But this administration is trying to spin scientific data and muzzle scientists toward that end. NASA's Mr. Hansen was right when he told the Times that Mr. Deutsch was only a bit player. "The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies," he said. We agree (WP 2/9).
  • The Ethical Corruption of Republican Congressmen and Senators
    • Ralph Reed, candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor and former executive director of the Christian Coalition, is another in a long line of corrupt Christian fundamentalist extremist politicians who have sunk their claws in the Republican Party. In his conservative magazine World, Marvin Olasky has run 10 articles and essays describing the $4 million in gambling money criminal GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff paid to GOP candidate Ralph Reed to lobby against casinos competing with Abramoff's clients. The articles have highlighted incriminating e-mails and other disclosures that have raised doubts about Reed's explanations of his activities. (WP 3/25)
    • Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin A. Buckham, received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political agenda in Congress. Buckham, who helped create the group while still in DeLay's employ, and his wife, Wendy, were the principal beneficiaries of the group's $3.02 million in revenue, collecting payments totaling $1,022,729 during a five-year period ending in 2001, public and private records show. The group's revenue was drawn mostly from clients of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The U.S. Family Network folded in 2001 under pressure from an FEC probe for involvement in controversial political matters. An FBI subpoena for the group's records indicates that the Bureau is investigating possible links between the payments and favorable legislative treatment of Abramoff's clients by DeLay's office. (WP 3/25)
    • Texas Nonprofit Is Cleared After GOP-Prompted Audit -- "This audit was political retaliation by Tom DeLay's cronies to intimidate us for blowing the whistle on DeLay's abuses," Texans for Public Justice director and founder Craig McDonald said. "Enlisting the IRS to intimidate critics is a dirty trick reminiscent of Richard Nixon. . . . It is not a crime to report a crime, as we did with DeLay." (WP 2/26) This is the second time Mr. DeLay and his associates have abused their authority by misusing federal authorities to punish their opponents.
    • Contractor Pleads Guilty to Corruption ... two more Republican lawmakers fingered in corruption probe: Reps. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R-Va.) and Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) (WP 2/24).
    • Reports surfaced that clients of a lobbyist married to one of Senator Arlen Specter's staff had received money through Mr. Specter's actions (NYT 2/17, WP 2/16).
    • A Senate committee yesterday rejected a bipartisan proposal to establish an independent office to oversee the enforcement of congressional ethics and lobbying laws, signaling a reluctance to get serious about enforcing rules on lobbying. This is further proof that, with the Republicans in control of Congress, lobbying scandals and corruption will continue. (WP 3/2)
    • After saying in January that he would end his regular meetings with lobbyists, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), the third-ranking GOP leader in the Senate, has continued to meet with many of the same lobbyists at the same time and on the same day of the week. He is hand-in-pocket with the corrupt GOP lobbyists. Sen. Santorum can't be trusted to tell the truth, he can't be trusted to do the people's business. (WP 3/8)
  • Electronic Voting Machines Need to be Regulated
    • Touch-screen voting machines, created, marketed and programmed by companies whose goal is to elect Republicans, are inherently untrustworthy. The Maryland House of Delegates unanimously passed legislation yesterday to ditch the state's touch-screen voting machines for the coming election in favor of a system that uses paper ballots. The 137 to 0 vote in the House and the endorsement of the plan this week by Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. represents a stunning turnaround for a state that was on the leading edge of touch-screen voting in 2001, and it reflects a national shift toward machines that provide a paper record.

Newspaper and Magazine Resources:

    The New York Times

    The Washington Post

    Asheville Citizen-Times

    The Nation

    The Hightower Lowdown

    • http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/index.cfm home page
      • George W. Scorns the Very Notion of "Commonwealth": Our Health and Education -- Trashed for the Corporate Good
          Very few presidents in our nation's string of 43 have been as brazenly servile to the moneyed elite as has George (only Grant, McKinley, and Harding are competitive). And none have been so blithely obtuse to that servility, couching every single act as being for "the children," "the single mom," "the small farmer," " the seniors," or some other humble group that actually gets none of the action. ...
          The Bushites are laissez-faire purists striving for their ideal of a corporate-run state. Not only does this mean removing public restrictions on corporate power, but also removing anything and everything that has the word "public" attached to it -- from education to Social Security, housing to health care, national forests to our local water supplies. Their extremist anti-government agenda, culled from a sprawling cluster of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks, is so sweeping and is being pursued so energetically ...
          It's our "commons" that they're out to eliminate. The commons are both the common wealth that all of us own together, and the public institutions that we've established for our common good. The commonwealth includes such physical assets as our air, airwaves, pure water, the ozone layer, and all of nature, as well as such intangible assets as human rights and liberties. The public institutions of the commons run the gamut from our national treasury to schools, water systems, wildlife preserves, elections, postal service, and parks.
          Bush and Company are not merely trying to take us back to the Gilded Age of pre-New Deal, robber-baron corporatism, but also all the way back to the "enclosure movement" of 18th-century England. Back then, with the blessing of parliament, the dukes and barons of the aristocracy suddenly laid claim to the forests, meadows, wild game, and other resources that, up to then, all had shared (and the peasantry had literally relied on for sustenance), enclosing these commons as the private property of the elites.
          Three centuries later, here we go again, for Bush has blessed a gold rush by today's corporate elites to privatize our commons, while also denigrating, defunding, and eliminating our public institutions. As usual, George couches every step down this path as the very opposite of what he's doing. (Examples given include Social Security and education, especially No Child Left Behind and the defunding of Head Start, "only one of the most successful education programs in history".)

