Reuters: "The Kerry campaign on Friday criticized the administration for putting off, possibly until after the election, issuing an annual report that could show an increase in the number of households that either don't have access to enough food or have experienced hunger. The Agriculture Department report, originally scheduled to be made public either Thursday or Friday, is being 'reviewed' [yeah, right] by the department. Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said the delay, coming just days before the election, was an example of the Bush administration withholding bad news from the American people." This is not the only report Bush has delayed till after the election. Another report, stuffed with environmentally disastrous pro-oil-industry proposals, was hidden away in early Oct. when "reviewers" predicted the public would be outraged by the plan.

Here's the propaganda version: "U.S. marines are preparing for a "decisive" assault on the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi to crush Sunni Muslim insurgents and Arab militants behind suicide bombings and beheadings of hostages. "We are gearing up for a major operation," Brigadier General Denis Hajlik told reporters at a base near Falluja on Friday. "If we do so, it willbe decisive and we will whack them." Now here's the REAL story: US soldiers don't have a prayer of 'crushing' insurgents, esp. not in Fallujah, population 350,000. An attempted all out assault could get dozens - even hundreds of soldiers killed, now or in the backlash later. But Bush wants voters to THINK that if they don';t vote for him that this chance for "decisive" victory will be lost. Like the con artist who talks you into blowing your last 10 bucks on a shell game because THIS TIME, you're sure to win! Except in a shell game, no one gets killed.

John Kerry, who at this point shouldn't be surprised by ANY stunt Bush pulls, was appalled by the latest Bush ad, that shows a big crowd of soldiers - the implication being that they are listening, enrapt to a Bush speech. But the "crowd" is in fact just a photoshopped phony. The Kerry campaign released this statement: "In response to the stunning revelation that the Bush-Cheney campaign's much touted closing ad has been exposed as doctored, the Kerry campaign is demanding that this fake ad be taken off the airwaves immediately. Senior Adviser Joe Lockhart quipped: "Now we know why this ad is named 'Whatever it Takes.' This administration has always had a problem telling the truth from Iraq to jobs to health care. The Bush campaign's advertising has been consistently dishonest in what they say. But today, it's been exposed for being dishonest about what we see." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/27/22442/878

The Nation Institute: "Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer." The story at the link below was developed by the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. Reporter Russ Baker conducted taped interviews with Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston-based journalist and the former ghostwriter for Bush's planned autobiography. Among other revelations, Herskowitz recalls from 1999 discussions that then Governor Bush was actively contemplating the invasion of Iraq, two or more years before 9/11. Baker's piece casts an unusually candid light on the thoughts and motivations of the 43rd President." So much for war "as a last resort!"

"Former West Point Professor, Bronze Star recipient and Operation Iraqi Freedom Veteran Patrick Murphy responded to Rudy Giuliani's comments about the missing explosives this morning with the following statement: 'This is another example of the Bush administration being derelict in their duties to lead and to take responsibility. As a soldier who served proudly in Iraq, I am disheartened by the former Mayor's comments. "This country needs leadership not excuses. Bush tried to win the war on the cheap, he didn't give us the troops the generals asked for, the troops that were needed to secure Iraq, now his surrogates are blaming the troops for his mistakes.' " Rudy Giuliani, on the Today Show had said: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there." Too bad there were TOO DAMN FEW!

BBC: "The US is playing down the significance of a UN letter saying almost 350 metric tons of high explosives went missing from an Iraqi base after the war. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said there was no risk of nuclear proliferation because of the theft." [Scotty obviously doesn't think the risk of blown up soldiers is any big deal]. Meanwhile, some US media reports [which sound like they were written by Karl Rove] seems] have queried if the theft happened before US troops arrived at the base at al-Qaqaa. NBC [the Pentagon "owned" GE Network] reported that one of its correspondents was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division which temporarily took control of the base on 10 April 2003 but did not find any of the explosives." This of course was revealed as a lie: "Other US outlets, including NBC's own news website, quoted Pentagon officials who said a search of the site after the US-led invasion had revealed the explosives to be intact."

Greg Mitchell asks: "Is there a level playing field in terms of factual knowledge about certain key issues? If not, does the media bear any blame? I've been asking these questions all year, and now there's more food for thought." A new non-partisan poll reveals that the overwhelming majority of Bush's backers' faith in their candidate is based on a belief that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaeda and possessed WMDs or a major program for making them - ie, their support is based on LIES."The new survey finds that if the Bush supporters knew (or accepted) the truth, some of them might feel quite differently about the war. Asked whether we should have gone to war if Iraq was not making WMD or providing strong support to al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said no." So does the media work to promote the truth? Just the opposite: it continues to systematically distort and supporess it.

Three former Foreign Service Officers are speaking out on how Bush's policies made their day-to-day work as US diplomats impossible and forced them to resign "I served the United States for 35 years and under seven administrations,"says Ann Wright. "I resigned from a career as a diplomat -- a job I dearly loved -- because I could not defend the policies of the Bush administration toward Iraq. Ironically, as a 29 year veteran of the Army Reserves, I could still be sent there at any time."All three reluctantly became activists and joined Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, an unprecedented coalition of over 50 career chiefs of mission and retired four-star military leaders which is urging that Bush not be re-elected. On September 30 DMCC issued a statement, noting that, "The claim that we are safer is the biggest lie of this campaign season."" Yet the mainstream media continues to suppress this info..

AFP: "US President George W. Bush has touted the capture or killing of 75 percent of Al-Qaeda's leaders to show US voters the war on terror's progress, but intelligence experts say the group's senior ranks have been filled by new people. "We're making progress, three-quarters of Al-Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice," Bush said in the last televised election debate against Democratic challenger John Kerry on October 13. Melvin Goodman, a national security expert at the Center for International Policy, questioned Bush's figure. "The president throws numbers around," Goodman said. The US intelligence community is "not even sure about the number of actual Al-Qaeda (members)," he said, adding, "We don't know the real number." In any, says Goodman, using such numbers "is of course the wrong way of thinking of [fighting terrorism]. It is not a mechanistic process. These are people who come from an environment which is perpetuated by our actions and that environment."

Here's the pathetic state of the US media today: The networks rejects ads for the release of the DVD of a popular, award-winning movie (Fahrenheit 9/11), yet then run an ad stuffed with lies - lies previously completely discredited - not once, but over 9,000 TIMES! Annenberg FactCheck reports: "Two misleading Bush ads accusing Kerry of supporting tax increases on gasoline and middle-class parents were running heavily last week. Both ads repeat claims we've repeatedly disputed here. Both ads repeat claims we've repeatedly disputed here. They both attempt to portray Kerry as eager to raise taxes on middle-income taxpayers, which Kerry has said consistently he won't do. One ad characterizes Kerry's votes against proposed tax cuts as votes to "raise taxes," an outright falsehood.... Together the two ads aired 9,118 times on stations monitored by TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG."

Brad's Blog reports: "As reported previously, and it looks like the scrubbing of various historical documents and other elements of the White House Website is continuing! And may be wider and more systematic than previously known. The BRAD BLOG has discovered a boat-load of audio and video that has been removed from the website!" Among the things taken down: the audio on which Bush states "I'm not that concerned about Bin Laden;" the White House list of "Coalition" members; clips containing Bush vows to reduce spending and to reduce greenhouse gases, and several clips in which Bush makes confident references to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. In short, the scrubbing amounts to a clear, and possibly quite illegal - COVERUP OF FEDERAL DOCUMENTS.

US Newswire: "A TV spot featuring Brooke Campbell, the sister of a US soldier killed in Iraq while searching for weapons of mass destruction, will launch the final round of a multi-city tour in battleground states by a group of women -- 'Band of Sisters' -- whose loved ones are currently serving in Iraq. The ad, titled 'He Doesn't Get It,' juxtaposes the President making light of his Administration's deception about the presence of WMD in Iraq with a real-world consequence: George Bush: 'Those WMD have got to be somewhere...Ha, ha...nope not over here.' Brooke Campbell: 'I watched President Bush make a joke...my brother died looking for WMD.' Campbell, of Kirksville MO, lost her brother Ryan on April 29 in a suicide bomber attack in Iraq. Sgt. Ryan Campbell, who was working to disable land mines when he was killed, had deep misgivings about the Bush Administration's rationale for war in Iraq." And now Sgt. Campbell -- along with 1,100 others -- is dead.

Media Matters: "Following Senator John Kerry's recent criticism of President George W. Bush's alleged failure to anticipate the current nationwide shortage of flu vaccinations, conservative media figures [SEVERAL of them - liars all] have quickly echoed Bush's claim that medical liability is the major cause of the shortage. But, according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, a division of the National Institutes of Health, fear of liability is "only a very small part" of the vaccine shortage." What Fauci carefully omits from his statement, perhaps to protect the pharamceutical industry with which his institute works so closely (TOO closely) is that the US gov has passed laws that insure the drug barons have extremely limited liability for vaccines.

Tonight, Tom Brokaw, Judy Woodruff, and the rest of the Bushie mouthpieces will undoubtedly announce that Iraq is no longer on the "terror black list." The uninformed (upon whom the media so heavily depends) will think: Wow! Things in Iraq MUST be getting better! They don't have terrorist there anymore! But, the actual story is that Iraq is no longer considered a hotbed of STATE SPONSORED terrorism. Why? Because Saddam Hussein is gone. No duh! But Bush needed a new phony sound byte to counter the charges made by Kerry and other international leaders that Iraq has become a haven for terrorists, thanks to Bush. But, of course, don't expect Brokaw or Woodruff to mention this little detail.

Cheryl Seal warned in 2002: "The Bush administration pledged, on paper and for the press - in true corporate flimflam style- that he was going to increase veterans benefits. But he cleverly fixed it so that the supposed increase in benefits never actually made it to the vets. While Bush allowed the VA to hire all sorts of new people to accept new claims (initial processing), no new "caseworkers" were hired, thus creating chaos and a heartbreaking bottleneck where new claims simply sat in limbo indefinitely. And now, it seems Bush has decided that even with this roadblock, vets were getting too much of the money he never intended for them to actually access in the first place. A few weeks ago, he instructed the VA not to inform veterans of the benefits they are entitled to. Yet he wants to create more veterans?"

Bush has made one too many statements that proved to be politically expedient, calculated lies. It is highly unlikely that Iraqis will take him at his word now as he claims to be willing to accept an Islamic Iraq if "free and fair elections" (ahem!) dictate that result. But Bush is spinning in such tiny circles now, he is now routinely forgetting what he said on earlier occasions. BBC: "Correspondents say Mr Bush's comments appear to clash with earlier remarks from his administration which rejected calls soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime for the creation of an Islamic state similar to that of its neighbour, Iran." If you will recall, during debate #3, Bush also forgot that he had said that Osama Bin Laden no longer concerned him. So who's to say that on Nov. 3 he'll "forget" he ever said he'd accept an Islamic Iraq?

Cheney and Bush claim that few drug barons make vaccine because of "lawsuit fears." But this is just plain FALSE. They don't make vaccine because they cannot overcharge for vaccine they way they can for other treatments. As to liability, drug barons are even protected from liability for childhood vaccines, which because of the sheer numbers used, incur the highest number of side effect cases. Scroll down to "Vaccine Injury Compensation Program."

Kerry campaign: "On Dec. 4, 2003, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez wrote in a letter 'to the number two officer in the Army, with copies to other senior officials, that his soldiers still needed protective inserts to upgrade 36,000 sets of body armor, but that their delivery twice had been postponed in the month before he was writing.' (Washington Post, 10/17/04) The NEXT DAY, Dec. 5, 2003, Bush told Americans the troops had everything they needed: 'Three years ago, our military was not receiving the resources it needed and morale was beginning to suffer. So we increased the defense budgets to prepare for the threats of a new era. And today, no one in the world can question the skill and the strength and the spirit of the United States military.' " More horrible still, the Bush "campaign machine" has produced phony polls showing that "most" soldiers in Iraq think Bush is handling things just peachy keen - putting an even bigger wedge between our troops and reality.

From Corrente: "Alert reader grannyinsanity explains: Let me explain this one to you folks. It is a diversion plain and simple. The biggest thing that happened at the debate was George Bush denying that he said he wasn't that concerned about Bin Laden. That was a lie so blatant that many bloggers had the link posted before the subject even changed. Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both predicted that we would be seeing that over and over. That hasn't happened because Lynne Cheney threw out a great big cheap shiny distraction. I would still like to see that public display of George caught in a big whopper, but that won't happen as long as the press is distracted by Lynne Cheney's hypocritcal grandstanding."

From Corrente: "Long story short: Bush has a brutally obvious 'tell': When he's letting loose with a real whopper, He says 'of course.' Froomkin noticed that after Debate 2, and challenged the blogosphere to check it out for Debate 3. If anyone did, I missed it. And heck, it was a Friday, whine... Anyhow, Bush is still doing it. Quoting Froomkin's entire post: In last Friday's column, I encouraged you to perk up your ears every time President Bush says 'of course,' because in adversarial settings Bush seems to use that phrase whenever he's about to say something that supporters might find obvious -- but that his critics might consider a whopper."

The US has NOT rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. They are still very much in Afghanistan, and have posed a major threat both to the Afghan government and to the recent elections. AFP: "A Taliban spokesman said all 18 candidates in Afghanistan's presidential elections were 'top targets' for attack, and claimed responsibility after a rocket landed near a school President Hamid Karzai was about to visit. 'All presidential candidates are our top targets now because they are running for the polls of a US-made election -- an election which will create a government in the interest of the Americans,' Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told AFP the Taliban had called on the 'Afghan nation to boycott the election and not vote because this is not going to be the type of government Afghan's want.' Taliban loyalists have vowed to disrupt the election and also claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on a US security firm."

Transcript of Bush press conference, March 13, 2003 via Buzzflash: "Q: Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? [...] BUSH: ... I don't know where he is. Nor -- you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you [...] Q: Do you believe the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead of alive? BUSH: As I say, we hadn't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, you know, again, I don't know where he is. I'll repeat what I said: I truly am not that concerned about him."

Tables of US tax data compiled by the Tax Policy Center shows that the smallest proportion or the tax cuts, in terms of after tax change in income, went to Americans making less than $75,000 per year, while the lions share went to those making over $500,000 per year. Bush may have cynically played with statistics to even dare make such an outrageous claim. He is technically accurate if he means NUMBER OF TAXPAYERS receiving some sort of cut -- not number of tax DOLLARS. But the percentage of change in after tax dollars for the poorest Americans ($10,000 or less/year) was just 0.2%.

Since 2001, because inflation has risen faster than salaries, the average "spending power" income for American workers fell by 1.7%. So take off $680 per year for your family of 4's $40,000. (http://www.house.gov/georgemiller/middleclass/middleclass1.html) Also, average annual energy costs have risen dramatically since 2001- a family of four pays $1,100 more per year in fuel (heating, cooking and transportation). http://money.cnn.com/2003/02/10/pf/saving/oil_and_you/ Next we have healthcare costs. Since 2001, average health insurance costs to workers has climbed by 36%, with the average annual rise for a family of four amounting to at least $400 (http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml) So tally it up: $680 + $1,100 + $400 = $2,180. Minus Bush's $1,700 tax cut = a NET LOSS of $480 per year. Add to that rising rents and bank fees and shrinking savings accounts returns and that 'money in your pocket' just went sailing down a sinkhole.

FACT: Vaccine makers are protected from all vaccine lawsuits except those in which fraud and intentional wrongdoing are shown. ."Vaccine manufacturers and others are sheltered from product liability lawsuits by a special 1986 act of Congress. (See the US Code 42 USC 300aa for details.) This act set up a fund to compensate those who can prove serious injury from vaccines."--Roger Schlafly. Under Title 42.300aa-23. Trial, it states that if a vaccine manufacturer can show "it complied, in all material respects, with all requirements under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act [21 U.S.C. 301 et seq.] and this chapter applicable to the vaccine and related to the vaccine injury or death with respect to which the action was brought, the manufacturer shall not be held liable for punitive damages unless the manufacturer engaged in" fraud, illegal activity, intentional wrongdoing, etc. For more on drug barons and vaccines see http://www.whale.to/vaccines/profits.html

MSNBC, Sept 8, 2004: "Bush....asserted that 'nearly two thirds' of Al Qaeda's 'known leaders' had been captured or killed. The absence of any explanation [for this estimate] as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as 'meaningless' and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes. An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda 'leaders' that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks - the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate. 'It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it's meaningless when they said three fourths, ' said the official, who asked not to be identified. 'This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody's orifice."

April 2004 from ABC: "In an hour-long 'Primetime Thursday' investigation, Diane Sawyer uncovers disturbing new information about quality of care and questionable management practices at some of America's veterans' hospitals. These hospitals are the primary source of medical care for thousands of veterans -- including some of those returning from the current war in Iraq. Hidden cameras secretly journey inside some of these hospitals, documenting alarming examples of potentially dangerous hygiene practices, outdated medical equipment, understaffed wards and overworked nursing staffers. 'Primetime' also finds instances of doctors not showing up for surgeries and out-patient clinics."

Ya hear that, all you people whose jobs are now being done by workers in Mexico, India, and Indonesia? You didn't really lose those jobs! You imagined the whole thing! And you insurance, banking, and other office workers whose jobs were axed and replaced by either temporary workers with no benefits, phone lines to Pakistan, or new, lower-paid workers putting in 60 hours a week - well, that's all just an illusion! And by the way - those Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that say the US has gone from 111,560,000 private sector jobs in 2001 to 109,926,000 in 2004 - well, that must just be a typo! So let's just all clap our hands and wish really hard and be optimistic and not only will Tinkerbelle come back to life, but ALL those nasty, inconvenient little facts will just disappear!

AP: "Less than 7% of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved last year to rebuild Iraq has been spent, the Bush administration said Wednesday in its latest report on progress there. The State Department report, which said just under $1.22 billion had been spent through Sept. 22, affirmed anew that the U.S. effort to speed an Iraqi economic recovery is lagging well behind initial plans. The figure was no surprise because each of the administration's three previous quarterly reports have shown how slowly American expenditures are actually getting out the door. U.S. officials have blamed the ongoing insurrection and bureaucratic delays.In January, the Bush administration said it expected to have spent $12.7 billion by this past Oct. 1."

The Bush media has been spinning this one to sound like Bush is giving our combat troops a new big tax break. But he is merely signing a bill correcting a Bush style 'screw the poor" tax rip off.: "Congress passed legislation to end a quirky reduction in tax breaks that hits lower-income military families when their service members are assigned to Iraq, Afghanistan or other combat areas. Relief from the tax-break glitch was part of the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 approved Sept. 23 and sent to the White House. It applies only to tax years 2004 and 2005 but it could be extended. Last year up to 10,000 service members saw combat-zone tax exemptions lower their family income, for some by thousands of dollars. Victims of this tax break "inversion," as a Defense official called it, typically are lower-grade enlisted members or junior officers who are married with children, serve at least seven months in a combat zone and have little or no other family income."

IT was recently discovered that that the White House scripts the speeches for Iraqi PM Ilyad Allawi. Now here comes the latest "stage directions" from that ongoing White House stage play known as "The Bush Campaign." Now Musharaff - who is even more of a Bush puppet than Allawi - claims the VERY MORNING AFTER BUSH'S FAILED DEBATE - that Pakistani security forces killed about 100 al-Qaida terrorists during a recent military operation in tribal areas near Afghanistan. Musharraf asserted that the operation was "purely against al-Qaida." Guess where he delivered his announcmenet? From a plane on the way back from a visit to the United States. Guess that's when he got the '100 Al Qaeda Operatives Killed" script. So what's the next scene in the "play?" The day after debate #2 Musharaff claims (as predicted by Spoof) that the badly decomposed body of Osama Bin Laden is found?

You won't see this mentioned by Tom 'Tokyo Rose' Brokaw, Britt Hume, Judy Woodruff, and the rest of the cast of corporate clowns posing as "journalists." Can't have any news "inconvenient" to Bush's campaign leaking out now can we? Instead, we have been treated to slams of Kerry, who dared to suggest that the Bush administration would call up more troops AFTER the election, and without mentioning that little detail to the public. This story in Army Times can only be accessed by subscription but the headline is there: "MYERS: CALL-UPS EXPECTED AFTER ELECTION" - right under the headline "RECRUITING FALLS SHORT OF GOAL."

A new study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes reveals that Bush supporters "have many incorrect assumptions about his foreign policy positions. Kerry supporters, though, are largely accurate in their assessments. The uncommitted also tend to misperceive Bush's positions, though less than Bush supporters, and to perceive Kerry's positions correctly. Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto treaty (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44 percent) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%)." In short, these folks ain't too bright!

This underlying truth in this Pentapost article, which is spun using the "sweetened lemon" approach, is that Bush is LYING TO AMERICA about Iraq and continuing to ignore intelligence reports. Yet what does the minimizing, almost empty headline say? "Growing Pessimism on Iraq." Which, of course, could mean anything. What the article says is: "While Bush, Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being 'publicly acknowledged.' " A Bushie media euphemism for LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. "People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials."

Village Voice: 'George W. Bush is a fake cowboy. He plays up the image, big-time, with $300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo, saying that he'll 'ride herd' over ornery Middle Eastern governments... He branded Saddam Hussein's Iraq 'an outlaw regime' and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, 'There's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' ' But Bush is no cowboy. 'The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the chivalric knight,' observes Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist who teaches at So. Methodist University... 'The only serious difference is that your status doesn't depend on your social class. Our president is neither a knight nor a cowboy. He doesn't believe in taking care of the little guy, nor does he have the restraint or dignity of the cowboy.' "

Local officials in hurricane-trashed parts of Alabama were pleased when FEMA officials claimed that if they could have debris clean-up contracts signed by a deadline - a very SHORT deadline - that the feds would pick up 100% of the bill. So local governments scrambled to get the contracts. "But interviews by the Mobile Register about last weekend's rush to sign debris removal contracts suggest that Alabama Emergency Management Agency Director Bruce Baughman, Gov. Bob Riley and others provided assurances that they were not in a position to give. It now appears unlikely that the federal government will pay 100%, according to the top FEMA official assigned to Alabama for Ivan." So who do you supposed led the AL officials into believing that if they got contracts the feds would pay? Who do you think? The Bush admianistration! It's an old corporate ploy. Promise to reimburse someone later if they sign a contract and pick up the tab now - then leave 'em stuck with the bill!

