Decided Voter

From The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

2006-11-18T20:02:00.000-08:00

I just finished The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer and found this passage near the end:

I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of there own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When thing went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

Ignoring Desert Crossing

2006-11-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

I heard a person say...we didn't know what to expect in Iraq no one has fought a war like this.

Turns out, we had some idea what to expect. the military war-gamed an Iraq invasion in 1999. They called the project Desert Crossing.

The following story comes from The National Security Archive at The George Washington University.

Post-Saddam Iraq: The War Game[

"Desert Crossing" 1999 Assumed 400,000 Troops and Still a Mess

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 207

Introduced by Roger Strother

Posted - November 4, 2006

Washington D.C., November 4, 2006 - In late April 1999, the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), led by Marine General Anthony Zinni (ret.), conducted a series of war games known as Desert Crossing in order to assess potential outcomes of an invasion of Iraq aimed at unseating Saddam Hussein. The documents posted here today covered the initial pre-war game planning phase from April-May 1999 through the detailed after-action reporting of June and July 1999.

The Desert Crossing war games, which amounted to a feasibility study for part of the main war plan for Iraq -- OPLAN 1003-98 -- tested "worst case" and "most likely" scenarios of a post-war, post-Saddam, Iraq. The After Action Report presented its recommendations for further planning regarding regime change in Iraq and was an interagency production assisted by the departments of defense and state, as well as the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency, among others.

The results of Desert Crossing, however, drew pessimistic conclusions regarding the immediate possible outcomes of such action. Some of these conclusions are interestingly similar to the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown. (Note 1) The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional instability by opening the doors to "rival forces bidding for power" which, in turn, could cause societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines" and antagonize "aggressive neighbors." Further, the report illuminated worries that secure borders and a restoration of civil order may not be enough to stabilize Iraq if the replacement government were perceived as weak, subservient to outside powers, or out of touch with other regional governments. An exit strategy, the report said, would also be complicated by differing visions for a post-Saddam Iraq among those involved in the conflict.

The Desert Crossing report was similarly pessimistic when discussing the nature of a new Iraqi government. If the U.S. were to establish a transitional government, it would likely encounter difficulty, some groups discussed, from a "period of widespread bloodshed in which various factions seek to eliminate their enemies." The report stressed that the creation of a democratic government in Iraq was not feasible, but a new pluralistic Iraqi government which included nationalist leaders might be possible, suggesting that nationalist leaders were a stabilizing force. Moreover, the report suggested that the U.S. role be one in which it would assist Middle Eastern governments in creating the transitional government for Iraq.

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The article quotes General Zini saying:

"When it looked like we were going in, I called back down to CENTCOM and said, 'You need to dust off Desert Crossing.' They said, 'What's that? Never heard of it.'"

- General Anthony Zinni (ret.), 2004.

CNN runs this story:

War simulation in 1999 pointed out Iraq invasion problems

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 showed that an invasion and post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly three times the number there now.

And even then, the games showed, the country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.

In the simulation, called Desert Crossing, 70 military, diplomatic and intelligence participants concluded the high troop levels would be needed to keep order, seal borders and take care of other security needs.

The documents came to light Saturday through a Freedom of Information Act request by George Washington University's National Security Archive, an independent research institute and library.

"The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough troops," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director. "But the Desert Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground."

There are about 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from a peak in January of about 160,000.

A week after the invasion, in March 2003, the Pentagon said there were 250,000 U.S. ground force troops inside Iraq, along with 40,000 coalition force troops.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Central Command, which sponsored the seminar and declassified the secret report in 2004, declined to comment Saturday because she was not familiar with the documents.

News of the war games results comes a day before judges are expected to deliver a verdict in Saddam Hussein war crimes trial. (Watch people prepare as curfew sets across Baghdad in anticipation of the verdicts -- 3:20 Video)

The war games looked at "worst case" and "most likely" scenarios after a war that removed then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. Some of the conclusions are similar to what actually occurred after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003:

# "A change in regimes does not guarantee stability," the 1999 seminar briefings said. "A number of factors including aggressive neighbors, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect regional stability."

# "Even when civil order is restored and borders are secured, the replacement regime could be problematic -- especially if perceived as weak, a puppet, or out-of-step with prevailing regional governments."

# "Iran's anti-Americanism could be enflamed by a U.S.-led intervention in Iraq," the briefings read. "The influx of U.S. and other western forces into Iraq would exacerbate worries in Tehran, as would the installation of a pro-western government in Baghdad."

# "The debate on post-Saddam Iraq also reveals the paucity of information about the potential and capabilities of the external Iraqi opposition groups. The lack of intelligence concerning their roles hampers U.S. policy development."

# "Also, some participants believe that no Arab government will welcome the kind of lengthy U.S. presence that would be required to install and sustain a democratic government."

# "A long-term, large-scale military intervention may be at odds with many coalition partners."

Also look at this from The National Security Archive: New State Department Releases on the "Future of Iraq" Project

The Simpsons Take on the Iraq War

2006-11-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

2006-11-06T18:52:00.000-08:00

Slippidy-Slide

2006-11-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

Let's continue to watch as the Bush team preside over the Iraqi slippidy-slide toward chaos.

Military Charts Movement of Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.

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And they have charts:

2006-11-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

My little lamb.

2006-11-02T20:28:00.000-08:00

The Countdown

2006-09-08T18:08:00.001-07:00

The Countdown

2006-09-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

2006-07-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

In the laboratory of conservatism, George W. Bush and Dennis Hastert try to conjure up some winning strategy for the midterm elections.

Valerie Plame Sues Dick Chenney

2006-07-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press is reporting that Valerie Plame is suing Dick Cheney.

Former CIA Officer Sues Cheney Over Leak

WASHINGTON -- The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of revealing Plame's CIA identity in seeking revenge against Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

Several news organizations wrote about Plame after syndicated columnist Robert Novak named her in a column on July 14, 2003. Novak's column appeared eight days after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports, but the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

In that she could no longer continue in here career, she may have a case.

June Allyson

2006-07-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

If you like old movies like I do, this is a bit of sad news.

June Allyson, 'perfect wife,' dies at 88

My Brush With The Past

2006-07-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday, I’m heading to my local CVS Pharmacy to pick up a prescription when who should walk out of the of the door, none other than Walter Koenig.

I’ve seen him there before, but this time I said hello and shook his hand.

I live just across the street from Studio City and can see minor celebrities from time to time, normally I leave them alone, but I had to say hi this ocne to Mr. Checkov.

That Pesky Flag Amdnement

2006-07-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

Luckily the flag amendment failed to pass the Senate so now Mr. Bush can cut that cake.

It's a good thing because CNN reports that text of the amendment as:

"The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

I imagine that cutting and eating a flag cake could be taken as "physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

Not by anyone sane mind you, but hey, it's what the amendment says.

Shutting Down The Bin Laden Unit

2006-07-06T12:22:00.000-07:00

The ever seditious New York Times reports this rather interesting story.

I’ll reprint the whole story since it’s not too long and seeing that one can’t read the stories from the New York Times after a certain period of time has elapsed without paying for it....reprinting it seems to be the way to go.

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

The decision to close the unit was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military's counterterrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

An intelligence official who was granted anonymity to discuss classified information said the closing of the bin Laden unit reflected a greater grasp of the organization. "Our understanding of Al Qaeda has greatly evolved from where it was in the late 1990's," the official said, but added, "There are still people who wake up every day with the job of trying to find bin Laden."

Established in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden's calls for global jihad were a source of increasing concern for officials in Washington, Alec Station operated in a similar fashion to that of other agency stations around the globe.

The two dozen staff members who worked at the station, which was named after Mr. Scheuer's son and was housed in leased offices near agency headquarters in northern Virginia, issued regular cables to the agency about Mr. bin Laden's growing abilities and his desire to strike American targets throughout the world.

In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.

"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."

Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.

Some people may recall this exchange from 17 September 2001:

Q Do you want bin Laden dead?

THE PRESIDENT: I want justice. There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, "Wanted: Dead or Alive."

Q Do you see this being long-term? You were saying it's long-term, do you see an end, at all?

THE PRESIDENT: I think that this is a long-term battle, war. There will be battles. But this is long-term. After all, our mission is not just Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda organization. Our mission is to battle terrorism and to join with freedom loving people.

It would seem that things have changed a bit.

More On Domestic Surveillance

2006-07-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

AMERICAblog links to this interesting story from Bloomberg.

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say

June 30 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11," plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion."

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

"The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause 'exceptionally grave harm to national security' and would violate both civil and criminal statutes," AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk said in an e-mail.

U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller and NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment.

One wonders why they needed to do this seven months before 9/11.

Iraq

2006-06-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

In light of the recent debate in the Congress here is what I would like to see happen. Some enterprising White House reporter needs to ask Mr. Bush what defines victory in our current situation in Iraq.

Until we know what defines victory, it is wrong for Mr. Bush to keep saying ‘Stay the Course’ because there is no course to stay.

Simply put, the current situation in Iraq is untenable. We can stay there and bleed from a thousand paper cuts because we haven’t enough troops on the ground to do anything other than that. We haven’t enough troops to secure the country, some might say that in light of the recent kidnaping and killing of soldiers at a checkpoint, that we haven’t enough troops to secure much more of Iraq other than the Green Zone. We certainly haven’t enough troops on the ground to protect Iraqi civilians from car bombs and kidnapings.

Which leaves the question what to do?

With no definition of what victory is, as the current situation stands we’re spinning our wheels in the sand while soldiers die for some undefined cause.

The only other approach I can see is admitting, at least to ourselves, that the Rumsfeld approach to a minimal ground force to secure the peace was a failure. Secondly, we have to admit, at least to ourselves, that the flower-strewn welcome that Vice- President Chenney predicted not only did not materialize to the degree expected but was thwarted but mistakes like not stopping the post-shooting-phase looting.

After finally seeing the facts as they are, we’re left with only two viable conclusions. Declare victory and turn things over to the Iraqis and leave or send hundred of thousands of additional troops to provide security for the country and root out the insurgents.

Mr. Bush On The Border

2006-06-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

While speaking to the Border Patrol on 6 June 2006 Mr Bush said this:

But it takes the time, and yet, we don't have time to get this border enforced. And so, therefore, I decided to work with our state governors, Republicans and Democrats, to move 6,000 National Guard troops on the border to help the current Border Patrol do the job until the new agents are trained. That makes sense to me, doesn't it? If we've got a problem, let's address it square on. And if part of the problem is we're waiting to get new Border Patrol agents trained and we can't wait, let's move some troops in -- National Guard troops that will be able to help those of you on the front lines of securing our border do your job better.

*Emphasis added

Here is the full transcript.

"That makes sense to me, doesn't it?"

Is he asking the audience if it makes sense to him? Most likely he isn’t, but it gave me a good laugh.

Jazz Interlude

2006-06-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Once again from youtube.com.

This clip comes from a 1948 movie directed by Howard Hawks, called "A Song Is Born" and has a list of jazz giants in it including:

Benny Goodman
Tommy Dorsey
Louis Armstrong
Lionel Hampton

This clip features Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. Benny Goodman - Let's Steal Some Apples.

Have a look and a listen.

The 25 Worst Sequels Ever Made

2006-05-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

I like movies.

I like lists about movies.

Those two things converged when the Internet Movie Database, roughly one of the best internet sites ever, linked to this Entertainment Weekly story.

The 25 Worst Sequels Ever Made.

25. the Matrix Reloaded 2003
24. The Next Karate Kid 1994
23. Porky's II: The Next day 1983
22. Teen Wolf Too 1987
21. Legally Blonde 2: red, white & blonde 2003
20. The Godfather part III 1990
19. Revenge of the Nerds II: nerds in paradise 1987
18. Battle for the Planet of the Apes 1973
17. Star Trek V: the final frontier 1989
16. Ocean's Twelve 2004
15. Dumb and Dumberer: when harry met Lloyd 2003
14. Conan the Destroyer 1984
13. The Sting II 1983
12. Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace 1999
11. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights 2004
10. Jaws: The Revenge 1987
9. Speed 2: Cruise Control 1997
8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan 1989
7. The Fly II 1989
6. Weekend At Bernie's II 1993
5. Batman & Robin 1997
4. Blues Brothers 2000 1998
3. Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha' Hood 2003
2. CaddyShack II 1988
1. Staying Alive 1983

I must say, I agree with most of those...at least the ones I've seen.

Although I gotta say though that Ocean's Twelve wasn't that bad. Not great by any stretch, but not awful enough to make this list.

2006-05-25T12:17:00.000-07:00

The kid running in Hawai'i.

