By: Marianne Means  

Either White House press secretary Ari Fleischer needs a lesson in American history or he thinks we know so little about our national past that we would buy a blatant political spin that disparages the Founding Fathers.

Incredibly, Fleischer recently defended the White House insistence on keeping the names of the participants in Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force a secret by claiming that the precedent for such arrogant behavior was set by the drafters of the Constitution.

"Goddammit! The world is just filling up with more and more idiots! And the computer is giving them access to the world! They're spreading their stupidity! At least they were contained before - now they're on the loose everywhere!"

- Harlan Ellison, in The Onion

By: Simon Tisdall  

European and international reaction to George Bush's "axis of evil" state of the union address has ranged from unenthusiastic to downright hostile. Although the U.S. administration, and many Americans, may not be particularly worried about that, it spells the end of the September 11 international consensus and could produce big problems down the road - at home and abroad.

Judging by what Mr Bush said, and by the statements of other leading official such as the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the deputy Pentagon chief, Paul Wolfowitz, America's post-Afghanistan defence and security policy will have three main prongs.

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson  

Putsch's first budget is out, and if you need any evidence that Putsch and his junta are a bunch of mean, greedy, short-sighted, stupid bastards, the proof is all there in black and white.

Nine billion cut from highway spending. The sort of people propping up the junta don't use the highways much, and see no reason to spend their hard-stolen dollars on a bunch of plebes who were too stupid to stop them from stealing the government. Survival of the fittest. Fix your own damn potholes, chumps. Oh, and by the way, kiss Amtrak goodbye. It's one thing to give billions to the airlines, which Putsch's rich buddies use. Only common people use trains.

Twenty five percent cut in payroll taxes. Payroll taxes paid by employers, not employees...

By: Helen Thomas  

President Bush used his State of the Union address and some other recent speeches to flex the nation's military muscle and threaten several nations, designated as the "axis of evil".

Rarely has the world heard a more belligerent American president. His tone and substance have dismayed our allies as much as the targets he cites - Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

:	How many hippies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
:	Two, but they have to be really small and able to breathe in a vaccum.

"It [the Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."

- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) "Mark Twain"

"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are outgrowing."

- Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

By: Paul Krugman  

To place the stiffing of New York in context, you need to realize that when it comes to tax cuts and military spending, the Bush administration's budget is an exercise in unrestrained self-indulgence. There is a lot of stirring rhetoric, warning the nation that this is a time of war, in which everyone must make sacrifices - but this austerity does not extend to the wealthiest few percent of the population, who will not only get the lion's share of the future tax cuts already written into law, but would get most of the additional $600 billion in tax cuts the administration now proposes. (Actually it's about $1 trillion without the accounting tricks, but who's counting?)

And while there is much talk of hard choices, the administration seems loath to make any choices at all when it comes to defense spending. Does a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group have a 70-ton artillery piece that made sense, if it ever did, only in the cold-war era? We'll buy it. Do two competing contractors offer advanced fighters designed to fight a nonexistent next generation of MIG's? We'll take both.

But there are big cuts elsewhere, and big diversions of resources that will force future cuts. You know about the diversion of the Social Security surplus to cover deficits in the rest of the government - deficits that would be much smaller if the administration would forgo some of those tax cuts, and would vanish if it also exercised some restraint in its weapons purchases. But did you know that the administration has budgeted $300 billion less for Medicare than the Congressional Budget Office says is needed to maintain current benefits - never mind add-ons like prescription drug insurance? It's unclear whether the administration actually intends to deny medical care to retirees, or is simply trying to hide the sheer scale of the looming fiscal disaster.

By: Kirstin Downey  

Across Houston, Enron employees watched former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling's congressional testimony on television, turning incredulous, angry and then sarcastic by turns, as a man they knew as savvy and detail-oriented pleaded memory failure and ignorance about critical financial transactions at the now-collapsed energy giant.

Editorial from:  

With its glossy book format and American flag on the cover, President Bush's $2.1-trillion budget proposal couldn't be better packaged. But its looks aren't fooling anyone who can add. A national poll in Tuesday's Times has a very clear message for Bush: A wide majority of Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans, say they support delaying tax cuts rather than tapping Social Security funds to pay for Bush's extravaganza.

No one questions the need to run a deficit during a recession and war. But excess spending should be targeted, productive and temporary. The Bush plan, requesting $590 billion in additional tax cuts and $550 billion in new military spending over the next decade, is none of these. Some of the heavy weaponry, such as the Crusader howitzer, that the administration wants, makes no sense for fighting terrorism. Nor does speeding up tax cuts or piling on personal and corporate write-offs.

By: Cragg Hines  

Where do you start to dissect the tale of John Ashcroft's Justice Department draping over two semi-nude statues in its headquarters building?

Unfortunately, you can start at any point in the sorry story and end up with the same conclusion: Ashcroft almost certainly should not have any decision-making role in the display of art in public places and (this is not new) definitely should not be the nation's principal law-enforcement officer.

By: Sam Parry  

George W. Bush is trying to rewrite the history of his and his family's relationship with Enron Corp.'s disgraced former chairman Kenneth Lay. So far, Bush has enjoyed fairly good success as the U.S. news media has largely accepted the White House spin.

