By: Lisa Kadonaga  

This past year, I've been one of the minority of observers who didn't think the man was a total moron. Incurious, definitely - lazy, it sure looks that way - a twit, I'm not going to argue there. But it's possible to have normal or even above-normal intelligence, and be all of those things and more. If the coverage is anything to go by, I'm also part of an even-smaller minority who believe that Mr. Bush is pretty much the same person he always was - and that the total package is not exactly awe-inspiring.

By: Bridget Gibson  

George W. Bush has sunk to a level lower than that of any president in history. He's always been a pimp for corporate profits and a whore for special interest groups, but to stick it in the face of the American people on national TV, to so explicitly demonstrate how deeply in bed he is with specific industries and voter blocks, make his actions that much worse.

"There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid."

- Alexander Hamilton

By: Michael Gabriel  

George W. Bush has sunk to a level lower than that of any president in history. He's always been a pimp for corporate profits and a whore for special interest groups, but to stick it in the face of the American people on national TV, to so explicitly demonstrate how deeply in bed he is with specific industries and voter blocks, make his actions that much worse.

From:  

U.S. consumer confidence fell for a fifth straight month in November as Americans fretted over layoffs and job security, according to a report on Tuesday (11/27/01) that dashed expectations for a rise and suggested the holiday shopping season will be sluggish.

The Conference Board, a New York-based private business research group, said its index of consumer confidence fell to 82.2 in November, its lowest level in more than seven years, compared with a downwardly revised 85.3 in October.

Economists and policy-makers closely monitor consumer confidence because it can give hints about future consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. So far, spending has remained resilient in the face of what was dubbed this week as an official recession.

By: Richard Cohen  

Given the current situation, we may all have to breathe a bit more shallowly of the bracing air of freedom. But the new procedures would be less troubling if we had a president who had shown himself to be commendably suspicious of police power and who appreciated that civil liberties do not favor the guilty but protect the innocent. The record shows, however, that he is not the type, that he is tenaciously incurious and jaw-droppingly gullible in his approach to criminal justice matters. Unlike some Texas defense lawyers, our defender is not asleep. He's merely indifferent.

By: Frank Rich  

If the administration were really proud of how it's grabbing "emergency" powers that skirt the law, it wouldn't do so in the dead of night. It wasn't enough for Congress to enhance Mr. Ashcroft's antiterrorist legal arsenal legitimately by passing the U.S.A.-Patriot Act before anyone could read it; now he rewrites more rules without consulting senators or congressmen of either party at all. He abridged by decree the Freedom of Information Act, an essential check on government malfeasance in peace and war alike, and discreetly slipped his new directive allowing eavesdropping on conversations between some lawyers and clients into the Federal Register. He has also refused repeated requests to explain himself before Congressional committees, finally relenting to a nominal appearance in December. At one House briefing, according to Time Magazine, he told congressmen they could call an 800 number if they had any questions about what Justice is up to.

Editorial from:  

The House, however, is unlike the Senate in that a majority can force such a vote [on campaign finance reform]. Of the 218 who must sign the required petition, 210 have done so, and another has said he is willing to be the 218th. That means seven are needed, and there are several times that number - members of both parties - who haven't signed but voted for the bill in the past. They were pleased to be counted as sponsors when it was pretty clear the bill would die in the Senate. Do they withhold their support now that it can pass?

Some Republicans appear to be doing so out of misplaced deference to the speaker, some Democrats because they have found they enjoy the money the bill would ban. The truth is that both groups have turned to jelly when it matters. There is plenty of time for the House to take up the bill even this late in the year. Debate would take no more than a day. The bill otherwise goes over to next year, when further pretexts might be used to deflect it. The time to sign is now.

Executive Order Shows Contempt for Law and What's Right

Editorial from:  

Since passage of the post-Watergate Presidential Records Act of 1978, the official documents produced by presidents and vice presidents have belonged to the American people. President Bush has no right to deprive Americans of the reasonable use of their property.