Through a corporate style scheme of 'changing definitions', the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan has been underreported by nearly 17,000! UPI reports: "The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations." The traditional definition of a casualty, from the Pentagon itself: "Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured." But the "new definition" keeps most medical evacuations from being listed. Troops disabled by ailments such as "muscle strain, back pain, kidney stones, diarrhea and persistent fever" no longer count as casualties! "Casualty reports released to the public are generally confined to fatalities and those wounded in action," says the Pentagon. How very convenient for Bush.

Bush is lying daily about Iraq and, as always, the US media is aiding and abetting him - all at the expense of US troops forced to remain in a downward-spiraling hell. In July, top intelligence officials submitted a report to Bush on the horrific state of the war. But Bush refuses to tell America. Sidney Blumenthal writes: "Almost every day...Bush speaks with bravado about how he is 'winning' in Iraq. 'Our strategy is succeeding,' he [boasts]. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Ret. gen. Wm Odom, former head of the Nat'l Security Agency, told me 'Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends.' Ret. gen. Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Centcom: 'The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground."

What a hoot! Tom Brokaw on NBC apparently thought the public would be impressed that he could find an FBI 'expert" to claim the Bush National Guard documents were fake! But we all know now that you can find FBI and CIA agents eager to kiss up to Bush who will swear to just about anything, from WMDs in Iraq to "imminent dangers" based on four-year old information! Now the Boston Globe reveals that some of the features of the documents that Bush toadies like Matt Drudge claim "prove" the documents were fake - like the raised ''th," used to describe a Guard unit, the 187th, appears in a document in Bush's official record that the White House made public earlier this year. So, Drudge, et al, did the White House fake THOSE? Can't have it both ways!

Washington Post: "Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums rose 11.2 percent this year, registering the fourth consecutive double-digit annual increase and pushing the cost of family coverage under the most common type of plan past $10,000 ... 'five times the rate of growth in wages [and of] inflation,' said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.... [According to Altman this] unceasing rise will depress wages, affect hiring decisions and encourage outsourcing.... [The number of] uninsured will continue to rise, while the cost shouldered by workers lucky enough to have insurance will also climb, putting greater pressure on family budgets. [While the] percentage of all workers who have health insurance through their employers continues to slip, with 5 million fewer jobs offering health insurance now than in 2001 [and the % of] workers at small firms ... getting health insurance declined to 50 percent this year from 58 percent in 2001." Bush fails and lies--we pay.

In both the build up to the Iraq Invasion and during the war itself -- even as thousands of Iraqis and scores of Americans were dying -- Tommy Franks remained silent about the truth, just to further his own career. But, as AP reports, "[Sen. Bob Graham] asserted Sunday that the general who ran the war in Afghanistan (Franks) said more than a year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that his resources were being shifted in preparation for taking on Saddam Hussein. Graham contends that just months into combat in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks also told him that fighting terrorism in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere should take priority over invading Iraq. Graham said Franks told him he thought the United States knew less about the situation in Iraq than did some European governments, and the Bush administration should ask them for advice."

Baltimore Sun: "Yes, the latest employment data, released Friday, signal improvement. August's unemployment rate was 5.4 percent, compared with 6.1 percent a year earlier. Trouble is, the U.S. economy right now still has a million fewer people working than at the start of the recession in March 2001. And millions of discouraged workers have been leaving the job market or have become mired in underemployment. As a result, the labor force participation rate this summer fell to the lowest point in almost 13 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank, figure that translates to more than two million missing workers. These are workers so discouraged that they've given up looking for work, and thus they're not factored into the official unemployment rate calculation. If they were -- and there's a good argument for that -- the true unemployment rate would be more like 6.4 percent."

Greg Palast: "Sec. of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration's plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime.... According to the [Federal] Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place its little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay for a 'benefit' of $1.53 billion. I put 'benefit' in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush's Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers' pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change. President Bush announced in his convention acceptance speech this week that he was changing overtime rules to give workers 'comp time' off instead of pay. He forgot to mention that ... his Labor Department had already ... eliminate[d] overtime pay for millions - while failing to put into the regs one word about comp time. In the pre-September 11 days, we used to call that, 'lying.'"

Here we go again! Bush's engineered "bounce" started to fade before the print in the Newsweek and Time issues carrying the results even dried. Meanwhile, he is about to get hammered over the Medicare premium hike. So what do we hear? A claim that Saddam's top man has been captured! Trouble is, this claim didn't even stick as long as the phony bounce! Within hours, "Defense Minister Hazim al-Shalaan said reports of the arrest of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was sixth on a U.S. list of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam's administration and had a $10 million price on his head, were baseless. 'We don't have any information regarding this issue. What has been said of a statement by the Defense Ministry is baseless,' he told Lebanon's LBC television channel." So what's next? A new "orange alert"?

John Kerry blasted Bush for his latest cowardly attack on senior Americans. Late Friday - after most everyone had gone off for their weekends, the Bush cartel "just happened to mention" that it was going ahead with the largest increase in Medicare premium rates in the program's history. The announcement was intentionally made after the long holiday got underway and Americans were swamped with vacation and back-to-school activities and Hurricane Frances news. Kerry was infuriated on behalf of seniors: "[Bush] promised again a couple of nights ago to strengthen Medicare," Kerry told a rally at a baseball stadium in Akron. "Then you wake up when a lot of the news is being hidden by what's happening in the hurricane down in Florida, what's happening in Russia with 200 people tragically killed by terrorists." But that's just how cowards like Bush operate!

Graydon Carter has done an exhaustive search of key points in Bush's OWN speeches and statements and has revealed a clear pattern of manipulation and deception. For example: "Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida: ONE;" By contrast: "Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein: ONE HUNDRED FOUR." And, even more telling: "Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses: ZERO." This is a presidency that has ignored or directly jeopardized real national security to promote its own sick agenda.

So just how many more "revelations" can we expect about the entire 9/11- bin Laden and Saddam Hussein scenarios? Can we believe ANYTHING this administration has fed us in the past three years? AP: "Recent investigations into al-Qaida by the Sept. 11 commission and others have altered the once commonly held view that bin Laden's inheritance and massive fortune - estimated at $300 million at one point - were used to finance his operations. A network of businesses in Sudan, his base from 1991 to 1996, is also not thought to be backing al-Qaida. 'The CIA now estimates that it costs al-Qaida about $30 million per year to sustain its activities before 9/11 and that this money was raised almost entirely through donations,' the report said."

A.merican P.ropaganda: " Bush said opponent John Kerry's service was "more heroic" than his during Vietnam: "I think him going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets [Duh!]," said Bush, who served in the Texas Air National Guard. "He was in harm's way and I wasn't [another brilliant insight from the clueless one!]. On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone." LOL!!!! What a classic coward's statement! Like saying "Well, I woulda saved that kid from that burning building if someone has ASKED me!" The point is, of course, Bush KNEW his unit wouldn't be called up! That's why he was in it! So this entire statement is worse than meaningless. It is just more con-speak motivated only by the fact that he was caught smearing Kerry -- and that the Texas lawmaker who got him into the "call up-free" unit came forward and confessed. (Are we really expected to believe that AWOL boy 'would have gone'?)

AP: "Americans increasingly believe President Bush's re-election campaign is behind the ads attacking Democrat John Kerry's Vietnam experience, a [National Annenberg Election Survey poll found." Interestingly, the % of people who did not believe Kerry earned his medals was never that high - 30% at the peak, which has dropped to 24%. "In polling from Monday through Thursday, 46% said they believed the Bush campaign was behind the ads and 37% said they thought the ads were done independently." However, "After Ginsberg resigned from the campaign on Wednesday, 50% said in polling the next two nights that the Bush campaign was connected to the ads and 34% said it was not." And, as the full force of public response always lags by 7-10 days, we predict that this incident may be what does Bush in.

US Newswire writes: "Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) received a letter from the Executive Office of the President denying CREW's Aug. 24 request for records detailing White House contacts with individuals connected to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT). As grounds for the denial, the White House claimed that it was exempt from having to disclose the information... CREW's Executive Director Melanie Sloan stated 'If the White House really had nothing to do with SBVT or its ads, then there was no reason for it to deny CREW's request.' "

AP: "The Navy task force overseeing John Kerry's swift boat squadron in Vietnam reported that his group of boats came under enemy fire during a March 13, 1969, incident that three decades later is being challenged by the Democratic presidential nominee's critics. The March 18, 1969, weekly report from Task Force 115, which was located by The Associated Press during a search of Navy archives, is the latest document to surface that supports Kerry's description of an event for which he won a Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart. The document, part of thousands of pages of records housed at the Naval Historical Center, is one of several that say Kerry and other servicemen were shot at from the banks of the Bay Hap River on March 13, 1969. The Associated Press located the document Tuesday during a search of available records."

Reuters: "Democrat John Kerry will dispatch two fellow Vietnam veterans," including Georgia senator Max Cleland - " to Bush's secluded [not to mention phony] Texas ranch to press him to condemn television advertisements accusing Kerry of lying about his wartime service. The move comes one day after it was disclosed that a top lawyer for Bush's re-election campaign has been providing legal advice to the group behind the ads, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Cleland and former Army Green Beret Jim Rassman, whose life was saved by Kerry during a Vietnam war firefight, will try to deliver a letter on Wednesday protesting the ads to Bush." Altho' Bush asked for the ads to stop, he "stopped short of condemning the group or its specific accusations that the Democratic presidential candidate lied about his record in Vietnam." I.e., the "repudiation" was a sham show.

LA Times: "These Charges are False" ; Concord Monitor: 'Beneath contempt;' Reno Gazette-Journal: 'One went, and the other stayed home,' The Palm Beach Post: "This is the way Bushes do politics"; The Oregonian: "Now This Gets Nasty"; Charleston Gazette: "Ugly"; Las Vegas Sun: Bush's tacit approval of ad is "Shameful" ; Toledo Blade: "dishonest and dishonorable."; The Plain Dealer: "Ad Says Kerry Lied, Record Says Otherwise"; Lansing Journal: "Swift Boat Attack Ad Dishonest"; Bill O'Reilly (!!!): "Swift Boat Political Advertisement" is in "Poor Taste"; Lewiston Sun Journal: "Debunked Smears"; Columbus Dispatch: "Bush re-election machine busy tearing down another war hero." Democrats.com: "Way to go, Karl "Balloon-face McGoon Rove!! Your "grenade" blew up in your boss's face!

Daily Misleader "President Bush has adamantly denied any connection to ... the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) [Bush] Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that the White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign 'weren't involved in any way in these [SBVT] ads.' [But] Kenneth Cordier, who appears prominently in the SBVT ads, was a member of the Bush/Cheney veterans steering committee. According to [Bush's website] the veterans steering committee 'serve as messengers for the President's re-election campaign.' After the Kerry campaign exposed Cordier's involvement, a spokesman for Bush [said] Cordier would 'no longer participate' [and] the campaign had no idea that Cordier was involved in the SBVT ads.... The primary financial backer of the SBVT is Bob Perry - the top donor to Republicans in the state of Texas [and] a friend of Karl Rove ... for nearly 20 years. Perry ponied up $46,000 for Bush's gubernatorial campaigns and ... generously to Bush's presidential races."

This is SOOOOOOO Bush! First he uses the media to promote a lie that will gain him some immediate advantage (remember the Saddam ties to Al Queda lie the media spread so liberally throughout the land?). Next, he sits back and waits to see "what the market will bear." If he doesn't get called on the mat he continues to sit back and let others push the lie even further. Then, when it is obvious he is caught dead to rights, he issues a lame statement. So pardon us if we are not impressed by Bush's "denunciation' of the Swift Boat Phonies. It's too little too late. A bit like the hit man you paid a bundle once you're sure he's bumped off the target of your choice.

Hmm...looks like desperation is getting to the 'brain trust' (snicker) at the White House - 'cause their latest tactic smacks of too few hours sleep and/or too many cocktails. Check this out: "The Democratic Party launched a costly round of ads Friday to buttress John Kerry's credentials to be commander in chief as the White House accused the Mass. senator of "losing his cool" over attacks on his war record.' LOL! It gets better: "Asked about the relationship between Bob Perry, a financial supporter of the anti-Kerry group that paid for the ad, and Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, McClellan said, "I mean, they know each other. I know that...that still shouldn't be used to draw any connection there, because we have not been involved in this ad whatsoever." At least you made darn sure you covered your tracks, eh Scott? But "truth will out!" You and your boss are quickly running out of suckers willing to commit perjury, fraud, and treason for you.

Sierra Club: "On August 18th, the Sierra Club will release a new, hard-hitting report titled, "Air Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero: How the Bush Administration's Reckless Disregard of 9/11 Toxic Hazards Poses Long-Term Threats for New York City and the Nation." The 180 page report takes the most comprehensive look at well-known, and little-known, health impacts of the attacks of 9/11 and, most importantly, how the Bush Administration's mistakes in the aftermath are in danger of being institutionalized as policy to handle future attacks. The report will be released at a press conference with workers and residents who were exposed to Ground Zero pollution; health and safety experts; and members of Congress on Wednesday, August 18th at 11:00 AM, on the steps of City Hall. "

As we have asserted, tampering with audio files, video files and transcripts to intentionally misrepresent a public figures statements is FRAUD(are ya listening, White Knight lawyers who want to strike a blow for truth and justice?). While Bush, Bill O'Reilly, the RNC and others may not have a problem committing fraud or being a party to it, some conservatives have a conscience - Chris Matthews being one of them. US Newswire: "The Kerry-Edwards campaign reported that Monday night on Hardball, host Chris Matthews held the Bush campaign accountable for deceptive editing of his interview of John Kerry in January. In campaign speeches, the president has been using the clip to claim that Kerry called himself an anti-war candidate..." We salute Matthews for his honesty.

Nancy Reagan is a lady - that can be said unequivocally.So of course she won't come out and say 'Get away from me ya little punk!' when she sees Dubya. Instead, she has apparently adopted a dignified reserve, giving ZERO encouragement at the same time. But our Clueless Leader has tried to turn a two minute intrusion into her garden into a veritable endorsement worthy of space on the White House website! As you read it, just remember that no, you did not stumble across a fragment of a script from an upcoming Saturday Night Live skit...this is really on the White House Web site! The media is still insisting (see http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=5962723) that Nancy issued a "formal statement of support" for Bush's reelection, but the world has yet to see such a document/tape/video. It's all still "second hand" assertions - but then, that's what's passing as "reporting" these days.

Tom Teepen writes: "[Bush I] won the White House in substantial part thanks to a TV ad, all but openly racist, that cast Democrat Michael Dukakis as indifferently turning scary black criminals loose to murder good (presumably white) folks. In fact, Willie Horton had been routinely furloughed from prison in a long-standing Mass. work/release program that had had bipartisan support. The ad was produced by an 'independent' group, so Bush's fingerprints weren't on it. [Dubya] won the GOP nomination against John McCain [in 2000] thanks to a timely smear in which McCain was portrayed as a near-lunatic who had been driven batty by his long captivity in Vietnam. The group behind the smear was, again, 'independent,' Later, a Bush smear 'cast Al Gore, who is about as straight a shooter as politics allows, as a compulsive, almost pathological liar and exaggerator.' "Once again, hired goons did the dirty work. Now it's Kerry's turn to be slimed.

Daily Kos: "Behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, who is listed as the group's media contact; John E. O'Neill, and retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as 'the classic body-count guy' who 'wanted hooches destroyed and people killed. In 2000, a shadowy group billed as 'Republicans for Clean Air' falsely attacking the environmental record of Sen. John McCain. While the identity of those funding the supposedly 'independent' ads was carefully hidden, reporters soon learned that Republicans for Clean Air was simply Sam Wyly and his brother, Charles,' both Bush 'Pioneers.' Bush's 'Texas allies are now deploying the same techniques and personnel they used to attack McCain's integrity four years ago." Sleaze with a capital S.

Ron Fournier writes: "Republican Sen. John McCain called an ad criticizing John Kerry's military service 'dishonest and dishonorable' and urged the White House on Thursday to condemn it as well. 'It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me,' McCain said, referring to his bitter Republican primary fight with President Bush. 'When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry,' one of the veterans, Larry Thurlow, says in the ad.' First Thurlow had claimed to be a 'swiftboat crewmate' of Kerry's. Then he changed his story and claimed he somehow 'witnessed' the events leading to Kerry's winning of several medals. So where exactly did you witness the events from, Lare? Crouched in the grass with North Vietnamese on the banks of the river? There's no where else you could have been if not in the boat! 'I wish they hadn't done it,' McCain said 'I can't believe the president would pull such a cheap stunt."

Aha! So this is why Tom Ridge & the rest of the cast of the ongoing White House production "The Little Boys Who Cried Wolf" couldn't be more specific about their latest "terrorist threat" info! Their source is probably Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an alleged Al Queda "leader" who also supplied Bush with bogus info on Iraq's WMDs. It must have been insanely easy to trump up a good "script" for this installment of the White House show: not only did they probably have al-Libi, they also had the Pakistani police working with them - one of the most corrupt police forces on Earth! (see http://www.paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=56446)

Andrew Buncombe writes: "Howard Dean [observes] "I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism, His whole campaign is based on the notion that 'I can keep you safe, therefore, at times of difficulty for America, stick with me' and then out comes Tom Ridge. It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics." There have been numerous terror alerts since the 11 September attacks that appear to have been based on little more than chatter. Some - such as the arrest of Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty-bomber" - have been announced in a way designed to have maximum political impact. Other warnings have been based on information later shown to be incorrect." So just who are these millions of Americans who still believe they are being kept safe by Bush? Surely there aren't that many idiots taking up space on the good old native soil!

You will not see this story on CNN (Corrupt News Network) where it appeared for about an hour before being whisked off into "Never-Never-News land"). But the BBC still has some integrity, even after Hutton and Blair tried to stamp it out, so here is the story Bush and his media minions do not want you to see: "The US administration admits that new warnings of attacks on American cities were based on information gathered by al-Qaeda up to four years ago. Homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said some of the information recovered was collected in 2000/2001. But she said some may have been updated 'as recently as January of this year' (that's recent?!)." Meanwhile, Bush is now describing the US as a "nation in danger". Damn right - in Danger of another four years of G.W. Bush!

Because the last politically expedient "terrorist alert" played to a highly skeptical public (one poll showed 93% believing that politics not real danger motivated the warning), Bush is trying a new tactic to build credibility. This warning, he claims, came from AUTHENTIC AL QUEDA SOURCES! But, hey, Dubya, didn't the claim of WMDs in Iraq also come from "authentic Al Queda sources?" Back in August, 2003, as Bush was frantically trying to trump up enough of an Iraq threat to dupe Congress into giving him an OK for war plans, the White House and its pals in the Pentagon were making VERY similar claims - that "Al Queda operatives" had provided them with good information that not only "proved" Saddam had WMDs, but that he and Al Queda were in cahoots! Here's an Aug. 2003 bit from AFP

OK, so let's pretend for just a moment that the latest terrorist attack alert is authentic and not just old bad info recycled expediently just when Bush needs to deflect attention from his political opponent's successes and his own sorry failures. If the story being disseminated by the White House is real - that they have found bunches of detailed info on an attack, including targets, modus operandi, etc., then WHY are we having an alert? That's like foiling a bank robber a block from the bank, then closing up the bank for the day anyway. Says former top CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro, if indeed the plot has, as claimed, has been discovered and exposed, then "It kills it. This is a dead operational plan." So why are several cities - all of them, "coincidentally" bastions of Kerry voters - still having to pour millions they can't afford into the high alert?

SF Chronicle: "The White House raised the stakes in the political bidding war surrounding the Sept. 11 commission's call for sweeping transformation of the U.S. intelligence community when a senior official said Friday that Bush's recommendations 'will try to go beyond' those made last week by the bipartisan panel." The real scheme here is obvious, because Bush has used it again and again: He pretends he wants to go for "better" changes and commissions a study on it - his real plan, of course, being to STALL, STALL, STALL! He just did the same thing on air pollution: commissioned a $30-million "study" designed to defer implementation of real air-cleaning action as long as possible.

VOA News: "U.S. officials have refused to back down from Bush's charge that Cuba promotes sex tourism - something Cuban President Fidel Castro denies. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli says the issue of prostitution in Cuba is well documented. He referred to a 2002 human rights report that said Cuba had replaced Southeast Asia as one of the world's top sex tourism destinations. " Three days after Bush's claim, the LA Times revealed that the "documentation" was an undergraduate research paper found on the Internet! The author of said document said that not only was the info taken out of context, but "it is obvious they didn;t bother to read the whole paper." But maybe the GOP hopes that by creating a big stir around the issue of prositutes they can attract enough to NYC to meet the predicted GOP Convention shortfall!

US Newswire: "One thing you won't hear from the Bush-Cheney campaign this week is anything positive. They can't talk about the issues, because they have no plan for the future. They can't talk about their record, because it's riddled with failure. So they keep firing off intentionally misleading attacks to distract from all the things Bush and Cheney dropped the ball on over the past four years," said Kerry campaign spokesman, Chad Clanton." Here the Kerry campaign wades through the knee-deep reeking Bush lies to present the truth.

A few weeks back, Bush claimed Cuba "welcomes sex tourism" and also made vague insinuations about pedophiles and Cuba. Bush claimed to quote Castro: "Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world- and "sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency." Three days later, the LA Times revealed that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. "It shows [Bush] didn't read much of the article," commented Charlie Trumbull, the author. What Castro actually said: "There are prostitutes, but prostitution is not allowed in our country. There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist." Meanwhile, Wayne Smith, who served 6 years in Havana says that prostitution "is no longer any more of a problem in Cuba than it is in the United States."

"Before Bush took office, the two men met for two hours, and Clinton recalled telling Bush that 'by far your biggest threat is [Osama] Bin Laden and al Qaeda.' Bush told the commission that he did not remember much being said about al Qaeda, and that Clinton had emphasized North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Bush told the commission that former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke had mischaracterized an incident in his book, 'Against All Enemies.' In the book, Clarke said Bush, wandering into the situation room, pressed him in an intimidating fashion to find out whether Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush dismissed the idea that he would have wandered into the situation room alone. Bush acknowledged he might have asked Clarke about Iraq shortly after the attacks, and another aide recalled an exchange between Clarke and Bush on Iraq but did not find the president's manner intimidating, the report said." Does anyone believe Bush?

