By: Arianna Huffington  

With the stench of Enron growing more acrid each day, you'd think the last thing President Bush would want is to be seen toadying to another deep-pocketed energy giant.

Well, you'd be wrong.

In a shameless handout to a poor-little-me corporate mendicant, the President wants to spend close to $100 million to help Occidental Petroleum protect an oil pipeline unwisely built in war-torn Colombia.

For years, in a seedy little deal worthy of a Graham Greene novel, the oil company has been paying the Colombian army to protect its interests, forking over $1 for every barrel of oil produced. In fact, one out of every four Colombian soldiers in the field is assigned to looking after Occidental's assets. The trouble is, they aren't doing a very good job.

Colombia's guerrilla forces, which don't look too kindly on foreign multinationals in their midst, have made a habit of blowing up the pipeline. Last year alone, it was bombed 170 times and was out of commission for 266 days, putting a definite downward drag on Occidental's profits.

So here comes President Bush riding to Oxy's rescue with Super Huey helicopters and U.S. Special Forces to train a Colombian Army brigade to protect the pipeline. When it comes to Social Security, Bush can't wait to privatize, but when it comes to corporate security, he can't wait to "publicatize".

By: Bardo  

Po' "Dubya" wants to make up the rules as he goes along. If he doesn't get to, he might just take his ball and go home. What these dummies never seem to think of is that the same argument could be made about the Constitution. Are we to rewrite the Constitution just because the founding fathers didn't anticipate Bush's definition of war?

Of course, Bush didn't think of this when Karl Rove and Karen Hughes decided that calling terrorism a "war" made for good media and politics at home. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were crimes not war, from the begining. Why give a rag tag band of criminals like al Qadea the status of elevating their actions to war? Nobody called it "war" when Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building. The media and the Bush crowd just had to 'Wag the Dog'. With Clinton and Condit gone they just had to have something sexy to fill up all those news shows. So "America At War" fills the TV screens for months. But, war implies that prisoners of that war be POW's.

I seem to remember Poppy Bush having the same POW problem with Noreiga. The fact is that the Bush people want to use rhetoric in ways that they feel are politically beneficial without giving any thought to the consequences. Note the childlike, religious fundamentalist simplicity of calling anybody you dislike "evil" without regard to the consequences. Then later when their rhetoric becomes a problem they want to rewrite the rules. America needs to be run by adults not children.

"My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific."

- pResident Weak and Stupid, addressing the Japanese Parlament

Will the Real 'Bozo' Please Stand Up!

Mr. 'A'

Mr. 'B'

Mr. 'C'

Two of these individuals were born wealthy, were wild and reckless as young men, changed their ways, and came to believe that Gawd has given them a mission: to vanquish the 'evil ones' and rescue mankind from this 'evil', even if they have to destroy the world to accomplish their goal (and let Gawd sort it out afterwards).

Two of these individuals are wealthy moronic 'clowns', who wear makeup when they're on TV (one to hide his red nose - the other to create it).

Only one of them is described in both sets. He is a real 'Bozo' (and a real 'Boozo' as well).

Can you guess which one?

By: Carlos Kelly  

The words "devaluation" and "deflation" may both begin with the letter "D", end in the letter "N" and share other letters in "E", "L", "A", "T", "I" and "O" but they are two completely different words with completely different meanings.

Certainly enough difference in their meanings to send the Yen plummeting for a short while last Monday after Dubya's latest, but certainly not last, verbal gaffe.

This time it was the Japanese currency that suffered from Bush's laziness and stupidity, but what will the next flub cause? The beginning of World War 3?

From:  

How ironic. Enron gets lawmakers to take a stable, if inefficient, electricity market and render it unstable by deregulating it. Then Enron uses the very instability it created to force power producers and consumers to deal with it instead of dealing directly with each other. In this manner, Enron became the energy industry's biggest middle-man. By dealing in energy futures, Enron was neither producing nor consuming electricity. They were inserting themselves in the middle of a transaction and keeping a nice profit. Energy producers are making less, energy consumers are paying more (Can I have an "Amen" California?), and Enron laughs all the way to the bank. This interference with energy transactions accounted for 90% of Enron's earnings in 2000. There was even a faction at Enron that wanted to dump all of Enron's "hard assets" (the parts of Enron that actually did something useful, like produce electricity or transport natural gas) and concentrate entirely on its "middle-man" business.

Corruption aside, I think we Americans need to decide whether we want to allow this sort of "business" to operate in our country. We need national policy that promotes companies that add something to the economy, rather than take something away. Republicans have promoted the virtue of hard work to the idle poor. We need to promote it to our nation's corporations as well. My advice to the next Enron: If you want to get rich, we would prefer that you provide a new product or useful service, rather than simply thinking up new ways to pick our pockets.