    The American Prospect

    • http://www.prospect.org/web/index.ww home page
      • What Would Jefferson Do? An essay on faith, reason, terror, and democracy (The American Prospect article)
        • The United States enjoys higher levels of religious observance than any Western nation with an official church. Yet the religious right and its political allies are far from satisfied. They would like to accomplish what the Founders explicitly disavowed: to entangle the state in the promotion of religion. At a time when the United States and other Western countries are resisting Islamist holy war and attempting to convince Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere of the virtues of a pluralist democracy, the project of the religious right to inject God into government is ill-advised, if not bizarre.
      • Now for Some Bad (Tax) News (The American Prospect article)
        • Bush called the replacement of most federal taxes with a national sales tax "an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." Bush called scrapping personal and corporate income taxes in favor of a flat-rate wage tax "certainly one option." Explaining why Bush believes that both a flat tax and a national sales tax deserve consideration, aides emphasize that the president likes that such plans would essentially make interest, dividends, profits, and capital gains tax-free.
          ... exempting most of the income of the wealthy from taxes and dropping graduated rates in favor of a single tax rate has to be a huge cut for the rich. Because Bush promises no net revenue loss, how much more will everybody else have to pay? My organization ran the numbers on a national sales-tax bill introduced in Congress -- the idea Bush found "interesting" -- and found that it would saddle middle- and low-income families with average tax increases of $3,000 to $4,000 a year. We've done studies of the effects of a flat-rate wage tax, too, with similarly frightening results.
      • Earth Last--Senator James Inhofe's Multi-Pronged Attack Against Science (The American Prospect article)
      • Jimmy Carter Explains How the Christian Right Isn't Christian at All (The American Prospect article)
      • Professional Revolt - Many conscientious civil servants, including Richard Clarke, relied on empirical data while working for Bush. Then were forced to leave.
      • Attack Mode - Bush officials are reaching into their bag of tricks to try to discredit Richard Clarke. Guess what? It's not working.
      • Credibility Gap - The Bush administration has perfected the art of being dishonest without lying. Unfortunately, a compliant press (and public) have allowed them to get away with it.

    The Progressive

    • http://www.progressive.org/ home page
      • The Ballots Are Still Full of Holes (Mar 2004 issue)
        It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the Florida debacle in the 2000 Presidential election, Congress agreed in 2002 that voting practices had to be made more secure and accurate. But now we are approaching the 2004 election with an even more suspect voting technology than the notorious punch-card system. At least that's what some computer scientists and a growing number of progressive activists contend. They are upset over election officials upgrading their voting equipment with touch-screen ballots that electronically record votes. You think the Florida punch-card machines were a disaster? The touch-screen system could even be worse, say the critics. "In theory, you could change votes in a way that nobody could ever detect," says David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and the founder of verifiedvoting.org. Last July, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities created a furor when they declared Diebold Election Systems's software ripe for hacking. Security was "far below even the most minimal security standards," said the research team led by Avi Rubin. The researchers cited network safety problems, poor cryptography, and badly developed software as ticking time bombs. Not only could a voter "cast unlimited votes without being detected," they declared, but the prospect of an outside attack by a hacker intent on tilting an election was even greater. The Rubin report was nothing less than a call to arms: "As a society we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk," it concluded.
      • Protestor = Criminal? (Feb 2004 issue)
        In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the very least, the marginalization--of dissent. "We have not seen such a crackdown on First Amendment activities since the Vietnam War," says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "When you connect the dots--the FBI bulletin treating protesters as terrorists, the pattern and practice of the Secret Service of corralling protesters in zones far away, the actions in Miami and San Francisco and elsewhere--you see an increasingly hostile environment for groups that are expressing views that are divergent from the Bush Administration's," says ACLU Executive Director Romero. "Clearly, the government has put in place key policies and practices that try to shut down those that disagree with it."
      • We Are The Majority (Feb 2004 issue)
        How do we build a political movement in this country that represents all of the people and not a handful of millionaires? The middle class is collapsing, the people on top are making out like bandits, and the poorest people are struggling just to keep their heads above water. Today, the concentration of wealth and income in this country is not only greater than at any time since the 1920s, but it is far greater than in any other major country on Earth.
        What is even more cynical about these tax breaks is that here you have a conservative President and a conservative party, which for years have been ranting and raving about how terrible deficits are. But now they are giving us the largest deficit in American history. Why are they driving up a huge national debt that our kids and grandchildren are going to have to pay off? I'll tell you why they are doing that. They are doing that so that they'll come back before the American people and say, "We cannot afford to maintain Social Security; privatize it. We can't afford to protect Medicare and Medicaid; privatize it. We can't afford to protect the Veterans Administration; privatize it." That is their cynical plan: to destroy the basic rights that millions of people have fought for and received, and to bring us back to the nineteenth century, where the American people had no rights, where the elderly were the poorest people in our society, where children slept out on the streets without nutrition programs, where workers were unable to form unions, where there were no health care programs for the elderly. That is what they are trying to do, and we are not going to allow them to get away with it.

