By: Arendt  

The current Republican administration would not be in power without the support of the fundamentalist Christian movement. The administration wears its so-called "morality" and "family values" on its sleeve. They should be profoundly humbled by the facts that George and Jeb Bush and their families have 12 arrests to their name; that their children have serious substance abuse problems; and that both their administrations are implicated in and compromised by influence peddling scandals. But Pharisees, as Jesus noted, can easily "overlook the beam in their own eye".

It is long past time for people outside the fundamentalist religious community to put this administration's claims of virtue to the test. America has been subjected to twenty years of denunciation by a stream of fundamentalist crackpots, from the greed-ridden Jim and Tammy Bakker to the health-challenged Oral Roberts; from the sex-ridden Jimmy Swaggart to the anti-Semitic Pat Robertson. If America's diverse spiritual traditions fail to use our freedom of religion to defend ourselves against these relentless reactionary rantings, we will soon lose those freedoms to theocracy.

This administration prefers to proceed in secrecy, doing its work without public overview or input. It hides behind the most transparently duplicitous and high-handed press secretary since the days of Richard Nixon...

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The war was never really about fighting evil. We can no more eliminate evil than we can eliminate lust. It certainly isn't being fought to counter any credible military threat to America. While twenty guys with box cutters managed to get some very lethal results, they were still only twenty guys with box cutters. The United States isn't making some high minded declaration that killing innocent civilians is unacceptable, because far more innocents have been killed in Afghanistan than in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania combined. The war also isn't about "liberating" Afghanistan, unless it was to "liberate" what little infrastructure was left in their country after twenty years of wars we armed them to fight.

The war is about revenge, and oil. They hit us, and we wanted to hit them back ten times as hard. And we did.

Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are on the run, and no longer control a government that provides them with a base of operations. The oil pipeline the Bush administration sought from the Caspian across Afghanistan is back on track. We have achieved our objectives. While the U.S. should certainly continue to find, and perhaps eliminate, terrorists, we should do so covertly. Continuing to pummel Afghanistan with the blunt instruments of strike fighters simply creates more enemies than it eliminates. Reporters inside of Afghanistan describe "miles of housing, schools and government buildings reduced to rubble" and "tens of thousands of desperate people... packed into rooms without ceilings, without walls, without water or electricity or heat". We should declare victory, and leave. Or even better, we should declare victory and stay, not to provide security for Bush's oil pipeline to the Caspian, but to rebuild Afghanistan.

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools, whose lack of intelligence and creativity, is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

By: Paul Winkelmann  

"A woman's body was found in the ocean, bound and gagged, with her throat slashed... authorities suspect foul play."

Many years ago an anchorman once uttered these words. Viewers laughed at this ghoulish miscue while news producers across the country cringed. Foul play? No shit!

Well, get ready to laugh again.

Enron's cash filled tentacles were spotted stuffing Bush's wallet with thousand dollar bills... nearly every regulation Enron ever asked for, Bush got passed... Enron acted as Bush's personal headhunting service... Enron made frantic midnight death-throw calls to, by this time, wary and unusually uncooperative Bush cabinet members... the press uncovers lovingly personal notes between Bush and Enron CEO Kenneth Lay.

"Authorities suspect no foul play."

No, not the Democratic authorities. They have fully grasped the political implications of this situation. It's the GOP. The best we can coerce out of them is a begrudgingly whispered admission that this is merely a business scandal, but definitely, definitely, definitely, not political. Not political?

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In his 11 years as a federal trial-court judge, Mr. Pickering has displayed an undue skepticism toward cases involving civil rights. In voting rights cases, he has been troubled by well-settled legal principles like "one person, one vote" and overly concerned about the burdens that Congress, in enacting the Voting Rights Act, placed on local government. In employment discrimination cases, he has been too willing to accept employers' arguments that such suits are based on disgruntlement, rather than valid claims. He has also shown a hostility to awarding attorneys' fees in civil rights cases; without the fees, few such cases could be brought.

Mr. Pickering, a friend and ally of Trent Lott, the Mississippi Senator and minority leader, is also well outside the mainstream on issues of reproductive choice. He was a driving force behind the Republicans' decision to put a plank in their 1976 party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution.

"This China-man is crushin' muh girly HAND! Yiii!!!!"