Tonight on NBC it was revealed that Bush and his henchmen all knew that Sandy Berger was going to be investigated - or at least they had a pretext for said investigation - for weeks. But when did they "leak" the story? The week Bush needed a smokescreen most, with the Iraq death count hitting 900, the 9/11 report airing more findings, Halliburton under investigation AGAIN, the UN announcing Bush's withholding of Iraq contract evidence (a story the US media has nicely suppressed on Bush's behalf). We predict that this shamelessly obvious political witchhunt will play a key role in turning the tide against Bush once and for all. One poll showed that 93% of the American public said they believed Bush's last terrorist alert was a politically motivated smokescreen. The Berger case is even MORE obvious. The public has had enough!

Just as Halliburton's latest treasonous crimes come to light...just as public anger at the inadequacy of the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee report reaches the boiling point....just as the UN auditors accuse Bush of hiding evidence on illegal Iraq corporate contracts...what does the White House do? Orders a criminal investigation and FBI harassment a la Hatfill of former Clinton advisor and present Kerry advisor Sandy Berger! Berger, while preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 commission, took some papers home with him from the National Archive. But Bush wants to make it a "criminal case" - unjustified or not - so that his "base" - the underinformed, one-line-slogan-minded rightwingers who get all their news from Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh - have a new "instant demon" and the media has an "instant smokescreen."

This letter to the Editor of the Albany, NY "Times Union" says it all and shows that Americans are a lot less gullible than Bush assumes them to be: "Isn't it ironic and very disingenuous for George Bush to be touting how the United States is so much safer now because of the war in Iraq when just last week Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was giving the "sober" warning to expect a terrorist attack in the U.S. during the election process? So, Mr. President, which is it? " -Mary LaPlante, Clifton Park

The DeanRR group demands more: 1) Misleading Congress and the American people is acceptable under whose authority? The Bush administration's? Is it okay if not technically against the law? Do we require our President, his staff and cabinet to be under oath in order to hold them to truth-telling standards? | 2) Did the same lawyers that said Bush had the right to ignore the Geneva Conventions and order torture decide lying to Congress and Americans was OK? We need outside counsel to look at this. We can't trust the Ashcroft Justice Department to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." | 3) False estimates provided to Congress (and Americans), like torture memos, are protected by executive privilege? Is there anything the Bush administration won't claim is privileged? | Contact the NYTimes Phone: 212-556-1234 | Fax: 212-556-3690 D.C. Bureau phone: 202-862-0300 | 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036 | Email: letters@nytimes.com | Join www.democrats.com/media

Since when did family values include lying and attacking rivals with vicious smears? Since Bush decided to define himself as ruled by "family values" - his own warped version, anyway. In his latest attack ads against Kerry, Bush uses his typical campaign 2004 modus operandi, in which honesty and personal responsibility (you'll note the focus on making everyone but Bush accountable for their actions) play no part. Here is a categoric refutation of the latest sliming from the Kerry folks. We felt it was important to post this, as you know darn well that Bush's media minions at FOX, NBC, CNN, et al won't bother to question the latest Bush bilge.

Picking from a big field of new progressive books, international marketing expert Shel Horowitz declared, "My favorite of the progressive titles I saw this year: Big Bush Lies: 20 Essays and a List of the 50 Most Telling Lies of George W. Bush, anthology edited by Jerry Barrett and published by RiverWood Books, of Ashland, Oregon. It covers both his personal history -- the arrest for drunken driving, the allegations of cocaine use, and of course, his disgraceful record of military desertion even from the privileged and safe post he had -- and his record on labor, environmental issues, foreign policy, and other issues during his term in office." This book is a resource-filled, easy-to-use activist's guide to the Bush administration. Can be bought at Amazon.com and through most US bookstores http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1883991943/qid=1089764384/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-6600485-9728111

What a hoot! We found these two headlines back to back in the Sacramento Bee (we are sure the editors saw the significance, too!): First headline: WHITE HOUSE DOWNPLAYS BUSH-LAY RELATIONSHIP, followed by RIDGE WARNS OF 'CREDIBLE' AL-QUEDA PLOT. Is there still anyone out there on the planet who has failed to notice that EVERY SINGLE TIME Bush has an PR crisis there's suddenly a 'credible terror threat?' Of course the last 'credible threat" turned out to be a warning from a group that has claimed credit for everything but the cicada invasion. We say, save ink and combine the headlines: WHITE HOUSE DOWNPLAYS BUSH-LAY RELATIONSHIP BY WARNING OF CREDIBLE AL-QUEDA THREAT!

Stories are now emerging from Iraq about how private contractors, brought into Iraq by the US as "security personnel" are now kingpins in the Iraq blackmarket arms trade. The same thing has happened in Africa and elsewhere when mercenaries were brought in as "security." (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=536623) As this explosive story emerges, the Bush administration is pushing a smokescreen story: the danger of Saddam's "vast arsenal." We were told early in the war (when it was expedient to Bush PR-wise) that Saddam's weapons caches and citizen weaponry had been "secured." Remember all that NBC/FOX/CNN, et al footage of these "secured" caches? What amazes us is the "amnesia" of the alleged "journalists" who covered these stories - don't they REMEMBER these "little details?" Or do they just read whatever Bushscript is shoved in front of them on any given day?

This administration lies to the American public and manipulates news on an almost daily basis. When will the media ever hold them accountable?. VOA: "The U.S. Army is preparing to activate thousands of reserve troops for potential duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials say around 6,000 troops from the rarely-used Individual Ready Reserve will be informed of possible deployment. The troops would be used to help fill gaps in units serving in the two active U.S. combat areas. Violence in Iraq has forced the Pentagon to keep the troop level there at nearly 140,000, about 30,000 more than planned. The U.S. military has another 20,000 troops in Afghanistan."

First the Bush admin. reported HALF of the actual terrorists attacks. Next environmental groups reveal that the EPA's latest toxic release inventory has been manipulated to hide the actual rising levels of toxic pollution. Now we learn that that rosy projection of economic growth for the first quarter of 2004 was also fudged. BBC: "The US economy grew much slower than originally thought in the first quarter of 2004, a government report has shown. US GDP growth for the period from 1 January to 31 March has now been downgraded by the Commerce Department from an original 4.4% to 3.9%. This is below the 4.1% reported for the last quarter of 2004, and comes as a surprise for analysts who had expected the figure to remain at 4.4%. The downward revision in the economic growth figures was blamed on higher than previously estimated imports, and a reduction in the amount US consumers spent on bank services during the period. [Yeah, it's called having no money to spend]."

Bush is delusional enough to imagine that everyone in the US besides himself, Rummy and Cheney are slack-jawed idiots. Thus, he figures releasing a stack of cherry-picked pages from the White House files would somehow "vindicate" him of sanctioning, even endorsing systematic torture. But, reports the Guardian: "Instead, the administration yesterday stood accused of raising more questions than it laid to rest, with key Democratic figures and human rights activists noting that none of the documents specifically apply to treatment of detainees in Iraq. Questions were also raised on the role of George Bush after the release of a previously secret order he signed in February 2002. In the order, Mr Bush reserves the right to suspend the Geneva convention on treatment of detainees at any time. Patrick Leahy dismissed the release as a "self-serving selection" of documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," he said."

Reuters: "The Bush administration on Tuesday more than doubled its count of people killed and injured by international terrorism in 2003 as it revised a faulty report used to argue it was winning the war on terror. The administration said international terrorism killed 625 people last year, up from the 307 it reported on April 29 but below 2002's 725 fatalities. It found 3,646 were wounded last year, above the 1,593 initially cited and the 2,013 in 2002. The errors in the State Department's 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' report embarrassed the administration and dented its claim to be prevailing in the war on terrorism, a key part of Bush's re-election strategy. Colin Powell blamed 'computational and accounting errors.' " Yeah - the same "computational errors" used to massage unemployment statistics, war dead/wounded figures, and poll results.

Wile E. Coyote Putin has Bush just where he wants him - wasting US resources digging out of a quagmire in Iraq while he, Putin, triumphantly scoops up control of the region's resources. Putin helped achieve this by providing Bush with "inside info" that Saddam wanted to attack the US. Bush took the bait. But it's news to the State Dept., who say they knew of no such information from Russia. "State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters he did not know anything about the information that Putin said Russia passed on. No such information was communicated from Russia through the State Department, he said," Reuters reports. "Everybody's scratching their heads," another State Department official said." Everybody but Putin, that is. He's laughing all the way to the bank.

Denver activist Jason Salzman experienced pure exhilaration the night he got behind the wheel of a 1997 Ford Crown Victoria and drove around town pulling a 12-foot statue of President Bush with flames shooting out his trousers. You know, as in "Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .""There are so many people out there like me who feel so frustrated and so angry at President Bush," Salzman said Thursday. "It feels great to be out there doing something."..."More people cheer than give us the finger," Salzman said with a laugh. "...According to supporters, the aim of the vehicle is to make Americans aware that "George Bush has lied to us about many of the most important issues facing our country."

UK Independent: "George Bush, 1 May 2003: The liberation of Iraq removed... an ally of al-Qa'ida ; Cheney, 22 January 2004: There's overwhelming evidence... of a connection between al-Qa'ida and Iraq; Donald Rumsfeld, 14 November 2002: Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qa'ida ; Condoleezza Rice, 17 September 2003: Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged... The Bush administration's credibility was dealt a devastating blow yesterday when the commission investigating the attacks of 11 September said there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had assisted al-Qa'ida - something repeatedly suggested by the President and his senior officials and held up as a reason for the invasion of Iraq."

Bush is now claiming that Afghanistan should be a model of western-style democracy and reconstruction in the Middle East. He points especially to gains in the situation of women there. This false and self-serving claim proves just one thing: that Bush is an arrogant misogynist who does not give a damn about women - not here, most certainly not in Afghanistan. There has been very little change in the plight of Afghan women beyond a tiny highly publicized core in Kabul (the area under half-arsed media scrutiny). In fact, life for many women has worsened. When one compares the cowardice, weakness, and dishonest of Bush to the courage, strength, and outspoken honesty of Meena Nanji and other heroic Afghan women still struggling for basic human rights, as Americans, we should feel deep shame. If you want the truth about the plight of women in Afghanistan, here it is from a site by and for Afghan women. Main page: http://rawa.false.net/

The Bureau of Labor Statistics just released a report that shows that only 2% of the jobs lost in the first 3 months of 2004 were shipped overseas. While that figure may help Bush politically, it is misleading, says the San Francisco Chronicle. The report "only counts the jobs lost at companies with 50 or more employees, omitting those lost at a huge swath of small businesses. It is also silent on the fact that many new jobs, particularly those generated by Silicon Valley firms, are being created overseas at a much more rapid rate than those employers are adding positions in this country." Very interestingly, the areas where Bush policy has the greatest support lost the most jobs: " Midwest (34 percent), followed by the South (31 percent), the West (27 percent) and the Northeast (8 percent). "

When the news hit today that the Bush administration had completely fudged the terrorism statistics in its annual report, trying to make it look as if attacks had gone down last year, when in fact they had shot up, Bush media wonks like Andrea Mitchell blithered about how it was really just an accounting error - mistakes happen, you know. Yeah, right. Like we believe that. Nearly every Bush agency from the Pentagon (which keeps "reinventing" new ways to report soldier deaths in Iraq so they don't climb so fast) to the Labor Dept (which claims the job market is BOOMING, while the unemployment rate remains all but unchanged), have become hubs of corporate-style figure massage.

When it comes to understanding Americans, the only thing more clueless than the Bush administration is the corporate media. Check it out: (from the Pentapost): "The nation's economy is growing smartly, wages have begun to rise, and employers have added more than 1.4 million jobs to their payrolls in the past nine months. Yet voters continue to give Bush poor ratings on his handling of the economy It may sound baffling, but interviews with voters, pollsters and economists suggest Bush's stubborn difficulties on domestic policy boil down to an obvious problem abroad." Guess it must all be about Iraq, they muse. It couldn't POSSIBLY be that most of us have now caught on to the fact that the "good economic news" is all bogus - a "boom" of temporary, part time and service sector jobs, phony statistics, and smoke and mirrors.

The employment statistics just released by the Bush Labor Dept. don't add up - we mean they REALLY don't add up. While the media is touting "an end to the jobless recovery" brought by a seeming boom in the job market, this fails to match the facts: The jobless rate remains unchanged, at about 5.6%. New records were set in May for the number of people remaining unemployed for over a year. The average number of hours put in by working Americans is now 33.5 - not a fulltime paycheck. The number of jobless blacks rose from 9.7% to just under 10% in April, while the number of jobless whites rose from 4.9% to 5.0%. The rate of teen joblessness rose from 16.9% to 17.2%. The only gains (completely offset by the losses) were for women and Hispanics 0.2% for both groups). So tell us, Ms. Chao - what kind of deal have you worked out with corporations (pledges of temporary jobs, perhaps, that won't show up on paper when the workers are let go?) to pull this off?

When the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq hit 800, suddenly, the method for "death count bookkeeping" at the Pentagon - and reported by the media - changed. Now, mysteriously we see that the death count just reached "600." How can this be? Because now, to count as a "death," you have to die on the spot "in combat." That means that you don't count as officially "killed" if you step on a land mine and die a week later in agony in Germany. Pretty neat trick, eh? And just in time for Bush's "Grand Tour" of Europe to try to induce allies to send more warm bodies to Iraq. How stupid do he and his pals in the media think the public is?

The White House is doing what it always does whenever it is caught red-handed: Lie through their teeth - or through Scott McClellan's teeth, to be technically accurate. The Bush cartel has been cozy with Ahmad Chalabi for years. There is video of Chalabi sitting with the Bush family during last Jan's State of the Union speech. And Bush defended his golden boy against all criticisms back when he first picked Chalabi to be a big wheel in Iraq back in 2003. But now that the sh*t has hit the fan so what do we now hear from the White House? Chalabi? Oh, that guy - we hardly know him...and that State of the Union bit...er, that was sorta routine....

AP: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday blamed Washington for misinforming him about the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and denied lying to the public or misleading Parliament. Howard said U.S. Defense Department bureaucrats had failed to brief him on the abuse. 'I am very unhappy that I've been misinformed,' Howard said. Australia has 850 troops in and around Iraq, but none are implicated.' Until now, Howard has been a staunch Bush supporter. When questioned in Parliament about when Australian officials were first alerted to the allegations, Howard said he 'became aware of the scale of the alleged abuses ... at the time most other Australians did; sometime in April when the photographs emerged.' "

MSNBC: " In warning Americans to brace for a possible attack, Ashcroft cited what he called "credible intelligence from multiple sources," But terrorism experts [say the] claims actually were made by a largely discredited group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, known for putting propaganda on the Internet. "This particular group is not really taken seriously by Western intelligence," said terrorism expert M.J. Gohel of the Asia-Pacific Foundation. "It does not appear to have any real field operational capability." The group has claimed responsibility for the power blackout in the Northeast last year, a power outage in London and the Madrid bombing. None of the claims was found to be credible. "The only thing they haven't claimed credit for recently is the cicada invasion of Washington," said expert Roger Cressey, former chief of staff of the critical infrastructure protection board at the White House who served as deputy to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke."

After promising to support education and homeland security as a major part of his 2004 campaign, it turns out that Bush was secretly planning to slash those programs' funding in 2006 if reelected. The Pentapost reports: "Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout." Though officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy, a May 19 White House budget memo obtained leaked to the Post said agencies should assume that the cuts indicated in the printout will apply in 2006. A White House spokesman immediately began frantically spinning, claiming the memo is a routine "process document" to help agency officials begin establishing budget procedures for 2006. In no way should it be interpreted as a final policy decision, or even a planning document, he said." Yeah right!

The latest terrorist alert, coming just as Bush's poll numbers tank, economic indicators drop, and an Amnesty Int'l report condemns his war on terror, was oh-so-conveniently timed. So convenient as to be laughable. But what is far from funny is that through Bush's repeated misuse of terrorist warnings (they always seem to come when he has a PR problem), the public has become skeptical. Dem Dick Durbin of the Senate Intelligence Committee voiced what millions across the nation are now thinking: "We'll never know if the administration has new and justifiable information for this new warning." Harold Schaitberger, president of the firefighters' union, said "I do find it awfully convenient and suspicious that it happens to be tied in right behind the president's recent message to the nation as well as his troubling, plummeting poll numbers."" So the public, unable to tell when a warning is real and when it is merely another false Bush cry of "fire!" may pay the price.

Under Bush, National Parks have become more like corporate holdings than public lands. For example, millions have been spent on cell phone towers, while basic park needs go unmet. In a classic Bush coverup, the White House has ordered Park employees to lie to the public and direct all media reps to the Bush Parks PR mouthpiece in Washington. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility's Jeff Ruch says park leaders are ordered to "downplay negatives" because Bush made election-year promises to take good care of parks. "The Bush administration is trying to turn every national park into a local re-election campaign office," he said. An e-mail dated April 1 from a Park Service employee asked whether a directive went out to superintendents requiring all media to contact the agency's D.C. office when questions pertained to budgets. A second e-mail replied: "Yes. Interviews with media regarding budget are to be consistent with (Washington office) talking points."

FAIR reports: "While the press applies microscopic scrutiny to Kerry's statements, Bush's blatant lies - even those jeopardizing national security are ignored. On the record is a long list of press-ignored lies: Bush said Ken Lay supported Bush's opponent in his 1994 gubernatorial race, when Lay actually contributed three times as much to Bush; his insistence that the White House was not responsible for the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the U.S.S. Lincoln; his assertion in a 2000 debate that in his tax cut plan, "by far the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder," when the bottom 50%really got roughly 10% of the benefits; his boast that "I've been to war". And this doesn't even count his 2002-2004 lies -some of which caused the deaths of thousands of civilians and hundreds of US soldiers.

Guardian: "The US military admits that it probably killed 40 people at Mukaradeeb but says that none of them were civilians. So did the "foreign fighters" include the young girl, one of several children whose bodies were shown being buried on television? Or the Iraqi wedding singer and his musician brother, whose funeral in Baghdad was reported yesterday by Reuters? In Rafah, it is not believable that casualties on such a large scale - including some 50 injured as well as the dead - were caused by "warning shots" directed towards an unoccupied area (and since when are tanks used to fire such shots anyhow?). As it happens, we carried yesterday evidence of another earlier evasion - or lie - in Rafah: our correspondent was shown the bodies of four dead children, all with bullet wounds, whom the Israeli army claimed had been killed on Tuesday not by its snipers but by Palestinian bombs."

In a desperate bid to ram through his corporate-pandering, pollution-spewing, totally nonconstructive energy bill, Bush took the risk of lying on record today. He claimed to reporters that if his energy bill had been passed in 2001 that the US would now have the oil it needed, in large part because ANWR oil would be flowing. But "The best U.S. Geological Survey estimate is that less than a six-month supply of oil could be economically recovered from ANWR - about 3.2 billion barrels...- and that it would take at least 10 years of exploration, drilling and pipeline construction before the oil would reach refineries. In its peak year of production -- 2027 -- the Arctic refuge would yield less than 2 percent of projected U.S. consumption in that year."

The following statements by the grieving mother of a soldier killed in Iraq painfully illustrate how wantonly Bush has used his staunchest - and, alas, most poorly informed - supporters. "Someone has got to stop these terrorists... I believe al-Qaida was there in Iraq, and Saddam was letting them come in and out. I don't blame our government for Joel, I blame them. .We have to do what we're doing in Iraq. If Christ calls us home, no matter where we are in our lives, that is part of God's plan. God had other plans for Joel. He was a hero to me, but he would have been a hero to me even if he had stayed at home, drunk beer and gone stupid. Bush tells the truth. But if there are things that he doesn't tell us, it is for a good reason. I am content to trust him." This blind faith, built on Bush's self-serving calculated lies, misinformation, and manipulation of religion, makes a mockery of this poor woman and thousands like her, who have been willing to sacrifice all.

To protect itself, the Bush administration [and its media mouthpieces] are now rewriting the English dictionary, says Boston Globe reader Eric Verillo. Thus "Torture" is redefined as "abuse," "excesses," and "humiliation." Rape is "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner." Verillo offers Bush & Co. a refresher course in honest English: "Excesses that lead to death are 'murder.' The hundreds of women and children in mass graves in Fallujah are the product of a 'massacre.' Taken together, all of these add up to 'atrocities.' The dissemination of 'incomplete information' from 'imperfect intelligence' is called 'lies.' The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel have reaped in profits are called 'war profiteering.' The invasion of Iraq is called 'illegal.' The destruction of America's international standing is called 'permanent.' And Texaco/Phillips's high bid for Iraqi oil is called 'why we are in Iraq.'"

Any 12-stepper will tell you that three of the most common tactics used by unrecovered drunks and dry drunks to evade personal responsibility for outrageous behavior are: 1. Claim some other guy is worse, 2. Claim that if you expect better of them you're just expecting "perfection," and 3, never apologize. Bush proved his true stripes today by using all three ploys when he addressed Arab TV viewers: Hey, Saddam was worse! Whaddya want? Even democracies aren't perfect. Notable by its absence: an apology. And 43-47% of Americans continue to believe this is presidential material? Now THAT really is a sad commentary!

'Face the Nation' appears to be the current Sunday propaganda outlet of choice for the White House. On May 2, Richard Myers appeared in full uniform with so many ribbons on his jacket we wondered if he'd borrowed a few! Then Bush toadie Randy Cunningham debated Max Cleland over Vietnam as an issue in Campaign 2004. Cunningham spouted an astounding litany of lies and topped off his sideshow by claiming Bush knew what "real combat" was like because he lost a couple of pilot friends to Guard-duty crashes, including Dino Martin, Jr... First, Dino Martin Jr. died in 1987 - over 10 years after Bush was in the Guard. Second, we can find no evidence anywhere that Dino was a friend of Bush's - not even in Barb's bio. Third: why would Cunningham dare to compare hearing about a stateside peacetime accident with seeing your buddies blown to bits before your eyes in the Mekong Delta? Can you spell D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N?

Talk about a nudge from the past! It was the last days of April in 1973 when Nixon, guilty as hell, vowed that he had no involvement in Watergate and that he would cooperate fully with the investigation into the matter. Now, 31 years later as April comes to a close, G. W. Bush is vowing he is innocent of any responsibility for 9/11 and swears he is cooperating fully with the investigation. Let's hope that the deja vu continues and that he will be forced to resign!

