Remember how Bush and Cheney ran for office on being crack Bid'ness Men? Oh, that California Energy Crisis is just a market problem and deregulation and the market will solve it they said (and since then we've seen it was trumped up by massive fraud among their largest corporate energy financial supporters, who also happen to be among their old pals). Well, another sign that the spin and the reality don't mix is the spinning door at the Treasury department. You can't run for office again when your economic people are overseeing a rotten economy, you need new faces. Time to cut bait and tell the public the fish just weren't biting that old stuff but now we've got a magical new lure that is blessed by God (It wouldn't surprise me that they start saying something like that they are so deluded) and so ----tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts--- Goddamn that scratched record! Somebody buy a new one!



US Treasury Gets New Deputy, Fisher Quits

Wed Jul 9, 5:45 PM ET

By Glenn Somerville and Jake Keaveny

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Wednesday tapped an academic to take over the No. 2 job at the U.S. Treasury in the latest shuffle at the department that included the resignation of its top debt management expert.

The White House announced that Susan Schwab, dean of the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, was its choice to become deputy Treasury Secretary, filling a job left vacant since Feb. 27 when Kenneth Dam left it.

In a series of changes, Treasury also said Peter Fisher, the undersecretary of domestic finance, was quitting in October and that he will be replaced by 45-year-old Kenneth Leet, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS -news ).

Treasury has become a revolving-door for top officials in the past year, with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill resigning under fire late last year. O'Neill was replaced by current Treasury Secretary John Snow, who has been without a deputy since he took office five months ago.

Rebuilding at Treasury occurs as President Bush ( news -web sites ) begins his run at re-election in November 2004, aiming to seize whatever credit he can for a limping economy that has shed more than two million jobs since he took office in 2001...





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When factories and businesses cut back on inventory it tells the real story about the economy. Yet somehow major businesses and the wealthiest people in America are giving money to the Bush re-election campaign in astronomical and record numbers. "Wall Street economists" expected a GAIN in inventory, not a decrease. Hmmmm, if only I were a smarter guy and could figure it all out like President Bush...I'd be a rich man.


Wholesale Inventories Dip 0.3 Pct in May

Wed Jul 9, 6:03 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Inventories at U.S. wholesalers unexpectedly fell for a second straight month in May, the government said on Wednesday, as sales also sagged.

The Commerce Department said wholesale stocks dipped 0.3 percent in the month, as inventories of durable goods -- those meant to last three or more years -- and non-durable products slipped. Wall Street economists had expected inventories to post a 0.2 percent gain after a revised 0.3 percent slide in April.

Wholesale sales also slid. They fell by 0.5 percent after a revised 2.5 percent decline in April, the biggest drop in Commerce's records.

The wholesale inventories report provides a look at the supply situation in one of three major sectors of the economy. Factory inventories fell by 0.1 percent in May, Commerce reported earlier in the month. Inventories at retailers will be reported in the business inventories report on July 16.

Mickey Levy and Peter Kretzmer, economists with Banc of America Securities in New York, said the numbers showed businesses remain wary of being caught with too much inventory on hand.

"The behavior of inventories indicates continued caution on the part of businesses, uncertain about the path of demand and unwilling to hold ... stocks of goods," the economists said in a note to clients...







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Ah, if you go to the BUSINESS section on Yahoo/Reuters they frame the story correctly but in the TOP STORIES section you get the "highest level since May" take. HIGHEST NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED AMERICANS IN OVER 20 YEARS. Let me repeat that.

HIGHEST NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED AMERICANS IN OVER 20 YEARS.

One more time.

MORE AMERICANS ARE OUT OF WORK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 20 YEARS.

Boy that few hundred dollars in tax cuts is really going to help the...

LARGEST NUMBER OF AMERICANS WITH NO JOBS IN 20 YEARS.



Continuing Jobless Claims at 20-Year High

By Tim Ahmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of jobless Americans receiving benefits hit its highest point in over 20 years last month, and new claims for jobless aid unexpectedly rose again last week, the government said on Thursday...







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The jobless rate continues to match the historic lows of the first Bush's ONE TERM in office yet we don't see that angle mentioned in this story. Now remember. Summer usually sees an upswing in jobs concerning seasonal employment due to tourism. If jobs aren't traditionally increasing to cope with tourism then that means people aren't going on trips, meaning they are staying home to either save their money OR they don't have any extra to spend. Yet Treasury Secretary Snow says the "economy is poised to take off" due to those coming tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts---- Whoops! The record got stuck.

Jobless Claims at Highest Level Since May

By JEANNINE AVERSA, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - More American workers signed up for unemployment benefits last week, fresh evidence that businesses are keeping work forces lean and playing it safe until the economy shows clear signs of improvement.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that for the work week ending July 5, new claims filed for unemployment insurance rose by a seasonally adjusted 5,000 to 439,000, the highest level since the week ending May 31...







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Ted Rall, who actually WENT to Afghanistan during the conflict there to learn and report upon it, lays it out. Bush has commited an act worth the price of impeachment (if you only apply the craven standard the GOP did concerning Clinton; much more so the loss of American and innocent Iraqi lives!). Any self-respecting conservative who railed against Clinton for lying to protect a private affair which had NOTHING to do with running the country, has the blood of thousands upon their hands and carries a growing blackness in their heart if they support Bush and his cabal of liars who lied, twisted and manipulated the truth to enter a war. A war in which its aftermath has proven grossly inept by its planning (if ever it WAS planned) and shown that major financial supporters and friends of the President and his administration are making billions of dollars off of sweetheart deals concerning the rebuilding of Iraq and the pumping of its oil. Historians in the future will be aghast at the audacity of the greed and lack of human empathy expressed by this callous, reckless and opportunistic administration.

A CRACK IN BUSH'S FACADE

Mon Jun 30, 5:08 PM ET
By Ted Rall

Growing WMD Scandal Could Lead to Impeachment

MINNEAPOLIS--Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction. He lied to us, the United Nations, and the soldiers he sent to die in Iraq. Bush's apologists defend his attempts to sell this obscene war as mere spin, but claiming certain knowledge of something that doesn't exist is hardly a question of emphasis. It's time to stop wondering where the WMDs are. Even if nukes and gases and anthrax turn up in prodigious quantities, it won't matter. Proof of Bush's perfidy, unlike his accusations that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, is irrefutable.

