LinkBlog: george+w+bush

Feingold, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and new Democrat Arlen Specter (Pa.) had the constitutional courage to oppose the Judiciary Committee bill eventually going to the floor that with few exceptions, leaves the Patriot Act intact. I'll be reporting on the crucial fight to bring the Bill of Rights back into the Patriot Act as Senate and House versions merge into a law to be signed by Obama as he continues the Bush-Cheney legacy. It was Feingold who, in October 2001, was the only member of the Senate to vote against the original Patriot Act as, on the floor, he accurately predicted our greatly weakened privacy, due process and other rights since then.

Millions of people are refusing to take the H1N1 vaccine. In the weeks ahead — if Obama’s emergency declaration falls under the above directives — we may witness a move toward martial law, forced vaccination, and internment of those who refuse. At best, Obama’s declaration is a flimsy attempt to scare people into taking the toxic soft kill vaccination. Let’s hope this is the case.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight. Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

This would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement. Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose. The Lackawanna Six were a group of young Yememi-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their “cell” in his January 2003 State of the Union address. However, an investigation by Salon failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a “sleeper cell” or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists.

But this new form of ersatz capitalism, in which losses are socialised and profits privatised, is doomed to failure. Incentives are distorted. There is no market discipline. The too-big-to-be-restructured banks know that they can gamble with impunity – and, with the Federal Reserve making funds available at near-zero interest rates, there are ample funds to do so. Some have called this new economic regime "socialism with American characteristics". But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the US has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance too. America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance and now to cars, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of longstanding corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

The Obama administration is now considering reinstating the Military Commissions Act after a four-month suspension, in contradiction to the president’s promise to end military tribunals for detainees and to close down Gitmo. While there is talk about reforming the act to restrict hearsay evidence and to permit defendants to challenge intelligence used against them, the disparity between the tribunals and due process for other criminals leaves intact the concept of “unlawful enemy combatant,” as contained in the act, and thus threatens further evisceration of the rule of law. Running on the platform of a constitutional law professor who would restore the rule of law to the United States, the stench of hypocrisy pervades Barack Obama’s administration. This is not to challenge the need to make decisions based on available evidence and to fine-tune these decisions according to the facts—something that Obama has often held up as his modus operandi. The problem is that one of these facts to be taken into account is that evidence against at least some of these detainees was unlawfully obtained.

On 9/11 the Bush administration declared a State of Emergency (SOE), which was formally proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and extended by Bush repeatedly thereafter, most recently on August 28, 2008.(1) Under cover of this SOE, Bush secretly enacted many extreme measures, ranging from suspension of habeas corpus to preparations for martial law in America; all these were undertaken as part of secret so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) procedures associated with the SOE, and first instituted on 9/11.

Scott Horton - a professor at Columbia Law School and writer for Harper's - says of the Bush administration memos authorizing torture, spying, indefinite detention without charge, the use of the military within the U.S. and the suspension of free speech and press rights: We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

PEPFAR may indeed turn out to be Bush’s major redeeming value as he continues to be criticized at home and abroad for his relentless war-making in Iraq and Afghanistan. The New York Times has argued that PEPFAR could be his “most lasting bipartisan accomplishment.” Says Dr. Alex Coutinho, a top AIDS expert in Uganda, “When I’ve traveled in the U.S., I’m amazed at how little people know about what PEPFAR stands for. Just because it has been done under Bush, it is not something the country should not be proud of.”

So no international tribunals or foreign countries have any power to investigate or prosecute American officials for war crimes (even when those war crimes are against citizens of those countries and/or committed within their borders). And, American political officials must also not be prosecuted inside the U.S., by American courts. "Nobody is entitled" to do that either, because "attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery." The implication of their argument -- which is now the conventional Beltway view -- is too obvious to require much elaboration. If our political leaders can't be held accountable for their war crimes and other serious felonies in foreign countries or international tribunals, and must never be held accountable in the U.S. either (because to do so is to "pour acid into our democratic machinery"), then it means that American political officials (in contrast to most other leaders) are completely and explicitly exempt from, placed above, the rule of law. That conclusion is compelled from their premises.

"I said, 'Get Bush on the phone.' They tried, and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said, 'I need to speak to him now.' He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call. I told him that the US cannot possibly vote in favor of this resolution. He immediately called [Rice] and told her not to vote for it."

I have repeatedly stated that the US regime of George W. Bush was not legitimate. How can I make it any clearer? "Illegitimate" means that the regime of George W. Bush was no more legitimate than the crooked regimes of tin horn dictators in banana republics. The Bush regime differed little in terms of competence or statesmanship. Now, in a cynical document that the US Army had never intended be disseminated publicly, we have confirmation that the position of the US vis a vis the rest of the world is based not upon Democracy or legitimacy. It is, rather based entirely upon force, aggression and US terrorism.

Among 82 researchers polled by Ms Kempner, who had received money from the NIH, almost a quarter had dropped or reframed studies around sexual behaviour they judged to be politically sensitive, and four had made career changes and left academia as a result of the controversy. Half reframed their studies to avoid work on marginalised populations, or dropped studies they thought would be politically sensitive, such as those on sexual orientation, abortion, childhood sexual abuse, and condom use. One interviewee said: “I do not study sex workers, I study ‘women at risk’.” Almost four-fifths believed NIH funding decisions had become more political under President George W. Bush than under his predecessor Bill Clinton, and more than a third believed they were less likely to receive NIH funding as a result of the controversy.

The government is opening some military airspace to ease airline congestion over Thanksgiving and Christmas, though the effort is likely to have only limited results. And if the weather's bad, all bets are off. President George W. Bush announced Tuesday that he's expanding the Thanksgiving express lanes this year to include military air corridors in the Midwest, the Southwest and the West Coast. That's in addition to the East Coast corridors, which were also freed up for holiday traffic last year.

As the 2008 presidential election heads into its final week, the current president threw a political wild card on table late Friday, when he asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the status of 200,000 Ohio voters. George W. Bush's request, if honored, could be politically explosive. It would remind voters of the Department of Justice's partisan abuses of power in the scandal surrounding the firing of seven U.S. attorneys in 2006 who did not deliver 'voter fraud' convictions.

A new court filing by the lawyers for Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Guantanamo detainees suggests that the Bush administration ordered the Bosnian government to arrest and hold the men after an exhaustive Bosnian investigation had found them innocent of any terrorism related activity and had ordered their release, in order to use them as props in Bush's January 2002 State of the Union speech. The filing--"Lakhdar Boumediene, et al., Petitioners, v. George W. Bush, President of the United States, et al., Respondents, Petitioners' Public Traverse to the Government's Return to the Petition for Habeas Corpus"--lays out the case that the Bush administration threatened at the highest levels to withdraw diplomatic and military aid to the Balkan nation if Bosnia released the men, which its own three-month investigation had found innocent of any terrorism charges in the days leading up to Bush's January 2002 State of the Union.

On Thursday's edition of The Colbert Report, bestselling author Naomi Klein argued that the Bush Administration creates crises in order to "enrich themselves and their friends," drawing parallels between the torture of prisoners and the economic bailout being provided to Wall St. by US leaders. Previously, Klein called out the sprawling economic crisis as just another example of the Bush 'shock doctrine,' a key component to the ruling regime's corporate agenda.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit -- but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain. Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas -- this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing. Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protege Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

New evidence from former U.S. officials reveals that the George W. Bush administration failed to adopt any plan to block the retreat of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the first weeks after 9/11. That failure was directly related to the fact that top administration officials gave priority to planning for war with Iraq over military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

What is striking here is the level of public opposition. It is somewhere between 55 and 90 percent, depending on the way the question is worded. Also, it is wide and deep opposition. It is made up of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, blacks, whites, rich, poor, men, women – just about everyone, with no systematic bias among the polled groups. In other words, we have here a wonderful thing: a clash of group interests, as Mises would say. It is the state and its friends vs. the American people.

Which raises three questions for me:

The Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in toxic mortgages in the largest financial bailout since the Great Depression, according to a draft of the plan obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.

Oliver North, who worked on COG planning with Rumsfeld and Cheney in the 1980s, was asked in the Iran-Contra Hearings about his work on an emergency plan “that would suspend the American constitution.” Democratic Senator Inouye, who was presiding, pounded his gavel and interjected that this was a “highly sensitive and classified matter,” not to be dealt with in an open hearing.[7] Congress has never discussed COG plans publicly since that time.

This is the entire, original video of Bush's appearance at Emma E. Booker Elementary School on the morning of September 11th, 2001. This video was originally posted for download on the school's web site.

Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.” The New York Times' page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans' civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come. It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans' information and exchanges online. "War powers" have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus -- detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.

After reviewing some of the more than 400 mainstream media articles written yesterday about the NIST final report on the collapse of WTC 7, it is easy to get the impression that no credible alternative explanations exist. Why would any American question the NIST report? They have no exposure to opposing views expressed by professional engineers and architects. It is as if none exist if you rely on the mainstream media. Only two outlets quoted members of the professional organization, AE911truth.org. More outlets quoted me than reputable scientists. Go figure. While many of the reports mentioned that NIST dismissed the possibility that explosives were used, not one outlet reported that NIST failed to perform a single scientific test for explosive residue. NIST ruled out the use of explosives because "...the noise associated with such an explosion would have been ten times louder than being in front of the speakers at a rock concert...". There you have it--government funded science at its best. NIST also claimed that no loud noise was heard by witnesses. I guess they did not have access to the oral histories from the New York Fire Department made public after suit by the New York Times, the source for the quote by NIST that there were no witness reports of loud noises. There goes that liberal media again, always attacking the Bush administration at every possible turn. Yesterday, while we were listening to the press conference hosted by AE911truth.org, we received many calls from media outlets inquiring about our take on what the NIST presented. We provided these "journalists" with the number for the conference call and suggested they contact members of AE911truth.org to get the perspective of professional, credentialed engineers and architects. After reviewing the media accounts of how the WTC 7 mystery is now solved, it is apparent that not one of these "journalists" chose to report what these professionals had to say. Based on the misquoted snippet from 911truth.org interviews on the subject, it is clear they neither listened to the press conference nor contacted any of the structural engineers or architects to whom they were referred. In the two and a half years as media coordinator for 911truth.org, I have learned that the reality created by the media is anything but fair and balanced. The producer of CNN's Showbiz Tonight demonstrated more intellectual curiosity about why we continue to raise questions than most of the journalists I have encountered. Earlier in the year, I received a call from a show producer at WOR radio in New York City, asking if I would go on the show to debate the host. I asked how much time we had for the debate. He said, without skipping a beat, 5 minutes. What kind of debate about the complex events of 9/11 can take place in 5 minutes? I accepted the offer on the condition that they play a few short sound bites I would supply in advance so that, at the very least, we would have a few specific issues to discuss. Here are the clips I sent for them to choose from, which include: President Bush at a town hall meeting, Ohio Senator Mark Dayton, Charlie Rose and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta and Commissioner Hamilton, Commissioner Ben Veniste questioning Condaleeza Rice, Missouri Representative Ike Skelton, Chris Matthews and Representative Dana Rohrabacher, George Tenet. Listen here. On the morning of the debate, the producer called to let me know that we were going ahead with the "debate" but the station would not play the sound bites. He told me that I could read the text of the sound bites but station management would not let me "program" the show. So let me get this straight, I can read what President Bush repeated at two publicly televised town hall meetings recounting his experience on the morning of 9/11 but the citizens of New York City could not hear him say it in his own words. When I suggested the possibility of media bias, he then told me the "host of the show did not know how to respond to the sound bites."

A forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was ordered on White House stationery and probably came from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a new transcript of a conversation with the Central Intelligence Agency's former Deputy Chief of Clandestine Operations Robert Richer. The transcript was posted Friday by author Ron Suskind of an interview conducted in June. It comes on the heels of denials by both the White House and Richer of a claim Suskind made in his new book, The Way of The World. The book was leaked to Politico's Mike Allen on Monday, and released Tuesday.

Pelosi told "The View" today that she'd impeach Bush if anybody knew of a crime he'd committed, just as she told Ed Schultz a year ago. Here's a list of crimes (PDF) drawn up by Conyers 2.5 years ago. And here's a list of crimes (PDF) from Kucinich's articles of impeachment drawn up by Elizabeth de la Vega. Could a few thousand people fax these to her please?

Update: Veteran, other activists kicked out of hearing

Today, CREW has released its newest study, Those Who Dared: 30 Who Stood Up for Our Country, recognizing the brave individuals who have acted and spoken out against unethical and dishonorable conduct in the Bush administration. The full report can be found here.