When the pro-Bush media thinks the White House has gone too far, you KNOW it's gotta be bad! Here are some sample "reviews" of the latest Bush campaign ads that make wild accusations against Kerry: : NY Times: "Commercial's Assertion is Misleading"; Washington Post: "Bush Ads Fall Short of "Minimum Level of Honesty"; Newsweek: "Bush Uses a made up number." ; Scripps: "Bush Ads Descend Into "Liar's Poker" "Making Charges That Were Unproven by the Facts", columnist Michael Kinsley: "Unfair", "Ridiculous" & "Phony"; Factcheck.org: "simply false."Slate: Bush Ad is Misleading "At the Very Least". Other news sources that call Bush claims into question include ABC, NBC, LA Times, MSNBC, and CNN.

No wonder Bush has failed to hold Saudi Arabia to the same standard he applies to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or other nations. No wonder he urged John O'Neill to back off his hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the summer of 2001 as a favor to the Saudi Bin Laden family. Seems like Bush has a lot to personally gain by pandering to the Saudis. Like manipulating gas prices to maximum political effect. Bob Woodward told 60 Minutes that "Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, promised Bush the Saudis would cut oil prices before November to ensure that the U.S. economy is strong on Election Day... Woodward said the prince pledged the Saudis would try to fine-tune oil prices to prime the U.S. economy for the election, a move they think would help Bush be re-elected." This isn't just unethical - it is fraud on a massive scale.

We predicted a few weeks back that Bush's insistence on a June 30 Iraq power transfer was a phony show - that he has no intention of transferring power then. Now Paul Bremer has released statements saying that Iraq will not be ready for the transfer on June 30. Is this the classic good cop/bad cop ruse? Bush, as the "good cop" promises to transfer power (while not really intending to), while Bremer the "bad cop" comes forward to squelch that idea? Says Bremer: "It is clear that Iraqi forces will not be able, on their own, to deal with these threats by June 30 when an Iraqi government assumes sovereignty. Instead, Iraq and troops from many countries, including the United States will be partners in providing the security Iraqis need." So Bush achieves what he wants - continued power in Iraq while appearing to have supported meeting the original commitment.

Scott Lehigh describes how Bush used his opening statement at the April 13 press conference to, once again, fraudulently - but oh so slickly - imply that Iraq was somehow linked to Sept. 11. "Referring to the roadside bombings and hostage takings in Iraq, the president said: 'We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on Sept. 11, 2001.'Although that sentence doesn't make a direct assertion, it certainly seems to imply, wrongly, past Iraqi complicity in the best-known instances of anti-US terrorism outside Iraq, and particularly in Al Qaeda's Sept. 11 attack. That even though, as the president conceded last year, the administration has no evidence Iraq was involved in Sept. 11." Oily, eh?

Yep, them thar tax refunds are gonna pull our economy right up by its bootstraps...NOT! USA Today reports Through April 9, the average refund was up [by] $102, an increase of about 5% from refunds during the same period last year, the IRS says. Economists and tax analysts had earlier predicted the Bush administration's $350 billion tax-cut package would boost refunds by more than 25%. The administration estimated the average refund would increase $300." What follows is a long litany of excuses for the discrepancy. Our theory is that Bush inflated the predicted figures to sell his tax plan, just as he knowingly "deflated" the cost of "Medicare Reform" by billions to sell that scheme.

One of the biggest sales pitches Bush and Ashcroft had for the Patriot Acts is the need to reform intelligence gathering systems. But now it seems the Patriot Act WAS, as critics have always warned, designed mostly to suppress citizen dissent. The proof: (David Johnson writes): "Bush said [on 4/12] that 'now may be a time to revamp and reform our intelligence services,' opening the way for consideration of changes at the CIA, FBI and other agencies." As it turns out, Bush "has not acted on a number of far-reaching proposals to reorganize the government's intelligence organizations, including recommendations made last year by a congressional inquiry into the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other independent intelligence panels."

Leaked details of the August 6 memo and statements from at least one government official present at the Aug 6 briefing when the memo was presented, reveal Condi Rice and her boss as inconscionable liars. BBC: "In her testimony, Ms Rice said the briefing referred to uncorroborated reports from 1998 that a terrorist might try to hijack a plane but did not raise the possibility that airplanes might be used as missiles." However, the memo "made it clear that it was in the 2001 time frame and that the FBI and other intelligence agencies were investigating the reports. The New York Times also quotes a government official who says that Bush was told in the briefing that al-Qaeda supporters were plotting an attack in the US and wanted to hijack airplanes." This means that when Bush told Condi her testimony was great, he did so knowing she lied. In short, the entire administration should be impeached, starting with Condi, and culminating with Bush and Cheney.

As you read this speech, have your barf bag handy. An obviously desperate Bush has thrown every lie, phony promise and pathetic excuse he has in his bag of tricks into this one. Did you know that the economy is going great? That the only trouble with the American worker is that they aren't productive enough? That outsourcing jobs insures EXPORTS? (of what? - jobs?).That the war caused of the recession, not Bush policies? That pro-corporate tort reform will create jobs? That the tax cut has saved the economy? That 308,000 NEW jobs were created in March (nearly 100,000 were workers returning from a strike or back to work after bad weather)? That the demand for high tech skills will create new jobs for AMERCIANS (more than half of all hi-tech jobs are going to India). That the Bush energy policy will solve all America's problems, from health care to jobs?....got that bag ready?

KGW.com: "National Guardsmen returning from Iraq are finding that the funds promised them for tuition reimbursement are in short supply. The federal program that is supposed to defray up to 75% of their college expenses is short of funds, and until recently had no new funds in sight... New enlistees are still being promised this benefit when they sign up. 'This could not have happened at a more critical juncture,' wrote Brig. General Raymond C. Byrne Jr. on 3/22. Col. Cameron Crawford said that if the shortfall in the tuition program goes unfixed, it could impact the Guard's ability to retain experienced troops. 'It's fair to say that we have a grave concern that many of our folks will choose not to re-enlist. Long term, that's not healthy. These are the people we want to re-enlist, because they have the most experience and training,' Crawford said. 'It just affects our overall ability to stay viable. By not keeping this promise to our soldiers, it sends a real negative message.'"

Just when you thought Bush manipulations of economic indicators couldn't get any more outrageous...they do! We are all supposed to click our heels at the latest "job growth" of 308,000 jobs when a high number of these "new jobs" are not, in fact NEW jobs. Counted as new jobs are tens of thousands of grocery workers returning after being on strike, along with over 50,000 construction workers who were forced to wait out bad weather through February. In addition, you will notice that this corporate news release waits until near the end of the article to add that virtually none of the "new jobs" were in manufacturing. Nope, most of these "great new jobs" were in retail - i.e., mostly sub-living wage, sub-full-time, no-benefits store clerk positions.

Bush intentionally drove gas prices up in the runup to a renewed effort to push through his corporate-crafted "Energy Bill." He did it by allowing oil companies to reduce refinery production and by drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserves when crude prices were low, then making a big push to refill it when prices started to move up. By removing 150,000 barrels a day at a time when he should be releasing oil (see http://people.howstuffworks.com/question478.htm for how the SPR is supposed to work), he is creating an artificial shortage, which of course keeps prices up. Now we get the punch line: This week, Bush says the reason for high gas prices is Congress's failure to pass his energy bill! A bill that benefits no one but the fossil fuel and nuke industries. Just how stupid does he think Americans are?

Being a pack of corporate sharks, this administration does NOTHING without an ulterior, self-serving motive. It's an ironclad rule of thumb. The 9/11 commission flap is no different. After allowing the controversy over Rice's failure to testify to the 9/11 commission to hit the red zone, Bush does an about face and says Condi can testify...BUT only on certain extortionary conditions: that the commission will not try to get any more public testimony from the White House and that Cheney and Bush will meet only once and behind closed doors with the commission. This was, of course, just what Bush wanted all along - he simply used Rice as a poker chip to get it. A sadly willing and somewhat pathetic poker chip, we might add. In short, the commission, and the American public, have, once again, been "had."

The Independent: "The mobile labs, since exposed by weapons inspectors as hydrogen production facilities at best and phantoms at worst, were one of the centrepieces of Colin Powell's prewar address to the United Nations. As recently as January, Dick Cheney maintained that discovery of the labs would provide 'conclusive' proof that Iraq possessed WMD. A detailed investigation in the Los Angeles Times revealed that the source claiming to have seen mobile bioweapons labs was the brother of one of the senior aides to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who recently boasted how the erroneous information provided by his group achieved his long-cherished goal of toppling Saddam. The source, given the unintentionally appropriate code name Curveball, was an asset of German intelligence and was never directly interviewed by US officials. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency do not even know exactly who he is, the LA Times reported."

From April-early Sept. in 2001, the White House received repeated warnings from a wide variety of reliable intelligences sources, including Israel, Russia, France, and Germany, that an attack against the US could be imminent and that the attack could involve planes used as weapons targeting major US landmarks. Yet on March 25, 2004, Bush stood before an audience, cameras and tape recorders rolling, and stated that he had had NO ADVANCE WARNING of an attack, and had no idea airplanes might be used. This is either colossal stupidity - or the sociopathical arrogance of someone confident he is above the law. (for more details on pre-9/11 warnings see http://www.newsinsider.org/seal/smoking_gun.html

In an interview with Lisa Myers of NBC this week, Condi Rice went on record with an easily provable lie. She claims one reason Osama Bin Laden wasn't taken out in the summer or early autumn of 2001 before the 9/11 disaster is because the armed Predator surveillance craft - which had had OBL in its sights - was not operational. But according to several sources, this is a lie. The "Washington Post" reported: "On September 15, 2001, CIA Director Tenet tells Bush, 'The unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft that was now armed with Hellfire missiles had been operating for more than a year out of Uzbekistan to provide real-time video of Afghanistan.'" See also http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/popups/0008.html

The Pew Center reports, via CounterSpin: "When the pollsters asked people for a one-word description of Bush, equal shares gave positive and negative responses, a stark shift from last May, when positive answers outnumbered negative ones 2-to-1. The most frequently used negative word this time was 'liar,' which never came up last May. The most frequently used positive description this time was 'honest,' the same as last May." Meme of the Year -- George AWOL Bush is a LIAR, who cannot be trusted. Pass it on!

A group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, have issued a report detailing how the Bush regime has systematically censored or distorted scientific findings to justify its policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weapons. Do you ever wonder whether the real ambition of Bush and his cronies isn't to grab all the goodies for themselves -- it's to destroy everything that's good?

In the Wisconsin debate, Lester Holt asked Sharpton: "Do you think that the president knowingly lied, and if so, why?" "Clearly, he lied. Now if he is an unconscious liar, and doesn't realize when he's lying, then we're really in trouble. (LAUGHTER) Because, absolutely, it was a lie. They said they knew the weapons were there. He had members of the administration say they knew where the weapons were. So we're not just talking about something passing here. We're talking about 500 lives. We're talking about billions of dollars. So I hope he knew he was lying, because if he didn't, and just went in some kind of crazy, psychological breakdown, then we are really in trouble. Clearly, you know, I'm a minister. Why do people lie? Because they're liars. He lied in Florida he's lied several times. I believe he lied in Iraq... Why he lied? I think we should give him the rest of his retirement to figure that out and explain to us. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)" You GO, Al!

New York Times reports: "Bush was probably wrong when he asserted in his 2002 State of the Union address that American forces routing guerrillas of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had found designs for nuclear power plants, one of the three members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said. The commissioner, Edward McGaffigan Jr., who was appointed to the N.R.C. by President Bill Clinton in 1996, said in interviews last week that he and other members of the commission had scratched their heads when they heard the speech The president was 'poorly served by a speechwriter,' Mr. McGaffigan said. In the 2002 speech, Mr. Bush said of Qaeda terrorists: 'The depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world."

From Democracy Now: "Bush claimed in his 2002 State of the Union address that the U.S. discovered in Afghanistan detailed plans of U.S. nuclear plants. The Bush administration was forced to admit this week that the claim was not based on factual evidence after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said there was no evidence any such plans were found in Afghanistan. The Bush administration has been forced this week to admit that one of the most explosive claims of President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address was not based on factual evidence. Bush claimed that the U.S. has discovered in Afghanistan detailed plans of U.S. nuclear plants. On Monday night the White House told the Wall Street Journal that Bush's statement admitted no such plans had ever been found."

The Bush regime has launched an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality: the National Bureau of Economic Research. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers has "reinterpreted" the data provided by the NEBR to declare that the 2001 recession really began in the final quarter of 2000 -- yes, of course, during the Clinton Administration. And of course, Bush is doing this to evade responsibility for the devastating effects of his economic policies.

Josh Marshall writes: "Put simply, a majority of Americans now believe that the president bamboozled them on Iraq... Only 52% [in the ABC/Post poll] find the president 'honest and trustworthy'. For Bush, that means big trouble. Every president has characteristic strengths and weaknesses. By the end of his term of office, Bill Clinton's reputation as a truth-teller was in tatters. But that was never his strong suit with voters anyway. The measure of his enduring strength with voters is best gauged in a question pollsters usually frame as 'does candidate X care about/understand problems that affect people like you.' Clinton always did very well on that question... People never warmed to Bush as a literary critic or a raconteur. And he's usually done okay, but not great, on the 'care about/understand' question. His strong suit has always been honesty and trusthworthiness -- that and the closely related quality of 'leadership'. If he loses that, politically speaking, he's finished."

The Center for American Progress analyzes the 2004 State of the Union address, assertion by assertion. It should surprise no one that the address was one lie after another, easily refuted by Bush's own record.

From the Daily Mislead: "As part of his new proposal, Bush said last night 'I propose increasing our support for America's fine community colleges.' Last year, however, the president sought to cut $230 million out of vocational/community college education, along with 'eliminating funding for technical education.' When lawmakers tried to restore the cuts in April, Bush was adamant that the cuts be preserved, and his allies in the Senate voted down the funding. The president also recently eliminated all $225 million in funding for youth job training grants. The other key piece of Bush's proposal involves college funding. The president said last night, 'I propose larger Pell grants for students.' But he did not mention his recent decision to 'cut the Pell Grant program by $270 million'-- a move his own Education Department admits will cut off 84,000 students, and reduce grants for 'an additional one million students.'"

William Rivers Pitt writes: "It took a little less than a half hour for George W. Bush to taint the 215th State of the Union address with a bald-faced lie about Iraq. It was, in the end, merely an accent in the symphony. The nonsense began in this order: The economy is growing stronger. The tax cuts are working. Public schools are flourishing. The Patriot Act is excellent. Everything is rosy in Afghanistan. The people of Iraq are free. Throughout the vacuous peroration were more shooting-fish-in-a-barrel applause lines than has ever been heard in any major speech in American history.... The Iraq lie came when Bush claimed that David Kay's weapons inspection teams had found materials and equipment to construct weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In point of fact, Kay and his people found no such thing, just as the denigrated UNMOVIC inspectors likewise found no such thing."

Paul Krugman writes "The Price of Loyalty" "portrays an administration in which political considerations - satisfying 'the base' - trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter.' But there are many other revelations. One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses... Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that 'the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum,' knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only 'top-rate people,' asking his advisers, 'Didn't we already give them a break at the top?' Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East... in February 2001."

"Every time that we hear
our soldiers have died
We recall all the times
that the Bush Machine lied

"U-ra-ni-um
and WMDs
The Bushmen were told
there really were none of these"

Read the rest of Connie Cook Smith's satire.

"Bush press conferences - like Vice President Cheney sightings - are few and far between. Nearly three years into his term, the president seems to have perfected his down home, folksy-style shtick with reporters - and he's used it to sneak some misleading comments onto the record. Let's take a quick look at some of the president's most egregious falsehoods from yesterday" such as his "plan that will shrink the deficit in half in a five-year period". And his claim that "non-military, non-homeland security discretionary" fell from 15% in FY 2001 to "6%, 5%, and 3%" in FY 2002-2004. And his claim that "David Kay has reported back that he had weapons programs that would have put him in material breach of [UN resolution 1441]."

Bush's "budget moving through Congress 'calls for the elimination of the Hope VI program' despite Bush staging photo-ops at Hope VI housing projects to tout them. Bush's budget also proposes to not fully fund all Section 8 vouchers currently in use. Additionally, just this year, the Administration orchestrated the one-vote defeat of the National Housing Trust Fund, a bill that 'would have provided several billions of dollars a year for the creation of housing for extremely low income families.' Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) notes ' all told, the Administration has proposed nearly $2.5 billion of cuts in public housing over the past 3 years,' including terminating the Drug Elimination Grant Program, and slashing public housing construction funds, and the Rural Housing and Economic Development program." [Meanwhile] 66,000 recipients across the country could lose their rent subsidies in November, forcing them to move in with friends, rent substandard housing or face homelessness."

"The White House on Wednesday changed its account of a widely reported encounter between Air Force One and a British Airways jetliner during Bush's secret trip to Baghdad last week. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, told reporters the British Airways pilot had spotted [Air Force One] and radioed its pilot. But on Wed. Scott McClellan said the conversation took place between the BA pilot and the London control tower, and had been overheard on Air Force One. In Bartlett's original version, the BA pilot had radioed the [Bush] plane, asking: 'Did I just see Air Force One?' Mr Bartlett said Air Force One's pilot radioed back, 'Gulfstream 5', a smaller jet that would be all but impossible to mistake for a B-747. After a longer pause, the British Airways pilot responded: 'Oh.' BA, which denied that one of its planes had contacted Air Force One, said it could not confirm the new account." Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave...

Raff Ellis writes: "When Italy invaded the Sudan it had nothing to do with jealousy of the Sudanese polity. They simply wanted a share of colonial Africa, like the other Europeans had taken before them. When Germany invaded France it was not because it hated the freedoms that the French enjoyed, but because it was anxious for the domination of Europe. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, not because they resented American democracy, which they in fact despised as being weak and inferior, but because they were bent upon military conquest. As the above examples indicate, there seems to be no historical precedence to show that a nation was attacked because its attacker was envious of its form of government, except of course on September 11. Isn't it a joke, actually, to think that the WTC was attacked by a small group of people covetous of our way of life?"

Bush toady Kenneth Brill in Iran said on Friday there was "no rational basis" to assume Iran was not still deceiving the body about the full extent of its atomic program. Says Reuters: "Brill also criticized the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) [a agency KNOWN to be honest] for stating in a recent report on Iran's nuclear program that there was 'no evidence' Iran had a secret weapons program, as Washington alleges." So let's get this straight...the Bush administration - proven to be liars -- says there is no reason to believe Iran not lying about nukes. So how does that work out? If a known liar (Bush) says another liar is lying, which liar should we believe? Sounds like a Monty Python skit!

The Left Coaster blogs: "Bush's address before the National Endowment of Democracy is an insult to all Americans. He speaks of liberty, freedom and democracy while he and his minions are doing everything they can to destroy the democracy he swore to protect and defend. ... In Bush's America, democracy is something we impose on others whether they ask for it or not just as long as they vote the way Bush wants. Liberty is something that has to take a back seat when we are at war (in a war that will never end). And freedom is another word for nothing left to lose, except the democracy we once treasured and that Bush swore to uphold." The National Endowment for Democracy is a shadow operation of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. The NED has been involved in criminal operations such as Iran-Contra.

"'The intelligence process is a bit like virginity,' says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. 'Once you prostitute it, it's never the same. Your credibility never recovers. 'Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past several months has been like watching your daughter being raped.'... 'Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything.' It will, Mr McGovern believes, take a change of president and a change of CIA director to even begin to repair the damage done by what he sees as an overt politicisation of the intelligence business. But even that may not be enough. 'Unless what has happened in the past year and a half is recognised as a scandal, in which the CIA has been badly abused, then there's no hope,' he said."

Three years after STEALING the White House... Two years after shredding the Constitution with the USA Patriot Act... One year after lying to the American people and the world to justify an illegal conquest of a sovereign nation... Dictator Bush gave a major speech ordering other dictators to become democratic. Hey George, democracy begins at HOME. Start by admitting you STOLE the election, that you SHREDDED the Constitution, that you LIED to the WORLD - and then RESIGN!

Poor Maureen Dowd. She wants to call Bush a LIAR in the worst way, but the Bush embeds at the NY Times forbid it. Instead, MoDo is forced to perform literary contortions to obliquely make her point. "An information scam is good enough for George Bush's franchise... Bush is still manipulating reality... Those who go for the big con, who audaciously paint false pictures, think everyone else is stupid. They want to promote themselves based on the gullibility of others. For [PentaPost fabulist Janet] Cooke, [TNR fabulist] Glass and [NYT fabulist Jayson] Blair, their editors were the marks. But at least that unholy trio only soiled newsprint. For the Bush crowd, the American people were the marks." C'mon MoDo, show some guts and tell the truth - Bush Lies... every single day... about everything. Email dowd@nytimes.com

David Corn writes, "Can Cheney (and Bush) dodge responsibility for making exaggerated statements, if not outright lies? Cheney's office refused to respond to queries from Gellman. And the Post piece did not trigger any fuss. The news that Monica Lewinsky's semen-stained blue dress actually did exist had more pick-up than Gellman's scoop. While that one State of the Union sentence regarding Iraq's purported uranium shopping in Africa stirred a full-scale controversy in June and July, this more damning disclosure has yet yielded no repercussions. Cheney and Bush have not had to answer for their hyperbolic and designed-to-frighten prewar claims about Iraq's (practically non-existent) nuclear weapons program." Outrage must begin somewhere - when will the editorial pages of the NY Times, PentaPost, and LA Times start forcefully denouncing Bush's Lies?

Bush insisted the "Mission Accomplished" banner was NOT the work of "some ingenious advance man." Another Bush Lie! "First among equals is Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer who was hired by the Bush campaign and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Mr. Sforza created the White House 'message of the day' backdrops and helped design the $250,000 set at the Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war. Mr. Sforza works closely with Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman [who] is considered a master at lighting... A third crucial player is Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance. Mr. Jenkins manages the small army of staff members and volunteers who move days ahead of Mr. Bush and his entourage to set up the staging of all White House events. 'We pay particular attention to not only what the resident says but what the American people see,' Mr. Bartlett said."