Before he ordered U.S. forces to kill and maim tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi soldiers and civilians, Bush and Co. repeatedly maintained that they had absolute proof that Saddam Hussein still possessed WMDs. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Dick Cheney said in August. In January, Ari Fleisher said: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." WMDs; not a "WMD program" as they now refer to it. WMDs--not just indications of possible, or probable, WMDs.

Absolute proof...





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Where's the story on American deaths about to MATCH that of the Gulf War? It just hit 146. You'd think this would be closely watched but notice how the spin is applied today. Obviously the White House has its guard up and the word out to its media contacts not to mention the "Gulf War" total to keep the story muted after it was brought up on Tuesday. Watch for how this is treated when the number does meet or exceed the American deaths from the Gulf War as it will be telling.

Two More U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq

By Andrew Gray

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One U.S. soldier was shot dead and another was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Iraq ( news -web sites ), the U.S. military said on Thursday, as President Bush ( news -web sites ) acknowledged Washington had a "security issue" here.

The deaths raised to 31 the number of U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire in Iraq since May 1, when Bush declared major combat over in the war that ousted president Saddam Hussein...

And here's from Tuesday:

U.S. Toll in Iraq Nears '91 War Deaths
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday raised its count of Americans killed by hostile fire in Iraq since the war began in March to 143, a figure that approaches the 147 killed in the 1991 Gulf War.

When President Bush declared major combat operations had ended on May 1, the number killed in action stood at 114. Since then, guerrilla-style attacks have taken another 29 American lives, and Bush as well as U.S. military commanders have said the war is not yet over...






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This report on the economy and the job losses is from something I posted below and earlier. Stick with me and read what follows.

Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.

"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."
// posted by Sam @ 8:37 AM





Now look at this piece of propraganda cranked out in response by PRIVATE economists (meaning they are paid off for their opinions and paid off by the huge corporations fueling all that campaign election dough into Bush's Vicious Political Machine).

Analysts More Optimistic About Economy

Thu Jul 10,12:01 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Private economists have nudged their forecasts for the U.S. economy slightly higher for the second half of the year, according to the latest poll from Blue Chip Economic Indicators.

The closely watched Blue Chip newsletter said its panel of 50 economists projected U.S. gross domestic product would advance by 3.6 percent in the third quarter and 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter. That forecast, made in early July, was up from the June projection. In June, analysts forecast third-quarter growth of 3.5 percent and fourth quarter growth of 3.7 percent...


Okay, so Big Bid'ness put its story out and had the spin applied. Here's the White House coming out with its damage control by the new Treasury Secretary Snow as he parades the same ol' record and spins it about tax cuts, the economy is primed to "take off", blah, blah, blah. The only Snow that I see is here is a SNOW JOB!


Snow Optimistic About Economic Growth

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Newly enacted tax cuts combined with low interest rates have put the U.S. economy on a path toward growth, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said in an interview published on Thursday.

Snow told USA Today he expected U.S. growth to top three percent in the second half of the year. But he said he would like to see growth of around four percent to bring the unemployment rate below six percent.

"The economy is beautifully aligned for takeoff," Snow told the newspaper, noting the stimulative effect of the Bush administration's latest $350 billion tax-cut program and historically low interest rates...



How can these guys stomach looking at themselves in the mirror when they get up in the morning after repeating this line of bull over and over endlessly?






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Great news! Greg Palast has a blog! Note the addition of the link to his site right under the Kerry links to your right.

I highly suggest you stick your head in over there and catch his astute and knowing analysis and indepth reporting of the facts that our national media is NOT giving you on the crimes and cover-ups of Bush and his "cabal" (their words) of neo-coms.

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

Note: It’s getting mighty expensive replacing every television I throw through the window when Mr. O’Reilly appears. And ripping up the New York Times leaves me without the news I need to pick up after Pluto, my retriever. There’s only one thing to do: write the darn news myself. I am, I’ve heard, a journalist – but it’s only a rumor in the USA where my reports for BBC Television and the Guardian papers are stopped by the electronic Berlin Wall. So this missive today inaugurates Greg Palast’s Radio Free America, a web log of samizdat rants, raves and most important, hard-core must-know facts from my investigative stories appearing abroad. Three times a week at www.gregpalast.com you’ll find the news not in your news.






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Blowing up stuff and taking over countries sure costs lots of money! No wonder the GOP so wants to cut social spending. It puts a crimp in satisfying their bloodthirsty appetites for conquest. And now after spitting, crapping and stomping all over the UN Rumsfield and the Bushies are crying for it and other countries to clean up their mess.


Rumsfeld Estimates U.S. Monthly Costs in Iraq at $3.9 Billion
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
International Herald Tribune


WASHINGTON, July 9 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld estimated today that the cost of United States operations in Iraq were $3.9 billion a month — a figure considerably higher than previous estimates — as he testified today before senators who want other countries to absorb more of the coalition's human and financial costs.

The $3.9 billion monthly figure covers January through September of this year, reflecting an average cost for the final months of military buildup, the Iraq war itself and postwar military costs.

Mr. Rumsfeld agreed with senators that a greater NATO role in Iraq made sense, and said that he would support troop contributions from France and Germany, despite their opposition to the war.

Democratic senators said they were troubled at Mr. Rumsfeld's vagueness on what approaches had been made to NATO.

And General Tommy R. Franks, the outgoing head of the United States Central Command, indicated at the same hearing that he anticipated no reduction in the United States' force level for the foreseeable future.

In addition to the cost figure for Iraq, which Mr. Rumsfeld provided after repeated, pointed requests from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the defense secretary said that operations in Afghanistan were costing $900 million to $950 million a month...







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The experts are anxiously speaking up. Not only did Bush NOT plan effectively for occupying Iraq, he's crapped all over the UN and the world and told them we don't need their cooperation and help to create a democracy in Iraq. What a marooooon!

U.S. Military Scholars Warn of Wider Iraqi Insurgency
By David Morgan

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - With guerrilla-style attacks escalating in Iraq, the United States may have to begin turning over peacekeeping duties to an international force within a year, or risk a wider insurgency, military analysts warned on Wednesday.


