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In the World According to Neo-Con Fascists, Criticizing Bush is "Playing Politics" ... Hmmm...

12.31.04 (9:30 am) [edit]

[b]Have you noticed that in the world of the neo-con fascist traitors who lack a comprehension of our national history, that any criticism of Bush's War Crimes (hundreds of U.S. Soldiers & tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians slaughtered to enrich the Mad King George, the Asshole) are characterizied as "playing politics"... Hmmm ... Are you so stupid you buy this crap??? ... I hope not!!![/b]

Anyway, here is some food for thought for year-end:

[u][b]'Goodbye to 2004, another year of living stupidly'[/b][/u]

One of the blessings of having been around a long time is that in any dark moment of our national life you can usually think of another moment that, if you put your mind to it, seemed almost as dark or maybe darker: McCarthyism, Watergate, the disaster of Vietnam.

But never in the memory of the living generation have the errors, falsifications and unreason of policy come in such rapid and overwhelming succession that each buries its predecessor before it's even partially absorbed, much less understood.

The result is an historic dynamic of error, dishonesty and corruption that's far more frightening than any individual event. The counterpoint of revelations of flawed and myopic foreign policy decisions against the deepening quagmire overseas is itself so overwhelming that most people must have trouble keeping track of it.

In the traditional pace of things, each of these events would be a scandal:

* The unnecessary disaster in Iraq - the haste in getting into it, the inadequate preparation and resources to pursue it - now partly acknowledged even by the president and his "stuff happens" secretary of defense.

* The mess in an underfunded Homeland Security regime that requires every airline passenger to remove his shoes and risk a humiliating frisking, grants government snoops broad new powers, locks up suspects without legal rights, but can't properly vet its own Cabinet secretary-designee.

* The huge tax cuts, most of them for the rich, in a professed time of war, which supposedly requires no sacrifice from anyone other than the troops overseas. Among those men and women, even those who make it home in good physical health, a large percentage will need extended psychological help for the emotional battering they've undergone.

* The ballooning federal deficit resulting in large part from those tax cuts, the decline of the dollar to record lows against the Euro and the nation's concomitant decline in economic and political influence. At some point, federal borrowing will require interest rates high enough that they will choke us.

* The ongoing failure to launch a massive energy conservation program through higher auto efficiency standards and higher gas taxes to reduce our dependency on the very regimes that finance terrorism and which represent the most undemocratic forces on earth.

* The growing visa and security barriers to foreign scholars and students, once a mainstay of the nation's economic and scientific superiority, and the shrinking federal support for low income students in the face of the growing technical power and attractiveness of universities in China, India, Canada and Europe.

* The increasingly dysfunctional health care system, which with every "reform" becomes more costly, corrupt, inefficient and unfair.

* The fiscally destructive proposals for privatizing Social Security in the effort to take it down the same road.

Much of the debate of the past year has been about the national intelligence system - the need to create better coordination among the various federal intelligence agencies that in some cases can't even communicate internally. But the bigger problem, of course, is the other, more common kind of intelligence, and what seems to be the proud national repudiation of its use.

The president's critics, among them some former high officials in his own White House, say he doesn't want to know - that he wants only to be told whatever fits with his ideology, preconceptions and intentions. So now he is converting the whole Cabinet into a den of good news bears who will never tell him he has no clothes. One White House official, asked a question that included the word reality, swiftly answered that this government makes its own reality.

But what of the rest of us? Has the accumulation of stupidity simply overwhelmed us? Are we so fearful of the much-proclaimed terrorism threatening us, has it fatally dulled our critical faculties? Are we so locked into dutiful acceptance of each successive explanation of failure that we are rendered mute?

Is the great values revival myth now our surrogate for reason? As in the Orwellian state, we quickly forget even the immediate past. It was less than four years ago that we were told that tax cuts were advisable because budget surpluses weren't good for us, then that tax cuts were urgent to stimulate the economy, and now that they should be permanent.

Likewise that Iraq would be won and democracy installed once we reached Baghdad, then that it would happen once Saddam was caught, then when sovereignty was transferred, then when elections are held and now that it will take a few more years because, oops, the Iraqi security forces (read mercenaries) aren't up to the job.

We always recovered from our bouts of national craziness before. But rarely has the national march of folly generated a momentum of inattention, denial and forgetfulness as this one has. As the New Year begins, can we still embrace the collective vision for our children that we can do things better, more wisely and more humanely? Or will we be frozen in our national stupidity forever? - http://www.sacbee.com/content...

Billions for Pork as Science is Slashed!!!!!

12.31.04 (7:43 am) [edit]

[i][b]Damn the future, the GOP wants to buy votes today.[/b][/i]

Does cutting taxes force Congress to spend less money? So far under President Bush, the answer has been a resounding no. Now there's some evidence that Congress actually may be tightening the purse strings. Unfortunately, what it has done so far doesn't exactly prove the conservative case.

The new evidence is that Congress voted last month to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or NSF, which supports basic scientific research. This means that next year the NSF will have about 1,000 fewer research grants. This comes at a time when scientific experts worry that the United States is losing its worldwide primacy in science and technology.

Now, some of you righties may be saying to yourselves, "Great! We scaled back another big government program." But, remember, Republicans over at least the last decade have flaunted their support of science and technology. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich used to go on about dinosaur research and giving poor people laptop computers. Bush grandly promised a new mission to land humans on Mars in his last State of the Union address.

And the GOP commitment to science, at least until recently, very much included the NSF. Two years ago, the Republican Congress voted to double the foundation's budget by 2007. At the time, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard wrote that the White House considered the NSF to be one of the few "programs that work." Its grants go out on a competitive basis.