    Newsweek

    The Billings Gazette

    The Seattle Times

    • http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/ home page
    • Seattle Times Rejects Bush Record, Endorses Kerry
      • Editorial: Kerry for President
          Four years ago, this page endorsed George W. Bush for president. We cannot do so again — because of an ill-conceived war and its aftermath, undisciplined spending, a shrinkage of constitutional rights and an intrusive social agenda. The Bush presidency is not what we had in mind. Our endorsement of John Kerry is not without reservations, but he is head and shoulders above the incumbent. ...
          When war came, this page closed ranks, wanting to support our troops and give the president the benefit of the doubt. The troops deserved it. In hindsight, their commander in chief did not. ... The election of Kerry would sweep away neoconservative war intellectuals who drive policy at the White House and Pentagon. It would end the back-door draft of American reservists and the use of American soldiers as imperial police. ...
          In control of the Senate, the House and the presidency for the first time in half a century, the Republicans have had a celebration of spending. ...
          In our own industry, the Bush appointees on the Federal Communications Commission have pushed to relax restrictions on how many TV stations, radio stations and newspapers one company may own. In an industry that is the steward of the public's right to speak, this is a threat to democracy itself — and Kerry has stood up against it. ...
          There is in (Mr. Bush's record) a presidential blending of politics and religion that is wrong for the government of a diverse republic.

    Others

    • salon.com article: George W. Bush's missing year
        A Salon expose featuring a Bush family confidante broke the news that Bush was moved to Alabama when he was in the Guard because his father considered him a "political liability" and needed someone to "keep an eye on him." ... The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? "Good Lord, no." ... Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence.
    • Bush to Amish: "God Speaks Through Me"
      • President Bush met privately with a group of Old Order Amish during his visit to Lancaster County last Friday. He discussed their farms and their hats and his religion. At the end of the session, Bush reportedly told the group, "I trust God speaks through me."
      • Bush: God Speaks Through Me
          A firm belief that whatever he says or does is the Will of God would certainly explain a few things — for example, the idea that those who disagree must be treasonous. After all, people who disagree with what President Bush says and does aren't disagreeing with Bush, they are disagreeing with God. Who but those controlled and deceived by Satan would disagree with God? The level of hubris required for such an attitude is astounding. I really have to wonder how and why non-religious conservatives can trust and support him. They certainly don't believe that God speaks and works through Bush — or, at the very least, they are humble enough to allow that God might not be speaking and working through Bush. If Bush is firmly convinced of that, however, he'll never acknowledge any mistakes and he'll never back off from a course of action once taken. Can such a person really be trusted with the sort of power and responsibility inherent in the office of the President of the United States?
      • President Bush Receiving Orders from God?
          A president who prays needn't be a problem; a president who pays more attention to (his own interpretation of) the will of God than the law or the will of the people, however, definitely is.
      • Bush: Doing God's Work
          Just who is George W. Bush that he thinks he can speak for God? This is a perfect example of arrogance - but, unfortunately, it is an arrogance which afflicts a significant number of conservative evangelicals in America. They won't even recognize it as arrogance anymore, so convinced are they that they are right and righteous.
      • In an election year, reality has a hard time bubbling to the surface - by Molly Ivins (published 7/30/04 in the Asheville Citizen-Times)
          President Bush's slightly alarming claim to the Amish on July 9 that God speaks through him -- that's what he said, God speaks through him -- raises some troubling prospects. First of all, I think God has a better grasp of subject-verb agreement than George W. Bush do. Also, when Bush changes his mind, as he frequently does, do we think God has had to rethink things after the polls have come out?
          Nice to see President W. employing the tactic Texans got so familiar with under Governor W.: the "Gee, I'm really for it, but I can't be bothered to expend one iota of political energy trying to help it pass." (He also frequently uses the reverse ploy by announcing he opposes something he can't be bothered to spend an iota of energy on.) This is the game Bush is playing on the assault weapons ban, which he officially favors renewing (soccer mom vote there), but -- surprise! -- since he won't do anything to get it renewed it will be allowed to lapse (NRA vote there). Just what we need in this country, more automatic assault rifles.
      • Bush says "God Speaks Through Me". But what does he really mean? (irregulartimes.com)
      • Christian Principles in an Election Year
        • National Council of Churches, USA's "Christian Principles in an Election Year" Offer Criteria for Evaluating Candidates
            The National Council of Churches USA has released 10 principles for evaluating candidates that it hopes all persons of faith - whether liberal or conservative in their views - will study and apply in this election year. These "Christian Principles in an Election Year" apply well-established ecumenical principles to both domestic and foreign policy issues, and address issues of war, poverty, immigration, education, health care, racial justice, distress in U.S. inner cities and rural communities, the environment and the criminal justice system. They urge domestic policies that build "communities shaped by peace and cooperation" and a foreign policy "based on cooperation and global justice."
    • Ron Reagan Jr.'s Speeches
      • Ron Reagan reflects on his father's legacy -- 'First son' concedes his remarks about 'wearing religion on his sleeve' aimed at George W. Bush
          During his (Ron Reagan's) speech, he said: "Dad (President Reagan) was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference. ... what I find interesting about it is that everybody assumed I must be talking about George W. Bush, which I find fascinating and somewhat telling. If the shoe fits... I said 'many politicians.' If he's lumped in that group, then fine. Fine. That's all right. I think there's a lot of false piety floating around Washington ... I think he's (President Bush) used religion to make his case for a lot of things. ... Including Iraq."
        • Ron Reagan's eulogy
      • A text of Ron Reagan's speech as prepared for delivery Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention
          In a few months, we will face a choice. Yes, between two candidates and two parties, but more than that. We have a chance to take a giant stride forward for the good of all humanity. We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology. This is our moment, and we must not falter. Whatever else you do come November 2nd, I urge you, please, cast a vote for embryonic stem cell research.

