Stolen from:  

It's kind of sad, looking back...

• The last president constitutionally elected by the people.
• The last president who was never convicted of a crime.
• The last president who put the nation before his personal greed.
• The last non-cocaine president.
• The last president who wasn't wholly owned by BIG OIL.
• The last president who tried to stop a war, instead of snorting his way thru it while AWOL.
• The last president who could actually answer questions without a script from Cheney.
• The last president who could walk among the people without having actors bussed in from various outlets to pretend to fawn over "his greatness".
• The last president who wasn't afraid to walk in a McDonalds restaurant because he feared Ronald McDonald might outwit him in an impromtu debate.

Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end...

By: William Rivers Pitt  

Richard Nixon is remembered for many reasons. The manner in which he bare-faced his way through the 'Checkers' speech, his plastic smile, his kitchen table summit, his visit to China, his secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, the Christmas carpet-bombing that followed…and, of course, the Watergate scandal that consumed Washington D.C. and ultimately drove him into exile, are all part of our collective history.

By: Lisa Kadonaga  

The central fact of cities is that they are created by people. I have walked through cities that were a bit like Mr. Bush describes. Sometimes this happens so early in the morning that nobody is about -- or after midnight, when you make your way through darkened streets, past living rooms lit by the blue glow of television sets. On occasion I've felt the eerie stillness after a blizzard or ice storm. But all the time, I knew that people were merely asleep, or indoors, their presence still undeniable.

By definition, an empty city is no longer a true city, with no residents going about their business, and no sightseers. If you're sensitive to the regular pattern of comings and goings, this kind of blank spot is jarringly obvious.

There's something wrong about an urban void.

"The Bushes have long memories. They know full well it was Linda Tripp who, among others, ratted out the Bush-Jennifer Fitzgerald relationship during the first Bush administration. And there is no way that they are going to 'reward' her by giving her a new White House job... to the Bushes she is the one who exposed their own scandalous behavior and subsequent cover-up."

- John LeBoutillier

By: Isaac Peterson  

There is one thing I have to say after speaking with Gump. I came away believing that he really can do one thing that he claimed while campaigning. I believe that George W. Gump really can restore this world to what it once was: a red-hot, flaming ball of molten lava.

"We will withdraw from the ABM Treaty on our time table at a time convenient to America. And one of the things I've said in the course of questions about the ABM treaty, I said that we would consult closely with our allies in Europe as well as continue to consult closely with Mr. Putin. I have no specific time table in mind. I do know that the ABM treaty hampers us from doing what we need to do."

- pRresident Bush, declaring his intent to withdraw from 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

By: Eric Perlin  

Article from:  

NASA is ending a satellite mission monitoring the Earth's ozone layer because it can't afford the bill.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will switch off at the end of September, a decade after it was put in orbit.

NASA chiefs say the 6.5-ton satellite will either be captured by the space shuttle or allowed to crash back to Earth sometime between 2016 and 2027.

By: Noam Scheiber  

If my experience is any indication, center-left opinion journalists spend a lot of time wondering whether the people who write conservative economics polemics, the sort of supply-side screeds that appear from time to time on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, are shamelessly dishonest or just not particularly bright. Fortunately, sometimes the authors make that determination for us. There are times when the particular claim being made is so far beyond the pale that no one capable of stringing together two sentences could honestly believe it. (I'm thinking here of articles attributing the late 90's economic boom to the Reagan tax cuts of the early 80's, among others.)

By: Arianna Huffington  

Gather 'round little ones. It's story time. Today's is a scary one. It's about a president utterly lacking in imagination. It's called "The Very Uncurious President".

"Once upon a time there was the curious case of a man who was given the entire world and yet had no curiosity about it. Then he became president. He was the leader of the world, but nothing in it seemed to interest him. For instance, whenever he visited a class of school children he would always, always, always read the same book. No matter how far he traveled or how old his listeners, he never deviated from the tried and true. In fact, he was so reluctant to try another tale, his loyal retainers would sometimes clear the room of all other books, leaving only the president's favorite around. That way, George would never see a book that might make him angry or upset or confused."

By: David E. Sanger  

President Bush said today that there was a benefit to the government's fast-dwindling surplus, declaring that it will create "a fiscal straitjacket for Congress". He said that was "incredibly positive news" because it would halt the growth of the federal government.

"I'd like to say I'm glad to be here, but I'm under oath."

- Harold Ickes

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."

- Frederick Douglass

By: Marie Cocco  

The 90's unofficially ended yesterday.

The proclamation came in a White House budget document that shows, at bottom, the economy is a mess and no one in the administration has any plan for it. The chosen course of action is to paper it over and hope for the best.

By: Dave Zweifel  

When George and Laura Bush's teenage daughters, Jenna and Barbara, got into trouble for underage drinking and fake IDs, the White House spinmeisters told us, first, that it was no big deal and, besides, the young women were being singled out for harsher-than-normal treatment because they are the president's kids.

That, according to former Texas ag commissioner Jim Hightower, is a bunch of bunk.

They were singled out all right, Hightower writes in the most recent issue of his little newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown, but singled out for lenient treatment, not the other way around as the Bush administration would like Americans to believe.

By: William Spain  

In a case with implications for investigative journalism in the Internet age, a Canadian mining company has successfully used British libel law to shut down part of a U.S.-based Web site.

The case, which pits Barrick Gold, Barrick Goldstrike Mines and their chairman, Peter Munk, against Guardian Newspapers Ltd., was settled Tuesday with Barrick and Munk winning an apology and monetary damages from the Guardian - as well as the deletion of a story from a U.S.-based Web site.

Full Article or Local Copy
plus...
the Deleted Story!

"Okay brain, you don't like me and I don't like you, but lets get through this and I'll get back to killing you with beer."

- Homer Simpson

By: Clark Maxwell  

If one was to judge by the idea of America that is expressed in its founding documents, namely, the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, it is not hard to see that we have reached the apex of progressive development and are now in steady decline. On all fronts, socially, politically and culturally, we have seen debasements that no honest observer can deny exist, but the focus of discussions have become one of fixing blame in order to obscure what is really going on.

"Prohibition...goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

- Abraham Lincoln

By: Bob Herbert  

White power music is a growing phenomenon. Hammerfest 2000 didn't get a lot of news coverage, but it was the most successful white power concert in the U.S. last year. It was held in October and drew racist skinheads galore to the town of Bremen, Ga., which has a population of 4,500 and is about 50 miles west of Atlanta.

"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it."

- President Weak & Stupid

Editorial from:  

As environmental issues come to the forefront of the national debate, President Bush is filling cabinet posts crucial to environmental policy with longtime critics of the laws they are now sworn to uphold.

"My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the - in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen."

- President Weak & Stupid, Crawford, Texas, August 13, 2001

Speaking about Republicans:

"National Missile Defense is the most expensive possible response to the least likely threat we face."

- Sen. Tom Daschle

"I'm here in my office early in the morning because I want to be, not because I have to be. The president, ...it turns out, ...if he doesn't want to be here, he doesn't have to be here. Everybody else kind of, you know, shows up where he shows up."

- President Weak & Stupid, finding out he's actually in charge of which hours he works!

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