A wave of attacks that has killed 29 U.S. troops since President Bush ( news -web sites ) declared major combat operations over on May 1, appears to stem from a resurgence of Iraqi nationalism among both Sunnis and Shi'ites in the face of U.S. occupation, said scholars at the U.S. Army War College.

"If U.S. forces are still there a year from now, individuals who suggest the United States is there for bad motives will feel more comfortable stirring up problems," said W. Andrew Terrill, research professor at the Carlisle, Pa.-based War College's Strategic Studies Institute.

"Even the (Shi'ites) are saying you need to think about leaving, and they're the ones we're getting along with at the moment," he added...








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The $#@* just keeps piling up at the White House door.

U.S. Gave Inaccurate Iraq Picture, Ex-Intel Official
By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration gave an inaccurate picture of Iraq ( news -web sites )'s military threat before the war, a recently retired State Department intelligence official said on Wednesday, saying intelligence reports showed that Baghdad posed no imminent threat.

"I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq," said Greg Thielmann, who retired in September from his post of director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research.

"Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided," he said at a press conference held by the Arms Control Association.

President Bush ( news -web sites ) justified going to war based on the threat from Iraq's alleged biological and chemical weapons and nuclear weapons program.

"As of March 2003, when we began military operations, Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States," Thielmann said...







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Sure, we're blowing people up but are we losing the greater war for hearts and minds?

Experts: U.S. Needs Int'l Image Makeover

By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The United States is less vulnerable to terrorism today because of heightened vigilance but must improve its international relations in order to starve terrorist groups of new recruits, experts said Wednesday.

Scholars on terrorism and al-Qaida told the independent commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks that the United States badly needs an image makeover in the eyes of the world.

"Although we are winning the war against the organization called al-Qaida, we seem to be losing the cultural war," said Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace...


Now there has been talk that we did nothing for a decade to stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Funny, I remember Clinton giving the order to fire a Tomahawk missile and try to kill Osama Bin Laden and the GOP railed against this as political grandstanding at the time. Gee, I remember Clinton and Gingrich giving the okay for a bipartisan three year study on national security (the Hart/Rudman Commission) presenting a detailed history of Islamic terrorism and the threats it poised to the U.S. and what did Bush do when presented with the results of the study? He dumped it and said Cheney was on top of it. And I seem to remember that Clinton had weekly meetings concerning al-Qaida and Bin Laden (with the top expert in Islamic terrorism intelligence handling the briefing) but when Bush took over he dropped the meetings and updates. This is a MAJOR FAILURE on the Bush watch concerning judgement and the pursuit of national security. Here's the actual report.


The Hart/Rudman Commission Report


Here's a quick overview of the report and how the Bush administration dumped it (from SALON).


"We predicted it"

A bipartisan commission warned the White House and Congress that a bloody attack on U.S. soil could be imminent. Why didn't anyone listen?

By Jake Tapper...


And here's the executive summary from the report.

31 January 2001

Executive Summary of U.S. Commission on National Security Report

A bipartisan commission set up to evaluate the current national security climate and propose changes needed to meet new threats has issued a report that calls for major changes in governmental structures and processes.

Included in the report released January 31 by the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century are a proposal for a new, cabinet-level National Homeland Security Agency that would combine the Federal Emergency Management Agency with several other agencies, and a prescription for recasting a "crippled" State Department and the Department of Defense.

The 14-member commission, headed by former Senators Gary Hart (Democrat, Colorado) and Warren Rudman (Republican, New Hampshire), includes other former legislators, Executive Branch officials, military leaders and representatives from business, academia and the news media.

Following is the text of the executive summary of the 140-odd page report: The complete report can be accessed at www.nssg.gov.






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The more the Right tries to knock her down...the more books she sells.

Clinton's Book Sales Top 1 Million

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) has sold more than 1 million copies of her memoir "Living History," in almost exactly a month, her publisher announced Wednesday...





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"Things Are Going Very Well In Iraq"

Click on the quote to see the Pew Research Center Poll's results in graph form.









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What those unenlightened local residents didn't understand about when Bush comes to call you are ushered to what we Americans would call a "First Amendment Zone". All this while he delivers his rousing denunciation of slavery and the benefits of a free democracy (Thanks to Agent Sham for the link and quotes).



On Goree Island, Bush Visit Sparks Anger
Tue July 08, 2003 12:00 PM ET


By Clar Ni Chonghaile

GOREE ISLAND, Senegal (Reuters) - President Bush made an eloquent speech but did not win many friends during his brief visit to Goree Island off Senegal on Tuesday.

"We are very angry. We didn't even see him," said Fatou N'diaye, a necklace seller watching dignitaries file past to return to the mainland at the end of Bush's tour.

N'diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.

Bush came to Goree to tour the red-brick Slave House, where Africans were kept in shackles before being shipped across a perilous sea to a lifetime of servitude.

He then gave an eloquent speech about the horrors of slavery, standing at a podium under a sizzling sun near a red-stone museum, topped by cannon pointing out to the sea.

The cooped-up residents were not impressed.

"It's slavery all over again," fumed one father-of-four, who did not want to give his name. "It's humiliating. The island was deserted." ...






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NIXON'S GHOST DRIVES THE BUSH MACHINE AND ITS SPIN

Okay, here's how the spin is working from the White House on the fact that Bush lied about the Nigeria "evidence" to go to war. I have noticed a pattern of releasing info on this story from the White House. They come out with a statement late at night so that the morning headlines can push it off the front page (say like the amazing story that Bush has finally gone to Africa and is speaking about slavery, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz). The info I posted late last night (and that you can read below) was top of the heap on the Yahoo/Reuters TOP STORIES section around 1:30 am Pacific Coastal Time. So was the Bush drop in the polls story. Where is it now? I can't find anything but the 9/11 investigation story and it's buried in with the sub-group headlines.

What I see is both the White House playing this "put it out late" game and Reuters happy to join in (along with the rest of the news services). I've written their editors and asked why do they let them be sucked into this? Why? Because if they don't, the White House causes them grief on confirming other stories and info (and also subtly rewriting those stories to put a spin on the selling of the White House when they return them to their reporters).