"Bush is unquestionably the most indecent, deceitful, immoral, corrupt, ignorant, simple-minded, and dangerous person we've seen in the White House in decades."

- Severonius, in a Smirking Chimp commentary

By: Roland Watson and Oliver August  

Mr Bush’s attempts to soothe sentiments in the region after he had accused North Korea of being part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq appeared to have foundered.

In its first reaction to Mr Bush’s visit, the North Korean Foreign Ministry said that the U.S. President had insulted Kim Jong Il, the country’s leader, and dismissed his requests for renewed dialogue. "The remarks of Bush, prompted by the desire to conquer the Government of another country by dint of strength and dollars, remind people of a puppy knowing no fear of the tiger", its statement said. "[North Korea] can never pardon anyone who dares chastise its supreme headquarters and slander its political system, even though he is a man bereft of an elementary reason or a politically backward child."

Mr Bush was also put on the defensive by Chinese students, who forced him to concede that there were cultural and educational shortcomings in the United States when they challenged his account of the depth of American values. Visiting China’s foremost university, Mr Bush urged the country’s leaders to embrace tolerance, diversity and dissent, holding up the U.S. as an example of hope and opportunity.

But in the feisty question and answer session that followed, which contained suggestions of point-scoring by both sides, Mr Bush was challenged on his portrayal. One student said that he had read about high levels of American crime and juvenile delinquency in Mr Bush’s autobiography, adding that a fellow student from Tsinghua University had recently been killed while on an exchange visit in the U.S.

"The appearance is really disturbing. Americans are tired of investigations and scandal, but the best way to get rid of them is to elect a new president who will restore honor and dignity to the White House."

- George Dubya Bush, lying thru his teeth while on the campaign trail, Sept. 14, 2000

The influence of big energy corporations in the Bush Administration is no secret. But the story of Dick Cheney and his former company, Haliburton Co., has received little attention - and it may be the most important.

By: Jordan Green  

Prospects for democracy in post-Taliban Afghanistan appear dimmed by the bare-knuckled oil services deal-cutting overseen by the victor, the United States. Last December, the US Department of Defense made a no-cap, cost-plus-award contract to Halliburton KBR's Government Operations division. The Dallas-based company is contracted to build forward operating bases to support troop deployments for the next nine years wherever the President chooses to take the anti-terrorism war.

"Augmenting our military troops with contractor-provided support has proven to be an invaluable force multiplier", boasted Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar, celebrating the deal in a euphemistic language that is understood both as military triumphalism - and to Wall Street - as a cue that the new military mobilization could punch up the company's flagging stocks. In an October press release, the CEO who was compensated $11.3 million last year, had forecasted a good fourth quarter for profits in engineering and construction.

A Jan. 29 Washington Post article drew comparisons between Halliburton and Enron, pointing out that both their stocks plunged last fall, and that they share the same accountant, Arthur Andersen. (Halliburton has been plagued with lawsuits over its use of asbestos, discouraging investor confidence.) Another similarity is that their CEO's both cashed out before fall. In Halliburton's case, Vice President Dick Cheney cashed out $20.6 million in stocks before retiring as CEO. With Halliburton now ailing financially, it's only natural that the Defense Department, over which Cheney presided in the administration of Bush I, would provide the bailout.

By: Paul Krugman  

Finally, there's line 47. You haven't heard about that, but you will.

Here's the story. The Bush administration didn't want to give those famous $300 rebate checks; its original plan would have pumped hardly any money into the economy last year. Under prodding from Democrats the plan was changed to incorporate immediate cash outlays. But those outlays were included only grudgingly, and with a catch: they really weren't rebates. Instead, they were merely advances on future tax cuts.

What that means is that most taxpayers, when they reach line 47 of their 1040's, will discover that they owe $300 more in taxes than they expected. In other words, the one piece of the Bush tax cut that probably did help the economy last year is about to be snatched away. The direct monetary impact will be significant; the psychological impact, as taxpayers realize that they've been misled, may be even greater.

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Having simmered on the back burner through the aftermath of 9/11, Congress's effort to obtain records from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force has now reached a boiling point. The Enron collapse has only made Cheney dig in his heels even harder, such that the whole country is now wondering just what Ken Lay asked for - that is, recommended - at those meetings, and what Cheney delivered. But is it Enron's dealings with the task force Cheney is trying to hide, or Halliburton's? The huge Dallas-based oilfield services conglomerate, for which Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to July of 2000, may yet become Cheney's own poison pretzel.