"Bush unveiled his new fall line of spin tactics yesterday, designed to hide the truth from what promises to be an ugly winter for his administration. Check out his latest assessment of the escalating violence in Iraq. 'The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react... the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society.' So rest easy Wolfowitz, the rocket attack that nearly claimed your life earlier this week was a sign of progress! How comforting it must be to witness first-hand the successes of your post-war rebuilding plans. Scott McClellan echoed the resident's comments: 'Our military leaders have said that some of these attacks have become more sophisticated, but what you're really seeing is that the more progress we make, the more desperate these killers become.'"

John Dean writes, "David Corn, has written a powerful - not to mention disquieting - 324-page polemic addressing the pervasive mendacity of George W. Bush's administration. It is entitled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Actually, calling the book a polemic is misleading. It may be more accurate to call it a bill of particulars - the document that provides the specific charges underlying an indictment. In this case, the charges are highly credible. Corn is an experienced and respected Washington journalist. His evidence is overwhelming, his tone is measured, and his book a jaw dropper. This devastating work is not a laundry list of false statements; rather, it is the chronology of a residency. Corn found that 'lies, in part, made this resident, and lies frequently have been the support beams of his administration.' In sum, Corn has done for George Bush what Ken Starr did for Bill Clinton: provided evidence that places his residency in jeopardy."

While ex-CIA agent Ray McGovern was outraged that Bill Clinton lied under oath, he believes the scale of the Bush administration's deceit, which involved war and death, is in another realm altogether. "It's the first time that I've seen such a long-term, orchestrated plan of deception by which one branch of our government deliberately misled the other on a matter of war and peace. Here was a very calculated plan, proceeding from a 'Mein Kampf' type of document... The first objective was to deceive Congress into approving the plans. They succeeded masterfully. They had their war, and they thought that in the wake of the war, with Iraqis opening their arms to us, no one would really care whether there were, in fact, weapons of mass destruction. They were absolutely wrong on that. People do care, as one by one our servicemen and women are killed in a war fought on false pretences."

"Ellsberg doesn't shy away from unflattering portrayals of the Bush administration, saying that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to nat'l security; that oil interests drive US foreign policy; that the administration may be planning new offensives to achieve imperialistic goals; that Bush himself likely was a party in the Wilson scandal; and that even now White House staffers are likely busy covering up evidence of lies. People have 'a tremendous tendency to want to believe the President, because otherwise we're in deep danger. Well, we are in deep danger,' Ellsberg said. 'Could Bush possibly think of allowing an attack to a place that could kill Americans? I worked for a president, Lyndon Johnson, who consciously put destroyers in harm's way to get us into war... I can't say that Bush is not capable of doing what Lyndon Johnson was capable of doing." Ellsberg has criticized the foreign policy of several administrations, both Democrat and Republican. This one, he says, is the worst."

In a quick visit to the Philippines, "Bush told the Congress of this former American colony on Saturday that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy... While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Bush used the visit here to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades... Bush said the United States had 'liberated the Philippines from colonial rule,' using the same verb he often uses to describe American action in Iraq, but he skipped past Washington's own 48-year-long occupation of this archipelago of 7,000 islands." Perhaps we should just be grateful Bush didn't call the people "Pineapples".

Byrd: "I shall close my remarks with a horror story, in the form of a quote from the book Nuremberg Diaries, written by G.M. Gilbert, in which the author interviews Hermann Goering... [Goering:] 'But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.' 'There is one difference,' I pointed out. 'In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.' 'Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.'"

Sen. Robert Byrd declared, "The time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end. Mr. President, the Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. $87 billion is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods. Mr. President, taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this Administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods. The President asks for billions from those same citizens who know that they were misled about the need to go to war." You GO, Robert!

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) declared, "The Bush Administration's Iraq policy has been grounded in secrecy, deceit, and politics. Some suspected that a year ago; I refused to believe it. But now it is inescapable. The intolerable reality is that they blatantly twisted intelligence information to fit preconceived policies. They LIED to promote public relations-from the Jessica Lynch ordeal to the Resident's campaign landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln-and about what the war would cost our country. And through all of it, they have refused to answer questions, provide honest information, or accept any oversight or accountability for their actions. It is an abysmal-and at times inexcusable-record. I voted for the Iraq Resolution last year. I relied on the Resident's representations about the imminent threat Iraq posed to the US... I won't make that same mistake again. They have squandered their credibility and the normal deference we give to any Administration, Republican or Democratic."

"Three top House Democrats yesterday requested internal administration e-mails and other communications related to [an] ... (EPA) ad campaign to educate Hispanics on key White House environmental policies. Reps. Henry Waxman (Calif.), John Dingell (Mich.) and David Obey (Wis.) said in a letter to acting EPA chief Marianne Horinko the campaign constitutes an 'inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars,' may violate federal laws and should be discontinued until the lawmakers have a chance to review it. Government agencies are prohibited from spending appropriations for 'publicity or propaganda purposes' to support or defeat legislation before Congress, the members said. [They] called the ad campaign -- now slated to run through the end of October -- unprecedented and said they were aware of no other effort 'designed to favorably influence how millions of individuals view a pending legislative proposal.'" First the Busheviks pressured the EPA to lie about the Ground Zero fallout -- now this!

Paul Sperry of the right-wing WorldNetDaily writes, "A smoking gun found now wouldn't even undo the lies. It wouldn't negate the fact that the resident had no such evidence before the war when he claimed Saddam and Osama were thick as thieves, contradicting the intelligence community's threat assessment. He simply turned around and told the public a whopper... It was the height of irresponsibility to have done so in the middle of a war on al-Qaida, the real and proven threat to America. Bush diverted those troops and other resources -- including intelligence assets, Arabic translators and hundreds of billions of tax dollars -- from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani border. And now they've regrouped and are as threatening as ever. That's inexcusable, and Bush supporters with any intellectual honesty and concern for their own families' safety should be mad as hell about it -- and that's coming from someone who voted for Bush."

Book publishers have "suddenly" discovered that the truth does sell, especially if the truth is that the Busheviks are big fat liars. The success of such best sellers as Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them" and Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" is encouraging publishers to buy more of the same.

Jimmy Breslin writes, "Bush lied to you. Not misstatements. Lies. He and his people threw away their honor and consciences to lie to the people they had sworn to protect. The lies of Washington put young men from Seymour, Tenn., and Maspeth, Queens and Palos Hills, Ill., into boxes. And that, dear reader, is quite a lie. At the start, Bush claimed that Iraq had poison gas and was making nuclear weapons. Soon, they will poison us all and blow us up. His proof was documents forged by elementary-school pupils. Still, Bush used it in his State of the Union speech... Look now at the lie that George Bush carries into the United Nations today: We went into Iraq because they were part of the World Trade Center attack. That's what they told you, and Americans, who honor their government, believed what their government told them. And so did all those young people as they were about to put up their lives in the desert."

"This website was created as a pet project to better understand the workings of the Bush administration. It is a sister site to eRiposte. In this site, the remarkable rise of George W. Bush to the office of Resident of the United States, and his singular tenure as Resident are captured broadly. In keeping with the President's acclaimed interest in education, key aspects of his character and Presidency are examined and documented as hypothetical coursework at the University of Compassionate Conservatism1. The Bush administration is one that I believe is likely to fascinate 'revisionist historians' over time. It is also one whose political brilliance cannot be understated. By exploiting the environment subsequent to 9/11 - one in which the American media largely absconded from its true responsibility as the fourth estate for an extended period of time - the administration has created an interesting trench in the ocean of American and world history."

Jon Prestage writes: "What happened, in part, was that the administration succeeded in creating a sense that there was some connection between Hussein and 9/11. It did this without ever really saying so. What also happened is the mainstream news media failed the American people and, instead, served the interests of the Bush administration. Linda Feldman, a Christian Science Monitor reporter put her finger on a piece of the puzzle in a March 14 story. This was before the war. Referring to Bush's prime-time press conference the previous week, which focused on Iraq, she said the president [sic] mentioned 9/11 eight times. Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president, she said, Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks.'"

From Tom Tomorrow's blog: "NOW: ...President Bush said Wednesday... "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." THEN: Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate; March 18, 2003; Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:) Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:.. (2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 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. Sincerely, GEORGE W. BUSH (Emphasis added)"

"Bush said Wednesday that there was no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq... The resident's comment was the administration's firmest assertion that there was no proven link between Saddam and Sept. 11. It came after Vice President Dick Cheney clouded the issue Sunday by saying, 'It's not surprising people make that connection.' Speaking on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Cheney also repeated an allegation, doubted by many in the intelligence community, that Mohamed Atta, the lead Sept. 11 attacker, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in the Czech Republic five months before Sept. 11, 2001... Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday, 'I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that.'" The Bush gang lied and misled the public into War -- Impeach Bush Now!

The Guardian (UK) reports: "Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said Tuesday he had no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld was asked about a poll that indicated nearly 70% of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved. 'I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that,' Rumsfeld said. He added: '...[W]e know of various other activities. But on that specific one, no, not to my knowledge.' The Bush administration has asserted that Saddam's government had links to al-Qaida. And in various public statements over the past year or so administration officials have suggested close links. Vice Resident Cheney said on Sunday, for example, that success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the 'the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.'"

"The Resident says things that are misleading or just plain wrong every day, but most of these statements are never challenged. That's why we're launching Misleader.org, a new website and free daily email service for journalists and the general public to track George Bush's false statements. The daily dispatches will take a 'Just the Facts, Ma'am' approach -- no rhetoric, just a couple of paragraphs we'll email each morning on what the Resident said and why it was misleading or untrue. It's our hope that by doing some of the research for the press corps, we can ensure better coverage of Resident Bush's lies. To launch the site, we've taken out a full page ad in the New York Times titled 'Mis-State of the Union.' The ad reveals how the Resident mislead the nation in his State of the Union speech -- not just on Iraq, but on the economy, the environment, and other important issues. You can check the ad out at: http://www.misleader.org/pdf/nyt_ad.pdf"

Matthew Riemer writes for PINR: "A poll conducted in early August by the Washington Post revealed that 68 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein played a role in the September 11 attacks despite a continuing lack of evidence of such direct involvement or of even a vaguer relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. Such a discrepancy between available facts, evidence and public perception should elicit at least mild interest from those concerned with the continued functioning of a well-oiled, self critical democracy based upon an informed citizenry in the United States."

From Salon's interview with conservative CNN host Tucker Carlson: "SALON: [Y]our profile of Bush in Talk in 1999 had to be the most damaging profile of him yet written-swearing like a truck driver... [What was] the response from team Bush? CARLSON: It was very, very hostile. The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with. Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. So I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard-that I watched her hear-she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."

A Buzzflash Guest Contribution: "George Bush's tax breaks did not create 1.5 million jobs. The Bush tax breaks have created the worst deficits in history, and still America has lost more than 3.2 million jobs [Bureau of Labor Statistics, 9/03] since he took office. Bush has the worst economic record of any p/resident since World War II. The unemployment rate has gone up 50% -- from 4% to 6.1% in less than three years. Bush economics have not resulted in the net creation of a single job... To sell the tax breaks; Bush made specific promises of jobs growth. According to the White House's own estimates - Bush has fallen 437,000 jobs short of that promise for August alone [see www.JobWatch.org for Economic Policy Institute Analysis]. So to mislead people, Bush now says that the has avoided the loss of more jobs according to a report that the Treasury department says is 'unavailable.'"

Molly Ivins has compiled a list of the lies Bush, Cheney and their Busheviks told us to justify invading Iraq, and their subsequent attempts to deny they ever said any such things. In a just world, this column could be submitted as evidence in Bush's impeachment trial.

On 8-25-03, the Bushevik answer to Iraq terror was to rewrite the history of US occupation of Germany. Condi declared, "SS officers called 'werewolves' engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants." Rumy said the werewolves "plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques." But once again, "The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts... There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting... The total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases was zero." Stop the lies - Impeach Bush Now!

A nominating committee of noted journalists and pundits were asked to scan past serious fibs, deceptions, and untruths spoken by each of the four most recent presidents. The top six lies for each was chosen, then rated on a scale of 1 to 5. The scores were then averaged. Guess who came up the biggest liar of them all? What a surprise: G. W. Bush!

"Giving civilian federal workers a pay raise of more than 2 percent next year would jeopardize the war on terrorism, Resident Bush said Wednesday. In a letter to congressional leaders, Bush reiterated his support for giving the nation's 1.8 million federal workers the 2 percent raise he outlined in his 2004 budget proposal. A House appropriations subcommittee has included a 4.1 percent raise in its version of the legislation. Military pay is not affected. 'Such cost increases would threaten our efforts against terrorism or force deep cuts in discretionary spending or federal employment to stay within budget,' Bush wrote.... 'Full statutory civilian pay increases costing 13 percent of (the) payroll in 2004 would interfere with our nation's ability to pursue the war on terrorism,' he said." Gee George, you don't suppose that your massive, trillion-dollar plus tax giveaways to the Rich and your unnecessary, unjustified war took money for National Security out of the budget?

PentaPost reports, "Asked about U.S. force presence in Afghanistan, Bush said the U.S. presence is being 'gradually replaced' by other troops. 'We've got about 10,000 troops there, which is down from, obviously, major combat operations,' he said... In fact, the 10,000 troops in Afghanistan represent the highest number of U.S. soldiers in the country since the war there began. By the time the Taliban government had been vanquished in December 2001, U.S. troops numbered fewer than 3,000 in Afghanistan. And three months later, in March 2002, when the last major battle against remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda took place in eastern Afghanistan, about 5,000 U.S. troops were in the country." US troop levels aren't down, they have increased 100%. Howard Dean was lambasted by the media for miscounting US forces in Iraq by 8%. Where is the outrage?

Glen Yeadon writes, "By now its clear to everyone, that Bush lied to congress about weapons of mass destruction. He lied to the American people. He had aides lie to the Untied Nations. He lied about the connection between Iraq and bin Laden. He lied about Niger. He lied about chemical and biological weapons. He lied about the underlying reasons to wage war. He lied blaming others for his lies. He lied about his staff; they are all a bunch of convicted felons and retreads from his daddy's administration. He lied and good men died because he lied... He lied, his staff lied, his vice president lied, his whole administration is guilty of mass murder of the occupants of two nations whose people have committed no crime except being an impediment to the bush family oil oligarchy. Impeachment is not enough."

Peter Zimmerman writes, "It was not just 16 words. It was every word concerning Iraq's nuclear weapons program in George W. Bush's 2003 SOTU speech. The resident's principal argument for going to war - to prevent a 'smoking gun that would appear as a mushroom cloud' - was based on bad intelligence that was misused while good intelligence was ignored. Available evidence demonstrates that Saddam Hussein, an evil man who should have been evicted in 1991, lacked a serious nuclear weapons program in 2003. And if Bush had not held out the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons 'within months,' it is doubtful that Congress would have given him a blank check. How can one conjure up a benign explanation for Bush's assertions?... The resident, of course, is free to disregard intelligence, but he is not free to lie about it - either directly, indirectly or by innuendo - when making the case for war." Zimmerman was chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Clinton.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel: "On the Eve of the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1998, the Sexuality Information and Education Council sent out 'Ten Tips for Talking about the Starr Report with your Children.'... It's now 2003, and if the events of these last weeks don't provide parents with that special opportunity to talk to their children about the resident and values such as truth, lies, and consequences, then I don't know what does. So, with all due credit to the Sexuality Information and Education Council, here are 'Tips for Talking about resident Bush with Your Children.'"

So just how bad is Bush's systematic manipulation and outright fudging of scientific facts to further his own agenda been? Devastating. Here is a list of areas where Bush misuse of science has cost America - or threatens to cost us all: Abstinence-Only Education, Agricultural Pollution, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Breast Cancer, Condoms, Drinking Water, Education Policy Environmental Health, Food Safety, Global Warming, HIV/AIDS, Lead Poisoning, Missile Defense, Oil and Gas, Prescription Drug Advertising, Reproductive Health, Stem Cells, Substance Abuse, Wetlands, Workplace Safety , Yellowstone National Park....and these are just a few main categories! Read the full report, then send it to someone you care about!

"The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)," reports the Washington Post. "The 40-page document was compiled by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee's special investigations division. The report is part of an effort to highlight simmering anger among scientists and others who believe Bush has, far more than any past president, spiked science with politics to justify conservative policies in areas such as reproductive rights, embryo research, energy policy and environmental health." So what was Bush's response? The same sorry line he uses as his excuse for EVERYTHING: the Democrats are just playing politics! At least they're not playing dice with Earth's future.

They say "Art imitates life." But in Bush's case, "Life imitates art." Everything about this bogus president is a "creation," from his down home drawly accent (cultivated in his formative years in Connecticut?) to his preference for the classic showdown western "High Noon." (see http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1012618,00.html) Even Bush's ranch is nothing more than a stage setting, constructed solely to create the illusion of Bush as a "simple rancher/cowboy"- it was finished November, 2000 right on schedule. You know that little shack you keep seeing behind the talking heads reporting "live from Crawford"? That's one of the outbuildings that went with what is reported to have been a pig farm up until 2000. The real "ranch house" is a slick, 10,000-square foot suburbs-style McMansion. If Bush can lie about who he IS, why should we believe anything else he says?

"It's one of those little things Mr. Bush says that crosses the news wires, and unless you're looking really close your eyes might miss it, or more probably, your brain simply rejects it." BUSH: "And then we had the drumbeat to war. Remember on our TV screens -- I'm not suggesting which network did this -- but it said, 'March to War,' every day from last summer until the spring -- 'March to War, March to War.' That's not a very conducive environment for people to take risk, when they hear, 'March to War' all the time'"... "The fact that Mr. Bush and his handlers have convinced themselves that major ongoing US economic problems stem from loose media talk is probably the greatest 'Bushism' of all. It was THEIR war, based on THEIR reading of the intelligence tea leaves, and they think the US economy is in the tank not because Mr. Bush gave the budget surplus away to his rich friends via tax cuts, but because of media hype?" Bush is Mad! Sign our petition at www.democrats.com/madgeorge

Jim Lobe reports "In a poll released by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), swing voters - people who consider themselves independent of both major political parties and very likely to vote in next year's elections - were considerably more critical of Bush's handling of Iraq and wider foreign policy than the general public and more likely to say the president [sic] deliberately misled the public about the reasons for the war. The poll, overseen by PIPA and carried out by California-based Knowledge Networks, found that an absolute majority of independents believed that both Bush and his administration were misleading when they presented evidence to justify going to war with Iraq."

Steve Perry has compiled an excellent documented list of 40 lies. 1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward. 2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed WMD... 40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.

AP's Tom Raum writes, "In the rising controversy over how the Bush administration built its case for war in Iraq, one curious fact stands out. Some who gave Bush unwelcome information that turned out to be accurate are gone. Those who did the opposite are still around. Former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki voiced concerns about the expense, aftermath and forces that would be needed -- concerns now proving to be true. These men are no longer in the picture. By contrast, nobody so far has come under apparent pressure to resign in the events that led up to Bush's mention in his State of the Union address in January of a British intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. That claim was based on forged documents and challenged by the CIA." You said it, Tom!

From True Majority: "With each passing day new revelations are surfacing about the justifications cited by Bush to launch an American attack on Iraq. Bush's allegation that Saddam tried to buy uranium is the first claim getting the scrutiny it deserves.... There are two bills in Congress that would open meaningful investigations into what happened. To send a free fax urging your Congress Member co-sponsor HR-307 and HR-2625 just fill out this form."

Pete Goodwin writes, "It took a lot of Prozac and Norvasc but I finally finished parsing the POTUS' 'Denial and Deception' (their words, not mine) SOTU address... 18. 'Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program... The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.' Wow, a trifecta of deception in one paragraph."

"For the U.S. news media, there remains a great hesitancy about stating the obvious, calling Bush a liar. It's one thing to suggest that Bush was badly served by his staff on the Iraqi intelligence, but it remains outside the bounds to conclude that Bush willfully lied to the American people. The evidence, however, indicates that Bush played a central role in the deception campaign. Last January, for instance, the White House portrayed Bush as the man in charge of the State of the Union address. He edited the drafts, the White House said. He wrote notes in the margins. He gave his speech writers pointers. It's now clear that Bush's aides, in turn, pressed the CIA to let Bush use the strongest possible language about Iraq's alleged pursuit of uranium in Africa. Bush's speech then exaggerated the uranium claim even more, giving millions of Americans the impression that the uranium allegations were true, even as Bush's own intelligence officials thought the charges were bogus."

P.M. Carpenter writes, "As the Bush administration trots out wholly implausible deniability over its commander in chief's detachment from American intelligence findings, something far more troublesome inhabits the land: those millions of Americans who have settled into a state of denial about their recidivist president and his handlers. Nearly axiomatic is that anyone caught in a fix of his own making deserves a second chance, yet much of the public has given Bush Two third, fourth, tenth, umpteenth chances to conduct itself honorably. Yet every next chance brings only more deceit from the incorrigible Bushies -- and the public then punches the administration's ticket once again. The complex causes of our collective denial are for another day, although the pathological effect is simple, inescapable and in need of hasty broadcast from every hilltop: American democracy is imperiled from both above and below."

James W. Brosnan writes, "So who is the 'serial exaggerator' now? That's the tag Republicans hung on Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign over several gaffes in which he seemed to hype his experience. White House aides now dismiss as 'only 16 words' this sentence from Bush's State of the Union address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.' But as Gore's old Harvard pal, Bob Somerby, notes on dailyhowler.com, only 16 words got Gore in trouble when he said during a television interview: 'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.'"

They say reading is fundamental, yet a senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the NIE in its entirety. "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document," said the official, referring to the "Annex" that contained the State Department's dissent. The official said Bush was "briefed" on the NIE's contents, but "I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it." Apparently it wasn't important enough for Bush to bother with. This is perhaps the most unbelievable excuse since "the dog ate my homework". The pResident is about to take the country to war and DOESN'T read the entire document? "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

Rob Kall writes: "First, let's start off with the title of the website where they keep scum sucking George Bush's 2003 State of The Union Address. DENIAL AND DECEPTION. These images are copied from the White 'whore' House web site today. We'll see if they leave the ironic title up there. Denial and Deception is an excellent description of the content of Bush's speech. It's becoming pretty clear that Bush, the most lying, most despicable president in US history, knowingly lied about Saddam and Nigerian Uranium. But let's take another look at this joke of a state of the union address and go a bit deeper."

