OK, just one more (via Atrios). The Poor Man reflects upon Kristoff, too, with an even more interactive list of Bush lies. Now I'll leave this alone for awhile, at least until I go home tonight and pull out my copy of The Lies of George W. Bush.

"Meteor Blades" of Daily Kos, cogitating on the absurd Kristoff column with a little more finesse and grace than I did, points to this highly relevant Eric Alterman column from 2002. Alterman concludes:

Reporters and editors who "protect" their readers and viewers from the truth about Bush's lies are doing the nation -- and ultimately George W. Bush -- no favors. Take a look at the names at that long black wall on the Mall. Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ's failed presidency. Ask yourself just who is being served when the media allow Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity, in order to take the nation into war.

The Press Makes the Man --
I think I've seen this Columbia Journalism Review item blogged in a couple of places. Back when Kerry was being considered as Al Gore's running mate, he was "handsome" and "charasmatic" and possessed of an "easy manor." Now he's "wooden," "dour" and "aloof?"

What should we call it, then? --
I know Democrats are not supposed to point out Republican hypocrisies, but it's kinda hard to disagree with Molly Ivins:

Is it Christian to cut money for Head Start? Is it Christian to cut poor children off health care? Is it Christian to cut old people off Medicare? Is it Christian to write memos justifying torture? Is it Christian to cut after-school, nutrition and AIDS programs so multimillionaires can have bigger tax cuts?

What should we call it, then? Part II --
Kristoff sets aside Sudan today to scold liberals for calling Bush a liar. What is wrong with this man? "Stretched the truth"??!! And is there really any comparison to Clinton's "stretched truths"? You've just got to read this. In fact, let me make it a little easier for you:

So is President Bush a liar?

Plenty of Americans think so. Bookshops are filled with titles about Mr. Bush like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places" and "The Lies of George W. Bush."

A consensus is emerging on the left that Mr. Bush is fundamentally dishonest, perhaps even evil — a nut, yes, but mostly a liar and a schemer. That view is at the heart of Michael Moore's scathing new documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

In the 1990's, nothing made conservatives look more petty and simple-minded than their demonization of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were even accused of spending their spare time killing Vince Foster and others. Mr. Clinton, in other words, left the right wing addled. Now Mr. Bush is doing the same to the left. For example, Mr. Moore hints that the real reason Mr. Bush invaded Afghanistan was to give his cronies a chance to profit by building an oil pipeline there.

"I'm just raising what I think is a legitimate question," Mr. Moore told me, a touch defensively, adding, "I'm just posing a question."

Right. And right-wing nuts were "just posing a question" about whether Mr. Clinton was a serial killer.

I'm against the "liar" label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.

[...]

In fact, of course, Mr. Bush did stretch the truth. The run-up to Iraq was all about exaggerations, but not flat-out lies. Indeed, there's some evidence that Mr. Bush carefully avoids the most blatant lies — witness his meticulous descriptions of the periods in which he did not use illegal drugs.

True, Mr. Bush boasted that he doesn't normally read newspaper articles, when his wife said he does. And Mr. Bush wrongly claimed that he was watching on television on the morning of 9/11 as the first airplane hit the World Trade Center. But considering the odd things the president often says ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"), Mr. Bush always has available a prima facie defense of confusion.

Mr. Bush's central problem is not that he was lying about Iraq, but that he was overzealous and self-deluded. He surrounded himself with like-minded ideologues, and they all told one another that Saddam was a mortal threat to us. They deceived themselves along with the public — a more common problem in government than flat-out lying.

[...]

It wasn't surprising when the right foamed at the mouth during the Clinton years, for conservatives have always been quick to detect evil empires. But liberals love subtlety and describe the world in a palette of grays — yet many have now dropped all nuance about this president.

Mr. Bush got us into a mess by overdosing on moral clarity and self-righteousness, and embracing conspiracy theories of like-minded zealots. How sad that many liberals now seem intent on making the same mistakes.

Worth noting --
"A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens," according to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Where have you gone, General Shinseki? --
The army is pulling more than 5000 troops out of retirement.

Clearly not a member of the White House Press Release Corps --
An Irish journalist made the mistake of trying to hold an intelligent conversation with the Leader of the Free World. This I gotta see.

Surprise! --
Thank heaven Bush Co was able to dominate the headlines this morning with the surprise early transfer of pseudo-sovereignty (here for the Doonesbury synopsis) to Iraq two days ahead of schedule. Otherwise, the leading stories could have been any of the following: the Supreme Court rejection of a key tactic in Bush's "War On Terror," Bush's failure to convince NATO to send troops to Iraq (I could hardly believe my ears last week when I heard Bush telling NATO they had a "responsibility" to assist in securing Iraq; NATO has a responsibility to get Bush out of his "mess o'potamia" ???), the abduction of an American marine, or the box office record-setting opening of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" (leading even in "red states").

Remember Afghanistan? --
The "defeated" Taliban killed 16 people because they were carrying voter registration cards.

How absolutely shocking --
Billions in Iraq oil revenues are unaccounted for.

Testy times --
Via Josh Marshall, this terrific Joe Klein column on the real reason Cheney is swearing. (Where has the word "testosteronics" been all my life?!)

Fahrenheit 9/11 --
I was able to join friends to see the show Saturday afternoon, thanks to their fine logistical work in securing tickets and a good place in a gratifyingly long line. (Thanks, C, D, and E!) By now you've read dozens of reviews (Slate has two good ones - Hitchins' thumbs-down [of course; but he makes some fair points] and Edelstein's thumbs-up). My take: I doubt that it will really change any minds, because the people who most need to see this movie are least likely to attend; they are the ones who will organize boycotts and phone in threats and do whatever else is necessary to prevent their own and their neighbors' convictions from being challenged by fact. It will, however, cohere and energize those who are already actively working for "regime change" in November.