Cheney joined Halliburton just two-and-one-half years after leaving his post as Secretary of Defense under Bush I. Halliburton, principally through its construction subsidiary, Brown & Root, had already begun reaping the gains from privatization initiatives pushed by Cheney during the Gulf War. As Robert Bryce reported in the Texas Observer, in 1992 the Pentagon paid Brown & Root for a study of how private companies could better be used to provide logistics support for U.S. troops across the globe. Later that year the company won such a contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But the money didn't really start rolling until Cheney joined Halliburton in 1995. At that time, Brown&Root was bringing in less than $350 million per year in Defense Department contracts, according to the Baltimore Sun. By 1999, after four years with Cheney at the helm, that number had grown to more than $650 million. When Cheney left to join the Bush ticket in July of 2000, Halliburton execs made sure he would stay their man with an eye-popping "retirement package" worth more than $33 million. It paid off...

By: Nancy Zuckerbrod  

A college administrator who has called for greater oversight of drug companies no longer is under consideration to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Alastair Wood, a pharmacologist and assistant vice chancellor of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn., was told by the Bush administration he won't get the job, Vanderbilt spokesman John Howser said Thursday.

That's what real Americans are, card-carrying members.

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson  

In the movie, The American President (written by Aaron Sorkin and basically a trial run for The West Wing), Michael Douglas, accused of being "a card carrying member of the ACLU", demands at a press conference to know what, exactly, is wrong with being associated with a group that has devoted itself to upholding the Constitution of the United States.

Hopefully, the movie caused a lot of people who hear nothing about the ACLU except that it's a bunch of bad-ass Jewish trial lawyers who hate mom, apple pie, and God, not necessarily in that order, to rethink their perceptions of the organization.

But the religious right plows right ahead with its propaganda, and the best of them simply don't know what the hell they are talking about while the worst of them are simply lying through their teeth in the name of their God.

To claim that the ACLU is anti-religion requires that you ignore the many times the ACLU has gone to bat on behalf of believers and churches, defending the rights of people to observe their holy days, follow their rites, attend their churches, and wear the clothing and accoutrements appropriate to their faith.

"Everyone in our government — even the Vice President — should be accountable to the American people, and I hope the White House will reconsider their unjustified insistence on secrecy. Revealing the names of lobbyists and campaign contributors may be unpleasant to the Vice President, but, as previous administrations have learned, avoiding embarrassment isn't a constitutional protection."

- Henry A. Waxman, representative from California, commenting on the GAO lawsuit against the Bush administration

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Canadian television reported Friday that a Canadian warship in the Arabian Sea had seized a tanker suspected of smuggling oil from Iraq, leading many to suspect that the report was a hoax.

"You're kidding, right? Canada has a warship?" asked U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Like for war?"

"Does Canada know?" he added.

"Nobody was more stunned than we were", said Kali Omari, first mate of the seized vessel. "We saw this frigate steaming toward us, and we were worried, but then we saw the maple leaf on the flag, and we thought, 'Oh, Canadians. What the hell do they want?'."

By: Alan Cooperman  

Television evangelist Pat Robertson yesterday (02/21/02) described Islam as a violent religion bent on world domination, drawing immediate protests from American Muslims.

Robertson, one of the most powerful figures on the religious right, made the remarks on his Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club...

The "Fund Affair" reaches a crossroads.

Editorial from:  

Ironically, the one gossip-obsessed outlet that seems to have passed on the story is FOX News. About three weeks ago, political strategist and writer Jeff Koopersmith tipped off Roger Ailes to the brouhaha. The next day, Fund was a guest on one of the FOX News Channel's programs. Shades of Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich!

The terse and blunt nature of Ms. Pillsbury-Foster's subsequent press release, which is reproduced in its entirety below, speaks volumes in and of itself. While the editors leave it to our readers to reach their own conclusions, they believe that her assertions concerning Fund are not only credible but may be convincingly supported.

In many ways, we feel the most damning comment by Ms. Pillsbury-Foster is her assertion that Fund "has used slander, lies, and the power of his position to hide his actions from friends and the public". This sounds practically identical to accusations Fund himself hurled at President Bill Clinton at the height of the wave of orchestrated and phony "scandals" that were used to hobble his administration and falsely impeach him.

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