"George W. Bush was not the choice of a majority of Floridians (or of all Americans). Therefore, to 'restore honor and integrity to the office' he should either resign the presidency, allowing Al Gore to take over immediately, or he should be removed. This would be unprecedented, no doubt. It would likely cause great turmoil too. The country will survive, as it has after other crises, because it is the right thing to do."

- Mark V. Mayfield, in a Gainesville Sun editorial

"America is under attack. I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to. I’m sitting in the midst of a classroom with little kids and I realise I’m the Commander-in-Chief and America’s under attack."

- pResident Weak & Stupid, showing that he really is a 'dimwit'

By: Jon Elliston  

...the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department.

"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material", the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?

"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming in my apartment", she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But they stayed a while - 40 minutes, Brown estimates - and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.

And all because of a poster on her wall.

By: Tim Francis-Wright  

In January 1776, John Adams wrote in his "Thoughts on Government" that he envisioned "no good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men'". He referred to previous thinkers who had considered what was necessary in a republican government. Livy, in Ab urbe condita, described that Rome enjoyed "the authority of her laws supreme over all her citizens" [imperiaque legum potentiora quam hominum peragam]. Later, Adams introduced that phrase into the original draft of the Massachusetts Constitution. Adams knew that one of the failings of the Roman Republic was that it was too easy for the consuls, nominally the executives, to assume dictatorial power.

While the United States Constitution does not contain Adams's words about laws and men, his ideas resonated with those of the other drafters of the Constitution. The checks and balances built into the Constitution were put there specifically to avoid the perils of a monarchy or a theocracy. Recent actions by the Bush administration show a fundamental lack of respect for the tradition in the United States of trusting in the Constitution and the laws that derive from it. By contrast, the members of the Bush cabinet expect the American public to trust their judgment. They would prefer that American be a nation of men, and not laws.

"Never be irreplaceable. If you can't be fired, then you can't be promoted."

- unknown

By: Joanne Kenen  

Attorney General John Ashcroft will face a tough grilling from lawmakers in coming weeks over President Bush's proposal to create secret military tribunals and employ other "ad hoc, outside the justice system methods" to fighting terrorism, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said on Sunday.

Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said lawmakers in both parties were upset with Ashcroft, who won sweeping new powers to fight terrorism in post-Sept. 11 legislation and has since announced other controversial measures such as monitoring conversations between suspects and defense attorneys and interviewing thousands of young men from the Middle East.

By: Paul Winkelmann  

The Florida ballot count is in and, just as was the case a year ago, Gore won.

But Bush's surrogate liar, Ari Fleisher, insists that everybody has gotten over the election (if five Supreme Court Justices count as an election) fiasco that occurred barely a year ago. Like a broken record, he repeats over and over again that "America has moved on". Is Ari that out of touch? Has he been hiding in the same cave as Osama bin Laden?

By: Mark Weber  

To me the saddest commentary on our government's response to the Sept. 11 tragedy is the repeated invocations of God's blessings and the insistent appeals to patriotism to justify actions that demean our spiritual integrity and our democratic ideals.

By: R. B. Ham  

Dear American reader, it is past time to march on Washington demanding answers and evidence.

Now is the time to stop the Bush regime from covering up and rewriting the truth of what actually happened on 9-11, who actually planned and executed it and who stood to benefit from it.

Who is benefitting now?

If you don't act now, there may never be another chance.

If you don't act now, it may take another revolution to remove the yoke of totalitarianism that threatens not only the citizens of the United States, but the entire world.

By: Andrew Tobias

Shortly after becoming Attorney General, John Ashcroft was headed abroad. An advance team showed up at the American embassy in the Hague to check out the digs, saw cats in residence, and got nervous. They were worried there might be a calico cat. No, they were told, no calicos. Visible relief. Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the devil. (The advance team also spied a statue of a naked woman in the courtyard and discussed the possibility of its being covered for the visit, though that request was not ultimately made.)