Book Resources:

    Lies, And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

    • author (year published): Al Franken (2003)
    • publisher: Dutton/Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    • http://www.Al-Franken.com home page
    • Uses satire and an abundance of referenced facts to expose the lies of right wing radio talk shows and many others on the Right.

    Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush

    • author (year published): John W. Dean (2004)
    • publisher: Little, Brown and Company
    • http://www.twbookmark.com/books/15/031600023X/chapter_excerpt18541.html chapter excerpt
    • From the jacket:
      "John Dean knows what happens behind closed doors at the White House. As counsel to President Richard Nixon, he witnessed the malignant influence of excessive secrecy and its corruptionof good intentions. Pundits and partisans can point fingers. Only Dean can reveal with true insider knowledge the dangers of a presidency that has crossed the line.
      "In Worse Than Watergate, Dean presents a stunning indictment of George W. Bush's administration. He assembles overwhelming evidence of its obsessive secrecy and the dire and dangerous consequences resulting from a return to Nixonian governing. Worse Than Watergate connects the dots, explaining the hidden agenda of a White House shrouded in secrecy and a presidency that seeks to remain unaccountable. Dean lays out a blistering case against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, revealing, among other facts, even criminal offenses:
      • "How the Bush administration has shamelessly exploited the 9/11 tragedy, while secretly working to scuttle all efforts to discover why America was so unprepared.
      • "How Bush's deeply flawed secret decision making is costing American blood and well-being abroad and the loss of civil rights and liberties at home, while making Americans only more vulnerable to terrorism.
      • "How Bush and Cheney's blatant and unchecked use of Nixonian stonewalling, obfuscation, and deceit has concealed government business that the public has a right to know.
      • "How Bush and Cheney have taken a Nixonian approach to any and all efforts of Congress and the news media to check their use and abuse of power.
      "Worse Than Watergate brilliantly reveals the serious dangers of a president who, like Nixon, is a gambler and believes he is above the law. John Dean presents an irrefutable case that the tactics of the Bush administration are, in intent and reach, the most potentially dangerous threat to American life in recent political history. Shocking and revelatory, Worse Than Watergate is the book the Bush team doesn't want you to read."

    Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

    • author (year published): Richard A. Clarke (2004)
    • publisher: Free Press/Simon and Schuster
    • From the jacket:
      "'The [Bush] administration has squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda. ... A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11, and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safe from that threat.'
      "No one has more authority to make that claim than Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The one person who knows more about Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda than anyone else in this country, he has devoted two decades of his professional life to combating terrorism. Richard Clarke served seven presidents and worked inside the White House for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush until he resigned in March 2003. He knows, better than anyone, the hidden successes and failures of the Clinton years. He knows, better than anyone, why we failed to prevent 9/11. He knows, better than anyone, how President Bush reacted to the attack and what happened behind the scenes in the days that followed. He knows whether or not Iraq presented a terrorist threat to the United States and whether there were hidden costs to the invasion of that country.
      "Most disturbing of all are Clarke's revelations about the Bush administration's lack of interest in al Qaeda prior to September 11. From the moment tht Bush team took office and decided to retain Clarke in his post as the counterterrorism czar, Clarke tried to persuide them to take al Qaeda as seriously as had Bill Clinton. For months, he was denied the opportunity even to make his case to Bush. He encountered key officials who gave the impression that they had never heard of al Qaeda; who focused incessangtly on Iraq; who even advocated long-discredited conspiracy theories about Saddam's involvement in previous attacks on the United States.
      "Clarke was the nation's crisis manager on 9/11, running the Situation Room -- a scene described here for the first time -- and then watched in dismay at what followed. After ignoring existing plans to attck al Qaeda when he first took office, George Bush made disastrous decisions when he finally did pay attention. Coming from a man known as one of the hard-liners against terrorists, Against All Enemies is both a powerful history of our two-decades-long confrontation with terrorism and a searing indictment of the current administration."
    • Simon and Schuster web page
    • Simon and Schuster Against All Enemies web page

    Plan of Attack

    • author (year published): Bob Woodward (2004)
    • publisher: Simon and Schuster
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19691-2004Apr17.html 5-article adaptation of the book at The Washington Post web site
    • http://www.simonsays.com/content/content.cfm?sid=449&;pid=489452 Simon and Schuster web page
    • From the jacket: "Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over two years, examining the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam."

    The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill

    • author (year published): Ron Suskind (2004)
    • publisher: Simon and Schuster
    • From the jacket: "This vivid, unfolding narrative is like no other book that has been written about the Bush presidency -- or any that is likely to be written soon. At its core are the candid assessments of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, for two years the administration's top economic official, a principal of the National Security Council, and a tutor to the new President. He is the only member of Bush's innermost circle to leave and then to agree to speak frankly about what has really been happening inside the White House."
    • "Original documents available on http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/ ."

    Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth

    • author (year published): Joe Conason (2003)
    • publisher: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press
    • From the jacket: "Joe Conason, whose investigation of the conservative witchhunt of Bill Clinton became a major national bestseller, takes on the most common arguments, myths, and fallacies propounded by the Right -- and exposes them as the smear tactics they really are."
    • The Nation - Joe Conason

    American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century

    • author (year published): Kevin Phillips (2006)
    • publisher: Viking/Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    • http://www.americantheocracy.net/ home page
    • From the Preface:
      "Reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money—-debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits—-now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century.
      "The excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam. The rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections mark the transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in U.S. history.
      "The financialization of the United States economy over the last three decades—in the 1990s the finance, real-estate, and insurance sector overtook and then strongly passed manufacturing as a share of the U.S. gross domestic product—is an ill omen in its own right. However, its rise has been closely tied to record levels of debt and to the powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex. Excessive debt in the twenty-first-century United States is on its way to becoming the global Fifth Horseman, riding close behind war, pestilence, famine, and fire.
      "The three threats emphasized in these pages could stand on their own as menaces to the Republic. History, however, provides a further level of confirmation. Natural resources, religious excess, wars, and burgeoning debt levels have been prominent causes of the downfall of the previous leading world economic powers. The United States is hardly the first, and we can profit from the examples of what went wrong before."

    American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

    • author (year published): Kevin Phillips (2004)
    • publisher: Viking/Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    • http://www.americandynasty.net/ home page
    • From the jacket:
      "Despite their years in the political limelight, the Bushes are the family nobody really knows -- so contends Kevin Phillips, onetime Republican strategist and one of the country's premier political and economic commentators. The cozy imagery of Maine summer cottages, a gray-haired national grandmother, and cowboy boots has emphasized comforting family values. It has also distracted us from the fact that the Bush family has used all its resources to create a political dynasty that has gained the White House to further its family and ideological agenda, which would have horrified America's founding fathers. ... As far back as World War I, the family's single-minded focus has been on three major areas: intelligence, energy, and national security. ...
      "Phillips demonstrates how the Bush family has perfectly exemplified many of the growing trends in American political life -- policy favoritism to the top 1 percent, paper entrepreneurialism, and crony capitalism a la Enron (the Bushes' dealings with Enron go back to 1986). Far more than any previous political family, it represents an interlock between the hitherto temporary presidency and the permanent government. As such, the family has threaded its way through political and armaments scandals and, since the 1980s, faint hints of acts that might in another climate have led to presidential impeachment. ... And given the culture of secrecy that the Bushes have cultivated as an implement of power, dating back to Yale years for several men in the family, deceit and disinformation have become their political hallmarks. ...
      "By uncovering relationships and connecting facts with new clarity, Phillips comes to a stunning conclusion: the Bush family has systematically used its financial and social empire -- its 'aristocracy' -- to gain the White House and to subvert the very core of American democracy, government by and for the people."

    The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America

    • author (year published): Eric Alterman and Mark Green (2004)
    • publisher: Viking/Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    • http://www.thebookonbush.com/ home page
    • From the jacket:
      "When George W. Bush became president in January 2001, he took office with a comfortably familiar surname, bipartisan rhetoric, and the promise of calming a public shaken by the convulsions of impeachment and a contested election. Then nine months later, after the tragedy of 9/11, both the country and the world looked to him for leadership that could unite people behind great common goals.
      "Instead, three years into his term, George W. Bush has squandered the good will felt toward America, turned allies into adversaries, and is running the most radical and divisive administration in the history of the presidency.
      "The Book on Bush is the first comprehensive critique of a president who is governing on a right wing and a prayer. In carefully documented and vivid detail, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, two of the leading progressive authors/advocates in the country, not only trace the guiding ideology that runs through a wide range of W.'s policies but also expose a presidential decision-making process that, rather than weighing facts to arrive at conclusions, begins with conclusions and then searches for supporting facts.
      "... Alterman and Green connect the dots of what's behind all the policies and prevarications. The Book on Bush reveals a president who, while determinedly uninformed, uncurious, and unyielding, is messianic in pursuing the goals of his three leading constituencies: the religious right, big business, and neoconservatives. With few exceptions, the interests of these groups have been served so effectively that the result for America is nothing less than the attempted rolling back of the progressive gains of the past century."

    The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception

    • author (year published): David Corn (2003)
    • publisher: Crown Publishers
    • http://www.bushlies.com/ home page
    • From the jacket: "All American presidents have lied, but George W. Bush has relentlessly abused the truth. In this scathing indictment of the president and his inner circle, David Corn ... reveals and examines the deceptions at the heart of the Bush presidency ... he details and substantiates the many times the Bush administration has knowingly and intentionally misled the American public to advance its own interests and agenda ... The Lies of George W. Bush is not a partisan whine -- it is instead a carefully constructed, fact-based account that clearly denotes how Bush has relied on deception -- from the campaign trail to the Oval Office -- to win political and policy battles."

    Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire

    • author (year published): General Wesley K. Clark, U.S. Army-retired, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (2003)
    • publisher: Public Affairs/Perseus Books Group
    • From the jacket: "By pursuing Iraq, the real war against terror was subordinated and much of the enemy allowed to regroup, re-energized by an unnecessary campaign in one of the world's most sensitive regions. A new approach to winning this war is in order, and urgently needed."
    • Wesley Clark biography

Other Resources:

    John Conyers

    Hillary Clinton for Senate

    John Kerry For President

    • http://www.johnkerry.com/ home page
    • John Kerry presidential campaign. "From the moment I take office, I will stand up to the special interests and stand with hardworking families so that we can give America back its future and its ideals."
    • Kerry Says He Believes Life Starts at Conception
      • A Catholic who supports abortion rights and has taken heat from some in the church hierarchy for his stance, Kerry told the paper (the Dubuque, Iowa, Telegraph Herald), "I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception." Spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said that although Kerry has often said abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," and that his religion shapes that view, she could not recall him ever publicly discussing when life begins. "I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist," he continued in the interview. "We have separation of church and state in the United States of America."

    Michael Moore

    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

    • http://www.outfoxed.org/ home page
    • "Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a 'race to the bottom' in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know." -- Highly recommended.
    • Listing of Rupert Murdoch's media properties (from woopidoo.com)

    BuyBlue.org

    ChooseTheBlue.com

    • http://www.choosetheblue.com/main.php home page
    • ChooseTheBlue.com. "ChooseTheBlue.com compiles information from third party sources primarily to show certain reported spending by political action committees connected with a corporation and by that corporation's employees as political contributions, in each case related to recent federal elections. If each American who voted "Blue" in 2004 spends $100 in 2005 on products of a corporation that by reason of its employees' or connected political action committees' political contributions supported "Blue" over "Red," $5 billion in revenues would be shifted to "Blue" supporting corporations!"

    Media Matters

    • http://mediamatters.org/ home page
    • "Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Conservative misinformation is defined as news or commentary presented in the media that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda. For the first time, Media Matters for America has put in place a system to monitor the media for conservative misinformation –- every day, in real time -- in 2004 and beyond." -- Highly recommended.

    MoveOn.org

    • http://www.moveon.org/front/ home page
    • "A 501(c)(4) organization, primarily focuses on education and advocacy on important national issues." Highly recommended.
    • Al Gore: The Bush Administration is Destroying Democracy
      • In an address to the American Constitution Society, former vice president Al Gore accused the Bush administration of undermining democracy through deception, the erosion of checks and balances and a misinterpretation and exaggeration of presidential powers. "This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the American people."
      • Read his remarks [PDF] as prepared and available through the MoveOn.org website
    • Fox News: Unfair and Unbalanced
      • Moveon.org announced at a press conference that it had asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to halt Fox News' use of the allegedly misleading "fair and balanced" tagline. The groups filed the action under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which deals with deceptive practices in the advertising and marketing of cable television programming. "Fox News is misleading its viewers by calling its partisan programming 'fair and balanced,'" Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn.org, said in a statement. "There is nothing fair about deceptive advertising, and there is nothing balanced about telling only one side of the story. The Federal Trade Commission and Congress must act to prevent this misleading marketing from further harming consumers and public trust in the media."
      • "Activists Ask FTC to Take Action Against Fox News," Editor and Publisher - http://www.moveon.org/r?532
      • Associated Press report at The Boston Globe web site

    The Daily Mis-Lead

    Alliance for Democracy

    • http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/ home page
    • "The Alliance for Democracy is a new progressive populist movement --- not a political party --- setting forth to end corporate domination, to establish true political democracy, and to build a just society with a sustainable, equitable economy."
    • http://democracyalliance.com/ -- "web site coming soon"

    America Coming Together (ACT)

    • http://www.act4victory.org home page
    • "WE ARE THE FOOT SOLDIERS OF THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT. ACT has a clear goal: we will mobilize millions of voters who will say NO to the Republican agenda at every level. ACT will uproot the cynicism of politcs-as-usual. We are dedicated to defeating George W. Bush, electing progressives at all levels of government, and mobilizing millions of people to register and vote around the critical issues facing our country."

    The Media Fund

    • http://mediafund04.org/ home page
    • "The Media Fund is the largest media buying organization supporting a progressive message and defending Democrats from attack ads funded by the deep pockets of the Right Wing. We will ensure that a Democratic message focused on issues of concern to all Americans will be on the air during the critical period between the end of the primaries and the Democratic Convention when the Republicans' financial advantage is greatest. The Media Fund is the only significant voice that can defend against the Republican media assault and make certain the public hears about their disastrous failures at the local, state and national level."

    America Votes

    • http://www.americavotes.org/ home page
    • "America Votes is a new coalition of many of the largest membership-based groups in the country, who have come together to increase voter registration, education and participation in electoral politics. This historic partnership represents a combined membership of more than 20 million Americans in every state in the country. Groups that are part of America Votes work on a broad range of issues including environmental protection, education, human and civil rights, women's rights, choice and labor. At the national and state levels, America Votes partner organizations have joined together to share research and information in order to reach out to voters and encourage greater voter participation."

    Joint Victory Campaign 2004

    • http://www.victorycampaign2004.org/about.php home page
    • "Victory Campaign 2004 supports an aggressive national strategy that is attacking the right-wing on the ground and on the air. We are combining an innovative grassroots program ( America Coming Together ) with a sophisticated and powerful media operation ( The Media Fund ), which, together will expose the real Bush Republican record and deliver progressive victories at all levels in 2004."

    Climate Science Watch

    • http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/ home page
    • "Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change."