Mitch Daniels, then Bush's budget director, told Barnes that the NSF "has supported eight of the 12 most recent Nobel Prize awards earned by Americans at some point in their careers."

Still, you say, don't we face a huge deficit now? Indeed we do, but cutting support for scientific research is an incredibly mindless way to solve that problem. Deficits are bad because they represent a form of borrowing against the future. Every dollar we spend beyond our means today is one less dollar that we'll have to spend someday down the road. But scientific research is an investment in future prosperity. Cutting the NSF budget is like a family in debt pulling its children out of college but keeping its country club membership.

And this turns out to be utterly typical of the way conservatives practice fiscal restraint. Their strategy of "starving the beast" — trimming down government by depriving it of revenue — is not supposed to chop down spending per se; it's supposed to get rid of waste. As it happens, though, waste has flourished while Washington has sacrificed lots of necessary spending.

The former category includes big programs such as the $180 billion in agricultural subsidies Bush approved in 2001, or last year's Medicare bill featuring tens of billions in subsidies for healthcare industries. It also includes garden variety pork, such as money for the Punxsutawney (Pa.) Weather Museum or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. (Both projects were deemed vital in the same budget that trims the NSF.)

The NSF is not the only worthwhile project that has gotten stiffed. It's not even the only project that conservatives consider worthwhile that has gotten stiffed.

Crucial aspects of homeland security — such as inspecting incoming ships for nuclear material and hiring enough immigration agents to track down illegal immigrants from the Middle East — are getting far less than needed to ensure that Americans are protected from terrorism. Even the denizens of the conservative Heritage Foundation have complained about the Bush administration's stinginess on homeland security.

Why are bad programs driving out the good? Because budget pressure, the pressure of the deficit by itself, does not guarantee that Congress will make good choices. The Republicans' preferred plan, which we've seen through Bush's first four years, is to say yes to everybody: tax cuts and spending programs can buy a lot of votes. If they must cut back, they'll keep the programs that help Republicans win election, including the home-state pork, and cut out virtuous programs that don't have the same political muscle. Like the NSF.

Of course, this isn't an unalterable law of nature. If the governing party has some sense of responsibility, it will fund programs on the basis of the national interest rather than on the basis of which ones have the most powerful lobby.

That's what President Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, said he was doing when he promised to go after "weak claims, not weak clients." By that he meant he would try to cut out programs with a shaky rationale, not those that merely lacked powerful backers in Washington. The GOP's operating principle today is just the other way around. - http://www.latimes.com/news/o...,1,7598975.column

Billions for Pork as Science is Slashed!!!!!

12.31.04 (7:40 am) [edit]

Billions for Pork as Science is Slashed!!!!!

12.31.04 (7:35 am) [edit]

The Neoconnerie: Of Lice and Fleas ...

12.30.04 (5:56 am) [edit]

There's blood in the water and the neoconservatives in and around the administration are thrashing about like sharks. They've thrown Donald Rumsfeld over the side, and to many, their treachery is evidence that Rumsfeld can't possibly be one of them, a neoconservative.

The iconic Robert Novak has been particularly vocal in his attack on the secretary of defense's neoconservative credentials. In Rumsfeld's defense, I'll say this: his resistance to sending more troops to Iraq notwithstanding, his conduct during two years of war has never led me to doubt his dedication to the death and destruction that have accompanied the administration's democratic crusade in Iraq.

I do question, however, the motives of assorted Republican hacks desperately invested in distinguishing one administration lackey from the next.

Their aim? To saddle some with all the blame for the actions of a commander in chief who, "with unidirectional, God-inspired gusto," lied the nation to war. If Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rice are indeed recovering neoconservatives, the signs are sure to reveal themselves sometime soon (a possibility that doesn't diminish their culpability in the illegal, immoral, and idiotic invasion of Iraq).

The first of such signs might be the cancellation of the White House's Weekly Standard subscription. Before, one hopes, this intellectually degraded publication greases the skids for an American assault on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.

Proliferation experts from the U.S. State Department, France, Israel, and the IAEA all agree that, in secrecy and in violation of treaty commitments, the Iranians have been, as the IEEE's Spectrum reported in June 2004, "assembling the nuclear wherewithal with a speed and determination not seen since the heyday of Iraq's infamous nuclear weapons program of the 1980s." With "some of the world's largest reserves of fossil fuels," Iran's energy needs are not the cause of the urgency. The specter of an American army advancing on – and conquering – Iraq is.

In what reads like a remarkably unsophisticated policy paper, Reuel Marc Gerecht counsels in the Standard against any peaceful solutions to Iran's growing nuclear capabilities, for no real reason but that negotiations and inspections indicate a defensive "pre-9/11 mindset," while Gerecht prefers the purity of preemption.

Iran's burgeoning nuclear enhancement program is indeed worrisome, which is precisely why the "insights" of neoconservatives such as Gerecht must be avoided at all costs. Their failure to predict the shape Iraqi nationalism would take in response to an American invasion hasn't humbled them in the least. In fact, their prognostications about Iranian patriotism evince the same grandiose but out-of-focus "vision" they've imposed on Iraq, with calamitous consequences.

Duly, our neoconservative Nostradamus Gerecht predicts a favorable outcome in the event the U.S. decides to launch a missile attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. "Iranians are not nationalist automatons – they are among the most profound, cynical patriots imaginable," he patronizes. Americans can carpet bomb Iran's nuclear plants to their heart's content. There's no danger this will dissipate the average Iranian's detestation for the mullahs and spur an insurgency against the U.S.