Taken singly, any one of these stories would be startling and perhaps inexplicable if one believes the official story that America was attacked by an outside force on 9/11. Taken together, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the understanding of that day portrayed in the controlled corporate media is vastly distorted. By collecting this data into an easily digestible YouTube documentary format, these three videos make excellent tools for activists seeking to alert others to some of the many troubling unanswered questions about the defining political event of our age.

The impending invasion of Iran has been on the grapevine for the past three summers running and many are beginning to fear that the "boy who cried wolf" mentality is starting to discredit those who repeatedly warn of the coming attack. However, rhetoric has notably heated in the past few months. During Bush's recent visit to Israel, an Israeli official claimed that a senior member in Bush's entourage had stated in a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had resolved to attack Iran before they left office.

In the Georgia governor's race Republican Sonny Perdue upset incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. This was especially strange given that the October 16-17, 2002 Mason Dixon Poll (Mason Dixon Polling and Research, Inc. of Washington, D.C.) had shown Democratic Governor Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent, with a margin of error of ± 4 points. The final tally was, in other words, a jaw dropping 16-point turn-around! What the Cleland “defeat” by Saxby and the Barnes “defeat” by Perdue both have in common is that nearly all the Georgia votes were recorded on computerized voting machines, which produce no paper trail. In Minnesota, after Democrat Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crash death,34 ex-vice-president Walter Mondale took Wellstone’s place and was leading Republican Norm Coleman in the days before the election by 47 to 39 percent. Despite the fact that he was trailing just days before the race by 8 points, Coleman beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. This was an 11-point turn around! The Minnesota race was conducted with paper ballots, read by optical scan readers, but Mondale never bothered to ask for a recount.35 Welcome to a world where statistical probability and normal arithmetic no longer apply!36 The Democrats, rather than vigorously pursuing these patently obvious signs of election fraud in 2004, have nearly all decided that being gracious losers is better than being winners,37 probably because – and this may be the most important reason for the Democrats’ relative silence - a full-scale uncovering of the fraud runs the risk of mobilizing and unleashing popular forces that the Democrats find just as threatening as the GOP does.

To this day, al-Qaeda trumpets the attack on the Cole as one of its greatest military victories. It remains an improbable story: how two suicide bombers smiled and waved to unsuspecting U.S. sailors in Aden's harbor as they pulled their tiny fishing boat alongside the $1 billion destroyer and blew a gaping hole in its side. Despite the initial promises of accountability, only limited public inquiries took place in Washington, unlike the extensive investigations that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Basic questions remain about which individuals and countries played a role in the assault on the Cole.

A trip down memory lane, offered with little comment, although a bottle of cheap tequila and a few dramamine might be necessary, probably like the President before he took off.

Among other criteria, it stated that “[p]hysical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Three rather unsettling news pieces from today, the anniversary of Dr. King's assassination . . . wow. 1) "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear" . . . (Remember when the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was still in force?) 2) "The October 2001 memo arguing for unregulated military searches on U.S. soil has not been formally withdrawn and remains a secret but unclassified document." 3) 2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship Thanks to Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government for bringing these items to our attention. Almost seems important enough the corporate media would cover it, too, eh?!

REPORTER: Could you tell us what you think of the value of appearing together and how you would answer those critics? PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, first of all, look, I mean, if we had something to hide, we wouldn't have met with them in the first place. I came away good about the session, because I wanted them to know, you know, how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats. The vice president answered a lot of their questions, answered all their questions. And I think it was important for them to see our body language as well, how we work together.

President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. "The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it," Bush said. The bill provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and includes the interrogation requirement. It passed the House in December and the Senate last month. "This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe," the president said.

Since taking office in 2001, President Bush has issued signing statements on more than 750 new laws, declaring that he has the power to set aside the laws when they conflict with his legal interpretation of the Constitution. The federal government is instructed to follow the statements when it enforces the laws. Here are 10 examples and the dates Bush signed them:

In the name of full disclosure, I am not writing this from some disinterested “good citizen” viewpoint. I have a young nephew, John McNamarra, a heroic fireman who worked as a first responder at that site and who later volunteered for rescue work after Katrina in New Orleans. For the past few years he has been suffering from various cancers resulting from that work for which he is currently under treatment at Sloan Kettering. Last weekend he called me to talk about the government’s new betrayal. As the father of a one year old son, Jack, John is fighting the battle of his life, and there is no godly reason why men such as John have to fight the government as well for proper medical care and compensation. One pill – yes one small pill that reduces the agonizing nausea of his chemotherapy costs as much as a thousand dollars. Okay, I can rail about the greedy drug companies and their obscene profits, but my first concern is our government’s ingratitude and cruelty, something which the congress must address and remedy to help all these men and women. As Representative Carolyn Maloney writes, “It’s shocking that the president would use his final budget to take an axe to 9/11 health care programs.” Ms. Maloney is a wonderful representative but her use of shocking seems naïve. Are you shocked? After Katrina? After Walter Reed? Not me. I recall that first lie told by the federal government about the risk at ground zero to workers, one that came through the Bush mouthpiece, Christie Todd Whitman, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, now a lobbyist for nuclear power. This former New Jersey governor claimed that anyone in the area of ground zero, meaning not only the workers who worked in the rubble trying to rescue the buried and reclaim body parts, but the residents of the apartments in the area, were safe from the toxic fumes that filled the air for days, sometimes weeks. According to a later report of the New York City Department of Health “The collapse of the Twin Towers brought 200,000 tons of steel, 5,000 tons of asbestos, 12,000 miles of electric cables and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete crashing down into lower Manhattan… The combustion produced a toxic cauldron of concrete, dust, glass fibers, and cancer-causing asbestos, as well as particles of lead, chlorine…24 gallons of jet fuel, and burning plastics released carcinogens including dioxins etc.” As someone who lived more than eighty long city blocks north of ground zero I could smell the bitter, toxic air coming in through my bedroom window for days.

New York lawmakers in Washington who have been persistently pressing the White House for increased funding for healthcare programs for ailing 9/11 World Trade Center workers were jolted last week when President George W. Bush's proposed budget slashed those programs by 77 percent. Only last Wednesday, they pointed out, a White House spokesman had issued a statement that the president's 2009 budget would "reflect his continued commitment" to WTC workers. In reality, the budget issued appropriated a paltry $25 million, down from $108 million in the present spending plan.

Thailand’s war on drugs — vigorously approved by the Bush administration — has received far less attention in the United States than it deserves. When Thaksin launched his anti-drug campaign in 2003, he declared that “in this war, drug dealers must die.” Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha promised that drug dealers “will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace. Who cares? They are destroying our country.” The Thai government was concerned about the rising number of Thais taking amphetamine-type pills — popularly known as Yaa-Baa. The crackdown began in early February 2003. Within weeks, government officials were bragging about the number of bad guys killed. A New York Times article noted that “the killings started right on cue. Many victims were on secret, but official, ‘black lists.’” Throughout Thailand, local officials set up black boxes or mailboxes and encouraged people to accuse anyone suspected of involvement with narcotics — no evidence required. Many people used the anonymous system to accuse business competitors or personal enemies. According to a 2004 U.S. State Department human-rights report, the interior minister warned “governors and provincial police that those who failed to eliminate a prescribed percentage of the names from their blacklists would be fired.”

The official story of 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. One of these contradictions involves the question of how long President Bush remained in classroom in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of 9/11.

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it. 2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

"Fuck The Corporate Media" analyzes the tactics, both subtle and blatant, employed by the corporate media to control your mind. This video covers just one day in the lies of the corporate media. See for yourself how they sell us out in this startling comparison between what really happened on August 21st, 2003 in Portland, Oregon, and what they say about what happened.

As Ralph Nader describes it, Olver and the rest of Congress are afraid that -- if Bush or Cheney are impeached -- they might declare martial law and suspend the 2008 elections. How is Congress failing to remove Bush and Cheney from office based upon such fears any different from Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler so Hitler would not attack?

The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 -- a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina. White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted -- a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes...

Take a few minutes to watch this important video. Nader reveals comments by Massachusetts Rep. Olver explaining why he can't push for impeachment... indeed, "Things are a lot worse than we thought."

On November 8, 1967 the NY Times recounted a Yale Daily News report that five fraternities had been accused of "sadistic and obscene" initiations. The paper said that Delta Kappa Epsilon had used a "hot branding iron" on the backs of new members and quoted a former Delta president, Georg Bush, then a senior, that the resulting wound was "only a cigarette burn." This was not Bush's first bout with sadism. According to an article by Nicholas D. Kristof in Midland Life, "'We are terrible to animals,' recalled [Bush childhood pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. `Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,' Throckmorton said. `Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'" Psychologists don't think young men blowing up animals is such a good sign, as this report from Science News notes:

But as the series of events described in this article adequately shows, for more than an hour, while the attacks of 9/11 unfolded, the president's behavior was odd, out of character, and very suspicious. During the most important 90 minutes of his life, when his usual obsessive punctuality could have been an asset, Bush suddenly became a dawdler.

The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House's controversial warrantless eavesdropping program. The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

What killed over 1,000; totally destroyed the homes of 250,000; and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless? Not Hurricane Katrina. Is was the collapse of the federal levees. Poorly designed, poorly built, underfunded. The Bush Administration knew the levees had the potential to fail and did nothing. They did nothing during the catastrophe. And they've done nothing since to make good on their promises to help the people there rebuild.

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

While many would reject the idea of Bush as permanent dictator as offensive, unlikely, and absurd, this article echoes a document signed by President Bush himself, which would theoretically give him a dictatorship in the aftermath of a “Catastrophic Emergency”. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed on May 9, 2007 reads: “’Catastrophic Emergency’ means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions… The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government.”

Make no mistake. This is not a conservative group of politicos with an upgraded title. This is, in fact, a group that is extremely, not slightly reactionary. They are, also extremely, not slightly, dangerous. They contradict almost every concepts Americans associate with a democratic republic and they do not adhere to the restrictions and boundaries defined by the US Constitution.

Obviously, that result was the desired outcome all along, and Taco Bell employee Padilla was just a poor sap they used as a tool. (Remember all the “dirty bomb” fear-mongering that went away because they couldn’t gin up the vaguest of evidence? Of course you do.)

I think we can expect to see the "capture" of a truckload of people identified as fighters, carrying weapons – perhaps some of those 190,000 weapons conveniently misplaced by the Pentagon in Iraq –coming over from Iran very soon. (Can you say "Gleiwitz radio station"?) Or some similar incident to "confirm" direct Quds involvement in killing American soldiers.

The sheer abhorrence of the diatribe could lead many to think that this was some kind of attempt at black humor, a faux article written by a liberal intended as a parody to ridicule right-wingers, but it's not, it's real - this is what many of the Neo-Cons actually embrace. To the kind of people who think like this, carrying out a 9/11 style attack is like a walk in the park.

As the Bush administration's popularity has plummeted, the potential political windfall it would receive from another terrorist attack on U.S. soil has grown enormously. It seems as if the doctor who has become heir to our estate now faces ruin unless he receives this inheritance. The situation should be of concern not only to the citizenry, but also to the current administration itself. For it is certainly possible that terrorists may strike on U.S. soil sometime this summer, as the secretary of Homeland Security has predicted. If such an attack were successful, will Americans suspect that it might have somehow been facilitated or even orchestrated by the administration?

Four years ago, a Missouri man, Joe Amrine, was released after 17 years on death row after the collapse of all evidence that led to his conviction for a jail murder. The state argued, with a straight face, that even the establishment of innocence was not a reason to stop his execution, because nothing had been procedurally incorrect about his original trial. Again, it was a federal appeals court that weighed in on Amrine's behalf.

I wish more people in this country would really revere the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. But Cheney and Bush themselves are intolerant of the freedoms that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. In my book, “You Have No Rights,” I tell the story of a guy named Steve Howards who was walking through Beaver Creek, Colo., an open-air mall there. Of all people, Dick Cheney is there, shaking hands. And Steve Howards goes up to the vice president, about three feet away, and says, “Mr. Vice President, I think your policy in Iraq is reprehensible.” ... And then he walked away. But the Secret Service approached him 10 minutes later and said, “Did you assault the vice president of the United States?” Steve Howards said, “No, I was just expressing my First Amendment rights.” And they responded, “No, you assaulted the vice president of the United States. You’re under arrest.”