By: Gene Lyons  

Despite endless iterations of the GOP party line that Enron is a business, not a political scandal, the reality is otherwise. Whether or not Bush administration functionaries broke the law is almost beside the point. By the time Enron executives started begging cabinet members for help, the company was so deeply entwined with the White House it was hard to tell where it ended and the Bush administration began. No, the real scandal is what's legal, and what Enron's collapse reveals about GOP willingness to sacrifice its core constituency of small business and individual investors to ruthless corporate buccaneers.

Having learned nothing from the fiscal meltdown caused by "deregulation" of savings and loan banks twenty years ago, supposedly conservative Republican ideologues continue to espouse what's actually a form of radical corporate utopianism. Based upon a near-religious faith in the sacramental power of money, GOP dogma holds that hyper-rich corporate executives and board members are free of what traditional theology calls original sin, and above temptation.

Classic conservatism mistrusts concentrations of power on the grounds that human nature is inherently prone to corruption...

By: Joe Conason  

Mr. Cheney further vowed that the Bush administration would veto "any legislation... that is not based on sound science and can't be done safely", and that he and Mr. Bush would "support the E.P.A. setting tough standards for health and the environment before anybody does anything" at Yucca Mountain".

As of Feb. 16, 2002, those guarantees had expired; that's when President Bush announced his support for an Energy Department plan to move ahead with the Yucca Mountain project. Citing "two decades of sound science" that neither he nor his running mate mentioned two years ago - when Nevada's four electoral votes still could have gone either way - Mr. Bush ratified the recommendation of his Energy Secretary, Spencer Abraham. That moved Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid to call Mr. Bush "a liar".

Whatever one may think about the possible perils to be inflicted on Nevadans and the gaming industry, or the broader merits of nuclear energy, the Bush decision on Yucca Mountain again raises the question of the corporate domination of public policy, and especially energy policy, in this White House. Nevadans must wonder - as everyone now does in the era of Enron - whether corporate lobbyists and campaign donors somehow fixed the friendly politicians who once claimed to be their advocates.

Editorial from:  

When Mr. Lay turned 55, his friend George sent the Enron chief this note: "Wow! That is really old. It's a good thing your wife is so young and beautiful." That was speech, too.

The lobbying letters Mr. Lay sent the Texas governor over the years likewise were filled with speech. "Electric customer choice is gaining momentum across the country", Mr. Lay wrote in one that urged deregulation in Texas, which the state adopted. Mr. Lay sent dozens of such letters. If speech were money, George W. Bush could have run a pretty full campaign using just the Lay missives. Instead, Mr. Lay and Enron associates gave Mr. Bush $312,000 for his two gubernatorial campaigns and $113,800 for his presidential bid. In all, the company gave Republicans $426,500 in the 2000 campaign.

By: Michael Moore  

Today is, frankly, a day I thought I would never see. It is the day my book goes on sale to the public. That should be a simple event, as it happens every day with dozens of books that find their way to the bookstores of America.

But eight weeks ago it appeared as if this might never happen for my book, Stupid White Men. In those dark December days, as I was told that "changes had to be made", I was left to wonder if the 50,000 copies that had already been printed were well on their way to some big shredder in Pennsylvania. That was the option I was given - rewrite the book and "tone down your dissent", or face the prospect of your book being "pulped".

I refused to change a word and the publisher backed down. And thus, today, you are able to read my book, uncensored. What an odd thing to say in a free society! "We have decided that you can now read Mike's book!" I have had a small taste of the New Order in which we now live, and, folks, I gotta say, I don't like it one bit. The only good thing to come out of it is that they made a big mistake trying to silence the wrong guy.

Predator

The name of a 'smart', remotely controlled 'UAV' for surveillance/targeting of enemy troops on the battlefield - currently in use in Afganistan.

Also the name of a 'sci-fi action movie' starring:

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Who also starred in another 'sci-fi action movie': Terminator, about smart machines taking over the world. Smart machines like the Predator above? Hmmm...

What's Arnie know that us 'common folk' don't? (After all, he is a Repugnacan.)

So... if you see one of these 'Darth Vader' helmeted thingies over YOUR head: "Duck'n Cover!" It's what we were told by the 'spin machine' to do if A-bombs were falling (back in the 50's).

By: Louis Silverstein  

I would imagine that in the eyes of children, adults are quite weird. The big people in power approve of children seeing guns everywhere - in history textbooks, in the mass media, on the streets, in public buildings, and on public statues, but for children to view a naked breast is morally abhorrent.