If you've been reading books like House of Bush, House of Saud and following the "alternative press" tracking of the evolution of the Patriot Act (e.g., here), there is little that will surprise you, much to distress you (film footage of bombing victims - US and Iraqi alike; footage of a heartbroken elderly Iraqi woman sobbing "where are you, God!"), and some cheap but well-deserved laughs: Moore managed to secure film footage that makes each of the Bush Co players look as evil and conniving and deranged as they already loom in our heads (again, assuming this movie is preaching to the choir). Each shot of the Cheney Sneer generated audience hisses. A long segment of Bush "on camera" but not yet "live" to announce the beginning of war in Iraq shows him for many moments looking terrified and vacuous at the same time; then he seems to -- I can't be sure -- catch his image in a monitor?, or perhaps he sees an "imaginary friend"?, and he smirks, nods, slides his eyes sideways... Paul Wolfowitz sops his comb and his fingers with spit in order to slick his hair into place while he is being prepped for the camera. Some of the best laughs come from Moore's choice of background music: "We gotta get out of this place," plays while the bin Laden family is shown fleeing the country; Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" plays while Moore-as-narrator discusses Bush's altered National Guard records. The movie's least necessary elements include virtually any of Moore's on camera moments, and a long segment on state trooper cutbacks in Oregon. His argument that the army targets the economically disadvantaged for recruiting, while compelling, doesn't add a great deal to the movie narrative.

Bush is able to look simultaneously vacuous and evil through much of the movie. (Moore certainly set out to facilitate this impression through his careful selection of film footage, but the material was there for the picking. This is not a special effect.) This is a combination of traits that I've struggled to reconcile in my understanding of Bush during the last four years. I always thought that to be truly, effectively evil, it is necessary to possess SOME mental agility, which is already more than I'm willing to attribute to Bush. But there it is, frame after frame. An empty, and yet menacing look. (Which reminds me: doesn't the remake of the "Manchurian Candidate" look interesting?)

Will the right people see this movie? That tiny percentage who say they haven't yet made up their minds? For them, this movie has at least one good take-home message, stammered by Bush himself. "There's an old saying in Tennesee... Well, we have it in Texas. You probably have it in Tennessee, too. It says, 'fool me once...'" [-- obvious groping, looking down at notes, long pause -- ] 'shame on you. [-- another long pause --] Fool me again...' [furrows brow, leans forward on the podium, waits for the second half of the saying to come to him] ... See, the thing is, we can't get fooled again!"

Couldn't have said it better, myself, Mr. President! (OK, yes, I probably could have.)

A Friday afternoon hodgepodge --

(1) I need to think about how I feel about this. Does Congress need a religious caucus? Is there a prayer that it would welcome representatives of both progressive and conservative ideologies? Here's the LA Times story they mention. And here is The Revealer's skeptical take on the matter.

(2) If you're using Inernet Explorer to read page, you might want to know about this newest security flaw. I followed the recommended steps and seem to be clean. But as a friend observed, this might be as good a time as any to switch to Opera.

(3) Daily Kos shows how much Oregon Republicans want Nader on the ballot.

(4) Did Cheney stage a coup? Also from Daily Kos, referring to this Newsweek item:

This is startling information. The vice president ordered the president sent away and took control of the government. There is no other word for this than 'coup'.

There was a reason Cheney didn't want Bush testifying to the commission
by himself.

Here's a segment of the Newsweek piece:

But the question of Cheney's behavior that day is one of many new issues raised in the remarkably detailed, chilling account laid out in dramatic presentations by the 9-11 Commission. NEWSWEEK has learned that some on the commission staff were, in fact, highly skeptical of the vice president's account and made their views clearer in an earlier draft of their staff report. According to one knowledgeable source, some staffers "flat out didn't believe the call ever took place." When the early draft conveying that skepticism was circulated to the administration, it provoked an angry reaction. In a letter from White House lawyers last Tuesday and a series of phone calls, the White House vigorously lobbied the commission to change the language in its report.

"We didn't think it was written in a way that clearly reflected the accounting the president and vice president had given to the commission," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett told NEWSWEEK. Ultimately the chairman and vice chair of the commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former representative Lee Hamilton—both of whom have sought mightily to appear nonpartisan—agreed to remove some of the offending language. The report "was watered down," groused one staffer.

(5) Via today's Progress Report: Apparetly the Carlyle Group, which has long, deep ties to the Bush clan and to the Saudi royals has purchased Loew's cineplex Theaters. This nicely packages another component in the military-industrial-media complex.

(6) Al Gore, of "John Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-Eyed," delivered this speech to Georgetown University. Among the take-home observations:

I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.

(7) This just leaves me speechless. Schwarzenegger wants to save the money by killing stray animals sooner.

(8) Via Kevin Drum, a fascinating roundtable on Iraq in the current Rolling Stone.

(9) A match made in heaven -- Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama! I'm definitely going to need to make another centimeter of space on the CD rack for this one. (I only ran into that because I was poking around the Rolling Stone Magazine site; why did I stop reading that so many years ago?)

Black Box Voting --
Once again, Body and Soul has compiled a great posting - this one on electronic voting. Do have a read.

Friends in high places --
The Supreme Court continues to do the White House's bidding, refusing to make Cheney turn over his energy task force papers. But the duck-hunting had nothing to do with it!

Union-busting, discriminatory hiring, low wages --
Another story about Wal-Mart? Nope, Ralph Nader. See what Eric Alterman has rounded up. Will the Naderites ever open their eyes?

Bush wants more control over the Ryan White Act --
We've seen what he's done to international family planning and reproductive health efforts. Any doubts about how this will turn out?

They're a little slow to come around --
But apparently enough people have died, now. The majority of Americans polled now believe it was wrong to send troops to Iraq, and that the war has made us more vulnerable to terrorism.