I'm posting Joe Conalson's whole piece from his view of some of the White House spin and here's the BIG SPIN. The White House and Bush are now pushing that the lying didn't matter and that the BIG PICTURE is that Hussein was a bad man and needed to be taken out and that this will be proven some day, some where in the future ...and in a galaxy far, far away probably. They are AVOIDING the fact that either their intelligence was faulty or they didn't care or they lied to go to war. They are hoping like hell this story dies and as mentioned above they are doing everything they can to sweep it under the rug.

Joe Conason's Journal
The White House finally comes clean on one devastating WMD deception -- but it is still spinning the full story.

July 8, 2003 | Fleischer's modified limited hangout
Even in the Bush White House, the truth will seep out -- but only when the preferred lie can no longer be sustained. From last March, when the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed documents supposedly proving Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Niger as "crude" forgeries, until yesterday, the White House resolutely ignored the growing evidence that the president had misled the public about this crucial issue.

Perhaps when he first mentioned the alleged attempted uranium purchase in his State of the Union address, that was an honest if inexcusable error; since then, no such excuse has been plausible. And over the past few days, two things happened that forced a strangled confession from the White House press office.


On July 6, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV revealed in a New York Times Op-Ed essay that he is the previously "unnamed" envoy dispatched to Niger last year by the CIA -- and that he reported upon his return in February 2002, nearly a year before Bush's State of the Union speech, that the uranium story was false. "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," wrote the respected career diplomat.

Almost immediately following Wilson's devastating account came the release of the investigative report of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which cast additional doubt on the British government's promotion of the Niger uranium story last September (and much more).

Yet as of early yesterday morning, Ari Fleischer was still attempting to "contain" the embarrassing truth. "There is zero, nada, nothing new here," he told Times reporter David Sanger. In his blandly deceptive way, Fleischer claimed that "we've long acknowledged" that the Niger uranium tale "did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect." He went on say, "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the president's broader statement." Hours later, after the president and his entourage had left Washington for Africa, the White House issued " a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement."

Around the same time, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus received a similar statement from a "senior Bush administration official." As "authorized" by the White House, it said: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."

"Knowing all that we now know"? What about the facts they knew last spring, long before Bush, Cheney and Rice uttered all their frightening, baseless statements about the Iraqi nuclear threat? What about the facts they've known since no later than the eve of the war, when the IAEA informed them that the Niger documents were fake?

Yesterday's feeble admissions constitute what an earlier White House used to call a "modified limited hangout." The Bush crowd, improving on what they learned from the Nixon gang, has consistently excelled at lowering expectations of all kinds -- and this occasion is no different. Now even the briefest, most grudging and partial acknowledgment of an obvious fact qualifies as extraordinary candor.





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Read the whole NY TIMES editorial on why Bush has acted like a shameless despot to prevent a comprehensive PUBLIC 8/11 investigation. This isn't about politics. It's about the nation's security for its citizens and future generations!

Wrestling for the Truth of 9/11

The Bush administration, long allergic to the idea of investigating the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 terror attacks, is now doing its best to bury the national commission that was created to review Washington's conduct. That was made plain yesterday in a muted way by Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor, and Lee Hamilton, the former congressman, who are directing the inquiry. When these seasoned, mild-mannered men start complaining that the administration is trying to intimidate the commission, the country had better take notice...







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Doubters? I was one of 'em! My conservative friends called Clinton "Slick Willie". My nickname for Bush (besides the "idiot bastard") is "Dubya D-40", the slickest liar who ever held a public office. Only he killed thousands of innocents and continues to cause the death of American soldiers because of his twisted lying.

Bush Charge on Iraq Arms Had Doubters, House Told
By DAVID E. SANGER and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, July 8 — The State Department told a Congressional committee today that seven days after President Bush gave his State of the Union address, in which he charged that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium in Africa, American diplomats warned the International Atomic Energy Agency that the United States could not confirm the reports.

The State Department letter, provided to Representative Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, confirms that there were deep misgivings in the government about some intelligence Mr. Bush cited in his January speech.

On Monday the White House said for the first time that the evidence that Iraq sought nuclear fuel in Africa was not credible enough, and should not have been included in the president's remarks...





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The NY TIMES take on the Bush stonewalling.

9/11 Commission Says U.S. Agencies Slow Its Inquiry
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, July 8 — The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said today that its work was being hampered by the failure of executive branch agencies, especially the Pentagon and the Justice Department, to respond quickly to requests for documents and testimony.

The panel also said the failure of the Bush administration to allow officials to be interviewed without the presence of government colleagues could impede its investigation, with the commission's chairman suggesting today that the situation amounted to "intimidation" of the witnesses.

In what they acknowledged was an effort to bring public pressure on the White House to meet the panel's demands for classified information, the commission's Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman released a statement, declaring that they had received only a small part of the millions of sensitive government documents they have requested from the executive branch...






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The economy and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are NOT going to get better by the election. Wait until the polls are taken then.

Poll Shows Drop in Bush Approval Rating

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The American public has growing doubts about President Bush (news - web sites)'s efforts to improve the nation's economy and improve its health care system, a poll says, but they're not convinced that Democrats have the answers.

Bush's approval rating stood at 60 percent in the survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a significant drop from his 74 percent rating on April 9, the day the 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) fell in Baghdad and U.S. commanders said the Iraqi ruler's reign had ended.

The daily violence in Iraq (news - web sites) since Bush announced an end to major combat is bothering the public, with the number of Americans saying the military effort in Iraq is going very well down to 23 percent from 61 percent in mid-April. Still, two-thirds of those surveyed said the United States made the right decision to use military force against Iraq, and most Republicans and Democrats support the effort to rebuild the war-torn nation.

The poll of 1,201 adults conducted June 19-July 2 found growing criticism of Bush's handling of domestic issues...







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Bush stonewalled and tried to keep the 9/11 investigations closed. Lacking that he is attempting to run the clock out on the investigation. 70 million dollars and an unlimited time table to investigate Clinton's past and only 12 million and a year and a half to investigate the greatest security breach and attack on our nation in history. Hiding something? You figure it out.


U.S. Officials May Hamper Attacks Probe

By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A lack of cooperation from the Bush administration could hamper an independent inquiry into the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the commission's leaders say...







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Attention American Citizens! You stand hereby directed to prove your patriotism by printing out hundreds of the wartime morale posters at this website and distributing them widely throughout your community!