The psychological and political savvy! The sweep of ideas….

Has Gerecht ever considered that loathing both the clerics and the carpet bombers are not mutually exclusive sentiments? Naturally not. Our neoconservative doesn't draw his analysis from objective reality, but from a countervailing narrative he has concocted. A filament of this faith, for example, is that it is impossible to hate Saddam Hussein and, simultaneously, fight the American forces. Thus, neoconservatives insist that the growing, pan-Islamic guerrilla insurgency in Iraq is Sunni dominated – manned chiefly by disgruntled Ba'athists.

This neat but nutty bifurcation has allowed Gerecht to conclude that Iranians, due to their general disdain for the ruling ayatollahs, will not oppose an American strike. Or that Iran's Shi'ite Muslims – also a religious majority – will never put aside their theological differences and make common cause with their Iraqi Shi'ite brethren against the U.S.

"What a preemptive attack would certainly do is provoke another debate [in Iran] about the competence of a ruling clergy who led the nation into a head-on collision with the United States," Gerecht maintains.

Let's see if I've grasped this last neoconservative plot line: After we've "preemptively" pulverized their installations, Iranians, who already "have a very jaundiced view of the United States," will turn on their own rather than on us.

If these fantasies seem too deranged to be true, if it appears I've exaggerated neoconservative cretinism, I apologize. I didn't mean to suggest there has been no neocon learning curve. Gerecht has allowed for a corrective course of action: even if Iranians do embrace "vulgar" nationalism rather than deracinated democratic internationalism, we Americans can always … crush them.

Now, Gerecht's neocon credentials are beyond doubt, while Rumsfeld's depend on who you talk to. But so what? As Dr. Johnson said, "There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea." Neocon or not, louse or flea, a pest is a pest.

[b]Ilana Mercer is a columnist for Antiwar.com. Her new book is Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture. To learn more about Ilana and her work, please visit her website: http://www.ilanamercer.com/ .[/b] - http://www.antiwar.com/mercer...

The Neoconnerie: Of Lice and Fleas ...

12.30.04 (5:56 am) [edit]

The Buck Never Stops At The Top!!!!!

12.30.04 (5:46 am) [edit]

The FBI has blown the whistle on the Defense Department's military investigators by accusing them of abusive treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The FBI was especially outraged that the interrogators of suspected terrorists had posed as FBI agents.

Administration officials usually are pretty clubby folks who close ranks in times of trouble. But apparently, the FBI was not ready to take the fall for the Pentagon's atrocious treatment of some prisoners of war.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled the Pentagon's behavior as "tantamount to torture."

The big question is why President Bush has tolerated inhumane treatment of detainees and why he has not ordered a full stop to this shaming of the United States.

He has to accept some of the blame for rejecting the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of prisoners of war for so-called enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, site of a U.S. Navy base and the prison holding some 550 people from 40 different nations.

There are indications that prison guards and interrogators thought they were following orders from higher ups when they abused some detainees.

The FBI didn't complain publicly against the Department of Defense but a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union has smoked out memos written by FBI agents about the treatment of the detainees.

The records claimed the FBI learned that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved the impersonation of the FBI.

An ACLU attorney said the methods adopted by the military were "illegal, immoral and counterproductive."

The documents showed that FBI agents were particularly upset with what they saw as physical and mental abuse of the detainees, including the sticking of lighted cigarettes in their ears, choking, beatings, temperature changes, hooding, the use of dogs and other forms of harassment.

One detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag.

One of the agents complained that the military's aggressive interrogation was "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice."

In Iraq, an agent observed "serious abuses of civilian detainees," including strangulation, beatings and other physical harm and humiliations.

One detainee was described as "almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him." The agent surmised that the prisoner "had apparently been literally pulling his own hair."

Another report said soldiers at Guantanamo spat upon a detainee and beat him when he tried to protect himself. At one point, the soldiers beating the prisoner "grabbed his head and beat it into the cell floor," knocking him unconscious, the report said.

Describing an assault on a detainee, an agent wrote: "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public," the Defense Department will not be held accountable and the FBI will be left "holding the bag."

The morbid accounts run counter to the administration's claim there has been no torture at the Guantanamo prison. It's incredible that the abuses continued even after the photos of the mistreatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners shocked the world.

The administration has blamed free lancing by low-ranking reservists for the brutality. No top commander has been fingered for the disgrace.

This is an administration where the buck never stops at the top. Neither the Pentagon nor the White House acknowledges condoning such practices.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters last Tuesday that the president "expects that any allegations of abuse are taken seriously and fully investigated, and that corrective measures are taken to make sure that abuse does not occur again. That's what the president expects."

McClellan added the president has made it clear that, "We are a nation of laws and a nation of values, and we adhere to our laws and values."

He also said Bush feels that "people need to be held accountable and brought to justice if they're involved in wrongdoing" and that corrective measures are in place to prevent it from happening again.

American taxpayers have spent millions to improve the U.S. image in the Middle East and to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world, which opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But it will all be for naught unless the president makes an unequivocal statement that all prisoners and detainees we hold anywhere will be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and the standards of the Red Cross. - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com...

Bush's Torture At The Top: But, The Buck Never Stops At The Top!!!

12.30.04 (5:43 am) [edit]

Blood-thirsty Bushy-boy, the Sadistic Torturer: The Buck Never Stops At The Top!!!!!

12.30.04 (5:42 am) [edit]

In Bushy-boy's Bizarro World: The Buck Never Stops At The Top!!!!!!