But the reality, as established by a wealth of historical record and recent disclosures, is that Lay and Enron were instrumental in Bush's rise to power - and Bush played an important behind-the-scenes role in advancing Enron's aggressive deregulation agenda, which helped the energy trader ascend to its lofty perch as the seventh-biggest U.S. company.

From:  

Make sure you have a box of tissues handy, because this week the Top 10 Conservative Idiots starts off with the Ken and Linda Lay's heartwrenching tale of personal financial tragedy. It's curtains for John Ashcroft (2), who is protecting the nation's C-SPAN junkies from sexual perversion. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush (3) illustrates the wisdom of compassionate conservative child-rearing, Ari Fleischer (4) engages in a little historical revisionism, and Anthony Kennedy (5) suddenly discovers the rule of law. And looking forward to the upcoming festivities in Salt Lake City, we can all be thankful for Generation Life (10) who teach all of us a lesson about the Olympic Spirit.

"Whenever there's a Bush in the White House, many people die, and the rest of us are threatened. I just didn't think it would happen quite so quickly."

- Jello Biafra, in the Progressive

From:  

In George W. Bush's first year in office he:

By: Jim Washburn  

Move over, Lincoln - we'd like to blast Ronald Reagan's features onto Mount Rushmore. Erect a monument to him in every county. Engrave him on the $10 bill. Make a book extolling his character and achievements mandatory reading for schoolkids.

He saved us from the Red Threat and from Jimmy Carter. He brought back morning in America. He is America. With a flick of his mighty pen, he turned ketchup into a vegetable. All hail Ronald Reagan!

Jesus, can't we just send him a "Best Wishes" card and leave it at that?

"Putting Enron in charge of America's energy policy is like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank."

- Mark Shields, on Capital Gang

By: Barton Gellman  

Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in interviews with advisers and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the commitment of comparably ambitious means. In deliberations and successive drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive approved by Bush's second-ranking advisers on Aug. 13, the declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to "permanently eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.

Cabinet-rank policymakers, or principals, took up the new strategy for the first time on Sept. 4. It called for phased escalation of pressure against Taliban leaders to present them with an unavoidable choice - disgorge al Qaeda or face removal from power.

The directive asked the CIA and the Pentagon to produce options involving force - covert and overt - but it deferred decisions on their use. It had not reached Bush's desk by Sept. 11, and on that day its multiyear plan of single steps became a race to start the war on every front at once.

GOP Leaders: Invoking Executive Privilege a Mistake

From:  

Two Republican congressional leaders said Sunday (3/22/98) that President Bill Clinton's intention to invoke executive privilege in independent counsel Ken Starr's probe is a mistake.

"Surely they understand it's not going to be well-received", Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told NBC's Meet the Press. "I think it will damage [their] credibility. It looks like they are hiding something."

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, appearing on CNN's Late Edition, agreed, saying the prospect of executive privilege "gravely concerned" him.

"What have they got to hide if they're asking for executive privilege? Executive privilege is reserved for national security issues, not for personal conduct", the Texas Republican said. "The consequences that are coming out of this will be permanent consequences in denigrating the office of the presidency."

By: Bridget Gibson & James G. Wilson  

Public opinion of Bill Clinton and his extended family was shaped largely by tales of their private lives. The conservative media hammered away mercilessly at them with every rumor, innuendo and outright lie imaginable. Now we are supposed to turn the other cheek and let George W. Bush and his family rule in peace? We don't think so.

If these questions were appropriate regarding the Clinton family, there is no reason to believe that they are now "inappropriate" regarding the Bush family. To ignore reality will make one delusional and ill-informed. It is important that the behaviors of our nation's leaders be examined closely so that we can be certain that our country is being led by one that is capable of leading.

By: Robert Parry  

George W. Bush is back on the road, flattering the nation's "heartland" as a place where people appreciate the values of "family and faith, of personal responsibility and hard work". The implicit message is that Bush still finds those values lacking in coastal cities, despite the events of Sept. 11.

By: Gene Lyons  

In the commercial, all heartwarming front porches and grampaw and grammaw and cute kids and leafy country roads and pickup trucks, Hutchinson reminds us about something called the "Social Security Benefits Guarantee Act". Thanks to Sen. Tim, old folks can rest easy. Their payroll taxes won't be squandered on tax refunds for George W. Bush's campaign contributors. No yachts, no second homes in Aspen. at grampaw and grammaw's expense, no sir. Sen. Tim has done rode to the rescue.

An innocent bystander might wonder if Hutchinson was fixing to run against Pryor in the Democratic primary. Except, get this, there's no such law as the "Social Security Benefits Guarantee Act". It exists purely as a figment of his imagination. Hutchinson introduced it as SB 806 on May 1, 2001. With no co-sponsors in either party, it's defunct - an election-year shuttlecock batted into the air to fall harmlessly to the ground. Even if enacted, John Brummett pointed out in the Arkansas Times, the government would send you a meaningless IOU. Period.

Then there's Asa, the drug warrior. So far his biggest accomplishment has been a fiat banning hempseed oil from potato chips because it's derived from the same species of plant as marijuana. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. Nor that Asa's boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, has ordered $8000 drapes to hide a naked female breast on an art deco statue at the Justice Department. Wouldn't a WonderBra be cheaper?

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