    Union of Concerned Scientists

    • http://www.ucsusa.org/ home page
    • "The Union of Concerned Scientists is an independent nonprofit alliance of more than 100,000 concerned citizens and scientists. We augment rigorous scientific analysis with innovative thinking and committed citizen advocacy to build a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world. Science Distorted by Bush Administration: On a wide range of issues, objective scientific analysis has been suppressed or distorted when it fails to support the White House's political goals. UCS has launched a major campaign to stop this misuse of science before it damages our health, safety, and environment."

    Scientists and Engineers for Change

    • http://scientistsandengineersforchange.org/index.php home page
    • Scientists and Engineers for Change is a new political committee that believes science and technology are crucial building blocks for American prosperity that have not be adequately managed in the last four years. They dispatch leading scientists and engineers to college campuses and other places they can talk about embryonic stem cell research, global climate change and the other science and technology issues.

    Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

    • http://www.peer.org/index.php home page
    • PEER is a national non-profit alliance of local, state and federal scientists, law enforcement officers, land managers and other professionals dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values.

    Center for Responsive Politics

    Interfaith Alliance

    • http://www.interfaithalliance.org/ home page
    • The Interfaith Alliance was formed to counter the anti-science agenda and McCarthy-like tactics of groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. According to Walter Cronkite, groups like the Traditional Values Coalition "have shrewdly twisted the traditional healing role of religion into an intolerant, political platform ... Using religion as a tool to push their personal political beliefs -- especially in a time of national tragedy -- not only insults people of faith and good will, it also diminishes the positive healing role religion can and should play in public life ... The Interfaith Alliance is a non-partisan, grassroots organiztion of people from more than 70 faith traditions. It's the only organization working full-time to challenge religious political extremism, while promoting the healing role of faith in public life."

    One Thousand Reasons for Defeating George W. Bush

    Capitol Hill Blue

    • http://www.capitolhillblue.com/ home page
    • Republicans Who Support 'Anybody But Bush' (http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4106.shtml)
        Doug Thompson: In travels around the country in recent weeks, I’ve found many Republicans who feel betrayed by their own party. They say the President lied about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, has abandoned basic Republican principles like a balanced budget and now ignores states' rights. Some say they may stay home on Election Day. Others say they will hold their nose and vote Democratic.
        Publicly, Republican strategists say they are not worried about dissension in the GOP ranks but privately they admit real concern. “The fallout is significant,” admits one GOP pollster. “We could be seeing as much as 15 percent of Republicans who won’t vote for the President’s reelection.” This jives with a recent nationwide CBS News poll that shows 11 percent of those who voted for Bush in 2000 now say they will support the Democratic candidate. Another poll by Princeton Survey Associates finds 19 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of independents say they can’t support Bush’s re-election.

    New Democrat Network

    • http://www.newdem.org/ home page
    • "The New Democrat Network (NDN) is guided by the belief that there is a better set of solutions to our challenges then what is being offered in Washington today. It is the fundamental premise of NDN that we can and must do better -- as a political movement, as a political party, and as a nation."

    National Public Radio's Left, Right, and Center

    • http://www.kcrw.com/show/lr home page
    • An excellent political commentary program presenting all sides in civilized debate, produced by station KCRW and broadcasted over NPR, this is an excellent alternative to the vitriolic poison that characterizes so much of right wing talk radio. "Provocative, up-to-the-minute, alive and witty, KCRW's weekly confrontation over politics, policy and popular culture proves those with impeccable credentials needn't lack personality. Featuring four of the most insightful news analysts anywhere, this weekly 'love-hate relationship of the air' reaches about 50,000 of the most influential radio listeners in Southern California."

    electionline.org

    • http://electionline.org/index.jsp home page
    • "electionline.org, produced by the Election Reform Information Project, is the nation’s only non-partisan, non-advocacy website providing up-to-the-minute news and analysis on election reform."

    Black Box Voting

    Verified Voting

    • http://verifiedvoting.org/ home page
    • "VerifiedVoting.org champions transparent, reliable, and publicly verifiable elections in the United States. We advocate the use of voter-verified paper ballots for all elections in the United States, so voters can inspect individual permanent records of their ballots before they are cast and so meaningful recounts may be conducted. We also insist that software used in electronic voting equipment be open to public scrutiny and that random, surprise recounts be conducted on a regular basis to audit election equipment. Paperless electronic voting systems are failing us. Worse yet, resistance from the elections official community is astonishing!"

    Election Defense Action

    • http://networkofcitizens.org/ home page
    • "Every vote counted as cast. The purpose of Rapid Response is to ensure that our votes are counted as cast and that the certified elections truly reflect the will of the people."

    Project Vote Smart

    • http://vote-smart.org/ home page
    • "Thousands of candidates and elected officials. Who works for you? Who is seeking your vote? Project Vote Smart, a citizen's organization, has developed a Voter's Self-Defense system to provide you with the necessary tools to self-govern effectively: abundant, accurate, unbiased and relevant information. As a national library of factual information, Project Vote Smart covers your candidates and elected officials in five basic categories: biographical information, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and interest group ratings."