12.30.04 (5:36 am) [edit]

A Not So Wonderful Life

12.19.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

EXTERIOR BRIDGE OVER POTOMAC RIVER - NIGHT

CLOSE SHOT - Rummy is standing by the railing, staring morosely into the water. The snow is falling hard. Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he wheels around and wrestles an old man with wings into a headlock.

OLD MAN: Ouch! Tut, tut. When will you learn that force doesn't solve everything?

RUMMY: Who the dickens are you?

OLD MAN: Clarence, Angel First Class. I've been sent down to help you.

RUMMY, squinting: You're off your nut, you old fruitcake. You can't help me. I was a matinee idol in this town, a studmuffin. Now everyone's turned on me - Trent Lott, Chuck Hagel and that dadburn McCain.

CLARENCE: No more self-pity, son. I'm going to show you what the world would have been like if you'd never been born.

Clarence, who can fly now, takes Rummy's hand and they soar over the icy Potomac to the Pentagon. Beneath the glass on the desk of the defense secretary is a list of members of Congress and their phone numbers.

RUMMY: Who put that there?

CLARENCE: Sam Nunn. He's the defense secretary. Sam consults with Congress. Never acts arrogant or misleads them. He didn't banish the generals who challenged him - he promoted 'em. And, of course, he caught Osama back in '01. He threw 100,000 troops into Afghanistan on 9/11 and sealed the borders. Our Special Forces trapped the evildoer and his top lieutenants at Tora Bora. You weren't at that cabinet meeting the day after 9/11, so nobody suggested going after Saddam. No American troops died or were maimed in Iraq. No American soldiers tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. No Iraqi explosives fell into the hands of terrorists. There's no office of disinformation to twist perception abroad. We're not on the cusp of an Iraq run by Muslim clerics tied to Iran. Here's Sam. He's with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

GENERAL SHINSEKI: We got some good news today on the National Guard, sir. Recruiting is up 40 percent. With the money we saved killing that useless missile defense system, we up-armored all our Humvees.

RUMMY, fists and jaw clenched: Grrrrrrr...I want to see Wolfie!

CLARENCE: Sam never hired any of those wacko neocons. Wolfowitz is a woolly headed professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a consultant to Ariel Sharon. Richard Perle was never in charge of the Defense Policy Board, so he was unable to enrich himself through government connections, or help Ahmad Chalabi con the administration. Perle stayed an honest man, running a chain of soufflé shops. His soufflés were so fluffy he became known as the Prince of Lightness. Doug Feith never worked here, either, so he never set up the Office of Special Plans to spin tall tales about W.M.D. and Qaeda ties to Saddam. And he never bungled the occupation because there was no occupation. Without you to swoon over in a book, neocon doyenne Midge Decter became a fallen woman, like Violet.

RUMMY, dyspeptic: Holy mackerel! Take me to Dick!

CLARENCE: Dick and Lynne run a bait, tackle and baton-twirling shop in Casper, Wyo. You didn't exist, so you never gave him those jobs in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and he never ran for Congress or worked for Bush 41 or anointed himself 43's vice president. W. chose Chuck Hagel as his running mate. So without you and Dick there to dominate him, he was guided by his dad and Brent Scowcroft, who kept Condi in line. Colin Powell was never cut off at the knees and the U.N. and allies were never bullied. There was never any crazy fever about Iraq or unilateralism or "Old Europe." Here's Colin now, heading for the Oval Office.

POWELL: Merry Christmas, Mr. President. With the help of our allies around the world, we have won the war on terror. And Saddam has been overthrown. Once Hans Blix exposed the fact that Saddam had no weapons, the tyrant was a goner. No Arab dictator can afford to be humilated by a Swedish disarmament lawyer.

RUMMY: Goodness gracious, I've heard enough now. I'm going home. Unless you're going to tell me my wife is an old maid, because I wasn't around to marry her.

CLARENCE: Oh, no. Joyce lives across the street from your old house on Kalorama Road. She's happily married to the French ambassador.

"Auld Lang Syne" swells as we FADE OUT.

[b]Maureen Dowd, NY Times[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

A Not So Wonderful Life

12.19.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

CrackPot Bush's Social Security CrapShoot

12.19.04 (5:27 am) [edit]

"[i]We will not raise payroll taxes to solve this problem[/i]."
-- President George W. Bush.

"[i]Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real[/i]."
-- Tupac Shakur.

DETROIT -- President George W. Bush has disconnected reality from his public policy decisions. There is something revealing and striking in the fact that the President of the United States finds himself mentally on the same page with the late gangsta rapper. Tupac Shakur, at least, admitted his dreams trumped reality. Bush pretends he's for real.

Bush was talking about his plan to partially privatize Social Security to "strengthen" the program and "save" it from the ravages of Baby Boomers growing old and actually expecting to get the benefits they've been helping to fund for the last 40 years or so.

Shakur, while claiming to dismiss reality, actually had a better grasp of it than Bush is now demonstrating in his clouded vision and plan to increase dramatically government borrowing and indebtedness in order to finance a transition to add personal retirement accounts to Social Security.

Bush essentially wants to borrow money -- experts estimate $2 trillion over the next 10 years -- and gamble your money on his bet that government speculating on stocks will "fix" the system. Much of Bush's plan, projections and assumptions are kept deliberately vague. But he's clear in the promise no taxes will increase, no benefits will be reduced for this generation of retirees and that the best road to privatizing Social Security investments is paved with public debt.

We can only dream how this will work.

Bush wants us all to roll the dice and pray the switch to individual pension accounts won't result in the economic crisis that plagued Argentina in the 1990s, when a similar privatization shuffle was attempted. The government chose massive borrowing rather than taxes to fund the experiment.