Keeping Gonzales isn't cost-free. But for now, Bush seems to have decided that the importance of running out the clock on investigations by keeping his loyal Attorney General in place is worth any amount of criticism.

A New Zealand pizza chain uses President Bush's picture on a billboard.

Well, what else would make this picture complete? Have you guessed it yet? I know I thought I had seen it all until just yesterday. As I sat down at my computer I opened an email from a friend who shares my love of politics and, from time to time, emails job postings from various government departments and agencies, this time it was the White House internship program. As I clicked the link and waited for the page to load I took a sip of my coffee and then choked and spit the hot coffee all over the desk as the words leapt off the screen and pounded my eyeballs… “Thank you for your interest in SERVING PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH”

America's first Muslim congressman has provoked outrage by apparently comparing President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler and hinting that he might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks. Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler's later seizure of emergency powers. "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," Mr Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

Olbermann basically sees Chertoff as a propaganda minister, throwing up a diversion for Bush. I hope you're right Olbermann.

Suddenly, in the second week of February, 2007, Scooter Libby decided to lie down and let the steamroller of the criminal justice system roll all over him. He wouldn’t ask Rove or Cheney to testify. He wouldn’t call other witnesses from within the White House. His lawyer wasn’t going to bring up the Cheney memo again. Libby wouldn’t even take the stand in his own defense. And it all happened just about the time Rove and Cheney would have been forced to testify in court under oath. Coincidence or conspiracy?

This photo was emailed to me. Unfortunately, I know neither who the author is, nor whether or not it is real.

While NSPD 51 has the appearances of a domestic national security decision, it is, nonetheless, an integral part of US foreign policy. It belongs to a longstanding military national security agenda. Were NSPD 51 to be invoked, Vice President Dick Cheney, who constitutes the real power behind the Executive, would essentially assume de facto dictatorial powers, circumventing both the US Congress and the Judiciary, while continuing to use President George W. Bush as a proxy figurehead.

Libby's crime was obstructing an investigation that appeared to be headed for Cheney and possibly Bush. The proper course of action for Congress, in the face of Bush commuting Libby's sentence, is to begin impeachment hearings against Cheney and then Bush. With the White House openly disobeying a stack of subpoenas, it is finally clear that impeachment is the only possible check on Bush-Cheney power remaining to Congress. In fact, in the wake of Bush's Scooter commuting, the following people all released statements condemning Bush's action and recommending that Congress and the public do absolutely nothing about it: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. In contrast, Joe Biden recommended that the public phone the White House and complain. That ought to show them!

Former Environmental Protection Agency boss Christie Whitman says she urged Ground Zero workers to wear respirators, but then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani blocked her efforts. She also said city officials didn't want EPA workers wearing haz-mat suits because they "didn't want this image of a city falling apart."

Perhaps the real reason behind the Libby decision is that fact that the Bush administration knows full well that Libby took the rap for his criminal masters. Back in March a spokesman for the jury that convicted Libby told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for him and believed he was only the "fall guy." Denis Collins said that "a number of times" they asked themselves, "what is HE doing here? Where is Rove and all these other guys....I'm not saying we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of. It seemed like he was, as Mr. Wells [his lawyer] put it, he was the fall guy."

Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.” As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was "the War on Terror."

The Boston Globe's Charles Savage, who almost alone in the corporate media has doggedly pursued this sinister practice, reports numerous specific instances of Bush's deliberate subversion of legislation. Questioned about the story, a Bush spokesman answered, in essence: "Yeah? So what? The Boss does what he wants to do, and that's the way it is. You savvy?" The disgusting thugs who seized control of our government have been repeatedly unmasked. Their authoritarian pretensions and rampant lawbreaking have been repeatedly exposed in the media and by government insiders, and roundly condemned by numerous courts, including, as in this case, conservative courts packed with appointees of the Bush dynasty itself. Yet still, this gang squats in the White House, still they wield their earth-shaking powers, still they break laws and commit atrocities every day.

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part. The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

It's just one of those obscure little unreported-upon conspiracy theory-ready hunks of floating White House detritus, a couple of odd, sticky, foul-smelling documents no one really wants to touch and no one knows quite what to make of, probably means nothing, probably being misread anyway, all a bit overblown and strange and not all that important and not all that different than the way things are now. Unless, you know, it's not. Unless the violent twinge of queasy paranoia crossed with that uncontrolled bout of colon-clenching sighing you experience is deadly accurate and your radar for all things sinister and Rovean is right on target as you read about the delightfully titled National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, wherein it is calmly and furtively revealed that, in essence, George W. Bush owns your sorry ass.

It's hard to overstate the importance of Former Deputy AG James Comey's incredible testimony earlier this week. At a press conference today with outgoing British PM Tony Blair, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell asked President Bush about Comey's startling allegations. Needless to say, he refuses to answer the question and instead opts to remind us how much the Evil Scary Islamofascists want to kill us, and how Very Important this program is in order to "protect" us.

When faced with evidence that elements of our own government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, millions of Americans smugly respond that the Bush administration was too incompetent to have done it. A common statement is "They're too incompetent to even win a war against a bunch of poorly-armed people; how could they have pulled off 9/11?" Bush certainly acts like a bumbler and a good old boy. Cheney accidentally shot his hunting buddy. And Rumsfeld -- Secretary of Defense when 9/11 occurred -- apparently mangled the planning of the war in Iraq. Right? Not so fast. Are Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld really that incompetent?

President Bush issued a formal national security directive Wednesday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington without warning, whether smuggled in by terrorists or a foreign government, has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of federal worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the capital, in contrast with Cold War beliefs that a long-range strike would be preceded by a notice of minutes or hours as missiles were fueled and launched.

The poll from InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion asked a sample of 621 Americans, "Would you favor or oppose the impeachment by Congress of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney?" A total of 39% who answered said they favored impeachment, according to Towery. In opposition were 55% of respondents, with 6% answering undecided or don't know. There was a 4% margin of error.

George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm, reveals something extremely important about events in the final weeks before 9/11. For the first time, the former CIA Director admits he flew to Crawford in late August, just weeks before the attack by al-Qaeda cells known to be in the U.S., and briefed President George W. Bush personally about the threat.

April 28, 2007, thousands of patriots gathered around the nation calling for impeachment of the Bush administration. Philly 9/11 Truth joined their local event and with the approval of the host, World Can't Wait, delivered a powerful speech educating the open minded about state sponsored terrorism and 9/11. After an array of speakers and performers the event transmuted into a march through the streets of Philadelphia. As the crowd of enthusiastic patriots streamed through the city resounding chants and radiating an intense image, Philly 9/11 Truth seized the stream of impeachment and converted it into a river of truth by co-opting chants and emancipating minds. The following footage is exemplary of how a concerted effort by a small 9/11 Truth brigade can do the work of one hundred men.

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

ABC News reporter John Cochran told ABC's Peter Jennings, "He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff Andy Card whisper into his ear, then reporters said to the President 'do you know what's going on in New York'? - he said he did and would have something to say about it later." This contradicts Bush's statement that he made on two separate occasions, that he first learned of what was going on in New York from watching a television outside of the classroom as he prepared to talk about education with a group of Florida schoolchildren.

A Christian based group known as the Christian’s Liberation Movement has concluded that George W. Bush is a fake Christian and worships Satan. The group is demanding his impeachment not only for his crimes against humanity but for lying to the American people about his worship of Satan. It is highly doubtful that George W. Bush would have been elected President two times had the American people known about his secretive worship of Satan. Although this claim might seem difficult to believe, when one looks at the secret societies that George W. Bush has been involved with it becomes clear that George W. Bush is anything but a good Christian man.

Are we really expected to believe that Kia Baskerville learned of both the 1st and 2nd plane crashes (via cell phone) before the President of the United States? She learned of the first plane while on route to the school in the motorcade, but the POTUS did not?

While Speaker Pelosi had declared impeachment “off the table,” the Democratic Party rank-and-file has demonstrated its commitment to putting the issue “on” the table. And it’s no longer just the rank-and-file: Even among the members of the convention’s Resolutions Committee (appointed by the California Party chair), the impeachment resolution was the top vote-getter (tied with one other resolution).

On May 1, 2003, President Bush stood underneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner and announced that “Major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Here’s a by-the-numbers look at the situation then, compared to the situation now:

E-mails being sought from Karl Rove’s computers, and recent revelations about critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of Ohio’s stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and electronic files, preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale.The major media has come to focus on a large batch of electronic communications which have disappeared from the server of the Republican National Committee, and from White House advisor Rove’s computers. The attention stems from the controversial firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales. But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.

Backers hope the resolution -- and similar measures proposed in a handful of other states -- will send a clear message to the White House.

Accused al-Qaida agent Jose Padilla could be thrown back in a military brig even if he's acquitted or gets a light sentence in his civilian criminal trial beginning this week, experts say. All President Bush would have to do is sign papers again branding him an "enemy combatant," and Padilla would be back behind bars. Bush did that in 2002, when the Brooklyn-born terror suspect was stripped of his constitutional rights and held in a Navy jail for three years without charges. "There is nothing stopping the president from doing it," said Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who teaches law at Georgetown University. "If he were acquitted, he's not necessarily going anywhere." And if Padilla is returned to military custody, he could be held indefinitely until the end of the war on terror, Solis said.

In Grants Pass, Ore., at the Daily Courier, and at the Texas Sun, down in Texas City, journalists Dan Guthrie and Tom Gutting — separated by about 30 years in age but not at all by their conviction — were thinking: Where was Bush? Where was the presence that the nation craved in that terrible aftermath, but wasn't getting? As Guthrie wrote: "He didn't storm back to the capital and lead us through our darkest hour…. He skedaddled" to one Air Force base, then another. Guthrie praised New York firefighters and the passengers aboard United Flight 93 as "the heroes of this rotten week." As for Bush, Guthrie wrote: "We're praying for him." That was after he used, fatally, the word "cowardice." Hundreds of miles away, Gutting, who'd been a newspaperman since he was an Indiana teenager, was writing what turned out to be his last column. He praised Rudy Giuliani's decision to be "highly visible." He lambasted Bush: "It's time we snapped out of the 'support our president' trance and start to be vigilant citizens, as our Constitution demands." Well. The reaction didn't stop with the men's firings. An Alaskan fisherman professed a wish to use Guthrie for crab bait. In Texas, Gutting became, as the more colorful threats went, "a man who needed killin'."

In the wake of the tragic shooting massacre in Virginia this week gun control advocates have once again come crawling out of the woodwork to capitalize on the ill informed and automated response of blaming the destructiveness of a mentally ill person's rampage on the second amendment.

Prominent Iraq war opponent Cindy Sheehan urged US President George W. Bush on Friday to "end this madness" and accused his Democratic foes of having "betrayed" their anti-war supporters. Sheehan, whose soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, led dozens of protesters to a security checkpoint near Bush's Texas ranch, set up a makeshift altar, and read out names of some of the US dead in Iraq.

On Tuesday, meeting with the press in the White House Rose Garden, the President responded to a question about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Syria this way: “[P]hoto opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they’re part of the mainstream of the international community, when, in fact, they’re a state sponsor of terror.” There should, he added to the assembled reporters, be no meetings with state sponsors of terror. That night, Brian Ross of ABC News reported that, since 2005, the U.S. has “encouraged and advised” Jundullah, a Pakistani tribal “militant group,” led by a former Taliban fighter and “drug smuggler,” which has been launching guerrilla raids into Baluchi areas of Iran. These incursions involve kidnappings and terror bombings, as well as the murder (recorded on video) of Iranian prisoners. According to Ross, “U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight.” Given past history, it would be surprising if the group doing the encouraging and advising weren’t the Central Intelligence Agency, which has a long, sordid record in the region.

My main job is to protect the people, and I firmly believe that if we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy would follow us here. And what makes Iraq different from previous struggles is that September the 11th showed that chaos in another part of the world, and/or safe haven for killers, for radicals, affects the security of the United States.

Bush just spoke to the nation, trying to convince the public to support his Iraq quagmire, and he claimed again that the surge, the escalation, was the idea of his commanders in the field, and he's just following their advice. In fact, all of the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, ALL opposed the surge.

When the President of the United States of America is reduced to quoting propaganda nonsense fabricated by his own neocon supporters, that's pathetic. When he does so specifically in order to justify failed policies which continue to see dozens, if not hundreds, dead every day in Iraq, that's worse than tragic. It's criminal.