Cheney supports safe sex --
I've never read Wonkette, and finally decided to check her out, since several of the blogs I look at daily have links to her site. So today was my first visit, and the first thing I read is this hysterical gem.

Neither rain nor snow... Blog hosts, however, are another story --
Posting problems today (error messages from Blogger), but it looks like this will finally stick.

Say goodbye --
to an unusually brave, mature, enlightened and poetic young man.

How is that Clear Skies Initiative working?
Atmospheric toxins have increased for the first time since 1997, and only the second time since the EPA started keeping track, in 1988. See here, too.

California's Happy Cows --
produce toxic milk.

Was Cheney in the bathroom when the bill came? --
A friend marooned in Lincoln, Nebraska sent this item. Has there been a cabinet in history that managed to turn more "official visits" into fundraising opportunities?

I missed this WaPo story over the weekend, about evangelical Christian voters' apparent lack of enthusiasm for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. I love what Jim Wallis had to say:

The Rev. Jim Wallis, head of Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups devoted to fighting poverty, said he believes the Christian right is "out of touch" with most Christians' concerns. "Do we really think that Jesus's primary concern in this election year would be a marriage amendment? With the poverty rate rising, with one in six of all U.S. children and one in three children of color living below the poverty line, with more than a billion people around the world living on less than $1 a day?" Wallis asked.

"The truth is, the religious right is not even a majority among evangelicals, but they have very loud voices that presume to speak for a lot more people than they really do," he said.

The Reagan Glow --
-- didn't last for long, did it? Bush fires off 85 million dollars in attack ads, and -oops!- Kerry comes out looking even better.

About that "clerical error" --
The State Department report on terrorism has now been officially revised. The actual number of terrorism deaths is DOUBLE that previously reported. Double.

What people are reading --
This should keep those Justice Department library spooks busy tracking down thousands of enemies of the state. Click on the list to see the political leanings of the top ten books people are checking out!

Democrats, the party of the secular heathens --
-- get some advice from David Brooks on how to address faith issues. Amy Sullivan thinks it sounds familiar.

Nope, never said it (again) --
Sydney Schangberg writes in the Village Voice:

On March 21, 2003, the day after the war began, President Bush sent a letter to both houses of Congress laying out the legal backing and underpinning for his decision to go to war. In the letter's second paragraph, Bush wrote: "I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

Read his lips. He keeps swearing he never claimed a direct link, but here it is, as the saying goes, in black and white. It is very difficult to think of any interpretation of the above sentence other than that the president of the United States was declaring that Iraq was one of the "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Democracy in decline? --
Martin Jacques is worth pondering, here, but I don't really have time to ponder right now. Here's a good excerpt:

If it is mistaken to regard western democracy as a universal abstraction that is equally applicable across the world, it is also wrong to see it as frozen and unchanging. Indeed, there are grounds for believing that western democracy, as we have known it, is in decline.

The symptoms have been well-rehearsed: the decline of parties, the fall in turnout, a growing disregard for politicians, the displacement of politics from the centre-stage of society. These trends have been observable more or less everywhere for at least 15 years.

The underlying reasons are even more disturbing than the symptoms. The emergence of mass suffrage and modern party politics coincided with the rise of the labour movement, which drove the extension of the vote and obliged political parties to engage in popular mobilisation. The rise of the modern labour movement, moreover, provided societies with real choices: instead of the logic of the market, it offered a different philosophy and a different kind of society. The decline of traditional social-democratic parties, as illustrated by New Labour, has meant the erosion of choice, at least in any profound sense of the term. The result is that voting has often become less meaningful. Politics has moved on to singular ground: that of the market.

The influence of the market is manifest in multiple ways. The funding of parties now moves solely to its rhythm: big business and the rich are as important to New Labour as they are to the Conservatives. The same interests fund, and therefore influence, the parties. Big money calls the tune. Nowhere is this truer than in American politics, which has become a plutocracy mediated by democracy, rather than the reverse.

As the media has displaced traditional forms of discourse and mobilisation, ownership of the media has become increasingly important in the determination of political choices and electoral results. The most dangerous example is in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi's ownership of the bulk of the private media has enabled him to transform Italian democracy into something verging on a mediaocracy, leaving politics and the state besieged by his immense personal power and wealth.

Perhaps these developments point to a deeper problem incipient in western democracies. Far from the free market and democracy enjoying the kind of harmonious relationship beloved of western propaganda, democracy grew in fact as a constraint on the market, holding it at bay and enabling a pluralism of values and imperatives. What happens when this healthy tension becomes a dangerous imbalance, in which the market is dominant and consumerism is established as the overriding ethos of society, permeating politics just as it has invaded every other nook and cranny of society? Democracy comes under siege. In Italy it is
already gasping for breath. In the US it is deeply and increasingly flawed. Democracy is neither a platitude nor an eternal verity - either for the world or for the west.

CBS: a venerable tradition of censorship --
The signs were there. They were there before CBS killed the Reagan miniseries, before they refused MoveOn.org's Super Bowl ad, and before they tried to kill the 60 Minutes interview with tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. As I mentioned before, I've been reading "A Problem from Hell" and, last night, I was reviewing the various sticky flags I've placed throughout the book. One of them was for this item on page 77, part of a summary of the US reluctance to recognize the Holocaust:

"Hollywood eased into more realistic accounts of the horrors. The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy, jarred millions of viewers by including actual graphic footage from the camps, but the film contained few references to the specific victim groups. When a major network sponsor, the American Gas Association, objected to the mention of gas chambers in the 1959 teleplay version of the film, CBS caved in to pressure and blanked out the references." (emphasis mine)

Recall, in the matter of the Moveon.org ads, that CBS explained its policy was to decline "advocacy" advertising. Nonetheless, they apparently ran anti-Clinton ads by Citizens United in some markets, during the Sunday night 60 Minutes interview with Bill Clinton!