New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman regularly rains reality on Bush's fiscal fantasy parades, in which the president borrows today and hints that, come some indefinite tomorrow, benefits may be reduced.

"If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility," Krugman wrote.

Tupac Shakur had a handle on such recklessness in his song "I'm Getting Money," and Bush would do well to heed the wisdom from the 'hood.

"Shakin' the dice, now roll 'em. If you can't stand the pain, better hold 'em. 'Cause ain't no tellin' what you might roll."

Since others always endure the pain he causes, Bush rarely exercises such caution and restraint. Instead his "thought" process follows a predictable pattern which invariably leads him to "certainty." That's how we ended up in the tragic mess in Iraq. Bush continues to substitute his dreams of a military-imposed democracy spreading the winds of freedom across the despotic desert in the Middle East for the reality of horrible, endless bloodshed and Americans despised in the region.

Oh, yes, this nightmare of violence will also make us safer and more secure at home.

Here's how George W.'s dream world works. First, he feels what his "gut" tells him -- usually conclusions Karl Rove, the neocons and his corporate sponsors have already been whispering into his ear.

The next step is to "pray over" the matter, call it "reform" and sign on the religious right to declare the issue a matter of "values" and a "moral imperative." Toss in a few words about the future, children and your own courage in even bringing up the issue, and Bush is on his way.

From there, describe whatever the problem is as a "crisis" and use the usually compliant media to let the administration frame the issue and serve as an echo chamber for the White House talking points.

The Social Security fund is not in danger of imminent collapse and the use of the term "crisis" is largely a fabricated ploy to soften up public opinion to give Bush whatever he wants.

Some modest tweaking can sustain the Social Security trust fund with no change in benefits into the 22nd century, according to projections contained in a Congressional Budget Office report.

Based on that report, Krugman notes that Social Security fund stability "would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending -- less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of Bush's tax cut -- roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year."

The Social Security fund started accumulating vast surpluses because back in the early 1980s President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill cut a deal.

Confronting reality, they realized the fund needed a huge infusion of cash to guarantee that there would be enough money to pay for the Baby Boomers when they reached retirement age. So payroll taxes -- paid mostly by working-class Americans -- were increased. Ronald Reagan signed the measure into law. I repeat, Ronald Reagan signed the massive tax increase into law!

But, by golly, it worked. Surpluses did grow and the Social Security fund -- with modest adjustments -- can continue to provide American workers with what they have grown to expect.

The rest of the financing for the federal government has not fared as well. But George W. Bush refuses to face the reality that his tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, his unfunded imperial war in Iraq and his underfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit are creating the record government deficits.

Bush and his pals in the Republican Congress -- now legendary for their lard-assed political pork spending -- have created unprecedented fiscal peril and they have no plan whatsoever about how to address the problem. There's a real crisis there. We don't need to create one for Social Security, unless your purpose is to divert public attention from reality.

A few Republicans, though, are starting to squeal over Bush's plan to use public debt to pay for private Social Security investments. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports creating private Social Security retirement accounts, spoke heresy, using a forbidden word to challenge Bush's reality.

"You can't reform the system and put Social Security on solid financial footing without some sacrifice," the senator said.

Sacrifice! Sacre Bleu!

Spend, borrow and pray -- that's the Bush fiscal mantra.

Sacrifice is for the poor, the French and the realists. In George W. Bush's dream world, there is a free lunch -- at least, until the bill arrives and he passes it off to someone else.

Sen. Graham is open to the idea of raising the annual tax cap on Social Security earnings from the current $87,500 to $150,000. That would result in additional payroll taxes of about $3,800 a year for upper-income taxpayers. Graham proposes that those higher payroll taxes be imposed for 12 to 15 years or until Social Security achieves solvency under the new private retirement accounts.

Since those income-earners already have benefited richly from Bush's income tax reductions and elimination of dividend taxes, the plan makes practical sense, along with a touch of distributive justice. Bush will have no part of such a realistic approach.

Better to borrow the money now, increase the deficit and pass all those costs on to future middle-class wage-earners. Under Bush's plan, the sure winners are banks, Wall Street brokerage firms and his corporate sponsors. For the rest of us, it's a big gamble and more debt.

There may be merit in some limited privatization of Social Security investment, but those changes must be made carefully and responsibly. Social Security needs common sense, not Bush's radical salvation. Modest taxation and fiscal realism make much more sense than his wild dreams, "'cause ain't no tellin' what you might roll."

[b]Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@aol.com.[/b] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

CrackPot Bush's Social Security CrapShoot

12.19.04 (5:27 am) [edit]

A Catholic Crusader's Pious Punch

12.19.04 (5:22 am) [edit]

Bill Donohue, who abandoned his post as a professor at La Roche College to take up the role of Don Quixote of the Catholic laity, recently missed a windmill and ran his lance straight through the feelings of Jews, Protestants and a number of ex-Catholics and, well, Merry Christmas everybody and grab a helmet while you're at it.

Donohue is president of The Catholic League, which hunts out signs of anti-Catholicism. Its evidence has ranged from the blatant, like the "Left Behind" books, to the imagined, like the occasional theatrical satire. Mostly, he's been handy as a talking head on the cable networks and that's how he ended up on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," which was being hosted for the night by ecumenical powerhouse Pat Buchanan.

Donohue was asked to explain why Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" wasn't getting big buzz for an Academy Award.

He said this: "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the messiah.

"Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common.

"But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins. Frankly, Michael Moore represents a cult movie. Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America."