Bush toured the main hospital and Abrams Hall, where soldiers were transferred after they were vacated from the facility's Building 18, the site of moldy walls, rodent infestation and other problems that went unchecked until reported by the media. He said his conversations with those who had been in Building 18 left him "disturbed by their accounts." "The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures," the president told about 100 medical workers and patients at the hospital. "The system failed you and it failed our troops and we're going to fix it."

This is how far he, and his argument for continuing the slaughter in Iraq, has fallen: President Bush today was reduced to quoting two bloggers from Baghdad. He cited them as evidence that his surge/escalation is working. One problem: their posts were written weeks ago, and re-published in the Wall Street Journal on March 5. Only hours later did the White House reveal that the bloggers were brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, and these supposedly little-known average Joes had met Bush in the Oval Office in 2004. They are dentists and write an English-language blog from Baghdad called IraqTheModel.com, also available via Pajamas Media.

Bill Maher is asked if there is one question he would put to Bush, what would it be? Maher says he would confront Bush on why he completely failed to immediately react after he was told America was under attack on 9/11.

But of course the lives lost and ruined by Bush’s wars were lost and ruined in vain. For those who fight, a nondefensive war is the epitome of waste. Without the Bush lies about weapons of mass destruction and revenge for 9/11, who would have volunteered to go to Iraq or Afghanistan? Who would have chosen to finance those wars?

The main thing is that it is simply not correct that the fear of a Cheney or a Pelosi presidency provides Bush with some kind of insurance against impeachment. The only insurance Bush has against the impeachment he so richly deserves, and that a majority of Americans devoutly wish to see him receive, is a craven Democratic Party leadership, which because of a profound lack of principle, an excess of self-interested political calculation, and an astonishing misreading of the popular will, is going to any lengths to avoid doing what the Constitution demands it to do: impeach a president who poses a clear and present danger to the survival of Constitutional government and the rule of law in America.

And get this: The guy changing the scientific reports is not a scientist. Philip Cooney is an oilman, previously employed by the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's lobbying arm. When he left the government in 2005, he went to work for ExxonMobil. Can you say conflict of interest, boys and girls?

“Mr. President, ” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.” || “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Soon after becoming defense secretary, Robert Gates argued the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed because the international community would view any trials there as tainted, The New York Times reported on Thursday. Instead, Gates, who became Pentagon chief in December, argued that terrorism suspects should be tried in the United States to make the proceedings more credible, the Times said. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others argued against bringing detainees into the United States, and the discussion ended when President George W. Bush agreed with them, the newspaper quoted administration officials as saying.

We have seen an Army General or two fired in response to late-coming national publicity of abhorrent treatment of our maimed and recovering soldiers. But the real crime is much higher than three or four stars. The administration and the Pentagon didn’t plan for an occupation of Iraq, because that planning would belie our public optimism, betray the propaganda of cakewalks and a thousand flowers, and reveal the truth about the administration’s 2003 force-march to war. Likewise, to have planned for 25,000 injured Iraq and Afghan veterans, many permanently crippled, blinded, disfigured and brain damaged, and 100,000 psychological and emotional head cases trying to reintegrate into their former lives would have revealed the administration’s Iraq narrative to be dead wrong. No matter the cost, the Bush-Cheney narrative must be seen as the "reality."

So for those of you who draw the obvious conclusions about the real reason that Bush is setting these restrictive conditions for Rove and company during the attorney general scandal investigation, you may want to apply the same obvious conclusions to Bush’s behavior regarding the 9/11 investigation! Think about it!

Yep, you did it, George—mission impossible accomplished. Unbelievably, four years of a bungled occupation have managed to make Saddam Hussein’s tyranny look good in comparison with “liberated Iraq.” At least, that is the view of the Iraqi weightlifter made famous through a video of him taking a sledgehammer to Saddam Hussein’s statue. “I really regret bringing down the statue,” Kadhim al-Jubouri said on British television this week. “The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.” That’s the judgment of a man who spent nine years in Hussein’s jails, and, unfortunately, it is one shared by a majority of his countrymen, according to an authoritative poll sponsored jointly by ABC, BBC and USA Today: Only 38 percent of Iraqis believe that the country is better off today than under Hussein, while nearly four out of five oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

I agree we are a nation of "cowards." But I disagree on the timing. We are not spaghetti-spined because we might exit Iraq anytime soon. We became a bunch of yellow bellies on Sept. 12, 2001. That was when, in our fear and anxiety, inspired by the endless images of the still smoldering remnants of the Twin Towers, we Americans checked 200 years of self-reliance and the Constitution at the door, and handed the keys to the store over to a White House run by one guy whose military derring do was performed in the skies over south Texas instead of South Vietnam and by another who ran from an opportunity to fight for his country no less than five times. FBI Director Robert Mueller's recent revelations about the agency's abuse of the Patriot Act, rammed into law two weeks after 9/11, proves Ben Franklin was right: trading security for liberty leaves you with neither.

Bush's attempt to appoint Hit-woman Harriet to the US Supreme Court in 2005 surprised many. Not me. Miers, personal and governmental lawyer for George Bush, had quite a file on her boss, and he must have been grateful for her discretion. Most crucially, she knew why Bush so desperately needed to give GTech the lottery contract. The heart of the matter was the then-successful cover-up of the Bush family's using its influence to get young George Bush into the Texas Air National Guard and out of the Vietnam war draft.

But Gonzales is not just a self-serving political hack. He’s also an ideological hack. Like Cheney, he’s done everything within his power, and a lot of things outside it, to further the agenda of the imperial Presidency, whether that included Bush’s right to violate the “quaint” Geneva Conventions, or to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” or to illegally wiretap U.S. citizens.

What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability? Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion. Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.

There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.

To Dick Cheney's recent comments at an AIPAC conference (a shameful affair) that calls for withdrawal from Iraq only embolden our enemies, war hero Max Cleland had this to say: Where the hell were you in the Vietnam War? If you had gone to Vietnam like the rest of us, maybe you woulda learned something about war. You can't keep troops on the ground forever. They gotta have a mission. They gotta have a purpose.

It's not just the indifference and incompetence of the administration that are causing the troops so much unnecessary suffering. The simple truth is that the Bush crowd, busy trying to hide the costs of the president's $2 trillion tragedy in Iraq, can't find the money to pay for all the care that's needed by the legions of wounded and mentally disabled troops who are coming home. The outpatient fiasco at Walter Reed is just one aspect of a vast superstructure of suffering.

Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by attorneys prosecuting former White House staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case. Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy's stinging rebukes of the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson's wife's covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.

Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s. The case brought new attention to the Bush administration's much-criticized handling of weapons of mass destruction intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I realize, of course, in a complicated political system like ours, different players may have different motives, and these explanations may overlap. But can anyone think of a good reason why Republicans are leaving cities unprotected from nuclear attack, especially when all their policies in the Middle East are making such an attack more likely?

The file obtained from archive.org shows that the BBC's uncannily clairvoyant news coverage of the event began at 4:57 pm EDT, 23 minutes before the building actually collapsed. [3:19 on the archive.org video] Speaking from London, BBC World News anchorman Philip Hayton says, "We've got some news coming in – the Salomon Brothers Building in New York, right in that part of Manhattan, also has collapsed. This does fit in with a warning from the British Foreign Office a couple of hours ago to British citizens that… there was 'a strong risk of further atrocities in the United States. And it does seem as if there now is another one with the Salomon Brothers Building collapsing. We've got no word yet on casualties, one assumes that the building would have been virtually deserted." Hayton then reports that the US president is on a flight back to Washington from Nebraska, confirming that the broadcast time is just before 5pm EDT.

Well then, the grossly "criminally negligent" Bush regime should certainly have been in no position to influence the outcome of the investigation into September 11th 2001. Is that an unreasonable statement? Is it common to allow the suspect to initiate his own investigation? (outside of Washington D.C?) President William Jefferson Clinton was impeached for Obstruction of Justice, raising that particular offense to the level of an impeachable high crime. Has the Bush regime obstructed justice in regard to September 11th 2001?

If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime, one might formulate the main issues as these: Is the regime legitimate? After all, it took office by what millions recognize was a stolen election enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court and the president's brother's political machine in Florida.

You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better illustration of the administration's real priorities. Of course, this is part of a pattern of using security issues and "emergency powers" as excuses for naked union-busting. Remember that Reagan called the air-traffic controllers' strike a "peril to national safety" before breaking it (and the union's back). And let's not forget Bush's suspension of the David-Bacon Act while New Orleans was drowning.

Were Cheney a run-of-the-mill vice president, his inability to identify the line between fact and fantasy – or is it: truth and fiction – would be the stuff of comedy sketches. But, of course, Cheney is no ordinary second in command. Indeed, when it comes to foreign policy, he has for six years now been the real "decider." Only the most delusional observer of Washington fails to recognize that the Bush White House does what it does "because," as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill explained, "this is the way that Dick likes it."

President Bush has now definitively stated that bombs known as explosively formed penetrators - EFPs, which have proved especially deadly for U.S. troops in Iraq - are made in Iran and exported to Iraq. But in November, U.S. troops raiding a Baghdad machine shop came across a pile of copper disks, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order. This ominous discovery, unreported until now, makes it clear that Iraqi insurgents have no need to rely on Iran as the source of EFPs. The truth is that EFPs are simple to make for anyone who knows how to do it. Far from a sophisticated assembly operation that might require state supervision, all that is required is one of those disks, some high-powered explosive (which is easy to procure in Iraq) and a container, such as a piece of pipe. I asked a Pentagon analyst specializing in such devices how much each one would cost to make. "Twenty bucks," he answered after a brief calculation. "Thirty at most."

"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." So said President Bush on November 30, 2005, refining his earlier call to "bring them on." Jihadist terrorists, the administration’s argument went, would be drawn to Iraq like moths to a flame, and would perish there rather than wreak havoc elsewhere in the world. The president’s argument conveyed two important assumptions: first, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to U.S. interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists. However, the White House has never cited any evidence for either of these assumptions, and none appears to be publicly available.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

If we could manage to get past the tedious and the odious — like the empty speculation on whether a woman can win, or whether Barack Obama is black enough — we might be able to engage the essential issue facing the U.S. at this point in our history. And that is whether, once the Bush administration has finally and mercifully run its course, the country goes back to being a reasonably peaceful, lawful, constructive force in the world, or whether we continue down the bullying, warlike, unilateral, irresponsible, unlawful and profoundly ineffective path laid out by Bush, Cheney & Co. The question is not so much whether a Republican or a Democrat takes the White House in the next election; it’s whether the American people can take back their country.

Here's the real deal. George Bush sends American troops into the bowels of Iraq from his "beautiful White House." And each time he does, he is sentencing them to death. If not death of the body, then degrees of death of the spirit. If they do manage to survive, in whole or partial bodies, there is no bridge long enough to close the emotional chasm between the Iraqi war zone and home. Upon discharge, troops are required to answer (then and there) such questions as: Do you have PTSD? Do you have thoughts of suicide? Do you have thoughts of murder? etc., etc., etc. Give me a break. Who can possibly answer questions like that with any degree of accuracy until there is some distance from war? And even if they can, admission that they may be experiencing some stress/distress means they will be held by the military for some indeterminate period of time and won't get to go home. What would you choose after six months, a year, two years in Iraq?

With the "mainstream media," that is, the government’s propaganda ministry, bombarding the American public with "news reports" from unidentified sources that the US government has proof that "the highest reaches of the Iranian government" is supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency, Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demurred. General Pace told the Voice of America on February 12 that he has no information indicating that Iran’s government is supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency. General Pace said that "Iranians are involved," but "what I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se, knows about this . . . I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit." Unlike the New York Times, Fox "news," CNN, and the TV networks, General Pace refused to lie for the Bush Regime.

The Omar case teaches a different lesson. It teaches that the rule of law -- even in times of war -- strengthens national security without handicapping the military. It teaches James Madison's understanding in Federalist 48: "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."

Dissociation is a more complicated defense mechanism than denial. It doesn't just pretend that reality isn't there. It replaces reality with a fantasy world. We dissociate when we daydream. But when we repeatedly live in our own world, we do so at our peril. A gambling addict buried in debt is sure that next time he is going to win, but he almost never does. Despite his wife's expressions of unhappiness, a husband believes he is in a good marriage, and is shocked when she announces she wants a divorce. A patient avoiding childhood memories of sexual abuse tells her therapist she had a happy childhood when it couldn't possibly have been. We see evidence of the president's dissociation in his assessments of Iraq. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he still maintains that Iraq is not in a civil war, but "in a difficult struggle against the insurgents." Long after his generals concluded that we are not succeeding there, he repeatedly declared "we are winning."