Enron Executives Found Guilty

2006-05-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

Jury Convicts Enron's Skilling and Lay

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 25, 2006; 2:24 PM

HOUSTON, May 25 -- A federal jury today convicted former Enron chairman Kenneth L. Lay of each of the six counts with which he was charged and convicted his protege Jeffrey K. Skilling of 19 of 28 counts, holding the top executives accountable for fraud on their watch.

The jury returned to the courtroom after deliberating for fewer than six days over a trial that took almost four months, avoiding eye contact with the two defendants and their families. After the verdicts were read, U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III also found Lay guilty in a separate case of four counts of bank fraud.

Lake set sentencing for both men for Sept. 11.

As the verdict was read, Lay stood in the front of the courtroom near a bench he had occupied along with his wife, Linda, and daughter, Elizabeth Vittor, both of whom began to weep. Other family members sat in the front row among the spectators in the courtroom.

Skilling was impassive. He held his hands pressed together in front of him. After the verdict, he exchanged words with brother, Mark, and his defense attorney, Daniel Petrocelli. Skilling was the first man out of the courtroom, immediately after the judge left the bench.

After the verdict, Lake said that Lay would be required to relinquish his passport and he set a bond hearing for later in the afternoon for Lay. Skilling is already free on a $5 million bond.

Skilling and Petrocelli appeared at microphones set up on the courthouse steps just minutes after the verdict was read, saying they would offer a "full and vigorous" appeal.

"We have just begun to fight," he said, standing beside his client who appeared composed as he thanked his family, his lawyers and the news media for their conduct during the trial.

Skilling, 52, and Lay, 64, once stood near the pinnacle of American business, as the energy trading powerhouse they created out of a stodgy pipeline company grew to become the nation's seventh largest public company. But their fortunes collapsed in a heap along with the business in December 2001.

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So What

2006-05-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

One of my new favorite blogs, Crooks and Liars, links this wonderful video at youtube.com.

Filmed in 1958, it's Miles Davis & John Coltrane playing the classic So What.

Go have a listen.

One Very Bad Example

2006-05-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

AMERICAblog points out how one person differs with Mr. Bush on the issue of the mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

Against a fence

Posted: May 15, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

Dear Jorge plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security – resources which will never materialize – in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America's wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

In fact, the hysterical response to the post-rally enforcement rumors tends to indicate that the mere announcement of a massive deportation program would probably cause a third of that 12 million to depart for points south within a week.

----

*Emphasis added.

One really needs to stop and ask oneself if the best example of successful mass deportations you’re going to use in you’re argument in favor of mass deportation of illegal immigrants is the Nazi’s.

I find it interesting that the author chooses not to use the word Nazi. As if the semantics of that covers up the death camps these people we sent to.

Is George W. Bush Just a Misunderstood Genius?

2006-05-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Apparently at least one person on the right side of the blogosphere seems to think so.

A Stroke of Genius?

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Hyperbolic? Well, maybe. But consider Bush's latest master stroke: the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The pact includes the U.S., Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea; these six countries account for most of the world's carbon emissions. The treaty is, in essence, a technology transfer agreement. The U.S., Japan and Australia will share advanced pollution control technology, and the pact's members will contribute to a fund that will help implement the technologies. The details are still sketchy and more countries may be admitted to the group later on. The pact's stated goal is to cut production of "greenhouse gases" in half by the end of the century.

What distinguishes this plan from the Kyoto protocol is that it will actually lead to a major reduction in carbon emissions! This substitution of practical impact for well-crafted verbiage stunned and infuriated European observers.

I doubt that the pact will make any difference to the earth's climate, which will be determined, as always, by variations in the energy emitted by the sun. But when the real cause of a phenomenon is inaccessible, it makes people feel better to tinker with something that they can control. Unlike Kyoto, this agreement won't devastate the U.S. economy, and, also unlike Kyoto, the agreement will reduce carbon emissions in the countries where they are now rising most rapidly, India and China. Brilliant.

But I don't suppose President Bush is holding his breath, waiting for the crowd to start applauding.

George W Bush, a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance.

Someone needs to take this guy's Kool-aid away from him.

2006-04-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

Some historians seem to be thinking about Mr. Bush and his place in history.

Domestic Surveillance and the Pulitzer Prize

2006-04-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the domestic surveillance story.

For a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, in print or in print and online, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

----

Awarded to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.

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The right-wing blogosphere quickly went on line to add their opinion about the Times and its reporters.

From the Power Line we have this post:

April 17, 2006

The Pulitzer Prize for Treason

Last year we noted that the AP had won "The Pulizer Prize for felony murder" for its spot photographic coverage in Iraq. We followed up in a series of posts featuring the analysis of former New York Times photographer D. Gorton (here and here). Mr. Gorton recapitulated his analysis in a devastating column for the Standard. Below is the photo in issue. (I wonder if Bilal Hussein was the AP stringer who has enjoyed such a fruitful collaboration with terrorists.)

Following in the footsteps of the AP last year, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize today for their treasonous contribution to the undermining of the highly classified National Security Agency surveillance program of al Qaeda-related terrorists. As I argued in a column for the Standard, the Risen/Lichtblau reportage clearly violated relevant provisions of the Espionage Act -- a particularly serious crime insofar as it lends assistance to the enemy in a time of war.

Juxtapose the Times's award-winning reportage with the Times's highminded editorial condemnation of President Bush for allegedly failing to follow proper procedure in declassifying the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate key judgments. Today the Times instructs us: "Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified."

Waving a wand is apparently a prerogative reserved to Times executive editor Bill Keller, who made the decision to "declassify" the NSA surveillance program in the pages of the Times. According to Keller, the publication of the NSA story did "not expose any technical intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record." Thus Keller waved his wand, and the Times blew the NSA program. Smarter folks than I will have to reconcile the trains of thought at work among the editors of the New York Times.

What about the Pulitzer Prize committee? When Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times in connection with his mendacious coverage of Stalin's Soviet Union, he performed valuable public relations work for a mass murderer. He nevertheless did no direct harm to the United States. Today's Pulitzer Prize award to the Times brings a new shame to the Pulitzer Prize committee that builds on its disgrace last year via the award to the AP.

Posted by Scott at 08:32 PM

Glenn Greenwald, of Unclaimed Territory, who pointed me to the story, has more.

Yesterday, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau received well-deserved Pulitzer Prizes for "national reporting" based on their (year-long-delayed) disclosure of the President's illegal NSA eavesdropping program. That award has set off a new slew of bitter commentary from Bush supporters, including Bennett, proclaiming that Risen and Lichtblau belong in prison. On his radio show this morning, the great free press crusader [Bill] Bennett said: "I think what they did is worthy of jail."

Powerline, as always, helpfully expounds on this definitively American principle of throwing reporters in jail who publish stories which damage the political interests of the Commander-in-Chief during a Time of War. In an item entitled "Pulitzer Prize for Treason," Scott "Big Trunk" Johnson says that Risen and Lichtblau won the Pulitzer "for their treasonous contribution to the undermining of the highly classified National Security Agency surveillance program of al Qaeda-related terrorists," which -- according to Johnson, "is a particularly serious crime insofar as it lends assistance to the enemy" -- all together, now -- "in a time of war."

On Charles Krauthammer's Bad Movie Reviews

2006-03-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

So, I sent the following letter to the Editor at the Washington Post.

Dear Editors,

Since, apparently in Mr. Krauthammer's mind, as a population, Americans are all so simple-minded that we couldn't walk out of JFK without being "taught" by the film the proper history of the incident, I'd just like to remind him and the Editors of the Post that some of us do not take the medium of film as a teacher of history.

Rather, some of us think that film can be used to raise questions, to challenge commonly held notions. A point that seems so far beyond Mr. Krauthammer's narrow-minded way of thinking considering the just plain stupid last sentence:

"Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction."

Of the 3 March 2006 piece.

I'm just guessing here, but apparently Mr. Krauthammer's does not believe that film, in this never ending age of the war on terror, should raise questions or challenge people to think about the world in which we live. I make that assumptive conclusion since Mr. Krauthammer's tendentious "reviews" of Munich and Syriana were so incredibly partisan and off base.

At any rate, I'm thinking we could get someone in Hollywood to channel Leni Riefenstahl and do a modern day of Triumph of the Will updated for Mr. Bush for you. Maybe the director could film one of his town-hall styled stops with the pre-screened audiences.

And no, lest someone feel so inclined to make the enormous leap in logic, I'm not comparing Hitler to Mr. Bush. I'm just comparing propaganda tools to propaganda tools.

Or, and this is just a thought, we could be able to convince Hollywood to churn out a spate of World War II era propaganda films. Even better though, for Mr. Krauthammer's apparent 'film must toe the party line' point of view was the Hollywood effort to re-fight and win Vietnam in several Regan era films.

Such films might warm the cockles of Mr. Krauthammer's conservative heart.

2006-02-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

The latest scar.

2006-02-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

CT Scan

2006-01-31T17:54:00.001-08:00

Picture I

2006-01-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

Picture II

2006-01-31T17:53:00.000-08:00

Picture IV

2006-01-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

Picture III

2005-11-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

A bit more graphic look at the scar.

2005-11-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

Ouch

2005-10-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

The kid and I.

2005-09-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

Lyla V

2005-09-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

Lyla IV

2005-09-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

Lyla III

2005-09-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

Lyla II

2005-09-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

Lyla I

A Handy Guide

2005-01-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has this guide to the Bush Administration's torture memos.

The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have disclosed memorandums that show a pattern in which Bush administration lawyers set about devising arguments to avoid constraints against mistreatment and torture of detainees. Administration officials responded by releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified documents related to the development of a policy on detainees.

----

Yes, we now live in a country where there are guides to how the Government set about to find a way to torture people.

How Cute Is My Little Girl???

2005-01-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

She's just the best!!

Power, Arrogance and Incompetence....

2005-01-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

....Must be about the Bush Administration.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales:

If the United States were to look into a mirror right now, it wouldn't recognize itself.

The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice, integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby, interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general, which just happens to be the highest law enforcement office in the land.

Mr. Gonzales shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval.

But this is the Bush administration, where incompetence and outright failure are rewarded with the nation's highest honors. (Remember the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded last month to George Tenet et al.?) So not only is Mr. Gonzales's name being stenciled onto the attorney general's door, but a plush judicial seat is being readied for his anticipated elevation to the Supreme Court.

----

The Bush administration and Mr. Gonzales are trying to sell the fiction that they've seen the light. In answer to a setup question at his Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Gonzales said he is against torture. And the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last week that said "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms."

What took so long? Why were we ever - under any circumstances - torturing, maiming, sexually abusing and even killing prisoners? And where is the evidence that we've stopped?

The Bush administration hasn't changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. It is eroding the checks and balances so crucial to American-style democracy. It led the U.S., against the advice of most of the world, to launch the dreadful war in Iraq. It led Mr. Gonzales to ignore the expressed concerns of the State Department and top military brass as he blithely opened the gates for the prisoner abuse vehicles to roll through.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales's confirmation hearings. Nothing's changed. As detailed in The Washington Post earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be charged.

----

*Emphasis added.

Josh Marshall....

2005-01-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

....Of Talking Points Memo on the Social Security debate:

---

So now you can see from memos emerging from the White House itself that this isn't about 'saving' Social Security. If it were, what would that sentence mean -- ("For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win")? The first time in six decades they can save it?

Clearly, this isn't about 'saving' Social Security. It is a battle to end Social Security and replace with something that Wehner clearly understands is very different, indeed the antithesis of Social Security.

This entire debate is about ideology -- between people who believe in the benefits Social Security has brought America in the last three-quarters of a century and those who think it was a bad idea from the start. There is an honest debate to have on this point, a values debate. Only, the White House understands that the belief that Social Security was always a bad program isn't widely shared by Americans. So they have to wrap their effort in a package of lies, harnessing Americans' desire to save Social Security in their own effort to destroy it.

One Paragraph

2005-01-03T22:35:00.000-08:00

Is all it takes for Paul Krugman to lay out how the current Administration does things:

The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government.

Alberto Gonzales

2004-12-27T18:35:00.000-08:00

For Attorney General?

Just say no.

Post Election

2004-11-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

I am deeply disappointed and saddened because it seems the majority of Americans voted for a guy whose only credentials are that he walks around like a sheriff and talks with a homey accent.

My one vote in opposition wasn’t enough to stop it.

The Republicans carpet-bombed political discourse in this country to get Mr. Bush back in office, and the press did next to nothing to hold Mr. Bush and the Republicans accountable for their distortions.

This Administration doesn’t have a clue, and the number of ways it doesn’t have a clue is frightening.

I only hope that the terrorists don’t smuggle something into the country in a non-inspected container. Remember, 95% of containers are not inspected....

I only hope that Mr. Bush’s deficit doesn’t hurt our country in ways that we’ll be paying for for years to come....