In 1995, London's "Sunday Times" reported that Iraq was making atomic bombs. The claim was based on documents supplied by exiled Iraqi scientist Khidir Hamza...documents which were proven to be fakes...just like the faked documents Bush cited in his infamous speech (was that Hamza's handiwork, too?) Many other claims by Hamza have been exposed as lies. Yet in 2002, though known to be a liar for 7 years, Hamza was chosen to be a key "witness," testifying before Congress about the alleged Saddam nuke programs. His effort was well rewarded. Two months ago, Rumsfeld appointed Hamza the new head of the Iraqi nuclear industry. Btw, did we mention? - Hamza and David Kay both worked for the same Bush-enriched defense contractor until recently: SAIC.

Mark Morford writes, "Is now the time? Is this is where we start to notice how it is all coming unraveled, Bush's snide web of lies just too flagrant and too insulting for too long, CIA directors and intelligence experts and military leaders and scientists and the like all coming forward now to refute any number of false BushCo claims, the chinks in the armor now becoming cracks and fissures and flubs and stumbles and ultimate raging implosions? Is this why impeachment proceedings have yet to begin in earnest against BushCo? Because we're just too stunned, too frozen in disbelief at the mounting mountains of evidence that we have been duped and misled and lied to on a scale we can't really begin to assimilate? Could very well be. Because the tower of lies, oh how it teeters, how it quivers, how it feels oh so ready to fall."

In a new intelligence dispute, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to the administration assessment of Syria's weapons of mass destruction. After the objections, testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton was delayed until September. Bolton was to tell the House International Relations subcommittee that Syria's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons posed a threat to stability in the region. The CIA said that assessment was exaggerated. After Saddam fell, some Bush aides hinted that Syria might be next. Bolton's planned remarks caused a "revolt" among intelligence experts who thought they inflated the Syrian weapons programs. A U.S. official said that after months of complaining about pressure to skew their analyses, rank-and-file intelligence officials "have become emboldened" by the recent public debate over Iraq. "People are fed up."

The UK Independent reports: "1 Iraq was responsible for the 11 September attacks... 2 Iraq and al-Qa'ida were working together... 3 Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a 'reconstituted' nuclear weapons programme... 4 Iraq was trying to import aluminium tubes to develop nuclear weapons... 5 Iraq still had vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons from the first Gulf War... 6 Iraq retained up to 20 missiles which could carry chemical or biological warheads, with a range which would threaten British forces in Cyprus... 7 Saddam Hussein had the wherewithal to develop smallpox. This allegation was made by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in his address to the UN Security Council in February. The following month the UN said there was nothing to support it... 9 Previous weapons inspections had failed... 10 Iraq was obstructing the inspectors... 13 War would be easy... 16 The 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch... 20 WMD were found."

AP reports: "As Resident Bush works to quiet a controversy over his discredited claim of Iraqi uranium shopping in Africa, another of his prewar assertions is coming under fire: the alleged link between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida. Before the war, Bush and members of his cabinet said Saddam was harboring top al-Qaida operatives and suggested Iraq could slip the terrorist network chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Saddam and al-Qaida and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best. 'There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation,' former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week."

From Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: "On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president's claim, it refused to do so -- and continues to refuse to this day. Interestingly, the national media in the US chose to ignore Heller's story. "

"Just as the managers of Enron were lying to investors and bond holders about their company's strength and financial position, so the administration was lying to its public and the world about Iraq's WMDs - the public rationale for the war. Just as the managers of Enron were 'cooking the books' through dubious accounting practices in order to record ever growing paper profits, so the present administration has been using the 'war on terror' and the promotion of 'democracy' in the region to justify a neo-colonial policy to reshape the Middle East to its own preferences. And just as the managers of Enron used a 'carrot & stick' to get their way with fund managers and stock analysts, so the administration is using bribery, bluster and threats to win allies and silence opposition to its policy in the community of nations."- Ahmed M. I. Egal

Cheryl Seal writes: "Why is Stephen Hatfill under 24-hour surveillance, though he has never been charged with any crime nor even declared an official suspect in the anthrax case? Is he a threat to the public - or to the Bush administration? It has been revealed that Hatfill deisgned a replica of a mobile biological weapons production laboratory for the Pentagon. The same Pentagon that now repeatedly keeps making allusions, for the benefit of the clueless mainstream media, to a mobile WMD lab allegedly found in Iraq. Yep, I bet a very convincing lab was indeed found in Iraq. In fact, I suspect it was the self-same mobile lab designed by Hatfill. And, were Hatfill not a 'suspect,' he could ever so easily confirm that fact."

W. David Jenkins III writes: "Anyway, here we find ourselves nose to nose with a sizable amount of 'free citizens' who don't seem to care that Bush and Co. lied to them! Think about it. Here are the same folks who were beside themselves with anger and hatred for a president who lied about an affair now saying, basically, 'Bush lied? So What? What about all those mass graves and all those liberated people? Who cares about all those innocent civilians who were murdered? Saddam is gone. We kicked their butts so let's all get down on our knees and thank God that Bush is president'... But if you want to believe that then you must go take down the American flag you've been flying so proudly, go into your back yard and dig a big hole and bury the damn thing. For any member of a free society to proudly proclaim that it doesn't matter if our leaders lie to us - especially when those lies threaten our security and cost thousands of innocent lives - then he has no business flying the flag."

AP reports: "The U.N. terrorism committee has found no evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaida and did not investigate Bush administration claims of such ties, officials said Thursday. The terrorism committee has just completed a draft report charting efforts by countries to track and shut down Osama bin Laden's operations. The report notes success in the war on terrorism stemming from the arrests of some top al-Qaida figures... The U.N. terrorism committee has found no evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaida and did not investigate Bush administration claims of such ties, officials said Thursday. The terrorism committee has just completed a draft report charting efforts by countries to track and shut down Osama bin Laden's operations. The report notes success in the war on terrorism stemming from the arrests of some top al-Qaida figures."

In an informal progress report on the House intelligence committee's probe into pre-war intelligence (or lack thereof), ranking Democrat Jane Harman spells out the lies Bush told to get us into a war. Harman says unequivocally that Bush was wrong when he declared on March 17 that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," and that Hussein was a bin Laden ally. The Republicans are doing their best to prevent any real investigation and suppress the truth. But it's becoming more obvious every day that the truth is too explosive to be contained: Because Bush lied, people died.

"Congress and the American people finally are beginning to raise serious questions about the credibility of the case the Bush administration made against Iraq in the weeks leading up to war. At the very least, the resident and other top officials grossly exaggerated the immediate threat posed by Hussein's regime. Claims about Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program and links to al-Qaida were based on transparently phony documentation. And while the search for chemical and biological weapons continues, it already is clear that the White House's specific claims about the scope and location of those weapons have not been borne out. A scrupulous investigation into charges that the Bush administration intentionally distorted intelligence to fit its political purposes in Iraq should continue. Our government's credibility depends on it."

Slate finally asks the question on every Democrat's mind: "Can Bush be both Ignorant and a Liar?"

"The Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people and to the world, concocting reasons for war in order to justify aggression against a sovereign state. Not since Hitler and the Nazis dressed up storm troopers as Polish soldiers and staged 'attacks' on German positions in 1939 has there been such a flagrant and cynical effort to manufacture a casus belli. It is important to recall the context in which the 'weapons of mass destruction' campaign unfolded. Mass protests throughout the world had demonstrated as the New York Times admitted at the time, that there were 'two superpowers-the United States government and world public opinion,' which were diametrically opposed to one another... There is no precedent in American history for the sheer scale of falsification engaged in by the Bush administration, the Republican Party and their media chorus. The 'credibility gap' of the Vietnam War era is nothing compared to the lie machine of the current government."

The lead story in the NY Times "Week in Review" is headlined: "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" David Rosenbaum addresses two of Bush's many lies: Iraq's WMD's and "this tax relief is for everyone who pays income taxes." Confronted with two flat-out lies, does the Times finally find its missing outrage? Of COURSE not! Are we dreaming, or did the same NY Times just FIRE Jayson Blair and its two top editors for lying? If lying is ok again, will they be rehired? If lying is ok again, will they demand an apology for Bill Clinton? And if exaggeration is ok, will the Times issue a formal apology to Al Gore for promoting the Bush Big Lie that Gore was a "serial exaggerator" - when he was telling the truth! Write darose@nytimes.com and letters@nytimes.com and tell them you're canceling your subscription if they refuse to call a LIE a LIE.

On 11-13-00, Mike Hersh wrote, "America cannot afford George W. Bush. The media ignored Bush's lies, docilely refused to probe his fundamental misstatements of facts, and allowed him to lodge false accusations with impunity. For example, Bush looked into the TV cameras and LIED when he claimed Gore outspent him on the campaign. Bush also LIED about his prescription drug plan covering all seniors. Bush LIED when he claimed Gore was using 'phony' and 'fuzzy' numbers on the Bush tax plan. Under the mild cross-examination by Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson, W was forced to admit that Gore was 100% right about Bush's tax plan. Bush does promise to give more than 40% of the entire surplus to the 1% of Americans who need it least. Bush LIED about this over and over and over during the debates and the campaign, and tried to claim GORE was dishonest. Finally, Bush came clean in the third debate But where was the media? And where is the outrage?"

"Every day brings fresh accusations that pResident Bush and his advisors stretched intelligence to get the United States into a war in Iraq, while the one feel-good story of the conflict -- the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch -- is looking increasingly phony... Lying in the service of power, money and advancement -- or simply to avoid embarrassment -- is nothing new. [What is different today] is that kids see lies, half-truths and hype not as aberrations but as the norm. 'What do you expect?' one student asked with a shrug last spring as my class discussed yet another government assertion that had turned out to be false. 'It's business as usual'... This Pinocchio culture has made kids alarmingly cynical: 43% agree that a person has to lie and cheat sometimes to get ahead, up nine points since 2000. [Young] people today are surprisingly blase' about shading the truth. They weren't born that way. They learned it" -- from Bush.

Harvey Wasserman writes: "The Bush assault is foundering on the shoals of Truth. The Republicans have seized control of the American judicial, legislative and executive branches. Their immensely effective corporate mass media misinforms, misleads and manipulates. They control the world's most powerful army, and are glad to use it without provocation. Having stolen the election of 2000, Bush's minions are rigging America's voting machines and erasing countless suspected Democrats from voter rolls nationwide. Their goal is to shock and awe the opposition into extinction. If 'image is everything,' Bush sits atop a dictatorial fortress, not likely to fall soon. But history teaches that, ultimately, Truth is more powerful than image: All the people can't be fooled all the time." Check out the 'Arsenal of Truth' -- an excellent bullet point list summarizing the abuses and failures of the Bush Regime.

"GEN. CLARK: I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror... there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein. MR. RUSSERT: By who? Who did that? GEN. CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But -- I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had -- Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made."

Stebbins Jefferson writes that Ari Fleischer "abdicated all responsibility to serve the people through the press. Instead, he refined the art of using voluble statements to disclose as little information as possible as long as possible. And on those rare occasions when journalists have had the effrontery to probe for specific clarification of issues, Mr. Fleischer's response was to spout more doublespeak or to ignore the offensive questioner altogether...There are a few questions Mr. Fleischer left hanging that are begging for answers. First and foremost, does this administration ever plan to release to the public the results of the government's official study of pre-9/11 intelligence about impending attacks? That information is needed to end the disquieting accusations that our government had information that, if acted upon, could have prevented thousands of American deaths. Such an official report could put fears of future attacks into a more enlightened perspective."

NY Times report: "Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials... The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq... 'This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted,' an intelligence official said. 'Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted.'"

From a Baltimore Sun guest editorial: "On the home front, ...Bush proclaimed that a report by leading economists concluded that the economy would grow by 3.3 percent in 2003 if his tax cut proposals were adopted. No such report exists. To explain why he has turned a $236 billion budget surplus into a projected $307 billion deficit in 2004, the resident claimed that he had said during the campaign that he would allow the federal budget to go into deficit in times of war, recession or national emergency but never imagined he would have a 'trifecta.' Actually, Mr. Bush never made such a campaign statement. These three caveats on deficits were promulgated by Al Gore... The resident also said to the father of twins, 'I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.' Mr. Bush was a member of the Texas Air National Guard between 1968 and 1973 and never left the country in pursuit of his duties." But he did desert his National Guard duties for over a year.

Inter Press journalist Jim Lobe observes, "When all three major U.S. newsweeklies--Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report--run major features on the same day on possible government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal.... The controversy over whether the administration of President [sic] George W. Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week." The important question, however, isn't "What did Bush know, and how much did he lie about it?" but "Now that it's obvious Bush lied, what will Congress do about it?" It's time for all patriotic Americans to tell their members of Congress: IMPEACH BUSH.

David Cogswell writes, "Mark Crispin Miller's political performance art has morphed from 'Bush R Us' into 'Operation American Freedom,' and it's a good dose of sanity and solidarity on a Sunday night. Last Sunday he performed at a space called Boomtown on 18th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. 'I need to get together often to talk,' he said. 'There are so many things I hear about that make me feel like I'm losing my mind. It's as if Bush had a big Bonsai tree growing out of his forehead and no one in the press says anything about it.' The war on terrorism is a failure, he said, but the war on France is going pretty well. He spent a little time explaining how it is that a free society becomes a 'bizarro universe' in which people can say black is white and up is down and these 'brazen lies resonate as if they were true.' "

TruthIsBetter.org has done an excellent job of debunking numerous GOP and Bush lies, including: "Republican federal budgets are fiscally conservative, favoring small government... Republican budget projections are truthful... GW says that he supports the U.S. Military... GW says that he is tough on corporate crime... GW says that he supports healthcare for all Americans... GW says that he wants to conserve the environment and develop alternative energy... GW says he wants to curtail spending... GW says he wants freedom and rights for all humanity... GW says that he cares about bringing democracy to Afghanistan... GW says he supports democracy... GW Bush said, prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. troops, that 'Saddam was a threat to the United States'... Bush says his Budget will Help Create Jobs." Check it out!

At George W. Bush's speech in Indianapolis to tout his tax cut, the VIPs invited on stage with him were told to remove their ties in order to look more like the common people. Thus the Busheviks created the illusion that ordinary people are allowed near Bush and that they support his agenda. That's all there is to Bush: phony images and deceptions.

Mark Morford writes: "Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way. See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha! ... Psychopatriots are a little nonplussed. Bush is merely 'embarrassed.' Peace advocates are sighing and drinking heavily. We have done this ghastly horrible inane hate-filled entirely unprovoked thing... and our leaders are not the slightest bit ashamed. But of course you're not the slightest bit shocked. You knew it all along. The WMD line was just a ploy that, tragically, much of the nation bought into like a sucker pyramid scheme."

WashPost reports: "The French government believes it is the victim of an 'organized campaign of disinformation' from within the Bush administration, designed to discredit it with allegations of complicity with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. In [an unprecedented] letter prepared for delivery today to administration officials and members of Congress, France details what it says are false news stories, with anonymous administration officials as sources, that appeared in the U.S. media over the past nine months. The stories, all of which Paris has heatedly denied, are part of an 'ugly campaign to destroy the image of France,' a French official said. Officials said they have no doubt that the stories were spread by factions in the administration itself -- hard-line civilians within and close to the Pentagon are their primary suspects -- and that there was no visible effort by the White House or other departments to discipline those involved or even find out who they are."

Molly Ivins writes: "But the weirdest media reaction of all is to the ongoing non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More and more stories quoting ever-unnamed administration officials appear saying that the administration would be 'amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium' and that finding large volumes of chemical or biological material is 'unlikely.' Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation... Nonexistent WMDs also present us with a huge international credibility problem -- particularly given that the Bush administration now feels entitled to 'punish' those countries that did not join the 'coalition of the willing.'"

"A front-page report in Sunday's Post helps reveal a culture of lying. Headline: GOP Eyes Tax Cuts as Annual Events. 'Congress will soon pass the third tax reduction in as many years for President [sic] Bush,' the authors say. 'Yet the impressive trio of reductions is but a small step toward the administration's goal: nonstop tax cuts'... Like everyone else in the 2000 race, Bush pledged that he wouldn't spend that money. His representation was clear throughout. Bush had counted every penny-- and when it came to federal tax cuts, $1.3 trillion was all we could afford. Again, everyone said this at the time... Everyone said that, with the baby boomers' retirement approaching, we had to start using those SS surplus to pay down the national debt. Three years later, Bush's continuing tax cut plans fly in the face of what he pledged as a candidate. Now we hear that the cuts will continue. But then, a culture of lying has only grown as our vaunted commander-in-chief has turned emperor."

When this article first ran in Democrats.com in July 2001, many people were shocked that such an article would be written. Now, a growing number of people worldwide are seeing and speaking out on the chilling similarities between the rise of Bush and the rise of Adolph Hitler. And, as the 2004 election nears, who knows how much more closely those similarities may become?

Jack Smith Writes: "Quote: 'Iraq is free.' Commentary: Iraq is a conquered land which has lost its independence and sovereignty to overwhelming U.S. military might in a war of aggression. Quote: 'When Iraqi civilians look into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and good will.' Commentary: They saw an occupation army, all too willing to shoot first and ask questions later."

"Seventy days without a peep," Etherzone reports, "The United States of America, reputably the wealthiest nation in the world, no longer has credit. Its credit card was cancelled seventy days ago, we've got a horrendous and increasing trade deficit, and the Euro is replacing the dollar as the world standard. Has the most powerful nation in the world become so engrossed in invading and stomping some little third world country that all else has been set aside? Not only have we added $653 billion in new debt since the beginning of fiscal 2002, but we hit the national debt ceiling of $6.4 trillion on February 20, 2003, and haven't been able to sell Treasury securities for any reason other than replacing maturing bonds, bills, and notes since that date." Why wasn't this front page news? Simple. Had it been revealed on February 20, the public outcry would have made prosecuting the war in Iraq impossible.

Cheryl Seal Reports: "One of the favorite tactics used by corporations to distract the public from the damage being done by said corporations is to launch a PR campaign that focuses in the exact opposite direction. A prime example of this strategy was perpetrated by GE, which, back when it was the world's foremost producer of nuclear weapons and other tools of death and destruction, launched its 'GE, We Bring Good Things to Life' campaign. Now Bush is using this exact same strategy on a grand scale: the 'Renewal in Iraq' campaign. There's now a whole gallery of stock photos of Bush standing beneath the 'RENEWAL IN IRAQ' banner with a sanctimonious smirk. The whole idea behind the campaign, just as with GE, is to hide what he is REALLY doing back home. Keep the media trumpeting the White House Press copy from Iraq - while making sure that domestic issue stories stay swept onto page 25 or so (if they make the papers at all)."

Robert Steinback writes: "'Would it bother you if we were to discover that George Bush lied about the case for going to war?' I asked. He knew what I was referring to. His blunt answer left my jaw hanging. 'Everyone knows he lied about weapons of mass destruction being the point of the war.' Just a few weeks ago, any statement from me that Bush's case for war was riddled with inconsistencies and illogic would have brought swift and fierce condemnation from this fellow. Now, basking in the glow of military conquest -- and confronted by a thus-far futile search for chemical and biological weapons -- this hawk breezily conceded the point while also waving it away as inconsequential. Have we become a country that wears its hypocrisy openly and proudly?... Oh, who cares -- we won the war! At least Bush wasn't lying about sex in the Oval Office! We'd have impeached him for that." No, that charge would only be used against a Democrat!

Isn't it just AMAZING that the only documents that appear to have been left laying around Baghdad after the looting just happen to be "evidence" against the enemies of G. W. Bush? First a forged document "proving that MP Geo. Galloway traded secretly with Saddam is found. Now a document claiming France colluded with Saddam is "discovered." This postage-stamp article says it all: Get that smear out - but don't include any real facts and don't interview the accused. What will they "discover" next? Documents proving Senators Snowe and Voinovich sold state secrets to Saddam? But don't expect anything about how Reagan-Bush sold Hussein conventional weapons and WMDs, and loaned him billions, with the help of their envoy Donald Rumsfeld.

Carla Binion writes, "In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote that tyrants often use propaganda techniques that rely on the following. (1) Repetition of catchwords, (2) Suppression of facts the propagandist wants the public to ignore. (3) Inflaming mass fear or other strong emotional reaction for the purpose of controlling public opinion and behavior... [Bush] has clearly exploited the American people's fears of terrorism since September 11. According to Huxley, Hitler said the masses run on instinct and emotion rather than facts and are easy to manipulate, while society's intellectuals and independent thinkers insist on factual evidence and logic and easily see through fallacies. Huxley says Hitler encouraged the masses to attack or shout down intellectual dissenters rather than engage them in logical debate, because the rational dissenters would likely win any argument on the basis of fact."

Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken write, "George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as resident. The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric -- about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the 'average' American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits -- is simply at odds with what Bush's policies actually do... More distressing even than the resident's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it... Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the resident's lies?

Hans Blix told Spanish daily El Pais, "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections... I now believe that finding WMD has been relegated... to fourth place." Blix said Bush had told him in October 2002 that he backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were getting impatient... "I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [WMD]. I think they now believe less in that possibility. But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

NY Times reports, "The war of words between the US and Syria escalated today when the Syrian Foreign Ministry said it hoped to 'see the invaders defeated in Iraq.' The latest bellicose remarks came after a speech on Sunday night by Colin L. Powell to a Jewish group in which he accused Syria of providing 'direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein.' He added, 'Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences.' Donald H. Rumsfeld had started the war of words on Friday, when he accused Damascus of shipping sensitive military technology to the Iraqi Army, specifically night-vision goggles. 'We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government responsible.'... But today, a senior American commander serving in the Gulf said he had seen no evidence that the Iraqi Army has obtained night-vision goggles. 'We have not to my knowledge seen any at this point,' Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said."

BuzzFlash writes, "The Bush Cartel and the GOP have three primary media tactics: 1) They create ongoing 'factoids' that become long-term media events (frenzies) that, for all practical purposes, drown out meaningful public policy debates. 2) They utilize sensational headlines to influence public opinion, even if the substance of the stories is not true. They know that the 'three-alarm' headline will be on the front page -- and may lead television and radio news reports -- but the retraction, if one is forced out of them by leaked evidence, will be on page 56 or not reported at all. 3) They discredit Democrats and other opponents through smear campaigns, making their alleged personalities an issue, not their policies. Given that the vast majority of the American public doesn't agree with the Bush Cartel and its extremist right wing ideology, the Cartel resorts to the three tactics above to accumulate power and pass radical budgetary, secrecy, anti-Constitutional and social agendas."