The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.

New York Rep. Vito Fossella, a Republican, said the administration next week will propose spending at least $25 million more to fund a Sept. 11-related health care program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan and a related effort for New York firefighters. "It's a breakthrough," said Fossella. "For the first time in the federal budget there will be a down payment to provide for funding for continued treatment and monitoring for 9/11 responders who need our help."

The congressman, a veteran of the Nixon impeachment hearings who recently published a book on Bush's crimes, today announced plans to have his Judiciary Committee hold hearings on Bush's rampant use of so-called “signing statements.” These are the documents the president has claimed give him the power, as a commander-in-chief, to ignore laws duly passed by the Congress.

09/11/2001 8:55 AM Rice calls Bush at the school and tells him a commercial plane hit the WTC, but both assume it was just an "accident".

Rancor, venom, and blocked anger only cause us emotional suffering. We want to blame our bad feelings on Bush and his policies. We are, however, less eager to acknowledge that blaming others is usually a cover-up for something we're not seeing or dealing with in ourselves. Besides, Bush is so dysfunctional that he very likely takes pleasure in causing us grief as he relishes his power over us. We don't have to go looking for extra helpings of his crow pie.

In an interview in GQ Magazine, Hagel reveals that the Bush administration tried to get Congress to approve military action anywhere in the Middle East — not just in Iraq — in the fall of 2002. At the time, Hagel says, the Bush administration presented Congress with a resolution that would have authorized the use of force anywhere in the region:

Two other unnamed officials who traveled with Bush on a state visit to Africa in July 2003 reportedly encouraged a Time magazine correspondent to ask about the circumstances behind Wilson’s trip, pointing him in the direction of Plame. At the top of the operation to counter Wilson were Bush, who approved the partial release of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD, and Cheney, who dispatched Libby to meet with reporters.

A former New York policeman died late Tuesday in a Manhattan hospital, just as his 21-year-old son prepared to appear at the State of the Union speech to symbolize the desperate health problems of his father and other sick Sept. 11 workers. The former officer, Cesar Borja, 52, had been in intensive care, breathing through a tube, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, awaiting a lung transplant. Hospital spokeswoman Lauren Woods confirmed the death late Tuesday.

Amidst the cacophony of bullshit came this belter. "We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast." According to numerous public officials, terror experts and intelligence personnel, this is simply not true.

A national poll carried in the Washington Post Sunday has Clinton leading closest Democrat contender Sen. Barack Obama by 24% and projects her to beat anyone the Republicans can offer, with the possible exception of former New York Mayor and 9/11 shill Rudolph Giuliani. A massive grassroots campaign needs to be activated immediately to challenge liberals who profess anti-war sentiments to vote for a real anti-war candidate, Congressman Ron Paul, a man who voted against the illegal invasion of Iraq unlike Hillary Clinton and who also unlike Hillary is firmly opposed to embroiling America in any further foreign entanglements such as Iran.

An elderly man who wrote in a letter to the editor about Saddam Hussein's execution that "they hanged the wrong man" got a visit from Secret Service agents concerned he was threatening President Bush.

Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any US intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq. Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none.

Do you think the White House even gives a shit that it's beyond ironic and somewhere down the short road to demented to declare Sunday "National Sanctity of Human Life Day," that yearly tradition that celebrates fetuses in all their gooey glory? Do you think that they even recognize that, if you unilaterally start a war and refuse to end that war even as you cause death, destruction, and misery of amazing proportions to pregnant and non-enfetused women, you don't get to say that you declare a day that is "a reminder that we must value human life in all forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient"? That if you advocate torture and degradation of non-enwombed humans you simply should have the self-respect and self-awareness not to proclaim, "Together, we can work toward a day when the dignity and humanity of every person is respected"?

A group of Methodist ministers from across the nation launched an online petition drive Thursday urging Southern Methodist University to stop trying to land George W. Bush's presidential library.

The fact is, the Bush White House has deliberately lied to our soldiers in Iraq. By feeding them a constant stream of bullsh*t about Iraq's "ties" to 9/11, the Bush team has created a situation in which our troops are filled with rage and hell-bent on vengeance: a situation that has been directly responsible for the barbaric acts that we've seen committed by U.S. troops in Iraq.

And it is not just US corporations any more. The US government is now captive to multinational corporations who seek to use US military power to enhance their dominance of the world economy. So here we are, holding the bag for these folks who could not care less what happens to the US citizenry. They have mobile capital, while we are stuck here in the "homeland." They can run, while we have to stay and accept the consequences of their actions. If the US becomes inhospitable due to retaliation by the rest of the world, these corporate criminals will just move somewhere else and buy assets in currencies other than the US dollar. In fact, evidence indicates that this is already happening.

The closest analogy in the human world for what the Bush administration has become is probably something like a tremendously huge infant. Like an infant, the Bush administration can’t be reasoned with and seems out of touch with what is going on in the big picture. And like a tremendously huge infant, the Bush administration is possessed of an enormous amount of destructive potential. And as it slowly dawns on people that there’s this incredibly huge infant running amok among us, people are bewildered because we’ve never experienced anything like this before in our lives and have nothing to compare it to in our imaginations. And so it seems impossible and crazy. And we don’t quite know what to make of it all.

It was once considered Americans' patriotic duty: enduring extraordinary tax increases in wartime to help finance the fight. Not today. Iraq is the only major U.S. conflict, except for the 1846-48 Mexican-American War, in which citizens haven't been asked to make a special financial sacrifice. President George W. Bush opposes tax increases, even as the costs escalate far beyond predictions and he calls for more troops.

The best approach to Iran, and Syria for that matter, is to heed the advice of the Iraq Study Group Report, which states: "… the United States should engage directly with Iran and Syria in order to try to obtain their commitment to constructive policies toward Iraq and other regional issues. In engaging with Syria and Iran, the United States should consider incentives, as well as disincentives, in seeking constructive results." In coming weeks I plan to introduce legislation that urges the administration to heed the advice of the Iraq Study Group. Dialogue and discussion should replace inflammatory rhetoric and confrontation in our Middle East policy, if we truly seek to defeat violent extremism and terrorism.

Cheney also brushed off a post-election poll showing that only 17 percent of the public supported sending more troops to Iraq. "And if we have a president who looks at the polls and sees the polls going south and concludes, 'Oh, my goodness, we have to quit,' all it will do is validate the al Qaeda view of the world. It's exactly the wrong thing to do."

Americans don’t have much time to realize this and to act before it is too late. Bush’s “surge” speech last Wednesday night makes it completely clear that his real purpose is to start wars with Iran and Syria before failure in Iraq brings an end to the neoconservative/Israeli plan to establish hegemony over the Middle East.

resident Bush once said he was determined to stick with the Iraq war even if his wife and his dog were the only ones left at his side. It's moving in that direction.

A critique of Bush's address to the nation

Corporate America placed George W. Bush in the White House to wage endless war; to bankrupt the federal treasury to the extent that few social programs will survive, and virtually all of our tax dollars will go into supporting the military industrial complex. The people who put him in office intend to end public ownership of the commons, as well as all government programs that do not directly benefit the wealthy.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

In this context, at least, the "surge" begins to make some sense – especially if, as can be expected, it is a "long surge" carried out by an administration that likes to push the envelope (and meets little resistance in doing so). An attack on Iran will be centered around the Persian Gulf, but is bound to have reverberations on the ground in Iraq. A "surge" – 20,000 U.S. troops, and possibly more – would buttress American redoubts for the inevitable backlash and reinforce our defenses against a flanking counterattack.

The longer we stay in Iraq, the likelier we are to get sucked into an Iranian quagmire that will dwarf our present predicament by several orders of magnitude. I would bank on a Cambodia-style incursion, a la Richard Nixon – a maneuver that, executed in the volatile Middle East, is likely to cause a seismic explosion that would reverberate across the globe with tremendous force. That's why we don't need a "surge" – and every moment we delay in getting out of Iraq takes us closer to the edge of the abyss.

"The endless Iraq war is decreasingly about Iraq and increasingly about the U.S. Constitution. ... [Bush's decision to escalate the war] is based on his flawed and dangerous theory of the "unitary presidency," a theory under which, once war is declared, the president as commander in chief can ignore constitutional checks and balances, disregard the bill of rights, suspend accountability, and concentrate dictatorial power in his own hands." --Former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart, HuffingtonPost, 1/9/07

"Do you believe as Commander in Chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do," 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asks Bush in the short clip uploaded to the CBS News web site Friday night. "I think I've got, in this situation, I do, yeah," Bush said.

Apparently there is nothing force cannot accomplish. No one can be shocked that Bush has chosen the path of more force, even to the absurd lengths that he took it during his speech equating obedience with freedom. This is the path he set out on after 9-11 – an unrelated event which he again dragged into the Iraq equation – and the path he has stayed on ever since. He knows no other way. Teaching Bush about subtleties such as diplomacy and trade is like telling a box turtle to write a novel. It is just not part of his intellectual equipment. Bush knows how to order people to bomb things, so order he does.

Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan? A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush’s proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran.

President Bush's decision to send 21,500 more combat troops to Iraq drew heavy fire from both Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday despite a plea by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a "national imperative not to fail."

The Democratic-controlled House Thursday passed a bill bolstering embryonic stem cell research that advocates say shows promise for numerous medical cures. But the 253-174 vote fell short of the two-thirds margin required to overturn President Bush's promised veto, despite gains made by supporters in the November elections. Bush vetoed identical legislation last year and the White House on Thursday promised he would veto it again.

REQUIRED READING FOR BUSH SUPPORTERS!

Don’t be afraid to start researching this stuff because the ramifications of not doing anything will be worse than if you let the damage continue to pile up. Maybe if enough of you come to terms with what is taking place more people can actually take action. Maybe the people who are trying desperately to alert the citizens of this nation about what is going on will have one less person slowing us down from stopping the madness!

The following letter, acquired by RAW STORY, was delivered to President Bush Monday, in response to an article published in the NY Daily News which revealed that Bush had written into a "signing statement" that the President could open Americans' mail.

This is part of a pattern, a Bush-Cheney habit of ignoring the Constitution. And it's grounds yet again for immediate impeachment, arrest, and imprisonment of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales.

The challenge is to shift the dynamic here at home, in our own prisonhouse of misplaced faith in government, our own illusions of goodness where instead there is only the now-metasticized military-industrial-congressional complex described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower nearly fifty years ago. Three generations since then, and maybe more, have disregarded, or perhaps never understood what we were paying for, in treasure and in constitutional principle.

As some people learned from the minimal and abusive media coverage, on December 8, 2006, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney introduced Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush, making him the 10th president of the United States to face such action. Of course, McKinney was on her way out of office and thus more willing to challenge the Democratic Party leadership by upholding basic Constitutional principles. Fewer people are aware that Congresswoman McKinney on December 27, 2006, entered into the Congressional Record (pages E2253 - 2255) extended remarks on impeachment that merit our close attention. Why would she do such a thing on her way out the door with no chance of reintroducing her bill in the new Congress? For one thing, she clearly would agree with the response Congressman John Conyers gave to Lewis Lapham when asked what he thought the point was of publishing a lengthy report laying out evidence of Bush's impeachable offenses. Conyers' response was: "to take away the excuse that we didn't know."

According to the President, a unified democratic Iraq would be a model for the Middle East, thereby causing democratic reforms in other Arab countries that would result in more stability and less terrorism. Even if Iraq miraculously ends up as a democracy, it hardly would be a model. Other Arabic societies would probably conclude that they don’t want to go through that much pain to have a more open political system. More likely, Arab peoples would make the negative association of democracy with the military occupation of an “infidel” superpower, thereby reducing the chances that democracy would spread in the Middle East. More likely still, Iraq will not be a unified democracy and thus won’t provide a model, except for chaos and mayhem. Most Arabs quite perceptively believe that “democracy” is a smoke screen for the Bush administration’s hypocrisy and ulterior motives in the region.