I only hope that some of the people who are unemployed in this country can find a job at a place other than Wal-Mart....

I only hope that some of the millions of people who lost their health insurance coverage can get it back in some way...or avoid getting sick in the meantime....

I only hope the Administration can do something about North Korea and Iran....

I can only hope that the Administration can do something about these things cause they haven’t cared to do much about them for the last 4 years.

What’s most saddening is that that apparently doesn’t matter to 53 million Americans. What matters is Mr. Bush’s empty rhetoric and posing.

And the result is that we get another four years of blinding incompetence.

The problem is that America will have to pay the price for that incompetence sooner or later.

But there’s nothing I can do about it now.

"George Bush Writes In Crayon"

2004-10-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Breslin just build himself a new house in Shrilltown....

He writes about the debate:

A leader showed up; his name was Kerry

George Bush reiterated time and again last night that it was hard work to run this government. It was hard work to lead a country out of tyranny and into democracy. It was hard work to read casualty reports. The war was hard work. And he made it plain that talking with somebody about his record as president was the grueling, hardest work you could want.

He showed for all to see what a minor mind he goes around with. I looked at this guy Bush last night and thought about young people dying in Iraq because of him. And there will be more and more because he is a man sitting with a car full of people on the train tracks and he doesn't know enough to get off with the train coming. Watch the ages of the dead night after night, day after day - 21 ... 23 ... 19 ... 25 ... Anybody responsible for getting people this young killed is a national menace.

Dumb people always are.

And don't tell me he's not dumb. Yes, he was matched against an absolutely first-rate mind last night. But he could have done a little bit better at covering his helplessness than flusters of college boy anger.

He whined and brayed about consistency. He used that word so he could underline his famous "flip-flop" attacks on John Kerry. He said that by opposing the way the war in Iraq is going, Kerry was sending "mixed messages" and they are harmful to our troops. I, Bush, never change.

There were problems to this. One, Kerry cheated on him and turned a fine line: "Don't confuse the war with the warriors." Then in the middle of Bush's reiteration of dusty phrase after dusty phrase, we should remain as we are, was Ralph Waldo Emerson's, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen ..."

It was better than anything you are going to read from anybody from now to the end of the election, and you will see that Emerson quote come alive whenever Bush opens his mouth and starts the same old lines. George Bush writes in crayon.

This Is What Happens When You Don't Pre-Screen The Crowd

2004-10-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

Wait a second, wasn't there a loyalty oath to get in here?

The Debate

2004-09-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

Watched it...great debate.

I think Mr. Kerry did very well and came in with a solid victory in the debate. He was calm and made his points well.

On the other hand, Mr. Bush was defensive and stumbling.

The very picture of his presidency.

Most of the night I felt like I was watching the flash cards in Mr. Bush's brain actually flipping to find the right word or phrase he'd been coached about.

And while that sorting process took place, he stood there mumbling random things until the caught an odd phrase or bit of talking point to say.

All in all, a good night for Mr. Kerry and another bad public performance for Mr. Bush.

Mirror Universe

2004-09-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

This whole misadventure in Iraq has been one colossal screw-up. Nearly all of which is the fault, in whole or in part, of Mr. Bush and his administration.

Remember back in 2000 when people were saying, ‘well, Mr. Bush ain’t all that bright but things will be ok, he'll surround himself with thoughtful reasoned people.’ Well, how’d that turn out? Mr. Bush still ain’t all that bright, he makes unthoughtful decisions based on advice from the ideologues he’s surrounded himself with, makes no attempt to gather information from outside his crony bubble, and then lives in a fantasy world when reality refuses to meet expectations.

I’ll tell you something else, if Mr. Kerry is elected, at least we’ll stop having our foreign policy dictated by the likes of these bozos.

All in all, I’d say this Administration is comprised of a bunch of incompetent fools at the highest levels. If it weren’t for the fact that we apparently now live in some strange mirror universe where they are not responsible for any of the incompetent, foolhardy things they’ve done, they’d be thrown out on their collective ear.

Write-In Republicans

2004-09-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about this story of late.

It reads in part:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee (news, bio, voting record), a Republican moderate from Rhode Island, said on Monday he might not vote for President Bush (news - web sites) in the Nov. 2 election.

Ok. Fair enough. There are grown-up Republicans who don't like what Mr. Bush is doing.

But the next paragraph adds a certain twist:

Chafee stressed, however, that he has no plans to bolt his party, and that if he does not back Bush he will write in the name of another Republican.

What it points out is that clearly there are Republicans out there who would rather drink glue than vote for Mr. Bush.

Find and dandy. I came to that conclusion a long time ago and I welcome them to the club.

However, on a serious note, this could be an important factor in this election in that it could syphon votes away from Mr. Bush...and while not giving them to Mr. Kerry, I think we can agree that any vote not for Mr. Bush is good.

It could be the left's version of the Ralph Nader factor.

Thing is, these folks either have not been positively swayed into voting for Mr. Kerry by his campaign rhetoric, or voting for a Democrat is prevented by partisan allergies....

So, I hit upon an idea. I have created a wedge group I call the Write-In Republicans.

Blogs need to spread the word...it's ok not to support Mr. Bush, his failed policies, and his incompetent Administration.

If you're a Republican and the thought of voting for Mr. Bush causes you to question your own sanity, and if, for some reason, you just can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, well, the Write-In a Republican name you do like!

For example, write in John McCain's name...everyone likes John McCain!

Or Colin Powell, he might still have some shred of reputation left. Maybe.

Write-in someone...anyone.

Anyone other than George W. Bush.

Undermining The Troops

2004-09-26T01:30:00.000-07:00

Publius at Legal Fiction writes about what and who might be undermining our troops.

And it's not John Kerry.

I’ll tell you what undermines our troops – getting troops killed undermines troops, Mr. Hatch – not criticizing the failed policies that got them killed in the first place. Bumbling an occupation and having no plan undermines troops. And Mr. Cheney, I’ll tell you what’s destructive to our effort in the global war on terror – your invasion of Iraq, which was Osama’s wet dream. And Mr. Bush, I’ll tell you how to embolden an enemy – invade the second-holiest land of Islam for no reason and then execute the war without a shred of competence. Lying about our progress also sends the wrong message to the people who are actually fighting your terrorist-aiding war. Let’s not forget that. We know exactly who – and what policies – have emboldened our enemies and undermined our troops. And it’s not John Kerry, or his criticisms of your failure. Nice try, though.

Via Kevin Drum.

Campaigning On Distortions

2004-09-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post writes:

Twisting the Truth

There is one good thing about President Bush's new advertisement showing John Kerry windsurfing: Kerry does enjoy windsurfing.

That alone puts the ad on a higher plane of truthfulness than many of the statements the president regularly makes on the campaign trail. A press corps that relentlessly nitpicked Al Gore in 2000 in search of "little lies" and exaggerations has given Bush wide latitude to make things up. I guess the incumbent benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations.

----

....Kerry gave a tough speech attacking Bush's policies there. Bush fired back, as he had every right to do, and denounced what Kerry said.

"Incredibly," Bush said of his opponent, "he now believes our national security would be stronger with Saddam Hussein in power, not in prison." Then Bush quoted Kerry. "Today he said, and I quote, 'We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.' He's saying he prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy."

Now, to have a Democratic nominee preferring dictatorship to democracy would be big news indeed. But here is a full rendition of the passage from Kerry's speech that Bush partially quoted: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, that was not in and of itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction that we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

----

A very intelligent political reporter I know said the other night that Republicans simply run better campaigns than Democrats. If I were given a free pass to stretch the truth to the breaking point, I could run a pretty good campaign, too.

This Administration Has To Go

2004-09-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

From a Washington Post editorial:

What remains objectionable -- what looms as more objectionable than ever, now that the government has acknowledged Mr. Hamdi's unimportance -- is the unnecessary assault on civil liberties that the administration led in his case. For three years the administration insisted that Mr. Hamdi be held incommunicado and without any semblance of normal legal process or rights despite his citizenship. For most of his detention he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer. In 2002 the government contended in court that merely allowing him to meet with counsel "jeopardizes compelling national security interests" and would "interfere with if not irreparably harm the military's ongoing efforts to gather intelligence." Mr. Hamdi, it warned, might even "pass concealed messages through unwitting intermediaries."

The government insisted that the courts authorize Mr. Hamdi's detention purely on the basis of a two-page affidavit from a mid-level Defense Department bureaucrat who claimed no personal knowledge of the case. An American citizen could be plucked out of all of the protections of the civilian justice system with no significant judicial review and no opportunity to rebut the facts behind the decision, the administration argued -- and it pushed this view all the way to the Supreme Court, where it received the rebuke it deserved.

----

Apocalyptic justifications for needlessly aggressive positions that have gross consequences for liberty cannot be wiped away with a blithe "never mind."

I Don't Care About Polls...But This Poll Says...

2004-09-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

We also learned yesterday, that Mr. Bush, the steely-eyed, resolute, plain-spoken, non-poll watcher, watches polls:

Bush Shrugs Off Bad Polls on Iraq Outlook

Thu Sep 23, 5:24 PM ET

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) on Thursday shrugged off polls that suggest most Iraqis see Americans as occupiers not liberators. "I saw a poll that said the 'right track-wrong track' in Iraq (news - web sites) was better than here in America," he told reporters.

"It was pretty darn strong," Bush told a Rose Garden news conference with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. "I mean, the people see a better future."

If you claim not to care about polls, why are you citing them as evidence of anything?

The Politics Of War

2004-09-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum writes the following as part of a good post:

That election, and the political considerations that go along with it, have been driving our military strategy for the past two years. Before the war, we passed up a chance to take out terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi — for political reasons. We invaded with too few troops — for political reasons. We lowballed the cost of the war — for political reasons. We ignored the UN and then turned around and pleaded for their help — for political reasons. Then we installed Iyad Allawi as president behind the UN's back — for political reasons.

And just recently we've learned that the Marines were yo-yoed in and out of Fallujah — for political reasons. The president has bizarrely dismissed his own intelligence agencies' analysis of Iraq as "guessing" — for political reasons. He's ignored the advice of his own generals about troop requirements for the upcoming elections — for political reasons. And assaults on Baathist enclaves have been postponed until December — for fairly obvious political reasons.

Everything is politics with this Administration.

Cause It Worked So Well The First Time

2004-09-22T01:25:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that the Administration is considering taking it's traveling Regime Change Road Show one country over.

With Iran policy in a state of flux, there is a drive among conservatives to reach out to Iranian dissidents and exiles seeking to overthrow the government, much as efforts were made with Iraqis in the 1990's. Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, is sponsoring legislation favoring "regime change," with what some say is the tacit backing of administration conservatives.

Last year, when it was trying to reach out to Tehran for cooperation on Iraq, the administration stated that it did not support regime change in Iran, though President Bush also spoke out in favor of greater democracy there.

Administration officials say that there was an internal debate last year but that the idea of giving aid to dissidents who might try to overthrow the Iranian government had been dropped for lack of any credible groups to support.

Yet the cause of regime change in Iran is expected to be revived if President Bush is re-elected, administration officials say....

----

Via Dan Froomkin.

Yet another reason why no one should vote to elect these people to office.

Mr. Bush's Top Ten Tax Proposals

2004-09-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

CNN writes about John Kerry's Top 10 list on David Letterman's show:

Kerry's "Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals" are:

10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents.

9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form.

8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton.

7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair.

6. Attorney General (John) Ashcroft gets to write off the entire U.S. Constitution.

5. Texas Rangers can take a business loss for trading Sammy Sosa.

4. Eliminate all income taxes; just ask Teresa (Heinz Kerry) to cover the whole damn thing.

3. Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.

2. Hundred-dollar penalty if you pronounce it "nuclear" instead of "nucular."

1. George W. Bush gets a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.

Via Pandagon.

Mr. Bush, Advocating Retreat And Defeat In The Face Of Terror

2004-09-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

Nick Confessore at The American Prospect Online makes note of Mr. Bush and his campaign's inconsistencies.

Mr. Bush said that John Kerry's plan for Iraq was "...exactly what we're currently doing."

Except, of course, for the part about being incompetent fools.

Anyway....

Steve Schmidt, Bush-Cheney '04 Spokesman, writes this about Mr. Kerry's position on the Bush-Cheney '04 website:

John Kerry's latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror.

As a result, it is clear that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, since it is the same policy advocated by John Kerry, is one of retreat and defeat in the face of terror.

If they said it...it must be true. Because we know, that to question the Bush Administration is to be unpatriotic.

It's The Other Way Around

2004-09-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's not so much that Mr. Kerry has come to Mr. Bush on how to deal with the aftermath of the Iraq of the invasion...rather, it's Mr. Bush coming to Mr. Kerry.

And people should understand that.