Let us put aside the irony that, on the day he received an Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore, a lifelong Catholic, attended Mass. Let's disregard the fact that Mel Gibson not only does not represent mainstream America, he doesn't represent mainstream Catholicism. He belongs to a schismatic group that does not honor the authority of the current pope.

Let us, instead, ask Bill Donohue why he seems to have a bad case of Jews on the Brain.

"Is there anyone in the world ... that hasn't admitted that Hollywood is essentially a Jewish town?" he asked me. "It's like asking the question who runs the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. Who runs the Mafia? It's the Italians."

Donohue's fixation seems to be less an animus toward the Jews than a willingness to use them, not to mention "wacko Protestants," for polemical leverage. His press releases of the past six years have often included a "what if they said this about the Jews?" angle when complaining about everything from plays that make fun of Catholic ritual to greeting cards that make tired Catholic jokes.

"I typically say 'blacks, Jews and gays,'" he told me. True enough. He was once asked how the Democrats could win back Catholic voters and suggested they could begin by thinking of Catholics as if they were all homosexuals.

"I realize that's a dicey thing to say," Donohue said. "But the media elite, the secular elite tend to have certain people that are their favorites."

This sort of envy by a group that is now, in large measure, so fully assimilated that we sometimes resemble WASPs with a meatless Lent, cannot be healthy, and the language in which it is being expressed takes on an edge of hatefulness. I don't think Donohue is an anti-Semite. Nor does Shmuley Boteach, the Orthodox rabbi and fellow MSNBC panelist who challenged Donohue's slur moments after it sprang from his lips.

"I like him. I respect him," Boteach told me. "I do not believe he's anti-Semitic and I think what he said on the air was repulsive and it troubles me that he does not understand what was wrong about what he said."

Donohue betrays no such understanding. "I think it's time people had an open conversation about this," he said.

I suspect it's under way now, and it has started out ugly. - http://www.post-gazette.com/p...

A Catholic Crusader's Pious Punch

12.19.04 (5:22 am) [edit]

The Mad King George Fails in Dictatorial Bid to Kill Off Kyoto Process

12.19.04 (5:15 am) [edit]

Governments from around the world yesterday narrowly succeeded in keeping the international bid to combat catastrophic global warming alive, in the face of determined attempts by the re-elected Bush administration to kill it off.

Top negotiators described the effort - at a special UN conference in Buenos Aires - as like hanging on to a cliff face by their "fingernails", as the United States and oil-producing countries threw rock after rock to try to dislodge them.

More than 36 hours after the conference was supposed to have ended - following two all-night negotiating sessions, and while workmen were physically dismantling the facilities around them - delegates finally agreed on a series of compromises that avoided complete breakdown and kept some life in the negotiations.

The US said that "on balance" it was "very pleased with the outcome", but its obdurate obstruction of even anodyne proposals at the two-week conference bodes ill for the future of the talks, which are designed to hammer out the next tough steps to be taken after the Kyoto Protocol runs its course in 2012.

It will also sharply increase the pressure on Tony Blair, who has committed himself to making progress on combating global warming - and involving the US in the effort - one of the key priorities for his leadership of the G8 group of the world's most powerful countries next year. Even before the cliff-hanger conference, Downing Street was increasingly at a loss about how it was going to fulfil the worldwide expectations raised by the Prime Minister in two high-profile speeches this year on what he describes as "long term, the single most important issue facing the global community".

The US performance in Buenos Aires appears to fly in the face of a commitment given by President Bush in 2001, when he announced that the US would withdraw from the protocol that it had previously played a key part in negotiating. In the face of international outrage, he said then that even though it was pulling out, the US would do nothing to obstruct other countries trying to reach agreement. By and large it has kept to this position since, at least in public, believing that the protocol was doomed without its participation.

But this autumn Washington was shocked and angered when Russia agreed to ratify the protocol - completing the number of countries needed, under its complex rules, to bring it into force. Environmentalists say that the re-elected Bush administration has decided to do everything it can to sabotage any further international measures, and is not concerned about the international condemnation it will incur in the process.

This transformed the Buenos Aires conference, which was expected to be a routine and relatively uncontroversial meeting, the last before negotiations on the follow-up to Kyoto begin in earnest next November. Its chairman, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, an Argentinian diplomat who played a central role in the negotiation of the protocol seven years ago, proposed an apparently inoffensive series of informal meetings over next year to prepare the ground for the talks.

But this was vigorously opposed by the US, which insisted there could only be one informal meeting, and that no ideas for the future could be discussed at it. The Americans also objected to mentions of the need to tackle global warming as opposed to adapting to it, and backed an extraordinary demand from Saudi Arabia that oil-producing states should receive billions of dollars in compensation from the rest of the world if they burned less oil.

Eventually a single meeting that could discuss the future was agreed for next May, and other uneasy compromises were reached, preventing total breakdown. "It is a finger-hold, like hanging on by your nails," says Michael Zammit Cutajar, a veteran climate negotiator for Malta who was for 11 years executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

The Mad King George Fails in Dictatorial Bid to Kill Off Kyoto Process

12.19.04 (5:13 am) [edit]

The Mad King George Fails in Dictatorial Bid to Kill Off Kyoto Process

12.19.04 (5:13 am) [edit]

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

12.18.04 (5:51 am) [edit]

[b]At the end of a dark year, we have our work cut out for us [/b]

"[i]A little rebellion now and then is a good thing[/i]."
-- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787

[b]In fact Jesus Christ was a revolutionary whom Bush/Cheney & the GOP would have called a "terrorist" & tortured in Abu Ghraib ...[/b]

After two tainted elections have failed to shake the status quo, it's easy to grasp the appeal of direct action. By "direct action," I mean non-violent civil disobedience.