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I'm still waiting for my conservative friends and their elite GOP leaders who said they impeached Clinton over a lie (for the honor of the office and the dignity of the nation) to lead the charge into investigating lies used to send our country and its fighting men into war and causing the deaths of thousands, including those of our own soldiers.

While I'm waiting I think I'll see if a monkey flies out of my butt.



Dems Urge Probe of Iraqi Uranium Claim

DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Democrats pressed for deeper investigation of pre-war U.S. intelligence efforts Tuesday after the White House admitted President Bush (news - web sites) had erred in his State of the Union speech when he said Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

As weeks have passed with the American search turning up no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites), criticism has been building concerning assertions the administration made as justification for the war.

"This is a very important admission," said Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken."

Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also said that the development underscored a need for more investigation.

"The reported White House statements only reinforce the importance of an inquiry into why the information about the bogus uranium sales didn't reach the policy-makers during 2002 and why, as late as the president's State of the Union address in January 2003, our policy-makers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false," Levin said.

Michael Anton, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said in a statement, "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged."...





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From that hysterical rag, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:


Conservatives' core duty on WMD
By Doug Bandow

...Conservatives' lack of interest in the WMD question takes an even more ominous turn when combined with general support for presidential warmaking. Republicans - think President Eisenhower, for instance - once took seriously the requirement that Congress declare war. These days, however, Republican presidents and legislators, backed by conservative intellectuals, routinely argue that the chief executive can unilaterally take America into war.

Thus, in their view, once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.

This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor...





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Occupation's Ordeals Ravage Iraqi Psyche

...Unable to communicate with English speakers, most Iraqis worry about the foreigners' intentions. And even some who have long-standing friendships with Americans speak darkly about what will happen if the occupation drags on.

"Even if I joined the resistance, I don't think I could kill an American soldier," said Wamidh Nadhmi, who for years entertained U.S. reporters in his Baghdad home with quiet, cautious criticism of Hussein's regime. "I'm an old man, a political scientist. I don't think I could pull the trigger."

But the thought has crossed his mind, he said. It is an irrational response to an irrational situation.

"There are three primary causes of stress: loss, change and threat," said Buthanina Hilo, dean of the psychology department at Baghdad University. The fall of Hussein and the arrival of the Americans have brought all three, she said.

Untold numbers of Iraqis have been thrown out of work by the war and its aftermath, losing their incomes and sense of purpose. The totalitarian discipline of Hussein's regime has been replaced by widespread crime and the uncertainty of American rule. Amid the dislocations of war, American bombs and bullets have been responsible for civilian as well as military casualties, and the lethal skirmishes show little sign of abating...







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Photo of Bush lying during the State of the Union address.







__________________________________________________

The signpost appearing up ahead in the fog. Viet Nam.

U.S. Toll in Iraq Nears '91 War Deaths
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday raised its count of Americans killed by hostile fire in Iraq since the war began in March to 143, a figure that approaches the 147 killed in the 1991 Gulf War.

When President Bush declared major combat operations had ended on May 1, the number killed in action stood at 114. Since then, guerrilla-style attacks have taken another 29 American lives, and Bush as well as U.S. military commanders have said the war is not yet over...





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Bush is Scheered off at the knees for his damn dirty lying!

July 8, 2003
Robert Scheer:
A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied

They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document — now known to be a crude forgery — that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.

What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.

Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."...





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Here's a follow-up statement DIRECTLY FROM THE WHITE HOUSE: The President LIED about the evidence he cited to go to war. This wasn't a lie about a blow-job dealing with a private affair. Innocents by the thousands were slaughtered and maimed while millions have had their lives thrown into chaos and peril by calculated lying by Bush before the entire nation and the world in a State of the Union address. A nation's tragic fate was created by a lie. And it is tragic because it's only getting worse in Iraq day by day. Why was it okay to impeach Clinton over trying to hide a tawdy affair and yet now we have a leader who is caught in a whooper LIE with mountains of evidence building up by the minute?

Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says

(The evidence is mounting by the minute that the White House always knew it was "flawed" but Bush went ahead and lied about it anyway!)

By DAVID E. SANGER NY TIMES

WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.





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Have you signed up? ---Sam

Answers Now on Distortion of Evidence!

Dear friend,

The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq
posed an imminent threat to our country. Now the evidence that
backed that assertion is falling apart.

If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used
false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented
deception. Even if weapons are now found, it'll be difficult to
justify pre-war language that indicated that the exact location of the
weapons was known and that they were ready to deploy at a moment's
notice. With a crisis of credibility brewing abroad and the integrity
of our President and our foreign policy on the line, we need answers
now.

Please join me in asking Congress to establish an independent,
bipartisan commission to investigate the distortion of evidence now, at:

http://www.moveon.org/distortion/

A President may make no more important decision than whether or not to
take a country to war. If Bush and his officials deceived the American
public to create support for the Iraq war, they need to be held
accountable.

Thanks.

MoveOn.org




________________________________________________________________________

Write the NY TIMES and call them on the spinning of this war!

I did and here's the email.

From: Sam Park
Date: Sun Jul 6, 2003 11:11:36 AM US/Pacific
To: Editor NY TIMES
Subject: Re:

I beg to differ with General Myer's assessment of the attacks in Iraq.

<< But General Myers said that it was wrong to think that the entire country was unstable or that coalition troops everywhere were under siege. To bolster his point he broke down the threat by geography and source.

In northern Iraq, which is dominated by Kurds, and the south, where Shiite Muslims prevail, "the situation is basically stable," with water, electric and sanitation systems back to prewar levels or better, General Myers said on Fox TV.

The problem, he added, was in Sunni-dominated central areas, and particularly in a triangle formed by Baghdad; Ramadi, to the west, where a bomb explosion on Saturday killed seven United States-trained Iraqi police recruits marching from their graduation ceremony; and Tikrit, to the northwest, a stronghold of Mr. Hussein.