It seems that Mr. Bush has decided...finally decided that is...that things should be done due to the fact that so much of what has happened has gone so wrong.

Paul Krugman writes:

The Bush administration fostered the Iraq insurgency by botching the essential tasks of enlisting allies, rebuilding infrastructure, training and equipping local security forces, and preparing for elections. It's understandable, then, that John Kerry - whose speech yesterday was deadly accurate in its description of Mr. Bush's mistakes - proposes going back and doing the job right.

Speaking Of Today's Right-Wing

2004-09-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

James Wolcott puts hammer to nail head:

Yesterday, C-SPAN II, as part of its regular weekend books coverage, ran a reading/q & a with Ben Ferguson, the young conservative author of It's My America Too. The plaintive whimpering of that title--in particular that "too"--is typical of the phony underdog position conservatives insist on taking to make themselves look like insurgents. Republicans control the presidency, the Senate, the House, and much of the judiciary, Fox News is #1 in cable news, the rightwing rules talk radio, and yet here's little big Ben, who at the age of 22 hosts his own rightwing radio show, pouting about feeling like an outsider in his own country, boo hoo.

----

At one point in his talk, he made light of John Kerry's war medals and wounds, snickering that Kerry's decision to go to Vietnam to be shot at was pure "opportunism," and that if he'd been wounded as badly as all that he'd be in "a real nice wheelchair" now. Of course, if Kerry had been crippled and reduced to a wheelchair, that wouldn't spare him further mockery, as Max Cleland has learned.

Now at this point a certain type of liberal will quote Joseph Welch's famous question to Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Liberals of a certain age love quoting that stirring heroic retort. When Anthony Lewis was a Times columnist, he used to quote it every other week it seemed, and I saw Richard Cohen pull a Joseph Welch a few columns ago.

But I won't. The question is no longer worth raising, even rhetorically. Because we know the answer.

They have no decency. Not a sliver, not a shred. Look at how Max Cleland has been treated, look at how George Soros has been smeared as some sort of Jewish intriguer who oozed his way out of Nazi Germany by Tony Blankley* and a drug kingpin by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, look at--oh, we know what the examples are.

Ben Ferguson can snicker that if John Kerry had incurred real injuries he'd be in a nice wheelchair today and the middleaged white fools sitting in the bookstore don't even raise a peep, which makes you wonder if ten years from now it'll be open season on any American vet from the Iraq campaign who's missing limbs or carrying shrapnel and gets out of political line. There is a myth that the Left spat on returning Vietnam vets in the Seventies. Well, the Right spits on Vietnam vets every day with impunity, and will spit on future vets. Conservatives support the military only in the vague abstract; beneath their patriotic bluster and sentimentality, they basically think soldiers are chumps, risking their lives when they could be staying home, making money, and carving out a neat career, as Ben has done.

Do you really think that Rush and Newt and Dick Cheney and the rest of them regret that they didn't serve in Vietnam, that they didn't do their part for a war they supported and whose cause they still think was just? Do you really think Ben Ferguson wishes he was in uniform fighting for democracy in Iraq instead of plastering his Lumpy Rutherford face on TV?

They have no conscience, they have no decency, so let's stop fake-pretending that they do.

*Emphasis added.

Via Atrios.

Turns Out...

2004-09-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bush was not telling the truth when he said this about his National Guard records:

Russert: Would you authorize the release of everything to settle this?

President Bush: Yes, absolutely.

We did so in 2000, by the way.

Eric Boehlert at Salon writes:

Under order from U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baer Jr. to find and make public any of President Bush's military records that had not already been released, the Pentagon late on Friday released yet another batch of documents.

Via Atrios.

On My Mind

2004-09-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

For somebody with any political savvy, beating Mr. Bush in this election should be as close to a slam dunk as it gets.

Iraq
Combating Terrorism
Foreign Policy
Medicare
The Environment
The Deficit

Will Mr. Kerry pull it out.

Given the direction the current incompetent Administration is taking the country, I certainly hope so.

Republicans Criticize Mr. Bush

2004-09-19T16:26:00.000-07:00

I'm sure this atricle is going to get the same sort of media play that the 'John Kerry campaign is being critized by Democrats' or the 'Kerry campaign is in trouble' stories.

Republicans Criticize Bush 'Mistakes' on Iraq

Sun Sep 19, 1:12 PM ET

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leading members of President Bush (news - web sites)'s Republican Party on Sunday criticized mistakes and "incompetence" in his Iraq (news - web sites) policy and called for an urgent ground offensive to retake insurgent sanctuaries.

In appearances on news talk shows, Republican senators also urged Bush to be more open with the American public after the disclosure of a classified CIA (news - web sites) report that gave a gloomy outlook for Iraq and raised the possibility of civil war.

"The fact is, we're in deep trouble in Iraq ... and I think we're going to have to look at some recalibration of policy," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record) of Nebraska said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We made serious mistakes," said Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), an Arizona Republican who has campaigned at Bush's side this year after patching up a bitter rivalry.

McCain, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," cited as mistakes the toleration of looting after the successful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and failures to secure Iraq's borders or prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country.

He said a ground offensive was urgently needed to retake areas held by insurgents, but a leading Democrat accused the administration of stalling for fear of hurting Bush's reelection chances.

The criticisms came as Bush prepared this week to host Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and focus strongly on Iraq after stepped up attacks from Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites).

After the CIA report was disclosed on Thursday, Kerry accused the president of living in a "fantasy world of spin" about Iraq and of not telling the truth about the growing chaos.

McCain said Bush had been "perhaps not as straight as maybe we'd like to see."

"I think the president is being clear. I would like to see him more clear," McCain said. He said Congress was expected to hold hearings on Iraq soon.

Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), an Indiana Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also criticized the administration's handling of Iraq's reconstruction.

Only $1 billion of $18.4 billion allocated by Congress for the task has been spent, Lugar said. "This is the incompetence in the administration," he said on ABC's "This Week."

GROUND OFFENSIVE

A ground offensive was essential to clearing insurgents out of strongholds such as Falluja, McCain said. He joined other lawmakers from both parties who said Iraqi elections scheduled for January would be impossible unless this were done.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the U.S. military intended to retake Falluja by the end of the year.

"We've got to take out the sanctuaries. We're going to have to sustain, tragically, some more casualties. Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it," McCain said.

"And the longer we delay ...the more difficult the challenge is going to be and the more casualties we will incur," he said.

Sen. John Kyl, like McCain an Arizona Republican, said, "Allowing the Iraqis to make the decisions not to go into some of these sanctuaries, I think, turns out to have not been a good decision, which we're going to have to correct now by going in with our Marines and Army divisions."

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, speaking on ABC, accused the administration of delaying an offensive out of concern it would hurt Bush's bid to win reelection on Nov. 2.

"The only thing I can figure as to why they're not doing it with a sense of urgency is that they don't want to do it before the election and they want to make it seem like everything is status quo," Biden said.

But Kyl said on CBS that time was also needed to train Iraqi troops to help secure areas recaptured from insurgents, and he disputed accusations Bush had not been open about the difficulties in Iraq.

McCain also called for enlarging the U.S. Army by 70,000 soldiers and the Marines by 20,000 to 25,000.

Kerry and other Democrats have said Bush plans to call up more part-time National Guard and Reserve troops after the November election to compensate for thinning ranks in the full-time military due to Iraq. The Bush campaign denied this.

Biden said disappointment with Bush's policies was bipartisan. "Dick Lugar, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, John McCain -- we are all on the same page. It is us and the administration. This has been incompetence so far," he said. (additional reporting by Sue Pleming)

Shrill Saletan

2004-09-17T01:44:00.000-07:00

William Saletan at Slate writes about the candidates speaking to the National Guard Association....

----

Most Guard officers, however, refuse to admit that their institution is being abused. They gave Bush standing ovations on Tuesday when he told them that "you're fighting terrorist enemies in Iraq" and that the war was "necessary to defend America."

Kerry brought them a different message. "Far too many of you have been on the ground for far too long, much longer than was expected or promised," he reminded them Thursday. "Many of you are our first responders here at home: fire fighters, police officers, and emergency medical technicians. To take you out of your communities is to take down our critical first line of defense. That's no way to protect America."

What response did Kerry get? Silence.

Those brave, loyal, hoodwinked Guardsmen. They think Bush is one of them. They don't understand that the only presidential candidate who's done the job they're doing now—risking life and shedding blood—is the guy on the other side.

It's All About Priorities

2004-09-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press has this story....

White House Wants to Cut FAA Budget

Thu Sep 16, 6:18 PM ET

By LESLIE MILLER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration wants to trim the Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites)'s budget for buying new air traffic control equipment at a time when more planes are in the air.

Air traffic controllers argue that more backup equipment could have mitigated the shutdown of a radio system at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday that left controllers unable to talk to pilots and caused a ripple effect of delays across the country.

Controllers have been asking the FAA (news - web sites) for another backup radio system for years, said Hamid Ghaffari, president of the local air traffic controllers union in Los Angeles.

"The response was, 'We don't have the funding,'" Ghaffari said.

The loss of voice contact with pilots caused at least five incidents where planes flew dangerously close to each other and delayed or canceled hundreds of flights.

FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the Los Angeles air traffic control center already has two backup systems.

Sept. 2 was the busiest day ever for the U.S. air traffic control system. The FAA forecasts a 24 percent increase in the number of planes in the sky — including passenger and cargo planes, general aviation and military aircraft — between this year and 2015.

But the administration has proposed cutting next year's FAA budget for equipment and facilities by 12.6 percent, from $2.862 billion to $2.5 billion. Both the House and the Senate have gone along with that figure so far in the budget process.

----

Air traffic controllers fear if Congress goes along with the cut it will force them to work with outdated equipment longer and prevent new backup systems from being installed.

Tom Brantley, president of the Professional Airways Systems Specialists union, said the systems that keep track of the planes in the centers between airport towers will soon reach their capacity.

"Cutting the budget by almost 14 percent is insane," said Brantley, who represents the people who maintain air traffic control equipment. "Seventy percent of the systems out there are in need of upgrade or replacement."

----

Oh, Those Details

2004-09-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has this story about some of the details Mr. Bush left out of his convention speech.

$3 Trillion Price Tag Left Out As Bush Details His Agenda

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 14, 2004; Page A01

The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.

A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.

Bush's pledge to make permanent his tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010 or before, would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years, according to administration estimates. His proposed changes in Social Security to allow younger workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds could cost the government $2 trillion over the coming decade, according to the calculations of independent domestic policy experts.

And Bush's agenda has many costs the administration has not publicly estimated. For instance, Bush said in his speech that he would continue to try to stabilize Iraq and wage war on terrorism. The war in Iraq alone costs $4 billion a month, but the president's annual budget does not reflect that cost.

Bush's platform highlights the challenge for both presidential candidates in trying to lure voters with attractive government initiatives at a time of mounting budget deficits. This year's federal budget deficit will reach a record $422 billion, and the government is expected to accumulate $2.3 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported last week.

----

Via Eric Alterman.

2004-09-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

Newsweek has this story:

It's Worse Than You Think
As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger

----

U.S. forces are working frantically to train Iraqis for the thankless job of maintaining public order. The aim is to boost Iraqi security forces from 95,000 to 200,000 by sometime next year. Then, using a mixture of force and diplomacy, the Americans plan to retake cities and install credible local forces. That's the hope, anyway. But the quality of new recruits is debatable. During recent street demonstrations in Najaf, police opened fire on crowds, killing and injuring dozens. The insurgents, meanwhile, are recruiting, too. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once referred to America's foes in Iraq as "dead-enders," then the Pentagon maintained they probably numbered 5,000, and now senior military officials talk about "dozens of regional cells" that could call upon as many as 20,000 fighters.

Yet U.S. officials publicly insist that Iraq will somehow hold national elections before the end of January. The appointed council currently acting as Iraq's government under interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is to be replaced by an elected constitutional assembly—if the vote takes place. "I presume the election will be delayed," says the Iraqi Interior Ministry's chief spokesman, Sabah Kadhim. A senior Iraqi official sees no chance of January elections: "I'm convinced that it's not going to happen. It's just not realistic. How is it going to happen?" Some Iraqis worry that America will stick to its schedule despite all obstacles. "The Americans have created a series of fictional dates and events in order to delude themselves," says Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who recently met with Allawi and American representatives to discuss the January agenda. "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."

----

It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August—the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting—a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."