The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public. The Bush administration didn't reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Admittedly, Bush may not know what he is doing from one moment to the next, as he is a former drunk and drug abuser, and thus a mental graveyard, but his coterie of neocons most certainly know what they are doing—coming up with excuses to send more troops into Iraq, not to win that which cannot be won, as another basket case, McCain, would have us believe, but rather to see through “mission accomplished,” the destruction and balkanization of Iraq. It’s a work in progress, with horrifying results. For instance, last weekend, a series of car bombings killed more than 70 people in Shia neighborhoods in the hours after Saddam Hussein was lynched by a gaggle of puppets installed by the neocons.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

Every picture of him, (not counting the famous one on the aircraft carrier) shows him wearing the most thoroughly unrumpled suit I have ever seen on a man who wasn't standing behind a podium introducing guests. Much has been written about his perpetual smirk. Maybe "smirk" isn't the right word. That patented carefree here-comes-another-quip facial expression of his may be the perfect accessory to what he is really showcasing: those immaculately pressed, carefully fitted never-worn-before suits. George W. Bush's suits look like they are freshly steamed and ready for an hour (with breaks for commercials) of making ribald remarks, bantering with celebrities and handing out statuettes.

Before the coming of George Bush and his shadow president Dick Cheney, the greatest military blunder in American History was thought to be Custer's Last Stand. It did not take a lot of hindsight to know that general Custer's vain assault on a much larger force of better-armed native Americans would come to no good end. His own turncoat Indian scouts told him the encampment at Little Bighorn was far too large to be attacked. They were changing back into their native clothes en masse so as not to be associated with the white man. But in his supreme arrogance Custer believed that HE knew better than his own best sources of intelligence. We all know the result of that one. How uncanny are the parallels to the current situation in Iraq? The neocon ideologues who seized dictatorial control of our government brushed off all contrary advice and manufactured intelligence to support their case. They dismissed any challenge to their vision of the absolute power of American military dominance as a matter of right. They fired any underling who dared to try tell them the truth, that deposing Saddam would lead directly and inexorably to an Islamic theocracy, if not a sectarian civil war. They used the power of their crony associates in the corporate media to smear any public critic. And they are still doing it.

Americans have curiously mixed attitudes about drug crimes. On the one hand, we blithely elect people to high office who did things that, had they been caught, might have earned them prison time. (In 2000, remember, George W. Bush was careful not to deny ever using cocaine.) On the other, we tend to see the stiff sentences given to those who were caught as fitting punishment for their contemptible behavior. In this realm, ideology has a way of overriding mere facts. We have learned, for example, that marijuana is a comparatively benign drug that has few risks and some apparent benefits. In 1999, a National Academy of Sciences panel said pot has "potential therapeutic value" for "pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation." The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed medical marijuana. Eleven states have also approved the idea. Yet the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, has spurned the idea. Not only has it actively fought state initiatives to let sick people get relief from cannabis, it has obstructed research to help patients.

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.

Why then do 48% of Americans believe what they say about 9/11? Why should we believe the word of President Bush and Vice President Cheney when it has been proven time and time again that they can't be trusted?

The idea of hitting Iran may make sense from the Bush-Cheney bunker, where the only consideration is not what's good for the country, but what's good for Bush and Cheney. After all, if you're losing your war in Iraq, and if you have hit bottom politically at home (Bush's ppublic support ratings are now down in the 20s, where Nixon's were just before his resignation, and Cheney's numbers have been in the teens for months), and if the public is clamoring for an end to it all--and maybe for your heads, too--expanding the conflict and putting the nation on a full war footing can look like an attractive even if desperate gambit. From the nation's point of view, of course, an attack on Iran would be an unmitigated disaster. There are no more troops that the U.S. could throw into battle (the Pentagon is scrambling just to find another 20,000 or so bodies that Bush wants to throw into the Iraq quagmire), so an attack would have to be basically that--an attack. Certainly the forces the Navy is assembling in the Persian Gulf, together with the B-52s and B-1s and B-2s available at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and at bases in other countries in the region, are capable of destroying most of Iran's nuclear facilities, as well as its military infrastructure. But in terms of conquering territory, the most the U.S. could hope to do would be to perhaps hold a beachhead on the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf links to the Arabian Sea. And even that would be a bloody challenge.

So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?

The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-American U.S. citizens and residents under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, when the country still was in shock over the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan, and Roosevelt's order prohibited such people from living on the West Coast in a position possibly to help an invasion force.

Tell you what: next time, the press should bring out some sex toys, maybe some porn, to liven up the whole experience. That way David Gregory can ask about something important, like troop increases, and tickle the Commander-in-Chief's prostate with the very non-hypotetical Turbo-Charged Dimpled Vibrating Twistomatic (that ass reamer takes eight D batteries). Helen Thomas can ask about the mounting civilian casualties in Baghdad and before Bush answers, she can have him look at a DVD of Pierced-Clit Teen Gang Bang, Part 23. Why not, huh? Then at least the press and the President can pretend they still have some spark left.

The popular, two-term governor has often been touted as a savvy politician with a good chance of following both his brother and father, George H.W. Bush, into the White House. But the unpopularity and dismal job-approval ratings of his brother may have scuttled any plans Jeb Bush may have had for a future in politics after running one of America's most crucial swing states for the past eight years.

"Only 28 percent of Americans say they approve of the way President Bush is handling Iraq," reports CNN's senior political analyst Bill Schneider. "Disapproval has reached 70 percent."

"For a man who presides over an unpopular war, just lost Congress and faces a final two years with constrained options, Bush gives little sign of self-pity," Peter Baker writes.

What, no landing in Marine One on the Tysons Corner shopping center parking lot, so that the President can hear from holiday shoppers about a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq? No pre-dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial to listen to that other war president's advice about timetables? How about a photo of W in the family quarters, listening intently to the video of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Association dinner?

And he also talked tough about President Bush's habit of issuing so-called signing statements, in which the president has laid out which parts of laws he has just signed that he will follow and which he won't. Like his predecessor, outgoing committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., Leahy pointed out that Congress can dissuade Bush from issuing more such statements by threatening to withhold funding or blocking his nominations. However, Leahy declined to issue an outright threat.

One reason that the Bush Administration can claim with a straight face that the U.S. does not torture is, of course, because all the top members of the Bush White House are world-class liars. The question here is, why? Why are they, first of all, rather openly employing torture? And secondly, what does this fact tell us about what is up with this brave new world of unspeakable horrors so thinly disguised that no one except the misinformed and gullible would believe the cover stories?

The MCA is “enabling act” legislation that preserves the appearance of law while empowering the commander in chief to do as he pleases. Bush’s torture policies may signal that he accepts the dicta of Richard Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the firewall of high approval ratings that buttressed Bush when the first Abu Ghraib photos leaked is gone. The media is exasperated with the administration’s penchant for secrecy. Much of Bush’s conservative intellectual bodyguard has given up the fight. It remains to be seen how much dunking, thumping, and cold water the Bush team can survive.

The recommendations made to President Bush by the Iraq Study Group (ISG is the acronym in English) comprise the greatest humiliation ever suffered by a seated American leader. They expose the delusion of the Bush Doctrine and the unilateralism of American decision-making that led to the defeat in Iraq. And, most of all, the report was a lesson in realpolitik for a group of amateurs called neoconservatives, who kidnapped the foreign policy of the United States.

As her final legislative act on Friday, outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney introduced an impeachment bill, although it was just a "symbolic parting shot" by the controversial Democrat and has no chance of passing. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had promised before the midterm elections that impeachment would be "off the table," and after the Democrats regained control of Congress, Rep. John Conyers, the soon-to-be chairman for the Judiciary Committee agreed. According to After Downing Street, one of the activist groups helping to organize this weekend's events, there "will now also be rallies to honor and thank Cynthia McKinney."

It's great to live in a democracy with a free press. Someday I hope I have such an experience.

The Chaco area of Paraguay, the area in question, contains vast natural gas reserves. Most of the Chaco region belongs to private companies. Conveniently, the property that Bush claims not to own is close to the U.S. Mariscal Estigarribia Air Base and also near another large block of land controlled by the ultra right-wing Christian fundamentalist cult of Sun Myung Moon, a Bush contributor and supporter. Perhaps, Bush and Moon will be neighbors? The Reverend Sun Myung Moon owns almost 1.5 million acres. The local residents are not happy about Moon's intrusion and control. Of course, if Bush should ever need to claim political asylum, Paraguay has a history of giving asylum.

President George W. Bush has failed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; he has failed to ensure that senior members of his administration do the same; and he has betrayed the trust of the American people. With a heavy heart and in the deepest spirit of patriotism, I exercise my duty and responsibility to speak truthfully about what is before us. To shy away from this responsibility would be easier. But I have not been one to travel the easy road. I believe in this country, and in the power of our democracy. I feel the steely conviction of one who will not let the country I love descend into shame; for the fabric of our democracy is at stake.

It is questionable as to how effective this move could be in gaining support because of her reputation as a firebrand congresswoman and because, ultimately, she is on her way out of office. The Congresswoman and her staff realize this but hope that by filing the articles of impeachment it will, at the very least, open up a discussion on whether or not President Bush and key members of his administration have committed impeachable offenses and whether our officials should be held to account.

The Bush administration asserted in federal court yesterday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S. courts.

Neoconservative translates as “new conservative.” However, there is nothing at all conservative about neoconservatives. The name is a misnomer of the first rank. Neoconservatives believe that the US can deracinate foreign cultures and remake foreign countries in America’s image. True conservatives, following Edmund Burke, do not believe that a country can be shorn of its social, political, economic and cultural ways and made anew from the ashes. Modern history bears out this opinion. The Jacobins of the French Revolution were going to transform not only France but also all of Europe, but no such thing happened despite the abolition of feudalism in 1792 by the National Assembly, the guillotine and France’s military dominance of Europe for two decades. The Bolsheviks were going to transform Russia, but after 75 years of an unaccountable communist party, Russia has emerged more capitalist than when the communist transformation of Russia began.

Remember what Bill Clinton was impeached for when reading the following ten reasons why George W Bush should be impeached.

We need to know the truth and all the truth. The time has come, as well as the opportunity, for formal, Congressional investigations, based on subpoenas, sworn testimony, and direct evidence about 9/11 and about the created reality of the “war on terror.” The new Congress has no greater Constitutional duty than to find this truth and display it, if our nightmarish politics is to end. If such inquiries clearly exonerate the Bush Administration, the nation can breathe deeply and go on. If they do not, then but only then should impeachment be undertaken. To fail in this responsibility is to condone the surreal political discourse the Bush Administration has imposed. That could render it the permanent condition of American governance.

Acclaimed screen star DUSTIN HOFFMAN has slammed US President GEORGE W BUSH for manipulating the 9/11 terrorist attacks to facilitate the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I suspect history will judge this as one of the great (non-)events of the American experience, and one of the great (non-)turning points of the last two centuries, equally significant, though far less prominent, than many actual events and actual turning points. What happened and why, is, therefore, a question of no small importance to ponder. Why did the Cheney/Rove juggernaut travel half-way down the road to American fascism, only to pull up short? Why, in short, did they flinch?

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

"It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, 'Well, you’ve covered your ass,'" Gore continued. "And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it."

In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff. The EPA's professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to continue to demoralize its employees." The EPA's precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million cut in Bush's proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.

American liberties are the result of an 800-year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English-speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope, and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers. But, alas, "law-and-order conservatives" have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?

Let's examine the arithmetic of this systematic disappearance. In the first years after the attacks of 11 September, thousands of Taliban or suspected terrorist suspects were captured. Just in Afghanistan, the US admitted processing more than 6,000 prisoners. Pakistan has said it handed over around 500 captives to the US; Iran said it sent 1,000 across the border to Afghanistan. Of all these, some were released and just over 700 ended up in Guantanamo, Cuba. But the simple act of subtraction shows that thousands are missing. More than five years after 9/11, where are they all? We know that many were rendered to foreign jails, both by the CIA and directly by the US military. But how many precisely? The answer is still classified. No audit of the fate of all these souls has ever been published.

“I don’t support impeachment, and I don’t support impeachment hearings, even though I think the president has probably committed an impeachable offense,” Feingold said in response to a question from Al Schulz of La Crosse. “We are not required to impeach the president simply because he’s committed an impeachable offense, which I think he did with the illegal wiretapping. We have to decide whether it’s in the best interest of the country to go through that process.”

Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped to the lowest level ever, increasing the pressure on the commander in chief to find a way out after nearly four years of war. The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found just 31 percent approval on his handling of Iraq, days after voters registered their displeasure at the polls by defeating Republicans across the board and handing control of Congress to the Democrats. The previous low in AP-Ipsos polling was 33 percent in both June and August.