Yes, children of America, see, learn about, esteem, and play with guns, but don't view or touch your bodies - at least not those "dirty parts", because we all know that's what led Adam and Eve astray, an act of betrayal and sin that we are still paying for, according to the likes of John Ashcroft and William Bennett, God's chosen cultural warriors.

As Walt Kelly's Pogo often reminded us: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

By: Peter Schrag  

During the recession of the early 1990's, California Gov. Pete Wilson relentlessly attacked President Clinton's administration for failing to pay its share of the state's costs for services to illegal immigrants. Eventually, he succeeded in getting Congress and the White House to pass SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which last year provided California $237 million to help pay for some 25,000 illegal aliens in California's prisons. That's 42% of the entire SCAAP program.

Now President Bush plans to kill it. In his new budget, SCAAP gets the ax. It's a strange move for an administration that ranks homeland security among its chief priorities in the post-Sept. 11 era.

But it's hardly surprising. For this administration, stiffing California has become almost reflexive. From its treatment of California during last year's energy crisis to NASA's announcement early this month that it will move all modification work on the space shuttle from Palmdale to Florida, at a cost of some 300 high-wage California jobs, the administration seems to be making California pay for its overwhelming support for Al Gore in the 2000 election.

Friends of the first President Bush are profiting handsomely off the current president's pumped-up defense budget.

By: Robert Scheer  

Most former presidents putter around their presidential libraries, getting in a game of golf or two while they shuffle papers for their memoirs. Then there's Jimmy Carter, trying to atone for sins he didn't commit in office by becoming a carpenter for the poor, and poor Bill Clinton who still has to prove to right-wing talk show nuts and their spokespersons in Congress that his wife didn't steal the White House silverware.

Nothing like that for George, who has returned to the spirit of his early days, when he used the connections of his family name to strike it rich in the Texas oil fields. This time, the big prize lies in the defense budget. With his son the President defending the biggest military buildup since the darkest days of the Cold War by pointing to the grim work of Saudi-sponsored terrorists, no weapons system is too gaudy or implausible to be embraced with bipartisan fervor.

By: Maureen Dowd  

We're the white hats, but we're planning a "black" propaganda campaign against the axis - and even the allies.

People at the Defense Department and elsewhere are cringing at the news that the Pentagon's shadowy new Office of Strategic Influence is plotting to plant deliberately false stories in the foreign press, with both feral and friendly nations.

Covert disinformation activities have always been the province of the C.I.A. But Brig. Gen. Simon Worden, the head of the O.S.I., envisions a mission of psychological operations, or psyops, that "goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white", as a senior Pentagon official told the Times.

By: Craig Mazer  

What is wrong with Americans? GW has a tremendous approval rating. Yet, the man continues to do things that should make America cringe, both related to terrorism and otherwise. It seems that during a time of war, a friend of mine said quite correctly, we should be even more critical of our government. Instead, Americans are patting Dubya on the back.

Let's review. We go to war. Our economy sinks. It's easily blamed on the terrorist attacks, but the fact of the matter is that our economy was already doing poorly; Dubya's tax cut definitely didn't help and almost certainly hurt our economic situation. But, media and Washington spins put the blame squarely on 9/11 and Americans nod their heads and go back to praising Bush. Then in January 2002, Bush says that "over his dead body" will he scale back those tax cuts. As journalism Robert Scheer eloquently put it: "The president cannot say that 'over my dead body' will he forget his pledge to assist seniors with prescription medical costs, save Social Security and revive public education, when in fact his tax cut has made it impossible to deliver on any such promises."

Sadly, Bush's campaign lies are not limited to those above. Numerous, they also include his blocking regulations meant to make it easier for sick coal miners to receive black lung benefits and his decision to not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants, despite the fact that he promised support for both while campaigning.

By Dr. Erik Steele  

Q: What weighs four pounds and is going to hurt about 100 million people?

A: President George W. Bush's proposed 2003 federal budget.

The 2003 federal budget proposed by President George Bush should look like different things to different people, none of them good for the health of most of us.

"Civilized people - Muslims, Christians and Jews - all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom - a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God."

- religiously insane 'Crisco' John Ashcroft, in prepared remarks released by the Justice Department

"The era of the swaggering capitalist is over. The era of the reasonable capitalist and responsible government is beginning anew. Or so we have to hope, and demand."

- E. J. Dionne Jr., in the Washington Post

By: Peronet Despeignes  

Where many Americans focus on the boom, the White House appears preoccupied with what it calls bloat and waste.

Where others see a productivity miracle, Bush economists see room for improvement and insurance.