----

As much as ordinary Iraqis may hate the insurgents, they blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. Three months ago Iraqi troops and U.S.-dominated "multinational forces" pulled out of Samarra, and insurgents took over the place immediately. "The day the MNF left, people celebrated in the streets," says Kadhim, the Interior spokesman. "But that same day, vans arrived in town and started shooting. They came from Fallujah and other places and they started blowing up houses." Local elders begged Allawi's government to send help. "The leaders of the tribes come to see us and they say, 'Really, we are scared, we don't like these people'," Kadhim continues. "But we just don't have the forces at the moment to help them." Last week negotiators reached a tentative peace deal, but it's not likely to survive long. The Iraqi National Guard is the only homegrown security force that people respect, and all available ING personnel are deployed elsewhere.

*Emphasis added.

Via The American Prospect Online.

Which calls to mind this quote quote:

My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

Dick Cheney, Sunday, 14 September 2003 on Meet The Press

Based on that little piece of incompetence, I do not see how anyone would vote to let this Administration serve another 4 years.

Pessimism?

2004-09-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin points to this article in the New York Times.

THE RECONSTRUCTION

U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future

By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday.

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.

"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages. The officials declined to discuss the key judgments - concise, carefully written statements of intelligence analysts' conclusions - included in the document.

The intelligence estimate, the first on Iraq since October 2002, was prepared by the National Intelligence Council and was approved by the National Foreign Intelligence Board under John E. McLaughlin, the acting director of central intelligence. Such estimates can be requested by the White House or Congress, but this one was initiated by the intelligence council under George J. Tenet, who stepped down as director of central intelligence on July 9, the government officials said.

----

The new estimate by the National Intelligence Council was approved at a meeting in July by Mr. [John E.] McLaughlin and the heads of the other intelligence agencies, the officials said.

Its pessimistic conclusions were reached even before the recent worsening of the security situation in Iraq, which has included a sharp increase in attacks on American troops and in deaths of Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. Like the new National Intelligence Estimate, the assessments completed in January 2003 were prepared by the National Intelligence Council, which is led by Robert Hutchings and reports to the director of central intelligence. The council is charged with reflecting the consensus of the intelligence agencies. The January 2003 assessments were not formal National Intelligence Estimates, however, which means they were probably not formally approved by the intelligence chiefs.

Are You Pre-screened Enough?

2004-09-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing for Wednesday 15 September 2004 contains this:

The White House can be a lonely place these days, particularly if you're a reporter trying to ask the president a question.

----

And don't bother trying to ask the president a question -- unless of course you're part of a pre-screened audience at a campaign event.

As far as I can tell, Bush hasn't actually answered a single question from a reporter since the several interviews he did in late August, just before the Republican National Convention. That's more than two weeks ago.

At least twice in the past week, reporters have resorted to shouting questions, and he's ignored them.

And of course Bush hasn't held anything remotely like a news conference since Aug. 23, when he took some questions on his Texas ranch.

----

Why is Mr. Bush afraid of the American people?

Good Editorial

2004-09-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a good editorial about Florida's election system.

September 16, 2004

The Return of Katherine Harris

very state has an obligation to run elections that are not only fair, but also appear fair to the average voter. After the debacle of 2000, Florida's officials should understand this better than anyone. But its top elections officer, Glenda Hood, is acting in ways that create a strong impression that she is manipulating the rules to help re-elect her boss's brother. After her maneuvers this week to try to put Ralph Nader on the ballot, she cannot be trusted to run an impartial election.

In Florida's 2000 election mess, Katherine Harris served simultaneously as Florida's secretary of state and as co-chairwoman of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign committee. In her official capacity, she repeatedly took actions that favored the campaign. This year has turned out to be more of the same. When Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Ms. Hood as secretary of state, he chose someone with a history of partisanship, as a Republican officeholder and as a Bush-Cheney elector in 2000. Now Ms. Hood's politics appear to be influencing her election duties.

She recently conducted a highly suspect voting-roll purge of felons. The voters who were to be taken off the list included more than 22,000 African-Americans, who generally vote heavily Democratic, but just 61 Hispanics, who tend to favor Republicans in Florida. She was forced to scrap the list.

In last month's primary, some people without photo identification were turned away without being told that they could vote if they signed affidavits affirming their identities. After the same thing happened in South Dakota this year, the Board of Elections there told every polling place to post signs advising people of their rights. Ms. Hood's office insists that voters need not be told of the affidavit option. Voter ID is often a partisan issue because poor people and members of other groups that are less likely to have identification often vote Democratic.

Most recently, Ms. Hood has played a suspect role in helping Mr. Nader get on Florida's ballot, where he would be likely to weaken John Kerry. A court has ruled against Mr. Nader's claim to have met the requirements to be on the ballot.

Last night, the state was again involved in suits and countersuits over a presidential election in Florida. Ms. Hood's role has been a disturbing one. Instead of waiting as an impartial bystander for the court's direction, she seems to be trying to thwart any ruling that would take Mr. Nader off the ballot. At one point, while the court ruling eliminating Mr. Nader was under appeal, Ms. Hood's office hurriedly directed every county to add Mr. Nader's name to the ballots that will soon be sent to overseas voters.

Granting legitimate candidates access to ballots is important, but officials should obey the law. Ms. Hood had no right to try to proceed with her own preferred outcome. It is hard to believe that she would have done the same thing if the candidate had been one likely to hurt President Bush.

The nation cannot afford another tainted election. Governor Bush should quickly find an elections professional or academic of unquestioned neutrality to run Florida's elections.

----

Hold Them Accountable

2004-09-16T01:39:00.000-07:00

The Hold Them Accountable 2004 web site encourages us to hold this administration accountable for the incompetent way they have handled the Iraq situation.

I join them in their call for accountability.

Via Paul Glastris, guesting at Political Animal.

Given what we know now about Mr. Bush and his Administration, I don't understand how any reasonable person would vote to send this bunch back to Washington D.C. for another chance.

Why Is It...

2004-09-15T01:45:00.000-07:00

...that we don't really care that much about teachers?

This article just makes you wonder what we're thinking about as a country.

Teachers Lose Tax Breaks for Supplies

By ANDREA ALMOND, Associated Press Writer

----

Because of a budget crunch, California has suspended a tax credit that reimbursed teachers up to $1,500 for classroom supplies. Meanwhile, a $250 federal tax deduction for teachers that helped defray out-of-pocket spending expired this year.

----

For young teachers at the lowest end of the pay scale, the loss of the tax credits is particularly hard.

"The end of the tax benefits is effectively a tax increase for teachers — people who spend thousands of their own dollars each day for their classrooms and who don't deserve a tax increase," said Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association.

Nationwide, teachers spent an average of $458 on school supplies, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Association, a Maryland-based trade group.

The National Education Association and some lawmakers are working to reinstate the federal teacher deduction, which was introduced in 2002 but expired at the end of 2003. Teachers are still entitled to write off business expenses, like other taxpayers, but the amount they spend often does not meet the threshold for taking a deduction.

By ditching its tax break, California joined most of the rest of the nation. National teacher organizations do not keep track, but it appears few states now offer teachers any relief at all.

It's just pathetic how we treat the people who teach our children.

"...Bush did not comply with Air Force regulations...."

2004-09-14T01:43:00.000-07:00

Newsweek weighs in on the Guard issue with this article.

Nation & World
The service question
A review of President Bush's Guard years raises issues about the time he served
By Kit R. Roane

Last February, White House spokesman Scott McClellan held aloft sections of President Bush's military record, declaring to the waiting press that the files "clearly document the president fulfilling his duties in the National Guard." Case closed, he said.

But last week the controversy reared up once again, as several news outlets, including U.S. News, disclosed new information casting doubt on White House claims.

A review of the regulations governing Bush's Guard service during the Vietnam War shows that the White House used an inappropriate--and less stringent--Air Force standard in determining that he had fulfilled his duty. Because Bush signed a six-year "military service obligation," he was required to attend at least 44 inactive-duty training drills each fiscal year beginning July 1. But Bush's own records show that he fell short of that requirement, attending only 36 drills in the 1972-73 period, and only 12 in the 1973-74 period. The White House has said that Bush's service should be calculated using 12-month periods beginning on his induction date in May 1968. Using this time frame, however, Bush still fails the Air Force obligation standard.

Moreover, White House officials say, Bush should be judged on whether he attended enough drills to count toward retirement. They say he accumulated sufficient points under this grading system. Yet, even using their method, which some military experts say is incorrect, U.S. News 's analysis shows that Bush once again fell short. His military records reveal that he failed to attend enough active-duty training and weekend drills to gain the 50 points necessary to count his final year toward retirement.

The U.S. News analysis also showed that during the final two years of his obligation, Bush did not comply with Air Force regulations that impose a time limit on making up missed drills. What's more, he apparently never made up five months of drills he missed in 1972, contrary to assertions by the administration. White House officials did not respond to the analysis last week but emphasized that Bush had "served honorably."

Some experts say they remain mystified as to how Bush obtained an honorable discharge. Lawrence Korb, a former top Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, says the military records clearly show that Bush "had not fulfilled his obligation" and "should have been called to active duty."

Bush signed his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968, shortly after becoming eligible for the draft. In his "statement of understanding," he acknowledged that "satisfactory participation" included attending "48 scheduled inactive-duty training periods" each year. He also acknowledged that he could be ordered to active duty if he failed to meet these requirements.

Slump. Bush's records show that he did his duty for much of the first four years of his commitment. But as the Vietnam War wound down, his performance slumped, and his attendance at required drills fell off markedly. He did no drills for one five-month period in 1972. He also missed his flight physical. By May 2, 1973, his superiors said they could not evaluate his performance because he "has not been observed."

Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who originally certified the White House position that Bush had completed his military obligation, stood by his analysis. After a reporter cited pertinent Air Force regulations from the period, he complained that if the entire unit were judged by such standards, "90 percent of the people in the Guard would not have made satisfactory participation."

Some other experts disagree. "There is no 'sometimes we have compliance and sometimes we don't,' " says Scott Silliman, a retired Air Force colonel and Duke University law professor. "That is a nonsensical statement and an insult to the Guard to suggest it."

The regulations must be followed, adds James Currie, a retired colonel and author of an official history of the Army Reserve. "Clearly, if you were the average poor boy who got drafted and sent into the active force," he says, "they weren't going to let you out before you had completed your obligation."

Via Brad DeLong.

What The Button Says

2004-09-14T01:36:00.000-07:00

Do I really need to say anything more?

My Dinner With Ricky

2004-09-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this is one of those Los Angeles things.

While eating at Jerry's Famous Deli, Ricky Jay sat at the table across from my wife and I.

The details are as follows:

Ricky had a cookie.
The fellow he was talking to appeared to be showing Ricky some sort of card tricks.

So, oooo, ahhh.

Inflating Crowd Numbers

2004-09-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin links to this article by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post...

Wall-to-Wall Supporters: It Sure Is Crowded in Here -- or Is It?

This is the time in the political calendar when soothsayers point to the size of crowds at rallies to see which candidate is producing more enthusiasm. The campaigns, well aware of this practice, can't resist putting their thumbs on the scale.

On Tuesday, correspondents from The Washington Post and the Washington Times counted the crowds at President Bush's three stops in Missouri, then compared the actual figure with the official Bush campaign figure:

• Lee's Summit: Actual attendance, 8,500. Bush count, 14,000.

• Sedalia: Actual attendance, 2,200. Bush count, 3,200.

• Columbia: Actual attendance, 8,000 to 9,000. Bush count, 14,000.

It seems that the Bush campaign is inflating its crowd counts by 45 to 75 percent. Some of this may be the result of people walking through metal detectors more than once, but there's clearly some old-fashioned crowd padding going on.

Conflation Made Easy

2004-09-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

As if to prove that everything with this Administration starts with 9/11, today, Dan Froomkin writes about White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan conflating the 1000th death in Iraq with 9/11.

Conflation Watch

Here's how Scott McClellan handled the questions about the milestone yesterday:

"Q Senator Kerry is calling it a tragic milestone, reaching 1,000 deaths in Iraq.

"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we remember, honor and mourn the loss of all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice defending freedom. And we also remember those who lost their lives on September 11th. The best way to honor all those who have lost their life in the war on terrorism is to continue to wage a broad war and spread freedom throughout a dangerous part of the world so that we can transform that region of the world and make the world a safer place, and make America more secure.

"Q And you're convinced each one of those lives is worth it, Scott?

"MR. McCLELLAN: Each one -- well, let me say, when I say we remember, honor, mourn the loss of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we do so for those in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also remember those who lost their lives on September 11th, nearly three years ago today. And that's why I said it's important that we continue to wage a broad war on terrorism and that we work to spread freedom throughout the Middle East and transform that region so that we defeat the ideologies of hatred and tyranny.

"Q But the question is, for -- each of those families lost someone, a loved one, and each one of those is worth it -- that's the question.

"MR. McCLELLAN: Mark, I think -- I think of the cost we paid on September 11th, and September 11th changed the equation, as you've heard the President say."

Apparently, Mr. Bush Thinks He's Running For Dog Catcher

2004-09-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Two debates?