I reveal this tidbit not to belittle John Ashcroft’s faith or his prudishness, which are his own business, but because he has begun to meddle with my business.

In the middle of the war on terrorism, he has somehow found time to move to overturn Oregon's twice-passed referendum on assisted suicide, to assure that an Oregonian in his final days should be forced to agonize as God intended.

By: Robert Scheer  

Sadly, the old slander that a liberal is someone who has never been mugged is turning out to be true. The Sept. 11 attacks were so close to the center of the intelligentsia's power and consciousness that they have propelled many civil libertarians to abandon their long-held principles.

Action Alert

We are not powerless. We can do something to publicly show our OUTRAGE at the current unelected, fraudulent, unmercifull, ignorant, warmongering, constitution shreding administration...

    
Tie a Yellow Ribbon! 

By: Matilda Lipscomb  

Many, many years ago when I was still a child, there was a saying: "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong." In those days, shortly after World War I, fifty million Frenchmen was the whole population of France. I can't even remember to what this referred, but the point was... PIPE DOWN... NOBODY AGREES WITH YOU!!!

Stolen from:  

Despite all the Bush Administration's efforts to cover-up, enough information has leaked out so that it can now be reported why the trials of Bin Laden and the Taliban cannot be seen by the American People.

Russia has always wanted a pipeline through Afganistan. In their first meeting, Bush agreed to help Putin build it (big profits for Haliburton) and they became good friends.

The Bush Administration attempted to negotiate the rights from the Taliban, giving them money and support, even meeting with Bin Laden in his Hospital room in Germany. When they refused, the decision was made to go to war and eliminate them.

Even though they knew where to find him and a standing order to capture or kill Bin Laden had been signed by Clinton, the Bush Administration did not want to do it because they needed him as an excuse for the war with the Taliban. With the American media scratching their heads wondering how Bin Laden could have been so stupid as to attack the World Trade Center (knowing full well how America would respond), it is now clear that Bin Laden knew that a war against him would be starting any day and, like the Japanese sixty years ago, got off the first blow while he still could. Once the War had started the attack on the WTC would not have been possible.

Bush cannot afford to have Taliban leaders get on the witness stand and tell this story in front of the American people, ergo the Secret Military Tribunals. All the witnesses will be dead before they have a chance to speak.

would like to see Robert Parry look into this.

By: Eric R. Theiner  

Here's what happened - and if you put all the pieces that the (mostly foreign) press has assembled in perspective, it's hard to miss. Osama bin Laden's family had close ties to the Bushes to begin with. Just by playing in the same circles, they associated as businessmen often do. When OBL headed to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, the Bushes raised their eyebrows and thought, "there's a guy you could get to like".

Even without Bush involvement, OBL's group would have been armed by the CIA, but they probably used the buddy card to get special deals and treatment to aid in their fight against the Soviets. After it was pretty much all over, Bush buddied up a little more and said to OBL, "Hey, that was fun. Let's work together on some more deals to net power and money".

OBL's people killed soldiers in Somalia in an attempt to embarrass Clinton just like the Iranians held onto the hostages until Reagan was sworn in. It wasn't Clinton's operation, but it was on Clinton's watch and that was good enough. It was around that time that "Tim Osman" visited a number of Bush's oil buddies, wasn't it? Funny how a terrorist is on such good terms with the American oil industry at the same time that his organization is killing our troops. (My timing may be a little skewed, but I find it hard to believe that attitudes would change that much on either side over a year or two.)

"One of the greatest tragedies in human history was the hijacking of morality by religion."

- Arthur C. Clarke

By: Alan M. Dershowitz  

A long-term resident of the United States who President Bush believes may have aided a terrorist can now be tried in secret by a military commission and be sentenced to death on the basis of hearsay and rumor with no appeal to any civilian court, even the Supreme Court. This is the upshot of the "military order" issued by Bush on November 13, 2001. And that is not all. Noncitizens suspected of membership in Al Qaeda or of aiming "to cause injury to or adverse effects on the United States" can be rounded up and "detained at an appropriate location" for an indefinite time without access to the courts.