"That's where 90 percent of the incidents are," he said. >>

And yet we have this story (from AP)

<< Six British Soldiers Killed in S. Iraq
Wed Jun 25, 1:15 AM ET
By STEVEN GUTKIN, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Six British soldiers were killed in a police station in southern Iraq and eight were wounded in a nearby ambush Tuesday, marking the deadliest day of attacks on coalition forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The casualties were a shock to British troops occupying the largely Shiite south, which until now had been essentially free of the daily hit-and-run attacks plaguing American soldiers in central and western Iraq. British troops have felt so secure they have been patrolling the country's second-largest city, Basra, without flak jackets or helmets. >>

This attack was not done by one of "five (political) groups" as the General suggests but an angry mob of locals who, wrong or ignorantly, killed the soldiers for reasons stemming from frustrations with the occupation.

The General and the Bush administration that he serves are constantly spinning the situation in Iraq for political purposes. The truth is they were not prepared for occupying the country after the war. Their intelligence on the country was flawed from the beginning and the tragic results are the daily killing of American and British soldiers in what is turning into a bloody quagmire.


Sam F. Park




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Go to a small town, exploit their fears of 9/11, run a flag up their ass and have Bush come out and preach while singing from the re-election hymn. It's the Sam Walton style strategy for raising millions of campaign dollars (all while ruining the local businesses and "mainstreet" USA).

Bush's Brigadier of Bucks
How Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is managing the most formidable cash machine in American political history
By MATTHEW COOPER AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF

Monday, Jun. 30, 2003
George Bush could not have picked a better place to demonstrate the reach of his "shock and awe" money campaign. Headlining a luncheon at the Airport Marriott in the liberal Democratic bastion of San Francisco last Friday, the President politely thanked his supporters for their "hard-earned dollars" and walked away $1.6 million richer. But the backroom brigadier of Bush's financial blitz was quietly working the velvet rope at the ballroom's VIP section. Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is the man largely responsible for what is being heralded as the most formidable money machine in modern political history...




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WMD? Who? George doesn't even know.

Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By MASSIMO CALABRESI AND TIMOTHY J. BURGER

Sunday, Jun. 29, 2003
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.




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So we're beginning the national nightmare of having our soldiers (and soon, anyone from America working there) killed on a daily basis in Iraq. British troops are dying. A British jounalist was just shot and killed. How did we end up in this mess? Why should many who supported the war feel shame and guilt over it? Because they pay more attention to game shows and sit-coms than following the news and events that shape our country and government? They have no sense of history nor care to study the very democracy they are charged with governing. An election rolls around and they wake up from their self-induced sleep for five minutes to see who looks best like an actor playing president on TV and whose commercials deliver the best sound byte while attacking the other candidate.

A few thoughts on America today from various patriots who do care about our history, government and nation.

ROBERT BYRD
U.S. Senator from West Virginia

Nathan Hale volunteered to go behind the British lines in response to a call for volunteers by General Washington. He was discovered and arrested as a spy. That was on Sept. 21, 1776. The next morning he was hauled up before a crude gallows, and they said, "Do you have anything to say?" He said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

So here was Nathan Hale, who was willing to give everything he had. And yet we're not willing today in the U.S. Senate—the Senate passed that resolution shifting the power to declare war from the Congress to the President of the U.S. That was a shame, and only 23 Senators voted against shifting that power. When it came to the Senate, and we didn't cast a vote that demonstrated courage and not intimidation, we should have been reminded of Nathan Hale.

If the Founders had seen just that one vote, they would have been ashamed of us. We politicians have a duty, and we in the Senate have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall have the power to declare war. Yet we stood that right on its head, turned right around and shifted that power over to a President who was not even elected by a majority of the American people.

PAULINE MAIER
Author, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; currently working on a book on the ratification of the federal Constitution

What's wonderful about John Adams is his attitude toward the deification of the Founders, which was one of immense skepticism. The reinterpretation of the Founders as somehow a special species of human beings akin to religious figures came in after the War of 1812, but John Adams lived to see it, and being an outspoken man, he criticized it. He said, "You know, I don't recognize these people." He particularly execrated the cult of Washington. The idea was that they were human beings, not religious figures. He had the grace to say to a young American, "I'll let you in on a big secret: I don't think my generation was any better than yours."

[Yet] these were the people who laid down the basis for the institutions under which we now live. They managed to carry off a revolution that ended not in more carnage but in peace and in a constitutional order. This is a historical wonder.

How do you think they would take to a country in which the Supreme Court chooses the next President? In their craziest fantasies, the anti-Federalists never thought this would be possible—that Congress doesn't assiduously guard the right to declare war. They would find what came of the institutions they defined bewildering.

BERNARD BAILYN
Author, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders

The founding fathers matter today because they changed the course of history. In devising the forms of our public institutions, they thought long and hard about the problem of power—the power of the state, of the government—and how to protect the individual's liberties from the necessary powers of government. It came up first in their resistance to what they believed was the growth of autocratic power in Britain and in justifying rebellion against it. It came up in the writing of the first state constitutions. And it came up above all in writing and ratifying the Constitution.

The debate on the Constitution, which lasted for almost a year, was one of the greatest struggles over the principles of power and liberty ever recorded. And the result of that debate was that you could not properly have a bill of powers (which is what the Constitution is) without joining to it a bill of rights. That balance between the two—between powers and liberties—is the heart of their thinking, and if there is anything more relevant to our problems today, I don't know what it is.






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From Agent Largent (thanks for sending the whole article as I don't have a subscription to SALON) the Joe Consason skewing of rabid right winger Ann Coulter and her new rant, "Treason". This review is required reading so take notes there will be a test later.


Has she no shame?

Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment.

By Joe Conason

July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"

So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)

She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)

Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.

If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.

The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.

Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.

Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."


Has she no shame?


In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."


So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)


Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.

To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.


And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.

"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."

Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)

The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.

Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.

Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America. In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all, perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.

To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.


Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.


By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.

In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.

So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").

Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!

"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.

From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.





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MUST READ! You owe yourself a drink at the WHISKEY BAR for a...

Day in the Life

I read the news today, oh boy . . .

On the celebration of our country's beginnings it is our duty to try to understand how its image as a great shinning beacon of liberty has been warped into that of a small-minded brute with a flamethrower.

THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER

Fri Jul 4, 2:23 AM ET
Richard Reeves

By Richard Reeves

LONDON -- "What exactly do you think you're doing around the world?" a French reporter asked me the other day. He was not the first nor the last. They are "dissing" the United States all across what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls "Old Europe."

Bush's "Bring it on!" election style is a big help to our men overseas.