This article says the Mr. Bush is talking about having only two debates for the office of President of the United States.

How can he get away with this stuff?

Bush Likely to Bow Out of 1 Debate

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A08

President Bush may skip one of the three debates that have been proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates and accepted by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Republican officials said yesterday.

The officials said Bush's negotiating team plans to resist the middle debate, which was to be Oct. 8 in a town meeting format in the crucial state of Missouri.

The Bush-Cheney campaign announced that its debate negotiation team will be led by James A. Baker III, who was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. Baker headed the Bush campaign's Florida recount response in 2000 and is the current president's personal envoy on Iraqi debt resolution.

Baker negotiated debates in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992. As chief of staff to Bush's father in 1992, he took a cautious stance with the view that a sitting president has little to gain and much to lose in debates, according to accounts at the time.

Bush aides refused to discuss their opening position. Officials familiar with the issue said he plans to accept the commission's first debate, which is to focus on domestic policy, and the third one, which is to focus on foreign policy.

The audience for the second debate, to be at Washington University in St. Louis, was to be picked by the Gallup Organization. The commission said participants should be undecided voters from the St. Louis area.

A presidential adviser said campaign officials were concerned that people could pose as undecided when they actually are partisans.

"It's not a fear of the format," said the adviser, who refused to be identified to avoid annoying Bush. "They want two debates that are focused on clear differences on foreign and domestic policy. We benefit from the differences."

The Democratic team is led by Vernon E. Jordan Jr. The Republican team includes U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and campaign advisers Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin.

Washington University has set up a Web site saying the community "welcomes the nation and the world," has recruited 471 student volunteers and is holding weekly lectures on campaign issues.

The university was host for debates in 1992 and 2000. The commission picked the university in 1996 for a debate that was canceled after President Bill Clinton, an incumbent with a commanding lead in polls, accepted just two.

"That's kind of what we're hearing about the Bush thing right now," said Steve Givens, chairman of the university's debate committee.

Bush plans to accept debates at the University of Miami in Coral Gables on Sept. 30 and at Arizona State University in Tempe on Oct. 13. The campaign also plans to participate in a vice presidential debate Oct. 5 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Via Atrios who notes what he thinks the reasons are that the Mr. Bush's campaign team wants to duck a debate.

Atrios thinks that Mr. Bush just scared and can't handle questions from an actual, unscreen private citizen.

They might ask tough questions.

This Should Be A Huge Story

2004-09-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is one of those articles where one starts out wanting to put important sections in bold to emphasize their importance, but if that happened, the whole story would be in bold.

Bush fell short on duty at Guard
Records show pledges unmetSeptember 8, 2004

This article was reported by the Globe Spotlight Team -- reporters Stephen Kurkjian, Francie Latour, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes, and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Robinson.

In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.

He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a ''statement of understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory participation" that included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may be ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for unsatisfactory participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the records show.

The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with interviews with military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been ''satisfactory" -- just four months after Bush's commanding officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at his unit for the previous 12 months.

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, sidestepped questions about Bush's record. In the statement, Bartlett asserted again that Bush would not have been honorably discharged if he had not ''met all his requirements." In a follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared: ''And if he hadn't met his requirements you point to, they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years."

That assertion by the White House spokesman infuriates retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military officers who have studied Bush's records and old National Guard regulations, and reached different conclusions.

''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."

But Lloyd said that singling out Bush for criticism is unfair. ''There were hundreds of guys like him who did the same thing," he said.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system." And he agreed with Lloyd that Bush was not alone in doing so. ''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating on my income tax," Korb said.

After his own review, Korb said Bush could have been ordered to active duty for missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any given year. Bush, according to the records, fell shy of that obligation in two successive fiscal years.

Korb said Bush also made a commitment to complete his six-year obligation when he moved to Cambridge, a transfer the Guard often allowed to accommodate Guardsmen who had to move elsewhere. ''He had a responsibility to find a unit in Boston and attend drills," said Korb, who is now affiliated with a liberal Washington think tank. ''I see no evidence or indication in the documents that he was given permission to forgo training before the end of his obligation. If he signed that document, he should have fulfilled his obligation."

The documents Bush signed only add to evidence that the future president -- then the son of Houston's congressman -- received favorable treatment when he joined the Guard after graduating from Yale in 1968. Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1968, said in a deposition in 2000 that he placed a call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a Bush family friend.

Bush was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and dispatched to flight school in Georgia for 13 months. In June 1970, after five additional months of specialized training in F-102 fighter-interceptor, Bush began what should have been a four-year assignment with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron.

In May 1972, Bush was given permission to move to Alabama temporarily to work on a US Senate campaign, with the provision that he do equivalent training with a unit in Montgomery. But Bush's service records do not show him logging any service in Alabama until October of that year.

And even that service is in doubt. Since the Globe first reported Bush's spotty attendance record in May 2000, no one has come forward with any credible recollection of having witnessed Bush performing guard service in Alabama or after he returned to Houston in 1973. While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972. On May 1, 1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his annual performance review because he had not been observed at the Houston base during the prior 12 months.

Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the date of the drill.

Lechliter said the records push him to conclude that Bush had little interest in fulfilling his obligation, and his superiors preferred to look the other way. Others agree. ''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," said retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard.

Via Brad DeLong.

In light of the Right-Wing hoopla over the war record of Mr. Kerry this story should be huge.

But most likely, it won't be.

The New Teflon President?

2004-09-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Admittidly, I do hold partisan political views, but nothing seems to stick to Mr. Bush.

Nothing at all.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

....In a rational universe, like the one I thought I lived in before these books were released, the following things would be true. When the man the president of the United States appointed to be his chief economic policy advisor resigned from the administration and wrote a book about how the president's economic policy was terrible, this would be terribly damaging to the president. It also would be the case that when the man the president of the United States appointed to be his chief counterterrorism advisor resigned from the administration and wrote a book about how the president's counterterrorism policy was terrible, this would be terribly damaging to the president. It also would be the case that when the president of the United States unveiled a second term economic policy agenda his administration's economists think is a bad idea that that would be terribly damaging to the president. It also would be the case that, when the president's deputy counterterrorism advisor decided his counterterrorism policy was so bad that he needed to resign and become his opponent's chief national security advisor that this would reflect poorly on the president. Last but by no means least, it would be the case that if the man the president appointed to be his chief envoy to the Middle East resigned in disgust and started wandering around town talking about how, in fact, "the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (CORRECTION: That was Bush-supporter Tommy Franks, Bush's former envoy was General Tony Zinni who, without using profanity, said the whole gang in the Pentagon "ought to be gone and replaced". Apologies for the error, thanks to P.D. for noting it.) was making policy, well, that would damage the president.

Sadly, though, we don't live in that world. Instead we live in the world where no one cares about expertise, the capital's premiere newspaper is edited by a man who doesn't believe in judging the credibility of his paper's sources, and small inconvenient realities like the disgust felt for Bush's policies by all the top Republican experts goes almost unnoticed.

The CEO-In-Chief

2004-09-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bush ran as the CEO president, because, as we know, his previous stints as CEO were so successful.

Can we now add his current office to his list of CEO failures and move on?

Because if the CEO president does not listen to people who are trying to warn him, AND surrounds himself with incompetents who can neither do the task the CEO president has delegated to them or refuse to pass up pertinent information from other subordinates, AND refuses to replace these incompetents – WHY would anyone vote to give the bumbler another try at the office.

This ain’t Arbusto you know.

Foreign Policy, Bush Administration Style

2004-09-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias reminds me of one serious bit of foreign policy in the news in recent days.

Nonproliferation Notes

Readers may recall that about a month ago I was dumbfounded by reports that the Bush administration was scuttling the verification component of the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. The Treaty would, if properly enforced, damage US interests not at all while making it harder for terrorists and rogue states to acquire nuclear weapons. The administration's official line on why they'd done this -- that it was too expensive -- seemed to seriously call into question their sanity. Verification may be expensive, but it could hardly be too expensive to reduce the single greatest security threat facing the nation.

The current issue of the Economist has a seriously buried lede explaining that the main motivation was, in fact, "the worries of Israel and Pakistan, two allies that want to keep the option of adding to their stockpiles." We scuttled a treaty that will keep bombs out of the hands of terrorists so that Israel and Pakistan (!) can build bigger arsenals? Israel and Pakistan! The same Pakistan whose chief nuclear scientist was operating a global proliferation market. The same Pakistan whose intelligence services built the Taliban and nurtured al-Qaeda in its early days. The same Pakistan whose military runs terrorist training camps. That Pakistan? Apparently so.

What Matthew was dumbfounded by was this article:

US backs out of nuclear inspections treaty

By Dafna Linzer in Washington
August 2, 2004

In a significant shift of US policy, the Bush Administration has announced that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty to ban production of nuclear weapons materials.

For several years the US and others have been pursuing the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons.

At an arms control meeting in Geneva last week the US told other countries it supported a treaty, but not verification.

US officials, who have demonstrated scepticism in the past about the effectiveness of international weapons inspections, said they made the decision after concluding such a system would cost too much, require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty.

However, they declined to explain in detail how they believed US security would be undermined by creating a plan to monitor the treaty.

Arms control specialists said the change in the US position would greatly weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. They said the US move virtually killed a 10-year international effort to persuade countries such as India, Israel and Pakistan to accept some oversight of their nuclear production programs.

----
The Sydney Morning Herald

Matthew links to Laura Rozen's thoughts on the issue:

----

This administration is insane. I have no words.

Hard right conservatives and neocons have always disdained arms control treaties saying "Why bother? They can't be verified." But by killing the verification component of this treaty which would ban production of nuclear materials, they have surely made that a fait accompli. To what end? It surely couldn't hurt, and it's not like the US has such a good track record of intelligence on WMD issues in India, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, or Libya.

And, in one of those moments where movies speak volums about real life, Matthew links to Brad DeLong:

Kurtz: "What did they tell you?"

Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."

Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?"

Willard: "I don't see any method, at all, sir."

So, There Was No Connection

2004-09-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

This is just classic.

WASHINGTON - Two former Vietnam prisoners of war who appear in ads attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry were appointed by the Bush administration to a panel advising the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The former POWs in the ad, Kenneth Cordier and Paul Galanti, serve on the VA's 12-member Former POW Advisory Committee. VA Secretary Anthony Principi appointed Cordier in 2002 and Galanti in 2003.

Matt Kelly, Associated Press

It's so brazen.

Of all the Vietnam vets that could be on the committee, 2 of the 12 are from the Swiftboat Partisans for Mr. Bush.

Yeah, I'm so sure there was no connection.

You're left with your mouth open watching these people operate.

Mr. Bush Is Clearly Not Running On His Record

2004-09-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

William Saletan at Slate has a few problems with Mr. Bush.

NEW YORK—For $2.4 trillion, guess what word—other than "a," "and," and "the"—occurs most frequently in the acceptance speech George W. Bush delivered tonight.

The word is "will." It appears 76 times. This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president.

Except he already is president. He already ran this campaign. He promised great things. They haven't happened. So, he's trying to go back in time. He wants you to see in him the potential you saw four years ago. He can't show you the things he promised, so he asks you to envision them. He asks you to be "optimistic." He asks you to have faith.

"Since 2001, Americans have been given hills to climb and found the strength to climb them," said Bush. "Now, because we have made the hard journey, we can see the valley below. Now, because we have faced challenges with resolve, we have historic goals within our reach and greatness in our future."

Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They're all hills we've "been given to climb." It's as though Bush wasn't president. As though he didn't get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn't bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was "given," and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president left behind.

Via Atrios at Eschaton

The Republican National Convention

2004-09-02T14:19:00.002-07:00

So, here’s how I see the Republican National Convention going up to this point...

Wrap yourself as tight as you can in the memory of 9/11. In fact, hold your convention in New York just days before the 3rd anniversary of those attacks.

No one will notice or think it’s crass or inappropriate or anything.

And if someone asks what about how to fund education, remind them that everything changed that day in 2001 and that George W. Bush is a war president who makes decisions.
Say you’re going to be optimistic and then don’t be...use the old tried and true bait and switch tactic. You’re getting good at it.

In fact, be downright angry at the podium.

Wild-eyed is even better!

Republicans need learn how to embrace their inner John Kerry hatred. How dare he challenge Mr. Bush in this election?!?!
Attack John Kerry.

Attack, attack, attack.

Only wimps run on their record.
Avoid discussing policy.

In fact, avoid even the slightest hint of policy discussion. If someone asks about an actual policy, remind the questioner of 9/11 and the president’s steely resolve.

Mr. Bush Finds Some Nuance On The War On Terror™

2004-08-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post writes this in his column.

NBC
Bush was also interviewed by NBC's Matt Lauer for the "Today" show while on the campaign trail in Ohio on Saturday.

