The Bush/Cheney Administration Takes Us for Idiots
by Dave Lindorff
Anybody who thinks that the government is telling the truth about the plan to shoot down a dead spy satellite--that it's all about protecting us, and not about testing an anti-satellite weapon--has to be really stupid.And stupid is what the Bush administration and the Pentagon apparently think we are. |
President Bush's Safari to Find Friendly Faces
by Walter Brasch
President Bush is in Africa this week, sulking because he didn't get his way. In one of the rare times the past seven years, the House of Representatives, now under Democrat control for the first time in 12 years, defended the Constitution and refused to allow the President to bully it with a program of fear mongering. He really tried, though. |
What would George Washington think?
by Mary Shaw
Today America celebrates Presidents' Day, with George Washington's traditional birthdate falling later in the week, on February 22.On this day, I am wondering what George Washington would think of the current state of affairs in this country he helped to found. |
Military Tribunals and You
by Cindy Sheehan
I have just returned from five days in Egypt. To me, visiting foreign countries is so enlightening as an American who grew up as parochial and nationalistic as the next. However, since my son was killed in Iraq, I have had a crash course in foreign "relations" and cultures that came with a too steep price. |
Poverty Is Poison
by Paul Krugman
“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life. |
A Realist Called Obama
by Roger Cohen
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic wrote a simple sentence recently that cut to the quick of this U.S. election: “What you think of a presidential candidate is in large measure determined by what you think of the world.”In an eloquent column, he argued that “We are heading into an era of conflict.” From Waziristan to Gaza City the world of the next U.S. president will be one of foreboding. The threats, he suggested, were of a nature a neophyte senator called Barack Obama, who’s long on hope and short on hardness, is ill-prepared to confront. |
Former President Bush: Attacks on McCain's record 'absurd'
by CNN
Former President Bush endorsed John McCain on Monday and defended the conservative record of the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee. Bush's endorsement was another sign the GOP's establishment is coalescing around the Arizona senator. |
CIA set up 12 bogus companies mostly in Europe after 9/11: report
by AFP
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, the US Central Intelligence Agency set up 12 bogus companies in Europe and other parts of the world in the hope of penetrating Islamic organizations, The Los Angeles Times reported on its website late Saturday. |
McCain Facing Delicate Choice: A Role for Bush
by Elisabeth Bumiller
Senator John McCain’s campaign advisers will ask the White House to deploy President Bush for major Republican fund-raising, but they do not want the president to appear too often at his side, top aides to Mr. McCain said Sunday.After a weekend of strategy meetings at Mr. McCain’s Arizona ranch — in a sense, the first Sedona summit of the Republican Party’s new leadership — the advisers said that much remains undecided about coordinating the campaign with the White House and the party apparatus until Mr. McCain wins enough delegates to be the official nominee. |
Senate panel to consider new rules for adult arcades
by Amy Driscoll
It still pains adult arcade owner Gale Fontaine to talk about her 2005 arrest on charges of running an illegal gambling operation in Broward County.''I'm a great grandmother. My family had to watch as I was handcuffed,'' she said. ``And what was I doing wrong? Helping senior citizens?'' |
Did an out-of-control Bill Clinton slap protester?
by CapitolHillBlue.com
Democratic political professionals worry that former President Bill Clinton is "out of control" and "destroying his wife's campaign" after he reportedly slapped a heckler at a rally in Ohio and got into a shouting match with another.Party insiders tell Capitol Hill Blue that the former President's hair-trigger temper is surfacing more and more as he campaigns for his wife and his actions are "detrimental to the party and the Senator." |
Missing: The 'Right' Babies
by Kathryn Joyce
Steve Mosher is telling me about wolves returning to the streets of European towns. Not as part of some Vermont-model wildlife-recovery scenario but as emblems of a harsh comeuppance mankind is due--they're stalking out of the forests like an ancient judgment, coming to claim mankind's ceded land. We're sitting in a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia--a beautifying ex-industrial town in the Shenandoah Valley that, as the far edge of DC's suburban sprawl, is lately home to a surprising number of conservative Christian ministries. Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe's future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes "a decline that Europe hasn't experienced since the Black Death." The comeuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right "profamily" activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It's called the "demographic winter," a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which, they charge, "Western Civilization" is laying itself down to die. |
Texas poll shows dead heat among Dems
by Paul Steinhauser
It's all tied up in Texas. A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll suggests the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination between Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois is a statistical dead heat in Texas, which holds primaries March 4. |