U.S. Soldier Killed; 10 G.I.'s Injured in Separate Attack
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:05 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Mortar rounds slammed into a U.S. base north of Baghdad, wounding at least 10 American soldiers, the U.S. military said Friday.

Meanwhile, an American soldier was killed in an attack on his convoy in the capital late Thursday, U.S. military spokesman Cpl. Todd Pruden said.

News of the attacks was a somber start to American Independence Day activities for the 150,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.

It's bad in Iraq and will be getting worse by the election. Here's a slice of why Bush will have a real fight on his hands next year. Even the military families are getting pissed off at the lack of planning for AFTER the war.


Anger Rises for Families of Troops in Iraq
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN NY TIMES

FORT HOOD, Tex., July 3 — Luisa Leija was in bed the other morning, she recalled, when her 9-year-old daughter bounded in the room, saying, "Mommy, mommy, there's a man in uniform at the door." (click title above for rest of story)

You tell 'em, Dubya! And remember. This isn't a quagmire. Rummy said so.

Iraqis Defy Bush, Wound Seven U.S. Soldiers in Attacks
Thu Jul 3, 5:41 AM ET
By Daniel Trotta

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Seven American soldiers were wounded in two separate attacks on occupation forces in Iraq on Thursday, a day after President Bush said there were enough U.S. troops in Iraq to deal with the militants.

Three Iraqis killed, 10 US soldiers wounded as violence flares in Iraq

In a sign the guerrilla-style attacks were growing increasingly bold, assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a U.S. Humvee vehicle on a major street in central Baghdad shortly after 10 a.m. (0600 GMT), witnesses said.

Let's all go out and play baseball (T-ball for the kiddies) and eat ice cream!

Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.

"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."

First off, let me apologize about not being around of late. Work has demanded my attentions. Okay, I had some fun, too. Now, let's get back to examining the astute leadership of those playing with themselves in the White House.

Wow! Now this is real news! Bush is "concerned" about people out of work! And listen to this. Tax cuts will solve the problem!

W.House: Bush Concerned About Jobless Rate Rise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is concerned about a rise in the U.S. jobless rate and believes recently enacted tax cuts will help the economy, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday.

The government reported the jobless rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

"The president continues to be concerned about any American who is looking for work and is unable to find it," Fleischer said.

He said Bush was pleased that income tax withholding tables were now being adjusted to reflect recently enacted tax cuts and the first of child credit checks were going out at the end of July.

"We are also an economy that is having a slow recovery from that short and shallow recession and that's further evidenced in today's unemployment report," he said.

One Republican against Bush
By Amelia Hansen San Mateo Times


Monday, June 30, 2003 - SAN MATEO -- The keynote speaker at Sunday's 2003 Peninsula Symposium and Benefit for Peace, Justice and Human Rights railed against President Bush and left the audience with a straightforward message for the 2004 presidential election: "Remember the A-B-C's -- Anything but Bush and Cheney." The message was met with unsurprising enthusiasm from the crowd. But the speaker himself had a bit of a surprising background: Scott Ritter, former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is a self-professed conservative Republican who admitted to the audience he voted for Bush three years ago.

Since then, Ritter said, Bush has lied to the American public about the true situation in Iraq, particularly in regard to the weapons of mass destruction, which American forces, to date, have failed to locate.

"I leave the door open that they still may find something," Ritter said to the group of 100 or so people gathered in the darkened auditorium at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Sunday. "But even if anything is found, it won't be anywhere near what they said it was -- thousands of tons of biological weapons."

Ritter's new book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," published by Context Books, is due out next week.

A 12-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and an intelligence officer who served as a central weapons inspector between 1991 and 1998, Ritter said if no weapons are found, Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq should be condemned -- whether he lied or made an honest mistake.

"If Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction, they are in violation of international law," Ritter said. "If they aren't, then we are in violation of international law." Click For Rest Of Story

I posted what that commie rag, ARMY TIMES, had to say about Bush's lying concerning the treatment of military personal and families, now that liberal sob-sister Pat Buchahan is crying over Bush's lack of leadership and asks what is the plan concerning the war in Iraq. How dare he question the supreme intelligence of our leader!

WHY ARE WE STILL HERE?
Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted: June 30, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

"What are we getting into here?" asked the sergeant from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, stationed north of Baghdad. "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"

The questions that sergeant put to a Washington Post reporter are ones our commander in chief had better begin to address.

For less than three months after the fall of Baghdad, we have lost almost as many men in Iraq as we did in three weeks of war. One U.S. soldier is now dying there every day.

"Mission Accomplished," read the banner behind President Bush as he spoke from the carrier deck of the Lincoln. But if the original mission – to oust Saddam and end the mortal threat of his weapons of mass destruction – is "accomplished," why are we still there?

What is our new mission? What are the standards by which we may measure success? What will be the cost in blood and treasure? When can we expect to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis? Or is ours to be a permanent presence, as in postwar Germany and Japan?

If that sergeant does not know what he is doing there, it is because his commander in chief has left him, and us, in the dark. And if the president does not begin soon to lay out the case for why we must keep 150,000 men in Iraq, the American people will begin to demand they be brought home. Already, one poll shows that 44 percent of the nation finds the present level of U.S. casualties "unacceptable."

This is not 1963. Americans no longer have the same patience or trust in government we had when JFK took us into Vietnam. We are no longer willing to have Americans die in open-ended wars for unexplained ends. Dean Rusk's familiar mantra, "We are there, and we are committed," is no longer enough.

When the United States lost 241 U.S. Marines in the bombing of the Beirut barracks 20 years ago, and 18 Army Rangers in the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, Americans demanded we get out. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton hastily did.

As has been written here many times, Americans are lousy imperialists. We are uninterested in ruling and reforming other peoples if they appear to want us out of their lives. Nor are we willing to shed American blood for visions of empire dancing in the heads of Potomac pundits.

This week, six British soldiers were killed – three executed – after surrendering to Iraqi civilians enraged over intrusive house searches that they believe dishonored them and their women. This was in the Shia region of southern Iraq, which had been thought to be pacified.

One is reminded of Yitzhak Rabin's remark after the invasion of southern Lebanon had ignited the peaceful population there: "We have let the Shia genie out of the bottle."