UK Independent opines, "Every day public statements on the war are made with great bravado by British and US leaders. A day later most of them turn out to be inaccurate or untrue... Without qualification Tony Blair declared at the joint press conference with Bush last week that two British soldiers had been 'executed'. Shortly afterwards distressed relatives were informed that the soldiers had died in combat... Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon claimed that the discovery of protection suits in Iraq was 'categorical proof' that Saddam possessed chemical weapons. He withdrew the claim within 24 hours. Today we report that Mr Blair greatly exaggerated the scale of humanitarian aid being shipped to Basra. Half the load of a naval ship consists of food and other supplies from Britain. The rest of the ship is stuffed full of arms and ammunition... Most preposterous of all, Mr Blair and the US leaders said with certainty in advance that the 'liberators' would be cheered in the streets."

Cheryl Seal writes, "Archaeological expert McQuire Gibson revealed this afternoon that this site was a monument to the war dead of the Iraq-Iran war and barely a few decades old. The monument is near an historical area, but not IN it. The Pentagon knows this, because Gibson, at the Pentagon's request, supplied the military with a complete list of archaeological sites. If the Pentagon will lie baldfacedly about something like this, complete with photographic 'aids,' what WON'T they lie about? And we are supposed show support for our troops by NOT questioning these people? Some support that is! I for one refuse to join in this 'patriotic' push to shove our courageous guys and gals over a cliff of someone else's making."

FAIR writes, "On March 20, the second day of the invasion, U.S. military sources initially described missiles launched by Iraq as "Scuds"-- the U.S. name for a Soviet-made missile used by Iraq during the Gulf War. They exceed the range limits imposed on Iraqi weapons by the 1991 ceasefire agreement." On March 22, the Pentagon disavowed the story. Who fell for it in the meantime? NBC's Matt Lauer, Tim Russert, and Brian Williams; NPR's Bob Edwards and Mike Shuster; ABC's Ted Koppel and Derek McGinty; and FOX's William La Jeunesse. On March 23, the Pentagon announced a "chemical facility" in Najaf, which they disavowed the next day. Who fell for that one? ABC's John McWethy, NBC's Tom Brokaw and Jim Miklaszewski, and FOX, to name just a few. If there are "useful idiots" in America, these are the ones.

NY Times reports, "The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled. Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies. For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda... 'A lot of analysts have been upset about the way the Iraq-Al Qaeda case has been handled,' said one intelligence official familiar with the debate... Several analysts have told colleagues they have become so frustrated that they have considered leaving the agency."

PentaPost reports, "'It's a baldfaced lie to suggest that' the coalition for this war is greater than that for the 1991 war,' said Ivo H. Daalder... 'Even our great allies Spain, Italy and Bulgaria are not providing troops.' The administration asserts that 44 nations are part of the coalition, but officials reach that number by lumping nations providing military units or logistical assistance with an eclectic group of nations that are voicing only political support. The administration further suggests another 10 or so nations support the campaign but do not wish to be publicly identified. The first Persian Gulf War was prosecuted by a 34-nation military force, with each nation listed in the coalition contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. Dozens of others nations voiced support for the war against Iraq in 1991, meaning that under the standards used by the current Bush administration, the size of the 1991 coalition likely topped 100 countries."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is outraged that Bush lied to the American people and the world about Iraq's alleged efforts to purchase uranium from Niger. Waxman compiled all of the facts and sent a stinging letter to Bush: "I urge you to provide to me and to the relevant committees of Congress a full accounting of what you knew about the reliability of the evidence linking Iraq to uranium in Africa, when you knew this, and why you and senior officials in the Administration presented the evidence to the U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the American people without disclosing the doubts of the CIA." As Tom Engelhardt points out, this letter has received NO media coverage. We demand a Special Prosecutor for ForgeryGate!

Mercury News reports, "As UN nuclear inspectors flee Iraq, some of them are angry at the Bush administration for cutting short their work, bad-mouthing their efforts and making false claims about evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Some inspectors are 'scandalized' at the way Bush and Colin Powell, among others, have 'politicized' the inspection process. None of the nuclear-related intelligence trumpeted by the administration has held up to scrutiny, inspectors say. From suspect aluminum tubes to aerial photographs to documents -- revealed to be forgeries -- that claimed to link Iraq to uranium from Niger, inspectors say they chased U.S. leads that went nowhere and wasted valuable time in their efforts to determine the extent of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons banned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War... Inspectors [arrived] as hawks and leave as doves, after finding Iraq 'a ruined country, not a threat to anyone.' It is a view radically different than the administration's."

Patrick Martin writes, "Monday night's 15-minute speech by President Bush, setting a 48-hour deadline for war against Iraq, went beyond the usual distortions, half-truths, and appeals to fear and backwardness to include a remarkable number of barefaced, easily refuted lies. The enormous scale of the lying suggests two political conclusions: the Bush administration is going to war against Iraq with utter contempt for democracy and public opinion, and its war propaganda counts heavily on the support of the American media, which not only fails to challenge the lies, but repeats and reinforces them endlessly. Without attempting to be exhaustive, it is worthwhile listing some of the most important lies and contrasting Bush's assertions with the public record. All of the false statements listed below are directly quoted from the verbatim transcript of Bush's remarks published on the Internet."

Doug Ireland writes, "The 'powerful odor of mendacity' (to borrow Tennessee Williams' phrase) hung over George Bush's primetime virtual declaration of war Monday night. When Bush proclaimed that 'The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,' that was a lie. What are the 'most lethal weapons ever devised?' Why, nuclear weapons, of course. That Iraq possesses nukes, or is even close to making them, is something for which Bush has been unable to provide any evidence... Bush asserted that Iraq 'has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.' The last part of that was a lie... In a reflection of the chimerical nature of Bush's 'proofs,' his speech did not even mention 9/11."

Mike Duncan writes, "I've decided to go through Bush's Monday address and count all the lies in it. I lost count, you see, during the broadcast. This is from the text the White House put out. It is said that the best lies are mostly truth, so I'm just going to go through every paragraph and say true or false. If false, I'll explain." Duncan counts 20 lies. Great work, Mike!

AP reports, "A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq. Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting. They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof. 'It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy,' said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. 'That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days.'"

AP reports, "The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI on Friday to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq's nuclear program. An investigation should 'at a minimum help to allay any concerns' that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller... Rockefeller asked the FBI to determine the source of the documents, the sophistication of the forgeries, the motivation of those responsible, why intelligence agencies didn't recognize them as forgeries and whether they are part of a larger disinformation campaign." You go, Jay!

NY Times reports, "To hear senior Busheviks tell it, Iraq's latest pilotless drone has the potential to be one of Saddam's deadliest weapons, able to deliver terrifying payloads of chemical and biological warfare agents across Iraq's borders to Israel or other neighboring states. It could even, they say, be broken down and smuggled into the US for use in terrorist attacks. But viewed up close today by reporters ... the public unveiling of the Iraqi prototype seemed to lend the crisis over Iraq's weapons an aura less of deadly threat than of farce... The drone seemed like a sad, patched-together affair. Its two tiny engines, each about the size of a whiskey bottle, and attached to minuscule wooden propellers, looked about powerful enough to drive a Weed Whacker, as one wag present suggested. Like a primitive biplane from the earliest days of flight, its wings and twinned tail fins were made of wood and stretched fabric. Swathes of plastic masking tape covered the wing joints."

NY Times writes, "Colin L. Powell said today that the US might choose to abandon a second UN resolution authorizing military action against Iraq, only a week after Bush vowed to force countries to take sides on the issue... Until today, Bush had insisted the issue had to be resolved this week and that avoiding a vote was not an option. 'No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote,' he said last week... Powell argued that it would be politically less damaging to go to war without a UN vote than to proceed under the shadow of an explicit rejection of military force.. [which] would lead to accusations that the US was violating the UN Charter, which it helped write more than a half century ago. More hawkish members of the administration - including Rumsfeld and Cheney - also decided that the vote was not worth it, officials said, chiefly because it could slow their military plans."

Clarence Swinney is working on a comprehensive list of Bush's lies. Here are the first 10: 1. I passed a Patients Bill Of Rights as Governor 2. Trifecta 3. Compassionate Conservative 4. Action Administration 5. Al Gore lied on Internet 6. Al Gore lied on Love Canal 7. Al Gore lied on Love Story 8. Al Gore lied on Farm Work 9. Open Administration 10. I will protect the environment... If he missed any, let him know!

Thomas Ball writes, "So many lies have been spread by the Administration and their minions that it is hard to keep track. I suppose that's part of their strategy. Overwhelm the opposition and the public with so much misinformation that the truth will never be clear. They can then press forward in an ambiguous cloud of fear and 'what if?' scenarios. Thus, we should take pains to document the trail of deceit. As our part, we have created this list, sort of a handy tip-sheet to refute the arguments of the tin-pot, would-be murderers who insist on seizing Iraqi oil in exchange for the blood of our military men and women and the Iraqi citizenry. "

From ABC News: "Before Congress, and in public, resident Bush and Colin Powell have repeatedly pointed to aluminum tubes imported by Iraq which they say are for use in making nuclear weapons. But on Fri., head UN nuke inspector Mohammad ElBaradei told the Security Council that it wasn't likely that the tubes were for that use. ElBaradei also said that documents Bush had cited and relied upon to make the case that Iraq tried to buy uranium from a country in central Africa were fake. 'These documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic,' ElBaradei told the UN on Friday...'I think the fact that these documents turn out to be false really is an embarrassment...,' said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The documents were first disclosed by Tony Blair last September and referenced by Bush in his State of the Union address in January."

PentaPost writes, "A senior Republican lawmaker, firing back at Bush for recent statements blaming Congress for underfunding emergency workers, accused the White House of factual inaccuracy and inadequate communication. In an extraordinary departure from the public unity that has characterized White House relations with congressional Republicans, House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) wrote to urge White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to 'be responsible' and 'move on from this pointless and harmful debate' over legislation passed last month that included money for 'first responders' involved in homeland security... 'I believe White House statements that Congress only provided $1.3 billion for first responders are factually inaccurate because you have narrowly chosen programs that only you believe will support the first-responder community,' Young wrote in the three-page letter accusing the White House of various contradictions and inconsistencies."

PentaPost reports, "Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed 'not authentic' after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council. ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by Bush in major speeches and repeated by Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment... Bush, in his speech to the U.N. Security Council on Sept. 12, said Iraq had made 'several attempts to buy-high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons'... In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Bush said Iraq had 'attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.'" We're sick of the lies - impeach Bush and Powell!

Reuters reports, "The head of the U.N. nuclear agency said on Friday that the documents backing U.S. and British allegations that Iraq had attempted to import uranium from Niger were 'not authentic.' Britain and the United States have alleged that Iraq had tried to revive an ambitious atomic weapons program that was neutralized by the United Nations before inspectors left in December 1998. The claim Iraq had attempted to import the uranium was vital to the U.S. accusation, since it would not have needed the uranium for anything other than a nuclear weapons program... ElBaradei also said extensive investigations of high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq attempted to purchase had confirmed that they were not suitable for a uranium enrichment centrifuge program, as the United States had alleged. Weakening another U.S. allegation, Elbaradei said IAEA experts had concluded that none of Iraq's declared high-strength magnets could be used directly to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Robert Scheer writes, "The entire world is astonished that our resident is lying, not about a personal indiscretion, but about the most sacred duty of the leader of the most powerful nation in human history: the duty not to recklessly endanger the lives of his own or the world's people. Yet lie he has. The first lie, claimed outright, was that Iraq aided and abetted the Sept. 11 terrorists. There is no evidence at all for this claim... The second lie was that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction represent an imminent threat to U.S. security. Despite the most hugely expensive but secret high-tech spy operation in human history... and a vast network of defectors and spies, we have not been able to find their supposed weapons. The third and most dangerous lie is that our mission now is to bring lasting peace to the Mideast by a devastating invasion of Iraq, which will end... in U.S. dominance over the structure of government and politics throughout the region."

House Dems have documented 5 lies Bush told in his 2-28-03 speech on Homeland Security. Lie #1: "I proposed record funding for the first responders, $3.5 billion [in] the current budget. I've also requested another $3.5 billion in the 2004 budget." The truth: Bush proposed reducing existing grants to state and local law enforcement agencies by at least $1.2 billion; in his 2003 budget, he proposed an increase of only $1 billion, not $3.5 billion; in 8-02, he VETOED $400 million passed by Congress for first responders; in 2002, Bush actually froze money for first responders. Check out Lies #2-5.

FAIR writes, "On Feb. 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that 'raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist,' the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims... CIA spokesperson Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. 'It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue,' Harlow told Reuters (2/24/03). But on 2/26/03, a complete copy of the Kamel transcript - an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped 'sensitive' - was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who revealed that Tony Blair's 'intelligence dossier' was plagiarized from a student thesis. In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: 'All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed.'" Bush's W-ar is a BIG LIE!

If you thought "I am not a crook" and "I did not have sexual relations etc." were the biggest Presidential lies in history, you're wrong. They have been utterly eclipsed by Bush's claim that "Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us." Iraqi lives? The economic sanctions imposed by Bush's father have killed 1.5 million innocent Iraqis - including .5 million children. Bush's Nazi-style blitzkreig from the sky - "shock and awe" - will take tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives just in the first two days; if Saddam's army puts up any serious resistance, Bush's siege of Baghdad will take hundreds of thousands more. Iraqi freedom? The Pentagon isn't even pretending! Gen. Tommy Franks will run Iraq with an iron Baathist fist - the fist forged by Saddam Hussein. Bush cares about exactly one thing in Iraq - OIL - and the entire world knows it. Bush's speech should be read by everyone in the US and the world, and placed prominently the annals of infamy.

Here is an outstanding compilation of Bush's Lies. It follows Bush's campaign-like photo op appearances at hospitals, schools, factories, job centers, etc. where he promises to help those programs - and then documents each CUT that followed. This is devastating because it is thoroughly documented - be sure to send it to all your Republican "friends"!

Newsday reports, "There was only one problem with George W. Bush's claim Thursday that the nation's top economists forecast substantial economic growth if Congress passed Bush's tax cut: The forecast with that conclusion doesn't exist. Bush and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer went out of their way Thursday to cite a new survey by 'Blue-Chip economists' that the economy would grow 3.3% this year if Bush's tax cut proposal becomes law. That was news to the editor who assembles the economic forecast. 'I don't know what he was citing,' said Randell E. Moore, editor of the monthly Blue Chip Economic Forecast, a newsletter that surveys 53 of the nation's top economists each month. 'I was a little upset,' said Moore, who said he complained to the White House. 'It sounded like the Blue Chip Economic Forecast had endorsed Bush's plan. That's simply not the case.'"

After taking stenography of Bushit for more than 2 years, White House reporters may be finally awakening from their collective coma. This week's most important story is Bush's efforts to buy a majority of votes on the U.N. Security Council. But when reporters pressed Ari about the terms of these deals, Ari feigned pure unadulterated outrage. "Think about the implications of what you're saying. You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition." Suddenly, a remarkable thing happened - the reporters LAUGHED. They laughed LOUD. And they laughed so loud that Ari turned on his heels and marched right off the stage. Will this be reported? Will reporters follow up on Bush's global vote-buying effort? Will this be the LIE that broke the camel's back? Stay tuned! (Note: click the audio link and fast forward to minute 35. Or click this video link http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/edrive/iraq022503_whpb.rm and fast forward to minute 30.)

Paul Krugman writes, "This administration sets great store by credibility. As the justifications for invading Iraq come and go - Saddam is developing nuclear weapons; no, but he's in league with Osama; no, but he's really evil - the case for war has come increasingly to rest on credibility. You see, say the hawks, we've already put our soldiers in position, so we must attack or the world won't take us seriously. But credibility isn't just about punishing people who cross you. It's also about honoring promises, and telling the truth. And those are areas where the Bush administration has problems... Mr. Bush's mendacity on economic matters [have] reached almost pathological levels... Similarly unfounded claims have, in the eyes of much of the world, discredited the administration's foreign policy... Again and again the administration has cited evidence that turns out to be misleading or worthless - 'garbage after garbage after garbage,' according to one U.N. official."

BushWatch writes, "Bush lies so often and in so many different ways that I've never had the patience to keep a list of them. However, when I write something and include the generalization that Bush lies, some readers will write in and say, 'Oh, yeh? What did he lie about? I don't believe it.' What follows is an informal listing of just some of the lies he typically tells, starting from 2/01. Now, of course, we all know that Gore lies, Lott lies, Cheney lies, etc. But the difference between those liars and Bush is the Resident tells us that he is telling the truth when he is lying. Hence, he will tell us what he is going to do, like get his proposed tax cut from the surplus, then try to get his proposed tax cut from military and medicare funds, instead. Or, once he has actually begun a program, tell us lies about how or why the program has begun. Or tell a closed-door Dem meeting something and then swear up and down the next day that he didn't say it... Or, or...you get the idea."

There's a curious thing about George W. Bush's photo ops: every time he publicly expresses support for a social program or nonprofit organization such as Head Start, jobs training, literacy programs, Boys & Girls Clubs, children's health care, or programs for military veterans, soon afterwards he cuts the funding for that program. The Democratic Party has compiled a document comparing Bush's empty promises with his heartless deeds (this BIG document requires Acrobat Reader to view/print).

Historian P.M. Carpenter writes, "Assuming presidential history is still taught in some high schools, the above, I imagine, is at least the bare minimum that most students are asked to retain into adulthood: Johnson...Vietnam...lies...downfall; Nixon...Watergate...lies....downfall. Future history students, however, shall have an even easier time of it when asked to recall the gist of George W. Bush's downfall: He lied about everything. Historical simplicity, which inattentive high schoolers and 43 himself love so much, is usually easy to complicate. But Bush is laying such a chronically recidivist path of policy misrepresentations and deliberate deceit, he is making retrospective clarity -- the holy historical grail -- possible. As growing majorities throughout the world find Bush truly in-credible, his credibility gap also expands at home. If it continues to swell into 2004 ... well, that is why half the Democratic Party can be found only in Iowa and New Hampshire these days."

Clarence Swinney writes, "His background makes Clinton look like a Saint. His penchant for lying, when he is presented a conflict, is scary for a Devout Christian. My Lies list is not complete. I have 150 with more to come. 10) I will protect the environment... 14) I will Leave No Child behind - just the funding... 20) My Tax Cuts will not create deficits even in a recession... 32) I knew nothing about a possible attack. One of all time shameful lies. Eight months later Oh! I knew plenty... 39) I will pay down a record amount of the federal debt. Up is down to this BOY... 61) I will have a humble foreign policy. I would dread seeing an arrogant one... 91) We did not support the Venezuelan coup... 115) We will not become the police of the world. OK! Just judge, jury and executioner... 144) I am a Uniter not a Divider. Sho! Got the world united against us... 145) Ken Lay-First met him in 1994. Very stupid lie..."

"European intelligence officials questioned Colin Powell's contention Wednesday that the lethal poison involved in a terrorist plot broken up in Britain came from Iraq. Powell cited the plot in testimony before the House... 'The ricin that is bouncing around Europe now originated in Iraq -- not in the part of Iraq that is under Saddam Hussein's control, but his security forces know all about it,' Powell said. But investigators have said that arrests in Europe found suspected terrorists trained in biological and chemical weapons in the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia and nearby Chechnya -- and the traces of the ricin found in a British raid were clearly 'homemade.' A French intelligence source said he was 'stunned' by Powell's comment. 'There is no, repeat, no suggestion that the ricin was anything but locally produced,' he said. 'It was bad quality, not technically sophisticated.' Further, the source said, British authorities 'are clear' that the poison was 'home-made.'"

How many times has Bush told the American people and the world that "no decision has been made" about invading Iraq? Well, now we know he has LIED each time he said it. According to the NY Times, in July 2002 "King Abdullah decided to prepare for an American attack on Iraq last July, after a meeting at the White House with Bush. A Jordanian official familiar with that meeting said the 41-year-old king had asked Mr. Bush if there was any point in trying to persuade the American leader to abandon plans to topple Mr. Hussein. Mr. Bush, this official said, told King Abdullah that his mind was made up." Impeach Bush Now!

FAIR writes, "In reporting on Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, many journalists treated allegations made by Powell as though they were facts... This is of particular concern given that over the last several months, many Bush administration claims about alleged Iraqi weapons facilities have failed to hold up to inspection. In many cases, the failed claims-- like Powell's claims at the U.N.-- have cited U.S. and British intelligence sources and have included satellite photos as evidence." Here are several documented examples of Bush's lies about Iraq's weapons programs.

NY Times reports, "Bush's tax plan include dozens of small tax breaks for interests as disparate as insurance companies, elite private universities, operators of landfills and people of modest means who donate to their churches... Altogether, the tax breaks for special interests could total hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue losses over the next 10 years. Many of these proposals are similar to the ones Mr. Bush scoffed at when they were proposed in the 2000 election campaign by Al Gore... Two months before the election, Mr. Bush made this criticism of Mr. Gore's tax proposals: 'The tax code is too complicated as it is. My opponent's plan makes it more complicated with a lot of fine print. You get tax relief if you behave a certain way or only if you meet certain small categories. It's so targeted, it misses the target.' Mr. Bush declared at the rally, 'I believe that everybody who pays taxes ought to get tax relief,' not just 'the right people,' as defined by Mr. Gore."

Alexander Cockburn writes, "The reluctant jury found Ed Rosenthal guilty last Friday afternoon of breaching federal drug laws. Within moments of leaving the court, the furious jurors found out what Judge Breyer had prevented Rosenthal's defense team from disclosing to them: that Rosenthal had been appointed by the City of Oakland under the terms of California's Proposition 215, passed by the voters in 1996, as the supplier of medical marijuana to people in chronic and desperate pain. One juror was thrown into such anguish that she spent the evening in tears and finally decided go to the press to disclose her rage and disappointment in the justice system. Over the weekend, in anticipation of Tuesday's hearing on whether Rosenthal should be jailed pending sentencing in June, their anger hardened into determination to make a public stand." Clinton was impeached for lying to a jury - Impeach Bush Now!