See Condi spin --
I didn't get a chance to post anything over the weekend, so by now you've probably seen or read Condi's spectacularly contrived reinterpretation of what the 9/11 Commission meant to say in their report...

Never said it --
It doesn't seem to matter that the administration keeps getting caught in outright lies and contradictions of earlier taped and published statements, because they just keep doing it. But for the record, here's another gem from Cheney. (Um, was Gloria Borger even listening???)

Maybe she's just jealous? --
If you read this profile of Kerry in today's Times, it was hard to miss Wilgoren's sledgehammering attempts to show us that Kerry is very rich. But in case you did miss them, the Daily Howler is on it. When do you suppose we can expect Wilgoren's piece on the holidays and living quarters of Bush's multi-millionaire cabinet? Maybe when she stops working for their campaign.

Bush, Dry Drunk? --
This not entirely implausible analysis must be getting a lot of hits today, because it's up on the Google news site, at least for now. (The theory is not new, but this article is.)

Another book --
This one alleging that Al Qaeda will attack in order to keep Bush in office, because no administration has been better for their cause.

The Global Gag Rule hits UNICEF -
Body and Soul has a terrific post on Bush Co's Global Gag Rule.

For some reason, nothing really compelled me to post yesterday. Not the fact that Bush is lying all the more feverishly in response to findings from the 9/11 commission, or that the chairman of Shell Oil admitted that he's worried about global warming, or the story of the US soldier who found out the hard way that torture and abuse of "uncooperative" prisoners is pretty much S.O.P. at Guantanamo, or the mounting evidence that Donald-"I was blindsided" by revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib-Rumsfeld in fact authorized similar violations of international law, or that ethics complaints will be filed against Tom DeLay (although that couldn't happen to a nicer fellow), or the fact that the Justice Department lost its trumped-up case against a University of Idaho computer programming student (while managing to ruin his life) (actually, that's apparently older news that I missed earlier). I couldn't even get excited about the Civil Liberties Restoration Act, which promises to roll back some of the "most egregious and ineffectual post-9/11 policies," including "arbitrary and indefinite detentions, secret hearings, severe restrictions on due process, and violations of privacy and First Amendment rights."

But I think I'm snapping out of it today, at least long enough to note how terribly convenient it is that Putin suddenly remembers telling the US that Hussein had been planning terrorist attacks on US citizens. And to celebrate the fact that Kerry's favorability ratings are rising despite Bush Co's megamilliondollar smear campaign. And to appreciate Amy Sullivan's observation that, as the Pistons go, so goes Kerry...

Is that like the Nicene Creed? --
Southern Baptists are being encouraged to withdraw their children from government schools, en masse, in order to home school them or enroll them in "private Christian academies."

In an essay published last week at ethicsdaily.com, (Bruce) Shortt wrote, "Government schools are converting our children to alien creeds and infusing them with false and destructive values." Pinckney added, "God gives the responsibility for education of children to the parents, not the government." Indeed. And it has been the decision by too many parents to allow government to shape their children's worldview and values that is responsible for spiritual and intellectual disorder that now inhabits the souls and minds of too many offspring of Christian parents.

A friend sent the link (thanks, A.). I am a product of these so-called government schools, which I guess explains how I came to be infused with false and destructive values, but I don't remember reciting an Alien Creed. Now I want to write one, though.

Biz Stone, Smart *ss --
But, perhaps because I am infused with false and destructive values, he made me laugh.

"Get mad" --
A choice segment from Bill Moyers' keynote at the Inequality Matters Forum:

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of practicing journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy -- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California power market in telephone calls in which they gloat about ripping off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talk about political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few clicks later, you can find the story of how a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip off the government and the poor.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this gathering confirms that while an America with liberty and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media -- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. After all, the sight of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media. What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.

"And the world yawns." --
When Nicholas Kristof isn't trying to placate conservatives and concentrates on his reporting from Africa, he is at his best. For months he has been making an urgent case for US intervention to stop the genocide in Sudan (see here, here, here, and here, for examples). (You might also want to see this Mother Jones story, not by Kristof, for additional background). Coincidentally, I am currently reading Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and just finished the lengthy section on the tireless work of Raphael Lemkin to officially coin the word "genocide" and then create an international law banning it. One sadly foreseeable outcome of his effort is that governments now spend precious months studying situations and looking for ways to avoid using the word "genocide," for under Lemkin's law, declaring genocide obligates intervention. The lowest, darkest period of the Clinton administration was its deliberate refusal to call the Rwandan Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi minority genocide, and worse, their obstruction of UN efforts to intervene (see We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families for more disappointing revelations about the tactics of then-President Clinton and Madeline Albright during this holocaust). If Bush Co acts quickly on Sudan, it would actually mark a high point for this administration -- and a departure from a long, shameful national and international tradition.

Anyway, here is Kristof's current NYT piece. And here is an opportunity to take action.

Bush must go --
"A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November."

And Ashcroft must go --
Paul Krugman: "No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in History." (OK, Ashcroft has such a desperate need to be on television that he'll even make up terror threats to get there. It's becoming something of a joke. But let us not forget that Ashcroft-the-senate-candidate was soundly beaten by a dead man, and that can really mess a person up.)

And Cheney must go --
Rep. Henry Waxman is on Cheney's case in the Halliburton contract matter:

In a letter faxed Sunday to Mr. Cheney and given to reporters, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the minority leader of the panel, asked him for all records of his office's communications on the oil contracts and for records of Deputies Committee meetings where the Halliburton deals had been discussed.

"These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Mr. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton."

(By the way, Cheney is still asserting that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda...)

Three strikes --
Body and Soul gets my feelings exactly on that unbelievable bill permitting clergy to endorse political candidates. Here's my earlier post on it.