    Air America

    The Ed Schultz Show

    The Republican War on Science

    • http://www.waronscience.com/home.php home page
    • A stinging indictment of how the Republican Party has not only ignored science, but has used bad science to justify its political agenda.
    • Chris Mooney: "With the ascent of the modern conservative movement and its political domination of the Republican Party, two powerful forces had fused. On issues ranging from the health risks of smoking to global climate change, the GOP had consistently humored private industry's attempts to undermine science so as to stave off unwelcome government regulation. Meanwhile, on issues ranging from evolution to embryonic stem cell research, the party had also propped up the Christian right's attacks on science in the service of moral and ideological objectives."
    • "In short, the GOP had unleashed a perfect storm of science politicization and abuse, in the process precipitating a full-fledged crisis over the role of scientific information in political decision-making. Yet this insidious threat—to public health and the environment, but also to good governance, sound leadership, and ultimately knowledge itself—remained obscure to most Americans, veiled by the intricacies of the government regulatory process and the complexities of scientific disputation."
    • "I wanted to tell the full story of how science became a political football in modern American life. And I wanted to make clear the dangerous threat this development poses—to science, to our political system, and even to the Republican Party itself."

    Federation of American Scientists

    • http://www.fas.org/main/home.jsp home page
    • The Federation of American Scientists focuses the resources of the scientific and technical community on some of our nation's most critical challenges.

    The Scientist

    • http://www.the-scientist.com/homepage.htm home page
    • The Scientist is an international news magazine published in print and on the Web. It reports on and analyzes the issues and events that impact the world of life scientists. The Scientist provides a unifying forum for discussion of the topics -- news, research, profession and technology -- that drive scientific progress. Comprehensive and topical, it serves as an ally and a guide in today's exciting and competitive research environment.

    Environmental News Network

    • http://www.enn.com/ home page
    • An environmental monitoring group that keeps you abreast of environmental news and developments via email digests. Also features the Environmental Marketplace with links to information about hundreds of environmentally-friendly products and services, EarthNews radio (http://www.enn.com/multimedia/earthnews), and ENN Radio: "You can listen to this week's ENN Radio Program heard live every Wednesday at noon (Pacific Time) on the Icicle Networks located on the web at http://www.iciclenetworks.com/ennradio.htm . This show is also aired weekends on Sirius Satellite Radio -- check out their schedule for the broadcast times."
    • Local Officials, Citizen Groups Expose Bush Administration Plans to Exploit America's Forests - New Report Documents Destructive Logging and Energy Development by Bush Administration
      • Local elected officials, tribal representatives, recreation and fishing interests, and conservationists today condemned an array of Bush Administration proposals that threaten America's publicly owned forests. The citizens were in Washington, D.C. to highlight the release of a report, "This Land is Your Land," which details how the recent policy changes are playing out in communities across the country.
        • read about it (8/10/04 article)
        • Report: This Land is Your Land: The Bush Administration's Assault on America's Forest Legacy: http://www.americanlands.org/this_land_is_your_land.htm
          • New policies promoted by the Bush administration over the last three years seriously threaten our nation’s forest legacy. Many of these policies have been advanced under the administration’s broad reaching "Healthy Forests Initiative," which claims to make forests healthy by logging them. This report documents regional examples of damaging proposals moving forward under these new policies, from Alaska to Virginia, on lands administered by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These regional examples represent an extreme new policy direction that undermines critical protections for forests, endangers water quality, destroys fish and wildlife habitat, and diminishes the natural scenic beauty of the landscape.
    • White House papers indicate cuts in new Bush administration for education, environment, research
      • The Bush administration has told officials who oversee federal education, domestic security, veterans, and other programs to prepare preliminary 2006 budgets that would cut spending after the presidential election, according to White House documents.

    PBS - Public Broadcasting System

    Center for American Progress

    Progressive Legislative Action Network

    • http://www.progressivestates.org/
    • "The Progressive Legislative Action Network's mission is to drive public policy debates and change the political landscape in the United States by focusing on attainable and progressive state level actions. It will do so by providing coordinated research support for a network of State legislators, their staff's and constituencies, in order to equip them with coherent logistical and strategic advocacy tools necessary for advancing key progressive economic and social policies."

    Center for Digital Democracy

    Center for Public Integrity

    Citizens for Media Literacy

    Citizens for Youth Media Council

    Commercial Alert

    • http://www.commercialalert.org/
    • "Commercial Alert's mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy."

    Common Cause

    Consumer Federation of America

    Consumers Union

    Editor and Publisher

    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

    Free Press

    The Hunting of the President

    • http://www.thehuntingofthepresident.com/
    • One of the most popular U.S. Presidents in history, William Jefferson Clinton was also the subject of much controversy and a coordinated effort to discredit his presidency. "The Hunting of the President" is a documentary that describes the Republican vendetta behind the 10-year campaign to systematically destroy the political legacy of the Clintons.

    Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

    • http://iava.org/
    • "Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) is the nation's first and largest group dedicated to the Troops and Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the civilian supporters of those Troops and Veterans."

    Stanford Center for Internet and Society

    The World Can't Wait

    • http://www.worldcantwait.net/
    • "World Can't Wait is organizing people living in the United States to take responsibility to stop the whole disastrous course led by the Bush administration. We seek to create a political situation where the Bush administration's program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven from office, and where the whole direction he has been taking U.S. society is reversed."

    After Downing Street

    • http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
    • "After Downing Street is a coalition working to expose the lies that launched the war and to hold accountable its architects, including through censure and impeachment."

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