The email, which was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the first hard evidence directly connecting the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and the White House. The author of the email, whose name is blanked out but whose title is described as "On Scene Commander -- Baghdad," contains ten explicit mentions of an "Executive Order" that the author said mandated US military personnel to engage in extraordinary interrogation tactics. An Executive Order is a presidential edict -- sometimes public, sometimes secretive -- instituting special laws or instructions that override or complement existing legislation. The White House has officially neither admitted nor denied that the president has issued an Executive Order pertaining to interrogation techniques.

These charges potentially eviscerate the primary function of journalism—to gather and publicize information of public concern—particularly where the most vulnerable information to the public . . . is what the government wants to conceal. —Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with which this Voice columnist is affiliated.

"In this campaign, there was an orchestrated right-wing effort to distort my position on impeachment," Conyers said in a statement released by his Judiciary Committee spokesman. "The incoming speaker (Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.) has said that impeachment is off the table. I am in total agreement with her on this issue: Impeachment is off the table."

We'll be cleaning up Bush's mess long after his scheduled abdication on January 20, 2009. But the trillions of dollars in national debt he has run up and his two losing wars will drain our economy for decades to come. We've provoked a new generation of terrorists. Yet even more damaging and nearly impossible to unravel will be the threats to Americans posed by the neofascist national security apparatus the Bushists will leave behind--unless they use it to remain in power.

Groups backing the effort include Progressive Democrats of America, CodePink, Gold Star Families for Peace and Veterans for Peace. While the pro-impeachment movement has received little media attention, polls show growing numbers support for Congress to take such action. A recent Newsweek poll found 51 percent of all Americans - including 20 percent of Republicans - feel impeachment should be on the table.

Also remember that the worst depredations of the first Bush Administration, the Reagan Administration and the Nixon Administration were all carried out with strong Democratic majorities in Congress (except for a brief period of Republican Senate control in the Reagan years). Even in "normal" times (if we have ever known such a thing), even with the opposition party in control of Congress, there is virtually no end to the mischief that the executive branch can get up to. Nixon and Reagan waged whole covert wars, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without the approval or input of Congress. If anyone thinks the horrors of the Bush Imperium are somehow at an end – or will even be seriously impaired – by the results of yesterday's election, they have a harsh and bitter awakening to come.

Gates, 63, is a close friend of the Bush family. He served as CIA director for Mr. Bush's father from 1991 until 1993. Gates first joined the CIA in 1966 and served in the intelligence community for more than a quarter-century, under six presidents.

Bush's fantasies are even disturbing his fans. In a sit-down with wire-service reporters, Bush assured them that Rumsfeld, the most incompetent man on earth, would keep his job for two more years. Maybe in the last days of the Republican-dominated Congress, Bush can get him declared Defense Secretary for Life, sort of an American Raul Castro.

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush told a raucous crowd of some 5,000 GOP partisans packed in the arena at an earlier stop at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.

I’m more than a little worried. This is Bush’s final card. The elections came and went and a group of extremists and thieves were put into power (no, no- I meant in Baghdad, not Washington). The constitution which seems to have drowned in the river of Iraqi blood since its elections has been forgotten. It is only dug up when one of the Puppets wants to break apart the country. Reconstruction is an aspiration from another lifetime: I swear we no longer want buildings and bridges, security and an undivided Iraq are more than enough. Things must be deteriorating beyond imagination if Bush needs to use the ‘Execute the Dictator’ card.

The Bush Junta has quietly "tooled up" to utilize the U.S. military in engaging American dissidents after the next big crisis, with a frightening and overlooked piece of legislation that was passed alongside the Military Commissions Act, which greases the skids for armed confrontation and abolishes posse comitatus.

As for Bush, I started questioning his basic knowledge of life back in the days when he as Governor of Texas was not only supporting the death penalty full force, but applying it with little apparent consideration of the cases presented before him. He said he believed in the courts; apparently, he took it to mean that the courts would always get it right and hence he could effectively abrogate his oversight responsibility and just let the system proceed.

Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an "axis of evil", but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US.

Sullivan said the president was "so in denial," comparing the Rumsfeld endorsement to applauding the job FEMA's Michael Brown did on Katrina: "It's unhinged. It suggests this man has lost his mind. No one objectively could look at the way this war has been conducted, whether you were for it, as I was, or against it, and say that it has been done well. It's a disaster."

The new program is simply another wing of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence, publicly announced after 9/11 but simply the latest incarnation of a PR brainwashing scam that spans back decades. The OSI exploited legal loopholes by planting its propaganda in foreign newspapers that would later be picked up by U.S. newswires. In today's environment even that seems quaint, with the Pentagon openly and proudly shouting from the rooftops that they will knowingly violate the law to indoctrinate the American people.

It's one of those things I should have remembered from The West Wing, if from nowhere else. If a sitting President lets a bill sent to him by Congress go for more than ten days without signing it, it's considered a veto. The kicker is that it has to happen when Congress is adjourned, not when it's in session. Think back to last week and the fuss about the signing of the Military Commissions Act. Bush held onto that bill for about two weeks before signing it.

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is "martial law."

Besides objecting to Congress's list of qualifications for FEMA's director, the White House also claimed the right to edit or withhold reports to Congress by a watchdog agency within the Department of Homeland Security that is responsible for protecting Americans' personal privacy.

He (Libby) claims he was tortured in jail and that would be routine in Egyptian prisons," Grey said. "What he claimed most significantly was a connection between ... Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. This intelligence report made it all the way to the top, and was used by (former US secretary of state) Colin Powell as a key piece of justification ... for invading Iraq," he told the broadcaster. Powell claimed in a UN Security Council meeting in February 2003, weeks before a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, that the country under Saddam Hussein had provided weapons training to Al-Qaeda, saying he could "trace the story of a senior terrorist operative", whom Grey alleges is Libby. "At the time, the caveats to say this intelligence was extracted under torture were not provided," Grey said.

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

One of the many deranging consequences of September 11 was the reification of American power. Until that date, “US hegemony” was largely a matter of facts and figures, of graphs and pie-charts. Thereafter it became a matter of options and capabilities, of war plans cracked out on the President’s desk. We can understand the afflatus, the rush of blood, in the White House: overnight, demonstrably and palpably, a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas became the most powerful man in human history.

Why the hell is George W. Bush having another worthless goddamned press conference? He's like an adolescent boy who just discovered that jacking off makes him feel good, so he's gonna thwack that dick as often as he can get it up.

Yet Cheney isn't the only one who has benefited from the Bush administration's destructive policies. The Bush family has done quite nicely too. Just a few examples:

Mueller points out that not only have there been no terrorist incidents here in the past five years, but there were none in the five years before 9/11. Mueller asks: "If it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could be so easily exploited?" He also bolsters Dreyfuss's conclusion that the Bush administration can't take credit for the fact that we haven't been attacked again. He says, "the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched."

Now ask yourself: If a foreign nation was really about to attack the United States, especially with WMDs, would any president spend any time whatever going to the UN to seek permission to attack that nation first or spend time to round up a group of countries to participate in a “coalition of the willing”? That is beyond the realm of reasonable probability. In a real-life situation in which America was about to come under a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack the president would strike hard immediately to defend the nation against such an attack without first seeking anyone’s consent or approval.

So, by extending the U.S. occupation of Iraq -- rather than looking for an early exit -- Bush has played into al-Qaeda's hands. Indeed, looking back over Bush's almost six years in office, his actions -- or some might say his blunders -- have repeatedly benefited bin Laden's strategies.

Wallach also found a 1983 case out of San Jacinto County, Texas, in which James Parker, the county sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited. One victim described the experience this way: "I thought I was going to be strangled to death. ... I couldn't breath." The sheriff pleaded guilty and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country." But not our president. He's just about as proud as can be of the "program," boasting about all the fine intelligence we've extracted from the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while conveniently ignoring all the bad information that spilled out of him that sent our law enforcement on wild goose chases.

Clark said he felt Bush could have been more proactive and tried to "connect the dots" about bin Laden and a possible terrorist attack on American soil. By virtue of Bush's lack of leadership, he said, the president "more or less caused it to happen." "How does (Bush) think after that kind of record he could persuade the American people for a third time to trust him on national security?" Clark said, referring to the president's efforts to get Republicans elected in the November congressional elections.

They are not alone and solely responsible for creating the present day military industrial complex, however since 1915 the Bush family has been directly involved in World War One and Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, numerous CIA secret wars, the Gulf War, and now a “Never Ending War”. The past four generations of this one family have had a hand in promoting and profiting from most of major wars that America has waged since the beginning of the industrialized age.

"They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush's final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock. "The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress," said a Bush ally. "Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans–the ones that survive–treat them if they lose next month." GOP insiders are upset by Bush's seeming inability to come up with new ideas or fresh approaches. There is even a heightened sensitivity to the way Bush talks about advisers who served his father.

The Neo-Cons are threatening violence in an attempt to influence the actions and democratic participation of the citizens of the United States of America. That is the very definition of terrorism.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sets standards for interrogating suspects, but through a complex set of rules that human rights groups say could allow harsh techniques bordering on torture, such as sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia. With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looking on, Bush is to sign the bill which was negotiated in September after senior Republicans rebelled against the president's plan and forced concessions from him.

The arrogance of the Neo-Cons has led many to fear that HR 6166 is being maintained in a holding position in anticipation of a major event that will give the Bush administration carte blanche to expand its provisions and sharpen its focus to further target American citizens.

Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.

Former attorney general Janet Reno eventually decided to leave the decision on prosecution to the incoming Bush administration. And that's where the matter has languished ever since. Because the US investigation is being prolonged indefinitely, crucial documents are not declassified and not made available to the justice system in today's democratic Chile. This impasse is a thwarting of justice. Not only are family members of the murder victims deprived of a complete legal accounting for the crime; the people of Chile and America are denied the legally verified truth about a shameful chapter of history.

In the wake of September 11, it wasn’t surprising that Clinton’s successor George W. Bush legislated additional infringements upon civil liberties in the name of patriotism and national security. And yes, the Democrats overwhelmingly supported the Patriot Act in both of its awful versions. But it wasn’t the Patriot Act that allowed the federal government to make those sweeping detentions across the country immediately following 9/11 -- it was Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty bill. So, who is honestly supposed to believe that ushering the Democrats back into office in November will bring any sort of legitimate change -- in Iraq, or back at home?

Bush’s postsigning statement declared that he would interpret many sections of the new law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.” In plain English, this means that many of the limits that Congress imposed on Bush’s power — and that he accepted when he took the money Congress appropriated — are null and void. Why? Because the president says so.

Consider this: if this was the real Osama, didn't his appearance prove that Bush has wasted two hundred billion dollars and a thousand American lives (plus 100,000 Iraqi lives) without making us any safer from Osama? If the 2004 tape were genuine, wouldn't it prove that Bush is a total failure in his own "war on terror"?

What is illuminating about this developing story is that it reveals the essential context in which 9/11 occurred, and how it contradicts the "it-came-out-of-the-sheer-blue-sky" explanation that frames the official narrative.

We demand the immediate declassification and release of these latest documents and transcripts. The American public has the right to know what their government did or did not do to protect us from terrorist actions. Finally, instead of reorganizing an entire intelligence community because they "weren't sharing information", and rather than telling us that "9/11 was a failure of imagination", what we needed was for the 9/11 Commission to state the truth and hold those responsible to account. The most effective change for America would be to have a National Security Council that understands that it is their job to translate vital information into action.

So roughly at around 10:56am, "Air Cover" finally arrives for the President of the United States. At a time when America is "under attack" from kamikaze hijackers in commercial airliners.

"It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any President at any time in this nation's history," Olbermann said. "Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies, of treason."

To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency's director in last week's homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership." Bush signed the homeland-security bill on Wednesday morning. Then, hours later, he issued a signing statement saying he could ignore the new restrictions. Bush maintains that under his interpretation of the Constitution, the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions. The law, Bush wrote, ``purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

Attendees ranged from high school students who said they had ditched class to attend the rally to bearded older men. One man carried a sign that read, "Citizens with portfolios against the war." Another told a reporter: "I am 80 years old, and I am seething with fury."

"We are turning the corner in bringing forward a mass movement of resistance to drive out the Bush regime," said organizer Travis Morales with the activist group World Can't Wait.

The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The President, by failing to support a bill that would certainly have defined the nation's moral position, and might even have saved tens of thousands of lives, was choosing to appease, not confront the very "Islamo-fascists" against whom he rails in the abstract.

Just as it is hard to fully comprehend the grief of a beloved friend or relative killed needlessly in an accident, it is excruciatingly painful to try to come to terms with the pernicious betrayal of our Constitution and liberty that occurred in the Senate on Thursday, September 28.