You're either with him or against him --
Bush lobbied the pope last week, telling him that "not all the American bishops are with me" in the hope that this would compel the pope to encourage greater political activism among them. See Josh Marshall's earlier post on the item, as well as his follow-up, which says that the specific desires of Bush Co are clear: a Catholic condemnation of John Kerry would be a handy campaign tool. One of Karl Rove's key Catholic allies, Deal (yes, Deal, not Dale) Hudson, recognizes that the zeal to deny communion to everyone who defies Catholic teachings would leave precious few to take communion. So he advises that the bishops meeting this week to discuss sanctions simply "begin and end" with Kerry. According to the Washington Post:

Even better, he said, would be if priests would read letters from the pulpit denouncing the senator from Massachusetts "whenever and wherever he campaigns as a Catholic.

Is it over? --
The 24/7 Revisionist Reagan History Channels appear to have resumed regular programming. Ron Junior had close-to-the-last words at the sunset burial service on Friday, and they were pointed:

"Big as he was, he never tried to make anyone feel small. Powerful as he became, he never took advantage of those who were weaker. Strength, he believed, was never more admirable than when it was applied with restraint...

"Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference."

Go, therefore, and laugh heartily --
(Via Get Religion...) The Daily Telegraph's Oliver Pritchett, divinely inspired by publication of a highly contextualized "Pocket Prayers for Peace and Justice," has reworked some common signage into pseudopsalms. A few of the gems:

"We give praise unto thee and our mouths give forth thanks. Thou shalt be lifted up, for thou hast turned away from the counsel of the unhealthy who walk in the path of the Marlboro Light and bring forth clouds of abomination on their breath so that he that travaileth here and passively smoketh may perish."

"Rejoice and clap your hands, O ye daughters of Nuneaton, and be glad, ye sons of Tring, and ye who drive the latest top-of-the-range BMW, for in three miles I have prepared for you a service area, so that you may refresh yourselves in its clear waters and your babes and sucklings may have snacks in abundance and there shall be toilet facilities, yea also for the disabled."

"Great is this carton for it containeth a brand new personal computer. Let its ways be for ever upright. Let no man smite and let not the rain fall down upon it. For if the heathen droppeth it from a great height it will be destroyed and all its software with it and the heathen will then rend his garments and hide his face."

"Be sure, O my people, when you go forth from this train, that all your chattels go with you - yea, even unto your ox and your ass and your wife's sister's Marks & Spencer carrier bag and all manner of vain things, and your briefcase fashioned from precious Samsonite, for if any of these shall be left behind there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth and the litter in the carriage shall be like unto chaff."

"Woe unto trespassers."

More later, but take a look at Boondocks today (the one for the 14th, for those of you who drop by weekly)...

Somebody told me about an earlier Ronald Reagan Jr. interview expressing his thoughts about the current Bush administration (thanks, V.), so I went hunting. I think she heard about it on the radio. I'm not sure if this Salon interview is what she was talking about, but it's juicy. (You might have to watch one of those obnoxious ads to get access to the interview - I click the ad to start it, and do something else until it's done!) Here are some delectable and prescient outtakes from "Reagan blasts Bush," by David Talbot (4/13/03):

The Bush inner circle would like to think of George W.'s presidency as more of an extension of Ronald Reagan's than of his one-term father's. Reagan himself, who has long suffered from Alzheimer's disease, is unable to comment on those who lay claim to his political legacy. But his son, Ron Jr., is -- and he's not pleased with the association.

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people."
*****
Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Eashington Post's Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he's been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now.
*****
"My father had decades of experience in public life. He was president of his union, he campaigned for presidential candidates, he served two terms as governor of California -- and that was not a ceremonial office as it is in Texas. And he had already run for president, against Ford in '76, nearly unseating the sitting president in his own party. He knew where he was coming from, he had spent years thinking and speaking about his views. He didn't have to ask Dick Cheney what he thought.

"Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Reagan says he doesn't have anything personal against Bush. He met him only once, at a White House event during the Reagan presidency. "At least my wife insists we did -- he left absolutely no impression on me. But Doria remembers him very negatively -- I can't repeat what she said about him, I'd rather not use profanity. I do remember Jeb -- a big fella, seemed to be the brightest of the bunch. And of course their parents were very charming."

But Reagan has strong feelings about Bush's policies, including the war in Iraq, which he ardently opposes. "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn't hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, 'Let's hit Iraq.' They've used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."
*****
"And the weapons of mass destruction? Whatever happened to them? I'm sure we'll find some," he laughs. "They're being flown in right now in a C-130. "There were, and will be, a lot of people killed over there. And if you don't care about the Iraqi casualties, what about the American? We stand to lose more people in the next months of occupation than we lost in the weeks of war. One of the reasons we escaped largely unscathed so far was because our military moved so fast. But now we're sitting targets -- we have to establish bases, patrol the streets, guard checkpoints. We're sitting targets for suicide bombers and other terrorists."

Reagan's parents were notoriously remote from their four children. Ron Jr. reportedly had the closest relations with his parents and he remains close with his mother, Nancy Reagan, who as the keeper of the Reagan flame is often called upon to dedicate public sites bearing her husband's name. Reagan says his mother shares his "distrust of some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they're trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn't like their religious fervor, their aggression."

You'd think they would have looked this up, first --
The government's case on potential terrorist Jose Padilla hinges on his plan to make a dirty bomb with uranium. But scientists testify that you can't make a dirty bomb with uranium. At some point, this all begins to get comical. Except that people are being held indefinitely without legal representation by clowns like these. In any case, it looks as though Bush Co is going to lose big on this one, unless they can come up with a new criminal case against Padilla.

Revising this week's revisionist history --
Canada's Globe and Mail reminds us that Gorbachev had a bit to do with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.

This during a "good week" for Bush --
Kerry leads!