Lauer asked if Bush felt most Americans would say they are better off today than four years ago. "I think over 50 percent will," Bush said.

Bush also said the war against terrorism must be fought but that it's not likely to ever end. "I don't think you can win it, but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

Here's the video.

At any rate, I never thought the idea of a Perma-War on terrorism had any real currency, and I never liked the war analogy anyway.

So I guess I can't really fault Mr. Bush for finding nuance in the situation.

I just wonder what took him so long to see it.

So, Just To Recap

2004-08-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

There is no proof that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
There is no proof that Iraq had WMD stockpiles ready to use on the United States or on invading troops and as a result did not constitute an immediate threat to the security of the United States.
Iraq was a humanitarian problem with a brutal dictator. But rather than bothering to convince the American people and the world of the rightness of action in Iraq to remedy the humanitarian situation, they posited a fraudulently conceived argument that Saddam Hussein was such an immediate threat to world peace and security that he had to be removed from the power through the pre-emptive use of military force.

To my way of thinking, the Administration used 9/11 to accomplish the long held goal of hawkish Neoconservatives to finish the job of the first Gulf War and remove Saddam Hussein from power.

The problem with this is that an inconsistently applied foreign policy creates a number of problems.

There are other countries in the world with developing nuclear and WMD programs. I believe that one, North Korea specifically, has threatened to nuclear weapons on the United States should the United States intervene in North Korean affairs.
There are countries that harbor terrorists...and by terrorists not only those general bad terrorists types but also terrorists connected with 9/11.

Osama who?
There are countries with brutal dictatorial regimes that have growing humanitarian problems.
There are countries in the world that are not democratic.

When do we invade these countries?

It Never Really Was About WMD

2004-08-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

Here's another reason why I think the invasion of Iraq was never really about WMD or about the post-invasion bring freedom and democracy to an oppressed people justification....

Mr. Bush also took issue with Mr. Kerry's argument, in an interview at the end of May with The New York Times, that the Bush administration's focus on Iraq had given North Korea the opportunity to significantly expand its nuclear capability. Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

He said that in North Korea's case, and in Iran's, he would not be rushed to set deadlines for the countries to disarm, despite his past declaration that he would not "tolerate" nuclear capability in either nation. He declined to define what he meant by "tolerate."

"I don't think you give timelines to dictators," Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs. He said he would continue diplomatic pressure - using China to pressure the North and Europe to pressure Iran - and gave no hint that his patience was limited or that at some point he might consider pre-emptive military action.

"I'm confident that over time this will work - I certainly hope it does," he said of the diplomatic approach. Mr. Kerry argued in his interview that North Korea "'was a far more compelling threat in many ways, and it belonged at the top of the agenda," but Mr. Bush declined to compare it to Iraq, apart from arguing that Iraq had defied the world community for longer than the other members of what he once called "the axis of evil." Nor would he assess the risk that Pyongyang might sell nuclear material to terrorists, though his national security aides believe it may have sold raw uranium to Libya in recent years.

David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times

*Empashis added.

Via The American Prospect Online.

Yes, when presented with a question about the apparently very real nuclear capability of North Korea, a nation with

a brutal dictator and;
a horribly oppressed population;

the ever-engaged President of the United States just shrugs.

And says that he hopes diplomacy will work over time.

He Wasn't Even There

2004-08-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

Atrios points to this story about on of those Swift Boat Vets.

Vets Protest Prosecutor in Anti-Kerry Ad
Oregon Vets Protest Assistant District Attorney's Statement in Ad That Kerry Lies About Record

The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. Aug. 24, 2004 — Several Vietnam veterans are calling for an assistant district attorney to resign after questions were raised about his statement in a recent ad criticizing Democrat John Kerry's military service.
Alfred French of the Clackamas County district attorney's office appears in the ad sponsored by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In the spot, French says: "I served with John Kerry. ... He is lying about his record."

A group of Vietnam veterans who protested outside the county courthouse Monday said French implied he had firsthand knowledge of Kerry's war actions when in fact he had heard about what Kerry did from friends.

In an interview with The Oregonian newspaper last week, French said he relied on the accounts of three other veterans in making the statement about Kerry and did not personally witness the events. French did not return two messages left at his office Monday.

"As a senior assistant district attorney, you know as well as we do that that kind of ridiculous statement would never pass muster in a court of law," veteran Terry Kirsch said of French's account.

"We question your fitness to serve as an enforcer of the law after swearing to facts in a legal affidavit that you do not know to be true," he said.

Before recording the ad, French signed an affidavit that said: "I am able to swear, as I do hereby swear, that all facts and statements contained in this affidavit are true and correct and within my personal knowledge and belief."

It goes on to say that "Kerry has wildly exaggerated and lied about his record in Vietnam" and that he received his Purple Heart medals "in the absence of hostile fire."

Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star as commander of a Navy swift boat in Vietnam.

District Attorney John Foote released a statement Monday chiding French for bringing unwanted publicity to the suburban county's office, but stood by his employee.

"I do not personally share the opinions expressed by our prosecutor," Foote wrote. "However, all of our employees have the right to their own opinions on these subjects and to express their opinions on their own time."

Mr. Bush, You Should Be Ashamed

2004-08-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has this to say about Mr. Kerry's new ad called "Old Tricks".

----

Today, though, the Kerry campaign came out with a very powerful ad, one which in its tone and focus is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go.

It's called Old Tricks and the entire ad is a brief exchange from a debate from February 15th 2000 (which the political junkies among us probably remember) in which John McCain -- then in the thick of Bush's smears -- told Bush to his face to stop getting others to smear him over his war record. He ends by telling him he should be ashamed. The camera focuses on Bush and catches him not knowing how to respond, with what I think even his supporters would have to agree is a callow, trapped look on his face.

I say this is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go because it very powerfully captures a truth about President Bush -- namely, that he's a coward who truly lacks shame.

I don't say he's a coward because he kept himself out of Vietnam three decades ago. I know no end of men of that age who in one fashion or another made sure they didn't end up in Indochina in those days. (I quickly ran through both hands counting guys I talk to on a regular basis.) And they include many of the most admirable people I know.

He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions -- as McCain does in this spot -- he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

As I said earlier, this is vintage Bush. And it's also a subtle nod to all the ways that Bush is someone who's always gotten by with help at all the key moments from family friends, retainers and others similarly hunting for access and power.

There's another element to this ad that we'd be remiss not to note too. It puts McCain on the spot and pulls him right back to the center of this battle. Given the fervor of his words, he can hardly disavow them or complain of their use. But there's something else too. If you listen to the ad you'll see McCain hangs his demand for an apology on a letter signed by five senators, each Vietnam vets, calling on Bush to apologize for his smears against McCain.

The five, as reported by the Times on February 5th, 2000: Senators Max Cleland of Georgia, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Charles S. Robb of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In another post, Josh had this to say....

----

As I said, I think the Kerry campaign is right to go aggressively on the attack against the president for running his campaign this way and seeking to profit politically from this garbage. But that's not enough. Kerry's surrogates have to go aggressively on the attack against the president on all his many points of vulnerability, which are legion -- his dishonesty about his own gap-ridden service in the Texas Air National Guard, his White House's on-going efforts to cover up the Plame leak, the endless record of deceptions tied to the Iraq invasion, all of it.

Counterattacking on the president's shameless behavior on the Swift Boat matter is necessary, but hardly sufficient. To be successful, Kerry and his team and his surrogates (you know, the folks he's on a first name basis with but doesn't know from Adam and can't control in any way) need to place the president on the defensive across the board.

This whole Swift Boat episode is entirely in keeping not just with the record of George W. Bush, but, to be frank, his whole family. Think back to the 1988 and 1992 presidential races. Partly, it's in the their political DNA. But it's also in the nature of blue bloods trying to ape populist politics -- for the key example, see the 1992 GOP convention in Houston and the sad antics of Bush family retainer Rich Bond.

I said a few days ago that it was ridiculous to compare the ads run by Moveon to the Swift Boat ones. And it's true -- they're very soft soap in comparison. But that's a mistake. They should be hitting much harder.

The president has chosen the ground on which he wants to fight this campaign. And as per usual he's mobilized friends and family retainers to do the fighting for him. The president is playing tackle football, not touch or flag. If the Dems keep up with the latter they'll lose.

Back in the primaries John Kerry would say that if the Bushies thought they could pull a Max Cleland on him, he'd say, "Bring it on." Well, it's on.

My sense of Kerry is almost entirely defined by watching his 1996 race against Bill Weld up close. So I think he has it in him to fight. But now's when we find out.

Reasons Not To Vote For Mr. Bush

2004-08-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias writes a column called "The Brains Thing" that revives the old Mr. Bush-Just-Isn't-Smart-Enough-To-Be-President argument.

Only now, he has Mr. Bush's term in office to draw examples from.

Bush’s most high-profile foreign-policy failure -- the disastrously bad planning for the occupation of Iraq -- provides a direct analogue to the domestic scene. The government did, in fact, do a lot of good work on the subject under the auspices of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Group. Rival analysis from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, however, suggested that the task would be much easier. A president prepared to read and understand complicated policy briefs would have seen that the Future of Iraq Group had it right. But the country didn’t have a president like that. So yet again the path of expediency was chosen, with well-known results.

More typically, though, the president’s intellectual infirmity affects national-security policy by creating paralysis, as his famously divided foreign-policy team is unable to agree on a common approach and the president is incapable of choosing one side or the other.

As a result, one of Bush’s biggest foreign-policy disasters relates less to something he’s done than to what he hasn’t done: devise a coherent policy toward North Korea. The debacle began in March of 2001, with South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung scheduled to visit Washington. On the eve of the trip, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that the new administration would pick up where the Clinton administration had left off: supporting Kim’s “sunshine policy” toward the North and pushing for full implementation of the 1994 Agreed Framework under which North Korea abided by a stipulation not to build nuclear weapons in exchange for U.S. financial and energy assistance. The White House immediately contradicted Powell, giving us the first sign that something was amiss with the supposedly “grown-up” new national-security team and infuriating Kim. Administration hawks -- led by Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld -- didn’t replace the Powell-Kim-Clinton engagement policy with any real alternative; instead, they sought simply to talk tough and “isolate” North Korea, already the most isolated country on earth. Thus North Korea found itself featured in the 2002 State of the Union address as a charter member of the “axis of evil” (although this, the country later learned, was not a deliberate policy shift but simply a reflection of a desire to throw a non-Muslim country on to the list to allay fears that America was waging war on Islam). The hawks hoped that the regime would fall apart before it built nukes. Things didn’t work out that way.

North Korean President Kim Jong-Il concluded that because Bush clearly meant to invade Iraq, had broken off negotiations with his regime, and was now lumping the two together as “evil,” he might soon find himself targeted. The result -- a result that even a moderately engaged chief executive would have foreseen -- was a North Korean rush to acquire nuclear weapons that could deter U.S. invasion before it was too late. By October 2002, the State Department sent officials to Pyongyang to confront the regime with evidence that it had been acquiring centrifuges needed to make weapons-grade uranium. Instead of offering the expected denials, North Korean officials conceded that, yes, they had done just that. After some trans-Pacific name-calling, Pyongyang let the other shoe drop: Not only was it processing uranium (which could take years to be successful), it was also kicking out the weapons inspectors who, under the Agreed Framework, were safeguarding North Korean plutonium rods that could be turned into nuclear fuel within months.

The time had come for the president to do something about the situation. So he did exactly what we were assured during the 2000 campaign he would do: He asked his advisers. The problem was, they didn’t agree. Some were hawks and others more dovish, so Bush couldn’t make up his mind. As Fred Kaplan wrote in The Washington Monthly, Bush “neither threatened war not pursued diplomacy.” Eighteen months later, with U.S. forces pinned down in Iraq and North Korea allegedly possessing several nuclear weapons, military options had to be taken off the table, and even administration hawks agreed that they had to pursue talks. Unfortunately, when you refuse to negotiate until you have no sticks left, it’s hard to get a good deal, and the United States now may be unable to secure a non-nuclear North Korea. And if we do get what we want, we will surely need to give up far more than we would have had we just negotiated in the first place.

Worse, as the Prospect goes to press, history is repeating itself in Iran, pace Marx, as tragedy all over again. Tehran is cheating on its international commitments, and the United States needs to do something about it. Some in the administration want to pursue engagement; others want a push for regime change. As before, Bush can’t decide what to do, and as time goes on, our options will only get worse. No American has yet paid the price for the North Korean fiasco or the emerging one in Iran, but down the road our strategic position is deteriorating with remarkable speed while we have not yet -- and may never -- make up for the opportunity squandered at the beginning of the Iraq War.

Self-Inflicted?