Where would we be if, when history demanded, we didn't take direct action? The Boston Tea Party was "against the law." So, for that matter, was the Declaration of Independence, and the 56 signers took grave risks. As a result, five were tortured to death by the British, 12 had homes torched, and nine died in the ensuing war. Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax, to protest slavery and the Mexican War, landed him in jail where he wrote "Civil Disobedience." John Brown, Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey all felt so strongly about slavery's curse that they took up arms. Martin Luther King Jr. ended up in many jail cells, as did Rosa Parks when she wouldn't vacate her bus seat. Each year, peace activists trespass on the School of the Americas knowing many will end up in prison.

Were these people "terrorists" or "criminals"? In the fullness of time, they're seen as important figures in American history, pushing the nation forward when the nation refused to budge. Always at great physical peril, always for the better.

Where would the world itself be without the risks and examples of such "lawbreakers" as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, and all those "prisoners of conscience" detained and tortured each year, their plights forgotten, their hopes kept alive by Amnesty International (www.amn estyusa.org)? Thousands of activists worldwide use direct action to protect the environment and

bring peace, justice and freedom. Having in the eyes of the powerful "broken the law," they are squeezed into cages even as we speak.

They believe in the full meaning of the word "activist," with the emphasis on "active." As Nonviolence.org has noted, "An advantage to direct action is that it doesn't require the cooperation of the authority to be effective. If they intervene to stop your action, you have a dramatic story; if they ignore you, you've followed your conscience." The Ruckus Society (ruckus.org) puts it more simply: "Actions speak louder than words." Sometimes that is the only option left open.

America is getting close to this tipping point. At the end of a very dark year, it's apparent that our government isn't listening to the legitimate concerns of its citizens. Petitions aren't cutting it, nor are mass e-mailings to corporate flak-catchers, nor e-mail chain letters to the president with all those well-meaning people's names and addresses (all going straight to a Homeland Security Department databank for future reference).

When leaders themselves break the law of the land, if not God's commandments, a free citizen, who works hard and plays by the rules, is left with few options. To remain passive, in hopes of a miracle, is one. To become apathetic, cynical, bitter and violent are others. But, as Sen. Russ Feingold recently said, "America is better than this."

So, what am I saying?

Just this: If you've ever wondered what it would be like to rise in anger at a corporate board meeting and shout down the grinning skulls in the suits, you are not alone. If you ever secretly cheered when someone with more guts created a scene at an event where some neocon thug like Richard Perle or Henry Kissinger were honored guests, you are not alone. If you've watched unarmed activists block traffic or stand in front of military hardware to stop the madness, you are not alone. All it takes is to imagine it first, then do it.

Last week, for example, an activist claiming to be a Dow Chemical spokesman told the BBC that Dow was offering an "historic aid package for Bhopal victims" and selling its subsidiary Union Carbide -- responsible for the 1984 gas leak that killed thousands in India and left 150,000 people permanently disabled -- to compensate the victims. Dow's tin-eared response to this prank has been instructive.

Union Carbide's Web site declares that "UCC has contributed significantly in providing aid to the victims and has fulfilled every responsibility and obligation it had in Bhopal." The second phony statement issued in the complicated hoax -- that Dow's "sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow cannot do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to by law" -- clearly describes the company's position, stated and unstated.

Thank you, Dow, for verifying what we feared were the true ethics of the corporate (read: ruling) class.

As you can see, we have our work cut out for us. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

12.18.04 (5:49 am) [edit]

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

12.18.04 (5:49 am) [edit]

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

12.18.04 (5:46 am) [edit]

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

12.18.04 (5:46 am) [edit]

DER FUHRER'S DELUSIONAL FIDDLING While Iraq Burns

12.18.04 (5:42 am) [edit]

The White House seems to have slipped the bonds of simple denial and escaped into the disturbing realm of utter delusion. On Tuesday, there was President Bush hanging the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who slept through the run-up to Sept. 11 and then did the president and the nation the great disservice of declaring that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Another Medal of Freedom was given to Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator of the American occupation, who made the heavily criticized decision to disband the defeated Iraqi Army and presided over an ever-worsening security situation. Thousands upon thousands have died in this unnecessary and incompetently conducted war, yet here was the president handing out medals as if some kind of triumph had been achieved. If these guys could get the highest civilian award, what honor is left for someone who actually does a good job?

A third medal was given to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, which Mr. Bush, in his peculiar way, has characterized as a "catastrophic success." It's an interesting term. Some people have applied it to the president's run for re-election.

By anyone's standards, terrible things are happening in Iraq, and no amount of self-congratulation in Washington can take the edge off the horror being endured by American troops or the unrelenting agony of the Iraqi people. The disconnect between the White House's fantasyland and the world of war in Iraq could hardly have been illustrated more starkly than by a pair of front-page articles in The New York Times on Dec. 10. The story at the top of the page carried the headline: "It's Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price - $250,000 Buys Lunch With President and More."

The headline on the story beneath it said: "Armor Scarce for Heavy Trucks Transporting U.S. Cargo in Iraq."

This administration has many things on its mind besides the welfare of overstretched, ill-equipped G.I.'s dodging bombers and snipers in Iraq. In addition to the inauguration, which will cost tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush is busy with his obsessive campaign against "junk and frivolous lawsuits," his effort to further lighten the tax load on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, and his campaign to cut the legs from under the proudest achievement of the New Deal, Social Security.