Basking in Reagan's glow --
Maureen Dowd: "Finally, there's a flag-draped coffin and military funeral that President Bush wants to be associated with..."

The So-Called Religion Gap --
It's that time in the election cycle when we suffer almost daily discussions of the "religion gap," asserting that Republicans are the party of the weekly church attenders, and Democrats are the party of the secular and unchurched. This USA Today story is just one astoundingly uncritical example. (Where have all the journalists gone?) I could google many more. I have yet to see or hear any of these stories address the fact that survey respondents exhibit a well-established bias toward making themselves look good -- the "social desireability" bias. Teens underreport sex and drug use; adults underreport infidelity. And guess what: Americans OVERREPORT church attendance (thanks, A., for mentioning the study!). Here's an excerpt:

After the first wave of scholarly discussion, Hadaway et al. returned to Ashtabula County to measure Catholic attendance. They counted heads at all of the regularly scheduled masses in the county-38 in 13 parishes-over a several-month period. Based on the count, they projected an average weekly attendance of 24 percent of the Catholic population (a figure not far out of line with numbers reported by many Midwestern Catholic dioceses based on their own head counts). They then polled a scientifically valid sample of Ashtabula County residents by telephone. Fifty-one percent of Roman Catholic respondents said they had attended church during the past week.

Thus the "overstatement gap" snapped into focus. In the United States, the difference between attendance levels of 20 and 40 percent is immense-a swing of at least 50 million people. Institutional religion, far from being stable and vital in the United States, might well be weakening under the cover of misleading poll data. Any way one looks at it, there was a substantial religion news story to cover.

Come on, crackerjack news writers! If you're a working journalist, you probably went to college. If you went to college, you took a sociology or psychology class that told you all about this tendency and how it affects study results. Remember? Granted, it applies to humans in general, which means that, theoretically, a Democrat is as likely to overstate attendance as a Republican. But - social desireability bias, again - Republicans KNOW they're supposed to be reporting high church attendance to fit their party profile.

Maybe there's a "Dewey Beats Truman" lining in this cloud: Maybe the same people who are lying about where they were last Sunday are also lying about what they'll be doing on the first Tuesday in November...

Feeling safer, yet? --
Remember the much ballyhooed State Department report last month announcing that terror attacks were at an all-time low? Um, make that an all-time high. Apparently, quite a few attacks didn't make it into the tally, and the report is being reissued. One official blamed it on a printing deadline; another said it was a "clerical error" caused when another department took over the reporting.

Non-white voters need not arrive --
Via Tapped, Native American voters are apparently being discouraged from reporting to the polls in South Dakota. Where Daschle happens to be in a tightly contested race.

Another reason for Republicans to hate the French --
They might ban SUVs from Paris streets!

Oh, and that flight the White House said never happened? --
Happened. Joshua Marshall caught the item.

And as long as you're on his site, read this. House Republicans are trying to create wiggle room for clergy to engage in partisan politics without endangering their church's tax-exempt status, tacking the provision onto a jobs bill.

Be of good cheer! --
The guy who edits Daily Kos has some encouraging observations about upcoming elections.

Hard to argue with Juan Cole or Eric Alterman on the subject of Reagan's legacy. I'm already losing patience with the strangely one-sided tributes coming even from what Alterman terms the So-Called Liberal Media. The most popular president? Not. (And here.) I'm not heartless. I choke up watching the memorial proceedings. It's wonderful that Reagan apparently loved Nancy so dearly. It's terrible that his wife had to watch him waste away with Alzheimer's. He was witty, and in some ways, principled. Many people will miss him. But let's face it: Reagan was only "nice" and "grandfatherly" to a very select subset of the population. Everyone else could eat ketchup. Perhaps some of the greater sense of loss is captured in this paragraph from today's NYT:

Many were moved by nostalgia for an era that seems, with the passing of time, to have been simpler and less mean. Patricia Fuller, 67, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., said she left home at 5 a.m. to be among the first to pay her respects. "He made me proud to be an American," she said with a tear in her eye. "We need that again very badly, someone to bring that pride back. I hope there's someone out there."

(Safe to assume Bush isn't that person, for her?)

Greenspan, Evil Genius --
Having encouraged home-buyers to take out adjustable rate mortgages just a few months ago, Greenspan is ready to raise rates "sharply." To borrow a line from "Tom Tomorrow" in this month's American Prospect, "I'm in awe of his evil genius." (The cartoon does not appear to be on the site; you'll have to flip through a copy of the magazine at your library or newstand. It's very funny.)

Lawyers conclude the President is above the law --
Josh Marshall had more to say yesterday on the WSJ story (here's the NYT version, which does not require a paid subscription) on the torture memo. Marshall writes:

So the right to set aside law is "inherent in the president". That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means -- a government of laws, not men, and all that.

It's a lengthier, but insightful, post.

The good, the bad, the ugly --
Having successfully avoided all but the headlines all weekend, I finally confronted whole news stories today. The Progress Report has a good summary of Reagan's mixed legacy - as does Alternet. Eric Alterman links to a slightly less balanced piece he wrote four years ago, acknowledging that he would have been a little gentler had he written it in the aftermath of Reagan's death. If you have no patience for balanced treatments of Reagan's legacy and just want to be riled, read Greg Palast's angry obit. (The link is not working very well, so I can only point to his site. You won't have any problem finding the column!).

This San Francisco Chronicle piece wonders if Reagan's passing will galvanize Republicans to rally around their current oh-so-not-Reaganesque candidate. However, the event could strengthen Democrats, too: those of us who thought Reagan's conservatism was draconian in its hostility to the poor, the disadvantaged, the non-white non-males, the non-heterosexuals, and the environment, now could almost yearn for those years when comparing them to Bush's compassionless conservatism. Perhaps we'll work even harder for regime change in November. Yes, Bush will get a sentimental boost from the Republican National Convention, but six months is a long time for him to continue showing us how very unlike "the Gipper" he is -- despite Rove and Co's best efforts to position him in Reagan's glow.