Most people in this country may not realize the difference. Most may not understand that the world they live in changed in a deep and serious manner yesterday, and they no longer possess the rights that were written into law by James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and the authors of the Bill of Rights. Avedon Carol had it right when she published yesterday a list of the Bill of Rights with all of them crossed out except the third one, because we have not yet been told to quarter foreign or domestic troops in our spare bedrooms.

Some comments in Russian.

At one point Pastor Fischer equates the preparation she is giving children with the training of terrorists in the Middle East. "I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam," she tells the camera. "I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine." Those comments caught the eye of Talking Heads singer David Byrne, who saw the film at a festival in Washington in June. "I kept saying to myself, OK, these are the Christian version of the Madrasas," he wrote on his blog. "So both sides are pretty much equally sick."

We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further. Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted September 15-17 reveals that an astounding 42% of Americans believe that the current drop in prices at the pump are the direct result of manipulation by the Bush administration.

The New York Post's unctuous Page Six "reported" it, but it's also been independently confirmed that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann -- whose brave commentaries of late taking to task the Bush Administration (and President Bush himself) have invited genuine comparisons to Edward R. Murrow -- opened a suspicious letter with a California postmark that was mailed to his New York City home late Tuesday night and out poured a white powdery substance. A threatening note inside reportedly indicated that this represented revenge for his outspoken on-air views of late.

We are already witnessing the wheels of propaganda begin to turn in anticipation of a major announcement of Bin Laden's death.

While you can obviously imagine or gerrymander or stipulate a situation in which torture might yield useful information, in practice the systematic authorization of torture creates an army of butchers, not a crack investigative team. Bush, Cheney, and those around them remind me of Nietzsche's line about staring too long into the abyss. They've become transfixed, hypnotized almost, by the evils they believe themselves to be fighting. Obsessed to the point where they've clearly developed an admiration for the brutal methods, ruthless dishonesty, and utter secrecy with which the enemies of liberalism conduct themselves.

Conservatives were quick to lash out at Hugo Chavez for calling President Bush a "devil," but that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh was calling Democrats only a few years ago.

Using his research and recent gas price drops as a guide, Henwood accurately predicted last Thursday that it "wouldn't be surprising to see his approval numbers rise into the mid-40s." Polls over the weekend showed Bush's approval climbing all the way to 44%, his highest in a year.

A note of a private meeting between Mr Blair and President Bush in January 2003 shows that Tony Blair failed to confront Mr Bush when he claimed Saddam Hussein had tried to buy aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons production.

The irony of it all is that despite the smear talk of Hitlers in the Middle East, the leader whose thinking process most resembles Hitler's is our own president. Like Hitler, Bush's ideological beliefs have blinded him to reality, and like Hitler, he seems impervious to advice that conflicts with his beliefs. There the resemblance ends, of course, but it is bad enough. Hitler learned that he couldn't win a two-front war, and Bush will learn that he can't democratize the Middle East with bombs and bullets.

Torture degrades the rule of law, the fundamental purpose of which is to make it possible to settle disputes peacefully. If a person knows that he or she will be tortured after being arrested or captured and will not receive a fair trial, then there is no reason to surrender peacefully — in fact, it would be preferable to die fighting than to die in the torturer's dungeons and secret prisons.

The elite needs to maintain the facade that terrorist cells are everywhere and that only their smothering 'protection' will keep us safe. And yet time and time again the real terrorists are protected and given safe passage by the military-industrial complex handlers. Though the torture program is being sold to the American people as a necessity in the "war of civilizations," it is in actual fact a trial balloon for the incarceration of political dissidents during a time of manufactured national emergency such as a biological terror attack or race riots.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

IN THE FIGHT over rules for the interrogation and trials of terrorism suspects, there is a split -- not so much between Republicans and Democrats or the White House and the Senate, but between leaders like President Bush with no combat experience and those like Colin Powell who know combat and want to maintain the Geneva Conventions as a protection for US troops.

Did President Bush just admit that explosives were used in the WTC, or is this just another one of his many many infamous Bushisms?

Unlike past Congresses that shared the same party of an incumbent president, the Republican Congress during the Bush period has largely abdicated its constitutional obligation to assert its institutional authority. Whether Bush's power will be limited for his remaining two years in office or whether he will have a clear path for further adventures is a question that will be decided in the mid-term elections.

A document cited by President Bush in his recent speech at the Capital Hilton Hotel on how to 'win the war on terror' cites conspiracies as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to "address" and "diminish" the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.

In his speech on Tuesday, Bush was up to his old game of hyperbole, casting today’s enemies in the same outfits as Lenin and Hitler. The costumes may be scary, but they are way too large.

The president’s visit, on the eve of the anniversary, ushered in what will be a solemn day of remembrance of the attacks that tore through the city and the nation.

Yeah, laws suck, man. Especially when you wanna break them. And between the praise of torture (no matter what Bush calls it), the dismissing of the American justice system, and the vow to continue all of it, the Rude Pundit is left with this question: exactly what country are we fighting for? Because it's become appallingly clear that it sure as hell ain't the United States in any recognizable form anymore.

President Bush has acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons and said 14 key terrorist suspects have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The suspects, who include the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have now been moved out of CIA custody and will face trial.

A company that provided security at the World Trade Center, Washington D.C.'s Dulles International Airport and United Airlines between 1995 and 2001 was backed by a private Kuwaiti-American investment firm whose records were not open to full public disclosure, with ties to the Bush family.

Bush's thoughts on the fate of non-Christian souls became a minor source of controversy after he told the Houston Post in 1993 that only those who "accept Jesus Christ" go to Heaven. However, the future president was also earlier briefly engaged to a half-Jewish woman.

The director of the film, David Cunningham, is already backtracking about its accuracy, saying “this is not a documentary.” OK, fair enough. But the movie is being billed as “based on The 9/11 Commission Report.”

The imminent fifth anniversary of 9/11 provides the proper moment for a good, ol'-fashioned sum-up of the past half-decade under CheneyBush, especially because so much has happened in the past 12-months

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferenccz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting "aggressive" wars--Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

More to the point, it is equally true that Bush desperately needs the terrorists. They are his last frail hope for political survival. They divert public attention, at least momentarily, from his disastrous war in Iraq and his shameful abuses of the Constitution. The "news" of terror -- whether real or fantasized -- reduces American politics to its most primitive impulses, the realm of fear-and-smear where George Bush is at his best.

More sobering for the GOP are the number of voters who backed Bush in 2004 who are ready to vote Democratic in the fall's congressional elections — 19 percent. These one-time Bush voters are more likely to be female, self-described moderates, low- to middle-income and from the Northeast and Midwest.

The Israelis have also bombed Ashrafiyah, a Christian area of Beirut. They have ruined Christian businesses-- restaurants, nightclubs, retail shops, by destroying bridges, roads and ports and by killing tourism for years to come.

The president's ignorance, on display for the world to see, would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous.

The pilot and Vietnam POW -- a staunch Republican -- who pushed through the War Crimes Act of 1996 is appalled that the Bush administration, facing possible prosecution for war crimes, is devising a legal escape hatch.

One doesn't have to believe every aspect of every "conspiracy theory" about 9/11 to know one basic truth: At a minimum, the Bush Administration is guilty of gross negligence in not taking any efforts to prevent 9/11, despite CIA warnings, and of mishandling the hijackings once they occurred, not to mention Bush's passive response to the event, as he sat reading "My Pet Goat" while 3,000 people were dying.

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

As of July 11, President George W. Bush had said no (or, not unless I want to) to 807 provisions enacted by Congress that he signed into law, according to Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at the University of Miami, Ohio. That number compares to some 600 provisions challenged by all of Bush's predecessors combined, says Kelley. He has been studying presidential signing statements for a decade, and his work is backed up by other scholars.

"Historians will tell you that it's unprecedented for a president of the United States to make the personal decision to halt an investigation of his own attorney general and his own attorneys, based on his personal decision.

President Bush cast the first veto of his 5 1/2-year presidency Wednesday, rejecting legislation to ease limits on federal funding for research on stem cells obtained from embryos.

I wish Bush would adopt diplomacy, but he doesn't have the mind-set and temperament for it. A successful diplomat always leaves an out for himself and for the people he's negotiating with. Bush hasn't figured that out yet.

If someone is this ignorant, they're usually embarrassed and try not to talk much. But this guy is so dumb he has no idea how dumb he is. This sounds like a conversation you might have with a child, a mentally challenged child. Johnny, do you know how big Russia is? How about China?

At the G-8 summit, President Bush grabs German Chancellor Angela Merkel from behind and gives her a quick massage before rushing off. Chancellor Merkel is not amused.

You're at a photo op, reading a book with schoolchildren and an aide suddenly whispers that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. "America is under attack." You're the president of the United States. What do you do?

Does anyone even believe that Bush believes his own lies?

Justice Davis, writing at a time right after the nation had fought a four-year war for its very survival, a year after the president had been slain by an agent of the enemy, and while forces of resistance in the South were continuing to battle U.S. occupation troops, had it exactly right when he said: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.”

Paul said that Bush should be impeached not under the umbrella of partisan vengeance but for ceaselessly breaking the laws of the land.

To this day, the public has not been given one genuine piece of evidence that ties bin Laden to 9/11. I’m not saying he’s innocent, only that there was no proof at the time Bush used him as an excuse to invade Afghanistan.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a June 2004 judgment, stated, "For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."

The Bush administration, bowing to court edict and political pressure, guaranteed the basic protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives in the war on terrorism and asked lawmakers Tuesday to restore the military tribunals now in limbo.

Asked why the U.S. faced so many problems in the world, Bush said, "The reasons there are problems is because we confronted them."

It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.

President Bush used the patriotic setting of a Fourth of July appearance before U.S. troops Tuesday to mount a feisty defense of administration strategy in the war on terrorism and to assert that America was winning the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even as its talk radio auxiliaries accuse the New York Times and other media outlets of “treason,” “sedition,” and offering “aid and comfort to the enemy,” the Bush regime has quietly shut down the CIA's Osama bin Laden Unit.

The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush's personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush's security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president's bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush's feces and urine and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine Bush's waste material. One can only wonder why the White House is taking such extraordinary security measures for the presidential poop.

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush's disasters -- Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit -- are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy.

Temper tantrums, blaming others, revenge-seeking, destruction of property, deceitfulness and stealing -- it all adds up to a grim diagnosis.

In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency's network of technical research libraries. The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Channel 4 News tonight reveals extraordinary details of George Bush and Tony Blair's pre-war meeting in January 2003 at which they discussed plans to begin military action on March 10th 2003, irrespective of whether the United Nations had passed a new resolution authorising the use of force. Channel 4 News has seen minutes from that meeting, which took place in the White House on 31 January 2003. The two leaders discussed the possibility of securing further UN support, but President Bush made it clear that he had already decided to go to war. The details are contained in a new version of the book 'Lawless World' written by a leading British human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands QC.

Transcribed From "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions & Distortions" - Chapter Ten

The facts and allegations contained in this article are not disputed, are easily verified and are documented by the subjects in their own words. I am writing this not to tell you about some secret on to which I have stumbled, rather to explain the well defined and verifiable information that has been kept out of the public discourse by the American corporate news media. Perhaps this will serve as a prime example of how much media deception takes place in our nation.

The theory holds that the president has the arbitrary right to ignore any law that he feels is an unconstitutional infringement of his power – and a law is automatically unconstitutional if the president feels it infringes on his power. This neatly-squared circle makes Congress irrelevant and removes the judiciary from the loop altogether. Thus the only effective power left in the land is the "unitary executive" – the fancy modern name that the legal minions of President George W. Bush have given to the ancient concept of "tyranny."

Is the law of the land in the United States defined by the American Constitution or by George W. Bush and his cronies? Do signing statements, executive orders, warrantless secret searches and fake news indicate Bush is above the law - or breaking the law?

Air-conditioning puts a chill on community spirit, aids the cause of anti-enviros, and just might have given us President George W. Bush.

As we head toward yet another election in which the Republican case to the voters will be, “We’re strong and they’re weak,” it’s worth noting just how many times we’ve seen this drama played out. While it’s easy to see this argument as just being about the Iraq war, or just about national security, in fact it goes much deeper. These arguments delve into the psychology of voters and the officials they elect, and the political effects of our continuously evolving ideas about gender.

President Bush believes he has a power to issue a "signing statement" to every law he signs. The statement at times goes as far as pretty much anulling the law the President is ostensibly signing.