So much for America's wartime priorities.

Even domestic security gets short shrift. During the Republican convention, Mr. Bush said, "I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country." Try squaring that with the Bernard Kerik fiasco, in which the administration's background check of its candidate for the nation's ultimate domestic security post was handled with the same calamitous incompetence as the intelligence effort that led to the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush's pick (at Rudy Giuliani's urging) for homeland security secretary turned out to be a slick character who had once ducked a required F.B.I. clearance, had a social relationship with the owner of a company suspected of business ties to organized crime figures and had rented a love nest that overlooked the ruins of the World Trade Center.

"I'm Not Perfect," said a headline next to Mr. Kerik's picture in Tuesday's New York Post.

You wonder, with so much at stake, where to look in the Bush constellation for the care and competence that the times call for. Colin Powell is heading toward the exit, to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, who did her best to petrify the nation with loose talk about mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney would still have us believe in a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The man who took the lead in vetting Bernie Kerik, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, was also the point person in the administration's bid to duck the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and even to justify torture.

Mr. Gonzales is a favorite of the president, who has nominated him to be attorney general and may someday appoint him to the Supreme Court.

Medals anyone? The president may actually believe that this crowd is the best and brightest America has to offer. Which is disturbing. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

DER FUHRER'S DELUSIONAL FIDDLING While Iraq Burns

12.18.04 (5:42 am) [edit]

JUDGMENT DAY

12.16.04 (6:47 am) [edit]

[b]That "someday" is going to come.[/b] It most likely won't be soon, not for the first few months of the second term of the Bush administration, but it will have to arrive--the American people can only wear blinders for so long.

The administration very clearly and obviously prepared for a short war and a quick victory. It shot down comments about the possibility that the slog might be longer than a few months with its preplanned story line about soldiers being greeted with flowers and the end of "major combat operations." Its political operation perverted a bona-fide Vietnam war hero's image into that of a vacillating turncoat who parlayed mere scratches into Purple Hearts, and has deftly used the desire of the American people to support its troops at all costs (to keep these soldiers from suffering the abuse their predecessors felt returning from Vietnam) into an ironclad shield from criticism of their poor decision-making record.

But now and then, the curtain falls away. Last week the secretary of defense had the unmitigated gall to answer a fighting man with the same high-handed dismissiveness he uses to turn aside serious questions from the press. When Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a career bureaucrat whose wartime exploits were all in the college ROTC during the Korean war, where all the armor is that's supposed to protect them, the secretary replied, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want."

This, remember, is the administration that spoke of rolling out this war like an advertising agency rolling out a new product line. It had a chance to wait and go to war with the Army that the generals wanted--and went with the one they had, critics within the military be damned.

Rumsfeld also said you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can still be blown up. And then he got on his plane in Kuwait, far from the Iraqi battle lines, and flew home to safety.

On Dec. 9 Bloomberg.com ran a story on Armor Holdings Inc., the main--and only--supplier for the protective plates used on the Humvees deployed in Iraq, pointing out that the company said it could increase their output by as much as 22 percent--it's just waiting for orders from the Army. Reuters stated that a general in Kuwait said troops are still short 2,000 of a total 8,100 "up-armored" Humvees requested by commanders. This week The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has put together a new spending plan for the war calling for an additional $100 billion dollars more--30 billion more than had expected back in October during the heat of the presidential race.

Someone in this administration isn't telling the truth about what might be needed for the military to come out of Iraq in decent shape. But, as always when there is a conservative media operation ready to place blame anywhere but where it belongs, there's always a chance that a domestic disinformation campaign can save the adminstration's hide yet again.

A few days after Rumsfeld was revealed to be as callous about soldiers' lives as he is about reporters' questions, it was revealed that a reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Edward Lee Pitts, had suggested a list of questions for the soldier to ask Rumsfeld. In the eyes of the conservative media, this is a "setup." Never mind the fact that the question is only embarrassing if Rumsfeld had no logical answer for it--which he didn't. The New York Post is now saying the Tennessee paper "did the nation no service by reducing this debate to a gotcha-game played in the Kuwaiti desert--and the liberal media are compounding the damage." The Republicans own the base reasons for the war, the bad execution of the war, and all the branches of government that approved, prosecuted and are responsible for the war--and yet they still somehow try to blame critics for any of the problems of the war.

There's a cumulative drip-drip-drip of information that people are slowly absorbing about this conflict; people like retired Army colonel and military correspondent David Hackworth are pointing out that the military is falling far short of necessary recruiting goals--that the word is out on the streets that to volunteer for the "all-volunteer" military is to surrender the "voluntary" part. The Gannett News Service reported last week that a 70-year-old twice-retired Army doctor was just recalled into service to go to Afghanistan.

And, of course, our secretary of defense--who has all but admitted to having committed war crimes by ordering that some prisoners being held in Iraq be kept incommunicado from the International Red Cross--can't answer simple questions (prompted or otherwise) from soldiers risking their lives every day under fire.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, the straight-talking Republican from Nebraska, called Rumsfeld on the carpet this past weekend: "He's dismissed his general officers. He's dismissed all outside influence. He's dismissed outside counsel and advice. And he's dismissed a lot of inside counsel and advice from men and women who have been in military uniforms for 25 and 30 years."

It will be interesting to see how much fur flies when the American people have had enough. It may not be soon, but it's coming. - http://www.citypaper.com/colu...

JUDGMENT DAY

12.16.04 (6:47 am) [edit]

JUDGMENT DAY

12.16.04 (6:43 am) [edit]

JUDGMENT DAY

12.16.04 (6:43 am) [edit]