Meanwhile --
The White House is probably hoping this story will go largely unnoticed this week: via Atrios, Intel-Dump quotes at length and discusses a Wall Street Journal story on yet another classified legal memo justifying torture. A segment of the story:

The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful. But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens," normal strictures on torture might not apply.

This could explain a lot --
Matt Yglesias thinks Bush is an Iranian spy, and Eric Alterman thinks he's an Al Qaeda plant.

But it's different when you're a REPUBLICAN Catholic --
Amy Sullivan notes that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (D) has released a study assessing the voting records of Catholic senators, on issues about which the Catholic church has taken a stand. Durbin found that he and fellow Catholic Senator John Kerry (D) supported Catholic positions 60% of the time, where Catholic Republican Rick Santorum voted with the church ony 40% of the time. Sullivan writes:

An outraged Santorum took to the phones yesterday to charge that the study was "a selective attempt to make John Kerry and a bunch of liberal Democrats who disagree with the church's teaching look like faithful Catholics." Well, imagine that. Totally different from a selective attempt to make John Kerry and a bunch of liberal Democrats look like unfaithful Catholics. Because Lord knows Santorum is okay with that.

Will they put the campaign literature in the pews? --
The Bush campaign has emailed 1600 Pennsylvania churches (get it? 1600 Pennsylvania?) looking for campaign volunteers to coordinate their efforts among church goers "friendly to President Bush..."

This is rich --
Bush has more millionaires and multi-millionaires in his cabinet alone than any recent administration, and they are attacking Kerry's wealth??? Of course, we expect this kind of blatantly double standard from the same campaign who attacked Kerry for quoting scripture...

A less rabid voice in the wilderness --
Mainline churches have sent an open letter to Congress opposing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. "Although we have differing opinions on rights for same-sex couples, we believe the Federal Marriage Amendment reflects a fundamental disregard for individual civil rights and ignores differences among our nation's many religious traditions..."

Oh, and nothing to be alarmed about, but...
The Pentagon cannot account for all of its stinger missiles. Yes, the ones that terrorists can use to bring down commercial aircraft.

Never met the guy --
Via Kevin Drum, this is pretty funny: Bush in January asserting that he and Chalabi are tight; then Bush in June pretending he doesn't recognize the name "Chalabi"...

No matter how you cut it, Bush misspoke about the true beneficiaries of the tax cuts--Today's Progress Report linked to this Center for Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the Bush tax cuts. The report calculates the effects of two hypothetical scenarios for financing the tax cuts:

'The first scenario assumes that each household pays an equal dollar amount each year to finance the tax cuts. Under this scenario, each household receives a direct tax cut based on the 2001 and 2003 legislation, but it also “pays” $1,520 per year in some combination of reductions in benefits from government spending or increases in other taxes to finance the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Something close to this scenario could occur if the tax cuts were financed largely or entirely through spending cuts. We refer to this as the “equal dollar burden” scenario.

The second scenario assumes that each household pays the same percentage of income to finance the tax cuts. Under this scenario, each household receives a direct tax cut based on the 2001 and 2003 legislation, but it also pays 2.6 percent of its income each year. Something close to this scenario could occur if the tax cuts were financed through a combination of spending cuts and progressive tax increases. We refer to this as the “proportional burden” scenario.'

They find (among other things):

'+On average, the bottom four-fifths of households — households with income below about $76,400 — would lose more than they gain from the tax cuts once the necessary financing is taken into account.

+Middle-income households would be worse off under both scenarios for financing the tax cuts, but would fare much worse if tax cuts are financed entirely on an equal dollar burden basis (such as could occur if the adjustment were largely or entirely undertaken through spending cuts).

+Low-income households would be worse off under either scenario, but face potentially enormous costs if the tax cuts are financed entirely on an equal dollar burden basis.

+Conversely, high-income households would be net winners, and the gains among the highest-income households would be large.

+The net transfer in resources from low- and middle-income households to high-income households would be sizable.

+Under both of the financing scenarios, more than three out of every four households would ultimately lose more than they gain from the tax cuts.'

And they conclude:

'The tax cuts are often portrayed by their supporters as painless and simply “giving people their money back.” But the numbers presented above indicate that the substantial majority of American households ultimately will be made worse off by the tax cuts, because the tax cuts ultimately will have to be financed.'

A kinder, gentler pastoral letter --
A friend forwarded me this pastoral letter from Bishop John F. Kinney of the Diocese of St. Cloud (MN), addressing the issue of denying communion to parishioners who support positions or politicians that run counter to Catholic teachings. Will it get the same press play accorded Bishop Michael Sheridan's (Diocese of Colorado Springs) "pastoral" letter threatening to withhold communion from renegade voters and politicians? Here's Bishop Kinney's letter:

May 27, 2004

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

“Oh Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

Each of us prays those words at every Mass before receiving Holy Communion. In recent months, however, some Catholics have been asking whether some others are so “not worthy” that they should be denied the sacrament. It has been suggested, for example, that bishops refuse to offer Communion to pro-choice politicians, or to legislators who favor same-sex marriage, or cloning, or stem cell research, or capital punishment, or the war in Iraq, or... the list seems to grow longer every day. It has also been suggested that Catholics who vote for politicians who hold certain views on these issues should not present themselves for Communion.

In addition, bishops have been encouraged to deny Communion to members of groups known to oppose Church teaching on various matters of faith and morals. On the parish level, priests are sometimes urged to withhold the sacrament from individuals in the community who are rumored to be “living in sin.”

The question of who should and who should not receive Communion is not only on the minds of people in the pews. The bishops of the United States have established a task force to study what kind of response ought to be made to Catholic politicians who publicly oppose Church teachings. The Vatican has announced that the next Synod of Bishops will focus on the Eucharist, including the circumstances under which Communion should be denied. Thankfully, the task force will not conclude its work until after the general election in November and the synod does not convene until 2005, thereby avoiding accusations of political partisanship.