This is the kind of "military justice" now in effect for our alleged enemies both foreign and domestic. No wonder so many experts on wartime tribunals believe that "military justice is to justice as military music is to music". The role of the military is to win wars, to protect citizens, and to follow the orders of the commander in chief. Under our constitutional system of civilian control over the military, it is not the role of military subordinates to question and challenge determinations made by the president, and in every case coming before a military commission pursuant to this new order, the president will have already "determined" that there is reason to believe that the suspect is a terrorist. Command influence over these military tribunals will be inevitable.

By: Frederick H. Winterberg III  

In the wake of September 11, the government has, with predictable zeal, gone after the very things that I cherish about my country and that make is a special place to live. Our rights are flying out the window at an alarming pace. My privacy can be invaded, my home searched without reason, the environment and nature are being bulldozed in the name of profits and oil. I could even be jailed for writing this piece.

Yet I am still a patriot.

By: Tim Wise  

Imagine the following. You live in a community that has been experiencing a serious upsurge in crime. The possibility of being victimized is an ever-present reality, and previous attempts to solve the crime problem in the neighborhood have failed. Frustrated by this fact, local officials announce that beginning tomorrow, police will have permission to shoot anyone they suspect of criminal activity, on sight. No questions, and no arrest necessary. No need to even present proof of guilt to a magistrate - mere suspicion or circumstantial evidence will do. Sure, some innocent people might be killed, but if so, that would be an accident. Hopefully, say the local officials, this response will deter criminals and return the neighborhood to safety.

By: Jesse Jackson Jr.  

The 2000 presidential election, with more than 105 million votes cast, involved: five weeks of political and legal maneuvering; what many view as an arbitrarily imposed Supreme Court constitutional crisis; and a final five-to-four ruling by ideologically driven conservative Justices on the Supreme Court who essentially selected their favored candidate President of the United States. The final media consortium report confirms this. The two parties' political and legal tactics aside, if genuine democracy had prevailed and all the votes had been counted, Al Gore would have been narrowly elected President.

The United States advocates for democracy around the world. We sometimes even link economic or military assistance to the establishment of democracy in a foreign land. Can you imagine the American people and our government's response to a country that said it had established democracy and conducted a democratic election, but in a controversy over ballots could not provide us with official election results? Yet that is exactly the state of American democracy. There are no "official" results in our presidential campaigns, and the various sources of "unofficial" results vary by as much as 200,000 votes. Given the margin of victory claimed by Bush in Florida (537 votes), and Gore nationally (539,000 votes), a 200,000 variation in national vote totals should be of major concern.

By: Al Vick  

...Americans need to better balance their rightful desire to punish those who planned September's despicable acts against innocent people, with the continuance of the rule of law. If we set legal precedents that undermine constitutional safeguards against basic human rights, we all will be less free.

Secondly, it is important that all citizens of the United States be vigilant in protecting their Bill of Rights; for while these rights might sometimes be a stumbling block for over-zealous law enforcement officials, they are the only protection we have against potential dictators and those who would oppress us. If we cannot as a people honor the documents that guarantee the continuance of our inalienable rights, and if we no longer have the heart or the courage to hold our leaders accountable when they violate those rights, then we will surely tumble into tyranny; no matter what noble cause those freedoms are being cast aside for.

Finally, it's important not to allow ourselves to be stripped of our rights by the rhetoric and propaganda that is constantly bombarding us. If we listen to the mainstream media and government officials, we will hear them telling us that it is unpatriotic to question our government's domestic and foreign policy in this time of crises. In reality, nothing can be further than the truth. If we believe in the concept that we have a government of, by, and for the people, then it is our right to make sure that our country follows a moral course and continues to be a beacon of freedom for the world to admire and imitate.

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