It is an impression reinforced by their first annual Economic Report of the President, released earlier this month. Economic reports, like the White House economists who write them, come and go, but the 2002 report merits special attention from anyone who wants a better understanding of the economic philosophy guiding much of this administration - the most market-oriented since the Reagan years.

The trend of American companies avoiding taxes 'offshore'.

By: Molly Ivans  

In response to President George W. Bush's call to all Americans to give service to our country, some are enlisting in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Senior Corps or the armed services. Others have begun putting in their suggested 4,000 hours at a variety of charitable endeavors, through everything from the volunteer fire department to mentoring programs. And still other Americans are moving their companies to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands to avoid paying taxes. Isn't that special?

The New York Times reports a "megatrend" among American companies to incorporate in Bermuda in order to sharply reduce their taxes. Assorted financial advisers are encouraging these "moves", which involve nothing more than setting up a mail drop and paying a few fees. It's not necessary to have an office or to hold meetings there. One tax partner with Ernst & Young did cite patriotism as "the only potentially troubling issue", according to the Times, but concluded that profits trump patriotism. "We are working through a lot of companies who feel that it is [the right time to move offshore], that just the improvement on earnings is powerful enough that maybe the patriotism issue needs to take a back seat to that", said the partner's memo quoted in the Times.

By: James Carroll  

Aware that the preparation for war has its own momentum, are we setting loose forces we cannot control? Has the shoot-first-ask-questions-later mode of the war on terrorism led to a new recklessness in relation to anticipated wars against states that alone justify such a budget?

Knowing what the effect on our enemies of such a massive new arsenal will be, what will be its effect on us, just having it? The moral question: When America could have used its unprecedented power to lead the world away from war, what will it reveal about our national character that we did the opposite?

If this budget is adopted, will it mean that we Americans responded to our traumatic season of vulnerability with a radical new military posture because it seemed to salve a wound? World violence more likely, the long-term economic health of our own country undermined - and for what? To feel better?

By: David Corn  

On February 14, Bush unveiled his plan. Speaking at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Bush said: "I reaffirm America's commitment... to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate." Nothing wrong with that. But his next sentence was the give-away: "Our immediate goal is to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions relative to the size of our economy."

See the sleight of hand? "Relative to the size of our economy." Since the U.S. economy is growing, even if it's a bit sluggish of late, this means emissions can continue to rise, as long as the rate of emissions increase is below the rate of economic growth. Bush is not calling for real reductions, he is pushing for slower increases. Talk about accounting tricks. It's as if he hired Arthur Andersen to craft his global warming plan. And Bush intends to achieve his "goal" through voluntary action - meaning tax credits to encourage companies and individuals to decrease emissions. His plan would grant companies that produce greenhouse gases credits for merely monitoring and reporting their emissions, not reducing their output, and these firms could then sell their pollution credits to other companies, which could use the credits to increase their emissions.

Bush won't force a single greenhouse gas polluter to do a thing...

By: Peter Morton  

The Centre for Economic and Business Research Ltd. compared earnings reports from companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange with statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that remove several accounting adjustments.

If that were the case, the Dow Jones Industrial Average should be trading between 5,500 and 7,500 instead of trying to breach the 10,000 mark as it has been over the past several weeks.

"There are more Enrons", said Douglas McWilliams, head of the CEBR.

By: Paul Krugman  

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the economic merits of those tax cuts. What's really striking about this tactic is its sheer bloody-mindedness: the House leadership is willing to impose pain on some of the most vulnerable people in the country, desperate families whose breadwinners have been unable to find jobs, in order to push a divisive, partisan agenda.

And for what it's worth, that agenda is also bad economics. Last month the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reviewed a range of potential stimulus measures, including all the elements in the latest House bill. Sure enough, the bill consists largely of the very measures - accelerated tax cuts for upper brackets, reductions in the alternative minimum tax on corporations - that the C.B.O. concluded would be least effective.

What these proposed tax cuts have in common, of course, is that they deliver not a penny of relief to the great majority of American families.

From:  

It's raining money in Afghanistan! And it's raining conservative idiots back home in America. As usual, we've got the ten dumbest right here. As the House of Reps finally passed CFR last week, Ari Fleischer (1) is trying to claim the credit for his boss. The GOP is handing out kudos to a compassionate conservative child molester (2), while Pat Robertson (3) has gone completely kooky. The American Family Association (5) has got it's panties in a wad over a soft-drink can. The Texas GOP (7) is covering it's Enron-tattooed ass. David Bunning (8) is getting a hand from Senator Dad. Bringing up the rear, we've got George W. Bush (9 & 10) setting the standard with two list-worthy examples of conservative idiocy.

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