You may be wondering about my position on the question of denying Communion to various categories of people. I want you to know that I refuse to allow the Eucharistic liturgy to become politicized. What I mean is that I will not allow Holy Communion to be used as a weapon in ongoing political and ideological battles. For this reason, it is not my intention to reject anyone who comes forward in a respectful manner to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

At the same time, I uphold Church law which states that a Catholic who is conscious of grave sin may not receive Communion without previous sacramental confession, unless there is no opportunity to confess. The Church recognizes that it is for each individual to examine his or her own conscience in this regard, and I assume that those who come forward to receive the Body and Blood of Christ have done so and honestly believe they are not in a state of grave sin.

I want to emphasize that no human is capable of judging someone else’s relationship with God. While I admire efforts to preserve the integrity of Holy Communion, I caution against allowing the Communion procession to become an occasion for pointing out the supposed sins of others.

I return to the prayer with which I began. Note that it says, “Oh Lord, I am not worthy.” It does not say, “Oh Lord, my neighbor is not worthy.”

+John F. Kinney
Bishop of Saint Cloud

So much fun in today's New York Times alone --

Bush has lawyered up in case he is questioned by the grand jury in the Valerie Plame CIA identity disclosure case...

CIA director George Tenet has resigned for "personal reasons..." (Right.)

And DOD employees are being polygraphed to see who told Chalabi that the US had cracked Iran's intelligence code.

Doing unto others --
As I posted those few items last night, I marveled at the full complement of sociopathologies they demonstrated: in one single news day we saw the Bush White House lying, cheating, manipulating, exploiting and undermining, all for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful few. So I was primed to read Molly Ivins today:

Folks, this is what the Bush administration is really about. While we're all distracted with 9-11 and the war on terrorism, it is steadily making this country less fair and making life harder for most citizens. How long are you going to put any credence at all into what they tell you?

How to get valuable intelligence from an Iraqi prisoner --
"More than a third of the prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were shot, strangled or beaten by U.S. personnel before they died, according to death certificates and a high-ranking U.S. military official."

I'll take JFK's version (either one) --
Hendrik Hertzberg has an interesting piece in the current New Yorker exploring differences in the ways Kerry and Bush express their religiosity, in which he notes:

The salient division in American political life where religion is concerned is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, if it ever was, or even between believers and nonbelievers. It is between traditional supporters of a secular state (many of whom are themselves religiously observant), on the one hand, and, on the other hand—well, theocrats might be too strong a term. Suffice it to say that there are those who believe in a sturdy wall between church and state and those who believe that the wall should be remodelled into a white picket fence dotted with open gates, some of them wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer full of federal cash through.

President Bush is the leader of the latter persuasion, and his remodelling project has been under way for more than three years. This project goes beyond the frequent use of evangelical code words in the President’s speeches; beyond the shocking and impious suggestion, more than once voiced in the President’s approving presence, that he was chosen for his position by God himself; beyond the insistence on appointing judges of extreme Christian-right views to the federal bench; beyond the religiously motivated push to chip away wherever possible at the reproductive freedom of women. It also includes money, in the millions and billions. The money is both withheld and disbursed: withheld from international family-planning efforts, from domestic contraceptive education, and from scientific research deemed inconsistent with religious fundamentalism; disbursed to “abstinence-based” sex-education programs, to church-run “marriage initiatives,” and, via vouchers, to drug-treatment and other social-service programs based on religion. Though Congress has declined to enact the bulk of the President’s “faith-based initiatives,” the Administration has found a way, via executive orders and through bureaucratic novelties like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Compassion Capital Fund. “The federal government now allows faith-based groups to compete for billions of dollars in social-service funding, without being forced to change their identity and their mission,” the President boasted a couple of weeks ago, in a commencement address at a Lutheran college in Mequon, Wisconsin. He did not mention that “their identity and their mission”—their principal purpose, their raison d’être—is often religious proselytization.

He closes with these great words from the other JFK:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

Hey, people are reading this thing! --
I want to acknowledge the few comments that were made on entries in recent days! I was getting so used to seeing "0" on the comment tally that I almost missed them. I originally sent this blog address to just a handful of people, so I'm delighted to see that others are reading it from time to time. Keep checking in!

Fireworks over the SF Bay outside SBC Park, Saturday night, Memorial weekend. (Giants won.) 

Turnabout is fair play --
Americans United for Separation of Church and State wants the IRS to revoke the tax- exempt status of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs - where Bishop Michael Sheridan has instructed Catholics that they may not receive communion if they vote for politicians who back abortion rights. (Thanks for the heads-up, A.)

Bush leads in campaign lies --
Why won't someone in the media just say it? He LIES. "Untruths" is the best Dana Milbank can do, but at least he's writing about it here.

And Bush leads in misuse of taxpayer funds --
He uses Air Force One for campaign travel more than any preceding president.

Meanwhile, at an undisclosed location --
-- Cheney is still helping to run Halliburton. This Time magazine scoop asserting that Cheney coordinated a major Iraq deal for Halliburton in 2003 would be just shocking if anyone believed Cheney in 2000 when he claimed to have given up his financial and decision-making interest in Halliburton. Thankfully, I didn't believe him then, either, so I'm much better prepared to absorb this news.

Leave No Pharmaceutical Company Behind --
Seniors appear to be both under- and overwhelmed by Bush Co's Leave No Pharmaceutical Company Behind drug card program. Underwhelmed by the savings, and overwhelmed by the labyrinthine application process. Atrios spotted this wonderful flow(less) chart on the Hoeffel (PA) campaign site; it goes a long way toward explaining seniors' lack of enthusiasm.