On their visit to Baghdad, Sens. Lugar and Biden warned the U.S. Army might have to remain in Iraq five years. But Americans are not going to tolerate five years, or even two years, of guerrilla war without a better explanation as to exactly what vital interest of ours requires us to stay in Iraq and fight this war.

Moreover, there is every indication the security situation is getting worse. The incident in the south is but one example. The heavy-handed but natural reaction of U.S. soldiers to being ambushed and sniped at and killed every day is another. Invading homes searching for weapons, rousting out and roughing up Iraqi men, and patting down their women is a sure way to antagonize a fighting people.

Lest we forget, among the "Intolerable Acts" that led to our own revolution was the "Quartering Act," where Bostonians had to provide shelter for British troops sent to pacify the city after Sam Adams' tea party down at the harbor.

We are told the United States cannot walk away from Iraq now, or it would descend into chaos. That may be true. But if chaos is one alternative, another is a no-win war such as Israel is today fighting against the Palestinians. And the chances of that are daily rising.

A recent U.S. strike in the west turned up the bodies of Saudis and Syrians who had come to fight Americans, as their fathers went to Afghanistan to fight Russians. Moreover, U.S. pressure on Iran to permit inspections of its nuclear facilities – or U.S. pre-emptive strikes – would surely be answered by the kind of Iranian aid to and instigation of the Shias in Iraq that Teheran gave to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Hezbollah, after years of guerrilla war, drove the Israelis out of their country.

President Bush had best begin devising an exit strategy for U.S. troops, before our enemies succeed with theirs.

From Fred Clark at The Slacktivist:

http://slacktivist.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_slacktivist_archive.html#105678945898439031

A DAY AT THE RACES

A tortured, obvious and over-extended metaphor.

Okay, so you're going to the track and your friend tells you to check in with this tipster before you place your bets.

So you find the guy and he tells you he's got a sure thing in the fourth race. So you put your money down, following his advice, picking Restored Honor to win, Dignity of the Office to place and Changing the Tone to show.

The fourth race comes up and you lose, watching Harken Hijinx and Partisan Pitbull in first and second, with Vandalism Fraud just edging out DUI Disclosure for third.

So you tell your friend the tipster lied to you.

"Lie is a strong word," your buddy says. "It was really just a matter of emphasis."

"The guy is 0-for-3," you say.

"Hey, these are picks," your friend reminds you. "They're not guarantees."

When you point out that the tipster said it was a "sure thing," your friend tells you that you don't understand how the game works. "That's just a term of art," he says. So you figure you'll give the tipster another chance.

This time he tells you to bet on Ongoing Surplus, Balanced Budget and Sacred Lockbox. You place your bets and you lose again -- this time to three ponies named Record Deficit, Prodigal Tax Cuts and $7 Trillion And Counting. Your wallet is really hurting and it looks like you've been had.

"That tipster is a liar," you say again.

"Go easy with the L-word," your buddy says. "Just because someone repeatedly tells you things that turn out not to be true doesn't make that person a liar. Maybe he just got some bad intelligence. Or maybe he was ideologically self-deceived. Or maybe he has secret, classified reasons for not telling you the truth -- you know, for matters of national security."

"National security? " you say. "Everybody who listened to this guy is broke."

"Calm down," your friend says. "You can't prove intent. He's no liar."

Thinking maybe you should have "sucker" tattooed on your forehead, you head back to the tipster for another try.

He tells you he's got a can't-miss scoop and you put your money on Domestic Security, Four Freedoms and Twin Towers. The three horses collide out of the gate. You've never seen anything so horrible. They end up having to shoot all three horses, plus the jockeys, the track announcer and several thousand people in the grandstands.

"That was the worst thing I've ever seen," you tell your friend. "It was an unprecedented calamity. I'm never trusting this guy again."

But your friend says that just because the disaster took place on the tipster's watch doesn't mean he bears any responsibility for it.

"You said yourself it was unprecedented," he reminds you. "So how could he have foreseen that?"

You're thinking that it's a tipster's job to foresee such things, but you let it pass.

"Sure, we're all broke and thousands are dead," your friend says, "but that just means that it's time to rally behind the tipster. At times like this we all have to band together for the good of the racing community."

This odd argument somehow strikes you as hypnotically compelling. You go back to relying on the miserable failure of a tipster, still feeling like a sucker, but somehow proud to be one. Following his lead, you blow your next paycheck on a horse called Dead Or Alive. It doesn't win, place or show, and you can't even get anybody at the window to tell you where it finished. It's like it just disappeared.

This goes on for years. You keep staking your fortunes based on what the tipster says and you keep getting burned. In all this time only one of his picks even manages to show -- a skinny nag named Jobless Recovery -- but it doesn't pay very well.

Finally, you tell your friend you're about done. You're willing to give the tipster one last chance to prove he's even remotely worth listening to. One last chance and that's it.

Surprisingly, your friend agrees.

"Fair enough," he says. "See who he's picking in the Iraqi Stakes. If that doesn't work out just the way he says, you have every right to ignore him in the future."

So it all comes down to this. You take every dime you can scrape together and put it all down on the three horses the tipster assures you are a sure thing -- Terrorist Ties, Imminent Danger and Democratic Beacon.

You lose, tearing up your tickets as Nigerian Forgery, Doctored Intel and Gaza-On-The-Tigris win running away.

"That's it! " you tell your friend. "You said yourself that this race should be the deciding factor and it was. He lied again. The tipster is a liar!"

"Whoa! Calm down. Again with the L-word," your friend says. "He told you those horses would win, so you just assumed he meant today? You've just got to give it time.

"And remember you still can't prove he was lying. He may just have been mistaken. Or deluded. Or caught up in an exaggeration. He may have been given bad information himself. So you can't say he's a liar.

"Don't you see? Just because someone is consistently mistaken or deluded -- just because everything he tells you isn't true -- that doesn't mean he can't be trusted, does it? Does it? "

Sorry for the lateness of this posting. I've been working at my "real" job this weekend.


Let's see the Bush administration or Ann Coulter spin this and accuse the writers as being liberal traitors. Finish the piece by going to the website at ARMY TIMES.


Issue Date: June 30, 2003

Editorial
Nothing but lip service


In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.

For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.

Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.

Then there’s military tax relief — or the lack thereof...

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-1954515.php