2004-08-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias points to Keith Olberman on the Chris Matthews/Michelle Malkin kerfuffle. Since Mr. Olbermann wrote about it so well, I'll just post the whole thing....

Self-inflicted politics (Keith Olbermann)

My producer handed me a piece of paper, unexpectedly blank except for a brief quote that had just been clipped from Chris’ 'Hardball' interview with Larry Thurlow. He told me he thought the brief sound bite would fit ideally at the end of page A-2, our story on the conflict between Thurlow’s current version of the day John Kerry got his Purple Heart, and the Navy’s official records of 35 years ago— records that should have been written by Thurlow himself.

“I’m saying that he had a plan that included not only being a war hero, but getting an ‘early out.’”

There wasn’t much time to reflect —Countdown was to start about 20 minutes later— but the question formed quickly in my mind. “An ‘early out’? What the hell does he mean by that?”

The answer magically appeared moments later: “The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” are going to steer the Kerry-Shot-Himself flotsam into the mainstream media.

Michelle Malkin, the unfortunate and overmatched author of a self-loathing book that attempts to justify our World War II internment and robbery of Americans of Japanese heritage, became the harbinger of the next mucky smell of low tide. She raised the story— heretofore consigned largely to Robert Novak and everybody to his right— in that delightful, Teflon way of modern politics: ‘I’m not saying that John Kerry shot himself. But in the Swift Boat Veterans’ book, they ask whether or not his wounds were self-inflicted.’

If Ms. Malkin isn’t seen on television, or moving on her own power, in the next few days, it’s understandable. My colleague Mr. Matthews forced her to hang herself out to dry ten or eleven times (never prouder of you, Chris). He may have directed the momentum, but her wounds were ultimately, uh, self-inflicted.

As Chris rightly pointed out, nobody has produced an iota of evidence that John Kerry’s wounds were anything other than the result of combat. Even in the book, the references to it are speculative and without provenance. Ms. Malkin wouldn’t even go so far as to attribute the suspicion to herself. It was in the book.

Late Thursday, the Swift Boat gang announced a second commercial to premiere in the morning, and to this writing, nobody’s been tipped about what it contains. Yet the Thurlow comment (“he had a plan”) and Malkin’s humiliating performance reek of a trial balloon. The story of the wounds will appear somewhere— probably soon.

When I raised this prospect with John Harwood of 'The Wall Street Journal,' several viewers e-mailed to chastise us for not recognizing the difference between wounds that are “self-inflicted” and those that are deliberate attempts to injure one’s self. Throw a grenade, wipe out an enemy enclave, and get a piece of shrapnel in your head in the blow-back, and you’ve received a self-inflicted wound. It isn’t intentional and it isn’t dishonorable.

But of course that’s not what Thurlow said. He spoke of some vast Swift Boat Conspiracy in which Kerry steered not a crew of soldiers through hell, but rather, steered history. “A plan,” Thurlow said. “Included not only being a war hero,” Thurlow said. “But (also) getting an ‘early out’,” Thurlow said.

He’s not talking about an inadvertent blow-back wound. It was all a plan. And if the wounds weren’t deliberately self-inflicted (again, kudos Chris— he immediately told Malkin that such an act constituted a criminal offense), they must have occurred thanks to the timely cooperation of the Viet Cong, who were good enough to shoot Kerry on cue so he could go back home with all those medals and ribbons. You know, the ribbons he threw away in protest.

We’ll save the logical disconnect that pops up right there for another time.

This is about the politics of the Smear Thrice Removed. I’m not saying this, but questions have been raised by others.

It is a perfected version of what many of President Bush’s opponents have tried in the murky depths of his reservist days. It is execrable no matter who presents it, no matter which party benefits from it.

We will hear from the very jaded that it is nothing new. It was Winston Churchill, 70 years ago, who so succinctly, and so English-ly, noted “Politics are foul.” But with instant communications, the internet explosion, and the 527 Groups, they are foul at warp-speed. The blur between an accusation with at least a thimble of evidence upon which it can rest, and the whole cloth fabrication, is so rapid as to appear as a solid line.

It is remarkable to think that we are living in the same country where a vast majority of the population never knew that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, and where four different Republican presidential challengers, successively more and more distant of electoral chance and more and more desperate to close the widening gap, actually believed it inappropriate and unfair, just to mention it.

And that one was true.

Could Mr. Roosevelt’s limitations have been self-inflicted? Maybe some historian is asking that question. Because certainly I’m not.

But you have to ask yourself why they say Mr. Kerry's wounds were "self-inflicted" even if they mean the wounds came from a grenade he threw.

It's the association thing.

The Bush Administration did the same thing with Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Use the words together in the same sentence and get people to believe the Hussein / Al Qaeda link where none existed.

And the Administration gets to deny they never directly said Mr. Hussein worked with Al Qaeda.

So here comes the self-inflicted wound.

When I hear self-inflicted in a military sense, I believe it's easy to think something along the lines of, 'oh, the person did this to get out of combat' and not 'oh, that was from a grenade he threw at the enemy.'

And that's just what the people who push of this story want you to think. They want to taint the situation with the thought, even if it’s a slight thought in the back of your mind, that Mr. Kerry inflicted a wound on himself for medals and/or to get out of combat.

And I tend to think that those people who sill believe that Iraq had WMD before the invasion, are going to believe Mr. Kerry wounded himself on purpose.

Presidential Press Conferences

2004-08-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post writes this....

No Substitute

These "Ask the President" events are no substitute for news conferences.

As White House press corps veteran and columnist Helen Thomas recently put it in an interview in the Progressive: "The President of the United States should be able to answer any question, or at least dance around one. At some time -- early and often -- he should submit to questioning and be held accountable, because if you don't have that then you only have one side of the story. The Presidential news conference is the only forum in our society, the only institution, where a President can be questioned. If a leader is not questioned, he can rule by edict or executive order. He can be a king or a dictator. Who's to challenge him? We're there to pull his chain and to ask the questions that should be asked every day, for every move."

I Won't Say It....

2004-08-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

And I Won't Correct You When You Say It....

So go ahead and say it....

Dan Froomkin, makes note of how Mr. Bush is handling the spurious charges about Mr. Kerry and Vietnam....

Character Assassination

The format also offers a highly public airing of unsubstantiated charges against Bush's opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry, that the campaign would never make directly.

And Bush doesn't jump to refute those.

For instance, in Beaverton:

"Q On behalf of Vietnam veterans -- and I served six tours over there -- we do support the President. I only have one concern, and that's on the Purple Heart, and that is, is that there are over 200,000 Vietnam vets that died from Agent Orange and were never -- no Purple Heart has ever been awarded to a Vietnam veteran because of Agent Orange because it's never been changed in the regulations. Yet, we've got a candidate for President out here with two self-inflicted scratches, and I take that as an insult. (Applause.)

"THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Six tours? Whew. That's a lot of tours.

"Let's see, who've we got here? You got a question?"

Mr. Bush, bringing honor and integrity back to the White House.

When does that start again? It's been four years.

Four very long years.

Is John Kerry Tough Enough?

2004-08-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post basically writes that Mr. Kerry needs to better at striking when Mr. Bush makes political mistakes.

A point I agree with.

Mr. Kerry needs to be clearer and more concise with his message.

And he needs to play politics better. The Bush folks are geniuses at political give and take and spin as demonstrated that they are still in the race after a horrible four-year term in office. They seem to be setting the debate at this point. Mr. Kerry needs to make that change as soon as he possibly can.

I don’t know that he needs to be better at their game than they are. That might be expecting too much from Mr. Kerry, what he needs to do rather is to make it clear to the America people how Mr. Bush is spinning and playing games. Mr. Kerry shouldn’t let Mr. Bush get away with anything.

This part made me think of something else though....

It would not be a bad thing if this campaign turned into a referendum on Bush's effort to shift taxes from wealth to work. But to move the debate in that direction, Kerry has to be as tough and strategic as Bush has been, and a lot crisper in explaining what he stands for.

Kerry did seize on the CBO report and also on Bush's comment that a national sales tax was "an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." The White House moved quickly to play down the idea that Bush had any plans to impose a consumption tax. Here was Bush's defense of his comment to Larry King on CNN: "This is politics. People put words in your mouth." But unless I'm missing something, Bush is the one and only person who put those words into his own mouth. Bush's people would be jumping all over a comparable gaffe -- another word for an admission of a real but hidden belief by Kerry.

Bush has given Kerry an extraordinary gift with the sales tax comment. But Kerry has still not taken full advantage of it.

The problem as I see it with that is that Mr. Bush makes huge misstatements all the time and no one seems to care. Combine that with the fact that and the expectations of the office seem to been lowered so much for him and Mr. Bush just doesn't seem to be held to account for much of anything he says.

So when he says something like the tax thing, it's left to his assistants to clean up the verbal mess and for him to laugh it off later when he's asked about it.

It's like he not responsible for anything he says.

Mr. Kerry needs to change that.

Mr. Dionne is correct when he writes this....

If Kerry needs an even stronger offense on domestic issues, he also needs a much better defense of that Iraq vote of his. It really isn't so hard. When Bush went to Congress in the fall of 2002 for authorization to go to war in Iraq, he did so after saying he was going to the United Nations to seek international support for a war against Saddam Hussein.

Yes, the congressional resolution empowering Bush to wage war was far broader than it should have been. But when push came to shove, Kerry decided to take the chance in voting "yes" to strengthen Bush's hand in negotiating with the United Nations. That seeking U.N. support was never really a Bush priority and that he botched the postwar planning is the president's problem, not Kerry's. Why can't Kerry keep it that simple?

Reason Enough

2004-08-16T23:07:00.000-07:00

This from the The New York Times is reason enough not to vote for Mr. Bush.

Out of Spotlight, Bush Overhauls U.S. Regulations

JOEL BRINKLEY
Published: August 14, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 - April 21 was an unusually violent day in Iraq; 68 people died in a car bombing in Basra, among them 23 children. As the news went from bad to worse, President Bush took a tough line, vowing to a group of journalists, "We're not going to cut and run while I'm in the Oval Office."

On the same day, deep within the turgid pages of the Federal Register, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a regulation that would forbid the public release of some data relating to unsafe motor vehicles, saying that publicizing the information would cause "substantial competitive harm" to manufacturers.

As soon as the rule was published, consumer groups yelped in complaint, while the government responded that it was trying to balance the interests of consumers with the competitive needs of business. But hardly anyone else noticed, and that was hardly an isolated case.

Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president's agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.

And most of it was done through regulation, not law - lowering the profile of the actions. The administration can write or revise regulations largely on its own, while Congress must pass laws. For that reason, most modern-day presidents have pursued much of their agendas through regulation. But administration officials acknowledge that Mr. Bush has been particularly aggressive in using this strategy.

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A Pro-Business Tilt

The overall regulatory record shows that the Bush administration has heeded the interests of business and industry. Like the Reagan administration, which made regulatory reform a priority, officials under Mr. Bush have introduced new rules to ease or dismantle existing regulations they see as cumbersome. Some analysts argue that the Bush administration has introduced rules favoring industry with a dedication unmatched in modern times.

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But examples of countervailing, business-friendly changes abound, some that broke through the flak thrown up from the wars, and others that remain little known.

The administration, at the request of lumber and paper companies, gave Forest Service managers the right to approve logging in federal forests without the usual environmental reviews. A Forest Service official explained that the new rule was intended "to better harmonize the environmental, social and economic benefits of America's greatest natural resource, our forests and grasslands."

In March of 2003, the Mine Safety and Health Administration published a proposed new regulation that would dilute the rules intended to protect coal miners from black-lung disease. The mine workers union called the new rules "extremely dangerous," while a mine safety administration official contended, "We are moving on toward more effective prevention of black-lung disease."

In May 2003, the Bush administration dropped a proposed rule that would have required hospitals to install facilities to protect workers against tuberculosis. Hospitals and other industry groups had lobbied against the change, saying that it would be costly and that existing regulations would accomplish many of the same aims.

But workers unions and public health officials argued that the number of tuberculosis cases had risen in 20 states and that the same precautions that were to have been put into place for tuberculosis would also have been effective against SARS.

The next month, the Department of Labor, responding to complaints from industry, dropped a rule that required employers to keep a record of employees' ergonomic injuries. Labor unions complained that without the reporting, it would be difficult to identify dangerous workplaces. But the department, in a statement, argued that the records "would not provide additional information useful to identifying possible causes or methods to prevent injury."

The administration's 2004 budget proposed to cut 77 enforcement and related positions from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, while adding two new staff members whose jobs would be to help industry comply with agency rules. Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao explained to a House committee that the agency would "continue to target inspections based on the worst hazards and the most dangerous workplaces." As the budget proposal was announced, President Bush and other senior officials focused most of their remarks on the large increases proposed for defense and domestic security.