"A day after telling reporters that Bush had visited Johnson Space Center while serving as governor of Texas in the 1990s, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer backpedaled. 'I think right now it's somewhat murky,' Fleisher [lied once more]... Fleischer's boss, communications director Dan Bartlett, said a review of governor's records suggests he had not been to the center... On Monday, Fleischer dismissed suggestions that Bush had not been interested in the NASA program before the Columbia crash and rejected a report that Bush had never been to the Space Center. He told reporters Bush visited the facility near Houston in 1995 or 1996... 'To the resident's recollection, he thinks he has been there,' [Fleischer said], adding that Bush's staff from Texas also thought they recalled such a visit." Remember the furor in 2000 when Al Gore said he visited Texas with FEMA's Director - rather than Deputy Director? Where is the outrage???

Kent Conrad (D-ND) and John Spratt (D-SC) write that when Bush stole the White House, "people were debating how to put the Social Security surpluses in a 'lockbox' so they could never be borrowed and spent again. Bush proposed a standard: It said preserving surpluses 'at least the size of the Social Security surplus' would be the 'threshold condition of public finance.' Under the budget just submitted, it proposes, without compunction, to borrow and spend ALL of the Social Security surplus over the next 10 years. Two years ago we were also seriously debating how much of the $3.5 trillion in national debt could be paid. Bush's budget would settle that debate too. Under it, NONE of the debt could be paid. Instead, over the next 10 years, Bush's policies would ADD $2 trillion to $3 trillion in national debt... It would reduce national saving and investment, drive up long-term interest rates for consumers and businesses, and stifle future growth."

Bush's proposal to provide $10 billion to fight AIDS worldwide is another bait-and-switch scam. The money won't be going to established AIDS prevention and treatment programs. It will be used for unilateral programs organized by the same people who are pushing abstinence-only sex "education" while they themselves are in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. Expect a lot of faith-based "prevention" and no real help for the victims of AIDS.

Stephen C. Pelletiere was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's. In the NY Times, Pelletiere writes that both Iraq AND Iran used chemical weapons in the March 1988 battle for the Kurdish town of Halabja. The Defense Intelligence Agency "did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time... Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards."

NY Times reports, "Analysts at the CIA have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for w-ar... At the FBI, some investigators said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network. 'We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there.' The tension within the intelligence agencies comes as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is poised to go before the UN Security Council on Wednesday to present evidence of Iraq's links to terrorism." So who are the criminals cooking the intelligence books and lying to the world? DoD's Paul Wolfowitz and NSA's Stephen Hadley are the masterminds, supported by Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and of course Bush himself. Impeach them all!

On Tuesday, Bush cited the findings of Hans Blix as justification for W-ar. But according to Blix, Bush is LYING about Blix's findings. Inspectors have NOT "found that iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials... to prevent their discovery." There is NO evidence "Iraq was sending weapons scientists [abroad] to prevent them from being interviewed." There is NO evidence "Iraqi agents were posing as scientists." UNMOVIC has NOT "been penetrated by Iraqi agents." NO "sensitive information might have been leaked to Baghdad, compromising the inspections." Blix is calling Bush a LIAR - so why is this front-page news BURIED on page A10? E-mail letters@nytimes.com

"ElBaradei stood by his inspectors' findings that aluminum tubes the Iraqis had tried to import were for rockets and not for a nuclear program, as [Bush insisted] Tuesday. 'We believe the tubes were destined for the conventional rocket program,' ElBaradei said. He said the tubes could be modified for uranium enrichment but that the process would be expensive, time-consuming and detectable. Bush [also] said: 'Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say, and intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.' ElBaradei said it was unlikely his inspectors 'could be fooled in the nuclear area on who is a scientist and who is not. We know all the scientists from the past and I think our people could easily detect if that person is a scientist or not.'"

Dan DeLisio writes, "Among the plethora of sugar coated falsehoods contained in Mr. Bush's SOTU (Bad and Getting Worse) Speech was his bald statement that 'we will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, other presidents, and other generations.' Come again? Does he ever bother to really try and understand the import of the words that Karl and his minions write for him? If he did maybe he would realize how the vast gulf between his prepared text and cold reality, his credibility gap, grows wider each time he utters such a blatant untruth. The exploding Federal budget deficits that Mr. Bush's regressive tax cuts have played a heavy part in causing, and the even greater deficits that his new grievously ill-conceived dividend tax elimination proposals will cause, are a huge problem that will be passed on to future generations in the form of a runaway explosion in the national debt" - perhaps $2.15 TRILLION.

For a year, Bush has insisted Iraq is building nukes. In October, Bush declared: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his [slick Karl Rove phrase implying Al Qaeda connection] 'nuclear mujahedeen' - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." But Dr. ElBaradei's report challenges much of this case.... The agency's inspectors also visited all of the buildings that had been identified through satellite photos as possible sites for working on nuclear arms. "No prohibited nuclear activities have been identified during these inspections," he said. Bush is simply LYING about Iraq nukes.

NY Times opines that Bush "sacrificed truth for political gain this week when it filed legal briefs urging the Supreme Court to overturn the University of Michigan's use of racial 'quotas' in admissions. Michigan's admissions system does not use racial quotas. But the administration has clearly decided the best way to appease its right-wing supporters without alienating the rest of the country is to disguise its anti-affirmative-action agenda as an anti-quota crusade. The administration should start leveling with the American people about race, and it should stop trying to turn back the clock. Bush said this week that Michigan's policies were fatally flawed because they 'amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race'... But 'quota' has a specific meaning, and the University of Michigan's admissions policies do not meet it." In other words, Bush LIED - why doesn't the Times have the guts to say so? E-mail letters@nytimes.com

Paul Krugman writes, "Picture a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon. First he says he can handle a few drinks. Then, when his inebriation can't be denied, he insists it's only a temporary lapse. But eventually he turns mean. 'What's so great about being sober?' he growls, reaching for another bottle. As a drunk is to alcohol, the Bush administration is to budget deficits. During the 2000 campaign George W. Bush often pledged to maintain fiscal responsibility. Right up to the passage of the 2001 tax cut his people said they could cut taxes, pay for new programs like prescription drug coverage, and still pay off most of the federal government's debt. As soon as the bill passed, those rosy budget projections fell apart. Then came Sept. 11. 'Lucky me, I hit the trifecta,' declared Mr. Bush, claiming - falsely - to have said during the campaign that his budget promises didn't apply in the event of recession, war or national emergency."

Team Bush insists they "discovered" North Korea's secret centrifuge uranium-enrichment program in 2002, before Asst. Sec. of State Jim Kelly visited NK. But Joshua Micah Marshall writes, "former Clinton administration officials are saying this was known about in 1999 and 2000 and that they briefed the incoming Bush administration officials on this in January 2001... The administration's claim seems even more strained given the fact that this unclassified (i.e., public) CIA report to Congress, covering the second half of 2001, states... 'During this time frame, P'yongyang has continued attempts to procure technology worldwide that could have applications in its nuclear program. The North has been seeking centrifuge-related materials in large quantities to support a uranium enrichment program. It also obtained equipment suitable for use in uranium feed and withdrawal systems.'" Team Bush concocted the "new discovery" lie so they could blame Clinton for being duped. Impeach Bush Now!

WashPost's David Broder hates Democrats, so it comes as a shock that he has noticed that George Bush has betrayed the supposedly Republican idea of 'small government.' "When George W. Bush was running for president, he did not campaign as an enemy of the federal government. But he claimed that he would limit its growth and power. And he derided his opponent, Al Gore, as an advocate of 'big government'... [But] two years after taking office, Bush is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state governments, and injected federal requirements into every public school in America... Big government is back -- with a Republican label." Defeat ALL Republicans!

WashPost opines, Bush "came to town promising to change the tone of debate and to reach across party lines. Now he seems to have settled on a different course. Some of his advisers apparently have concluded that polarizing political fights with Democrats benefit the administration; that ugly combat, even in a losing and not terribly worthy cause, such as the renomination of Judge Pickering, only shores up support among the Republicans' socially conservative Southern base. Tactically they may be right. But as a method of governing, all-out war from Day One leaves much to be desired. With a razor-thin margin in the Senate and a slim majority in the House, Mr. Bush is unlikely to achieve progress on difficult issues, such as Medicare reform or improvements in the judicial confirmation process, without a willingness to compromise." Impeach Bush Now!

On 1-3-03, "the FBI admitted that the most important ingredient in the story -- that is, the proof -- is nowhere to be found: 'There is no border-crossing information that would say they're here,' FBI spokesman Ed Cogswell said. 'And to say they came in from Canada is pure speculation.' [The] odd, highly hyped saga began on Dec. 29, when the FBI announced that it was launching a national manhunt for the five men... believed to have come to Canada from the Middle East before entering the US on some unstated mission. Arriving just three days before New Year's, which provided an obvious peg for terrorism-related stories -- and right in the middle of the holiday 'silly season' -- the tale of the five mystery men quickly assumed tremendous energy. 'Frankly, we were surprised at all the coverage,' said Sgt. Paul Marsh, a spokesman with the RCMP. 'It was amazing, really'... 'It was a slow week at the White House. They needed something to stir the pot because nothing was happening in Iraq.'"

WorldNetDaily reports, "Intelligence pros say the White House is manufacturing terrorist alerts to keep the issue alive in the minds of voters and to keep Bush's approval ratings high, Capitol Hill Blue reports. The Thursday report said that the administration is engaging in 'hysterics' in issuing numerous terror alerts that have little to no basis in fact. 'Unfortunately, we haven't made a lot of progress against al-Qaida or the war on terrorism,' one FBI agent familiar with terrorism operations told CHB. 'We've been spinning our wheels for several weeks now.' Other sources within the bureau and the Central Intelligence Agency said the administration is pressuring intelligence agencies to develop 'something, anything' to support an array of non-specific terrorism alerts issued by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security." If this is true, Bush should be impeached immediately for playing politics with terrorism!

Intelligence professionals say privately the Bush administration is engaging in - hysterics - with multiple terrorism alerts that have little or no basis in fact. The alerts, instead, are part of a carefully scripted White House campaign to keep terrorism on the minds of American voters along with public approval ratings of administration handling of the stalled war on terrorism.

In one old Buster Keaton flick, a Confederate Keaton has stolen a train and is trying to escape a pursuing engine filled with angry Union soldiers. To slow their pursuit, he keeps tossing barrels and boxes out onto the track. In the past 10 days, Bush and his operatives have been doing much the same thing, with Trent Lott, Henry Kissinger, the missile defense network, and the roundup of Muslims their "barrels." "These "crises" are very likely all designed to keep America's attention riveted on one Bush hand while the other picks the world's proverbial pocket unnoticed," writes Cheryl Seal.

"From October 21, 2001, Jihad Unspun staff and researchers began tracking military casualties in the US war on terrorism campaign in Afghanistan from approximately 40 international news sources daily. Although limited information on the extent of casualties suffered in Afghanistan by US and Coalition troops has appeared in main stream North American press, this has not been the case in other parts of the globe. Only those reports that could be verified in more than one source are included here. This conclusion that can be drawn from this report is that the deaths of both US and Coalition soldiers are significantly higher than the public is being made aware of and therefore the willingness to continue the America war effort to new theatres such as Iraq is being orchestrated under false pretenses." JihadUnspun...See http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1202-06.htm See http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1202-06.htm -foreshadows U.S. lies on casualties

"I am using every opportunity to say to people in the government who are in the position that I was then, and who know that their president is lying us into a wrongful and reckless war, to do what I wish I had done in 1964-65: to go to Congress and the press with documents and tell the truth. That would be a risk, but there are times when big risks are worth that to save a lot of lives." So writes Daniel Ellsberg.

The "No Child Left Behind Act" is yet again another trojan horse designed solely to promote a hidden Bush agenda. In the "fine print" of the act (Section 9528), you will discover that the Act gives the Pentagon free access to student records - a so-called "funding provision." In short, if a school desperately needs the money from the program, which is supposed to help students read and perform better on tests, they can only get it by sacrificing their students rights.

Bush is reportedly trying to pressure the UN inspectors into giving him and his clueless, science-illiterate White House team an advance copy of the UN report - despite the fact that experts say it will take many days before EXPERTS (got that, Ari and Charlotte?) can fully and accurately interpret the reports. We all know why Bush wants the report, of course - so he can sucker punch the inspectors with a trumped up claim of violation and start the war - as he's always intended. Meanwhile, the UN inspectors threw down a challenge to Bush - if you have such detailed "secret" info on Iraq's weapons, then tell us where to look and save us some time. The answer, of course, was a big fat silence because there's a big fat nothing under Bush's claims.

NY Times reports: "Before the cold war ended, the United States often sent orchestras, dance troupes and other artists abroad to infiltrate Communist societies culturally. Writers like John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee and E. L. Doctorow gave government-sponsored readings in Eastern Europe that used literature on behalf of American interests." Now Bush and Charlotte "I'll Sell Anything" Beers have launched a multipronged propaganda assault on the world that includes an anthology of American writers' essays and a traveling road show of 9/11 photos (message: the U.S. has suffered more than ANYONE ELSE!!). Most laughable of all is Beers dissemination of videos "spotlighting tolerance for Muslims" in the U.S. As ever, for the Bush folks, everything's a sales pitch - nothing's ever about just BEING a decent administration and promoting real tolerance or compassion for the suffering of other nations.

Few people are left in the world now who have any doubt Bush intends to invade Iraq regardless of public opinion, economic advice, pleas of the civilized world, or lack of real pretext. As the inspections progress with peaceful, above board cooperation apparent, Bush has tried to spin his own irrational version of the situation, expressing "mounting skepticism" and claiming there ARE weapons - they're just being hidden somehow (gives an all clear to attack ANYONE, eh?). Meanwhile, a huge carrier has been deployed to the area (see http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/South/12/05/carrier.sails.ap/) and bombing raids are intensifying and now targeting civilian areas, according to Iraqi reports (http://www.uruklink.net/iraqnews/enews25.htm). All as if there were no weapons inspectors and G.W. had been elected King of the Universe, with an all-clear to do exactly as he damned pleases.

"Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s, knew about war and death," writes Patrick J. Sloyan. "So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches." And now, under Bush II, the truth about what is happening in Afghanistan - and perhaps Iraq II - may NEVER be known.

From the National Environmental Trust Statement: "This is Bush's payoff to 13 big electric utilities for the $4 million they gave to elect Republicans to Congress this fall. That's all it cost to get [Bush] to break his own campaign promise to clean up dirty power plants whose pollution kills 30,000 Americans every year....Today's rule changes mean Bush is willing to let these plants go on polluting for 15 more years -- until long after he leaves office. That's the exact opposite of what he promised Americans who voted for him in 2000. This is Bush's worst assault on public health so far. It will hurt far more people than last year's plan to allow more arsenic in the nation's drinking water. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are likely to be forced to vote on it early next year, and the issue will be simple: is your Member of Congress more interested in protecting the health of average Americans or in protecting the profits of 13 big utility companies?"

What an amazing coincidence! Before Leftwing Worker party candidate Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil on Oct 27, Bush was falling over himself to kowtow to Brazil, bailing their economy out. This was all in the hope that Lula would NOT win, but instead a Bush-corporate-friendly candidate would be plugged in. (see http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2002/November/Brazil_Nov02.htm) Now, less than three weeks later, Iran-Contra fiend Otto Reich has accused Brazil of being a site for a Hizbollah terrorist training. So what's the next step? An attempted coup d'etat like the one Reich and BushDaddy's CIA assisted against Venezuela's Chavez? Or something more barbaric?

Eric Alterman writes, "Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice...Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose--merely about war and peace. He has consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities...Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used 'for missions targeting the US' [and that] the IAEA revealed the Iraqis to be 'six months away from developing a weapon.' Both of these statements are false...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."

Eric Alterman writes, "Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice...Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose--merely about war and peace. He has consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities...Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used 'for missions targeting the US' [and that] the IAEA revealed the Iraqis to be 'six months away from developing a weapon.' Both of these statements are false...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."

Christopher Brauchli writes, "Victory will be Mr. Bush's when war is substituted for play. That is what Mr. Bush tells us and if he says it, it must be so — unless he is lying and the liberal press got it right after all."

Paul Krugman writes: "You may recall that George W. Bush promised, among other things, to change the tone in Washington. He made good on that promise: the tone has certainly changed. As far as I know, in the past it wasn't considered appropriate for the occupant of the White House to declare that members of the opposition party weren't interested in the nation's security. And it certainly wasn't usual to compare anyone who wants to tax the rich - or even anyone who estimates the share of last year's tax cut that went to the wealthy - to Adolf Hitler....The strategy used to sell the Bush tax cut was simply to deny the facts - and to lash out at anyone who tried to point them out. And it's a strategy that, having worked there, is now being applied across the board....You see, some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how George W. Bush got to the top."

"Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday. Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent. "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence." - UK Guardian

The Institute for Public Accuracy listened to Bush's War Speech, and offers a line-by-lie rebuttal. For starters, Bush's lie that Iraq poses a "grave danger" to peace. Rebuttal: "There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq is doing so, or has any intention of doing so. Other powers are actively disrupting the peace in the region: Israel is trying to crush Palestinian resistance to occupation with brute force, and the U.S. and Britain have bombed Iraq 46 times in 2002 when their aircraft are 'targeted' by Iraqi air defense systems in the bilaterally enforced no-fly zones. Most of our 'friends' in the region - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan - have strongly urged us not to go to war, and to tone down the war rhetoric. Aren't they better positioned than we are to judge what threatens their safety?"

Bush's chain of "evidence" against Saddam is made of smoke rings! The AP has assembled the chief lies. To these we add: Saddam tried to kill Bush, Sr. (Seymour Hersch's 1993 investigation found evidence the whole story was likely fabricated); Saddam searched for uranium in Africa (even the report shows he did NOT find any); uranium was being smuggled into Iraq as recently as last week (turns out it wasn't even radioactive material); an "official document" from the International Atomic Energy Agency shows Saddam was just 6 months from nukes in 1998 (no such document exists); Saddam has biological weapons (the U.S. gov. has known that for YEARS - in fact, the Reagan-Bush team GAVE him the stuff); and (most recently) our planes are being shot at by Iraqis (our planes are also dropping bombs on civilian airports, invading Iraqi airspace. And, Iraqis have been firing "statement" salvos at jets for 10 years, unable to hit any of them).

Rightwingers like to claim that Clinton bombed Iraq for political gain. But the 1993 bombing was in response to an alleged assassination attempt on Bush Sr. while in Kuwait. In fact, this report may have been engineered in large part by Bush pal Frank Wisner (a CIA and Enron bigwig) and former CIA director James Woolsey. "A senior White House official recently told me that one of the seemingly most persuasive elements of the report had been overstated and was essentially incorrect," said Seymour Hersh in a 1993 article. "And none of the Clinton Administration officials have claimed that there was any empirical evidence - a 'smoking gun' -directly linking Saddam or any of his senior advisers to the alleged assassination attempt. The case against Iraq was, and remains, circumstantial." Hey, BushDaddy's CIA provided the wrong map coordinates that led to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, as well as the faulty evidence that led to the bombing of the Sudanese aspirin factory!

AP refutes Bush's claims about how threatening Iraq is to the United States. "Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, on Wednesday: 'There clearly are contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship here... And there are some al-Qaida personnel who found refuge in Baghdad.' [But] U.S. intelligence sources indicate that evidence of direct channels between Baghdad and al-Qaida is tenuous... Bush, on Thursday: 'The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.' The Iraqi government has supported Palestinian and other regional terrorist groups, although not as actively as Syria and Iran... An organization devoted to the overthrow of the Iranian government is supported both by Iraq and by some U.S. members of Congress."

We aren't sure what makes this latest from Bush Propaganda Central more pathetic - the fact that it came the very day after Tony Blair's feeble attempt to sell the world a 'dossier' on Iraq weaponry or the fact that it is trying to pawn off a story that didn't even fly back when national emotions on Al Qaida were at a near-hysterical pitch. But here Bush & Co are again, trying to convice the world that Saddam is harboring Al Qaida and trying to do so in even vaguer, more slippery terms than last spring. In any case, this latest effort to snucker the public proves that this administration thinks everyone in the U.S. are half-witted. Btw - notice in the article's top photo how Rumsfeld appears to be trying to conjure up evidence, black magic style!

MSNBC reports, "Bush cited a satellite photograph and a report by the U.N. atomic energy agency as evidence of Iraq's impending [nuclear] rearmament. But in response to a report by NBC News, a senior administration official acknowledged Saturday night that the U.N. report drew no such conclusion, and a spokesman for the U.N. agency said the photograph had been misinterpreted." Bush "said Saddam could be six months away from developing nuclear weapons," citing a report by the UN-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But the IAEA report "said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability BEFORE the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed. The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium." EVERY charge about Iraq by Bush has proved to be a lie. Impeach Bush Now! NOTE: MSNBC scrubbed itself, but we kept original!

"The story behind the firefighter's flag was not revealed in the corporate media's early post-9/11 propaganda feeding frenzy. This flag, which was NOT the one dragged from the rubble, was commandeered from a yacht moored near the WTC. And, as an added twist in the Bush propaganda machine's tangled web, when the flag was recently returned to the yacht owners, they announced that it wasn't the right flag! Which, of course means that the "ground zero flag" they received was just one of many in the "ground zero flag" patriotic propaganda stable - sort of like all those different General Lees they had to use to create the mythic car on Dukes of Hazzard week after week. Am I knocking the flag? Absolutely not. But for me, the flag is not a mere object, like a plastic Jesus on the dashboard. It is a CONCEPT that is best honored not by carting it around the country like a traveling sideshow, but by upholding what it STANDS FOR." So writes Cheryl Seal.

Paul Krugman writes, "The Bush team's Orwellian propensities have long been apparent to anyone following its pronouncements on economics. Even during campaign 2000 these pronouncements relied on doublethink, the ability to believe two contradictory things at the same time... Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security always depended on the assertion that 2-1=4 - that we can divert payroll taxes into high-yielding personal accounts, yet still use the same money to pay benefits to retirees. The Orwellian tactics ... also include newspeak, the redefinition of words to rule out disloyal thoughts. Again, Social Security is a perfect example. Republican political consultants have found that in an era of plunging stocks and corporate scandal the word 'privatization' has taken on negative connotations. The answer? Deny that personal accounts constitute privatization, and bully the press into going along." Call the media and demand they tell the truth about Bush's lies!

Paul Krugman writes: "Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's '1984,' was a rewrite man. His job was to destroy documents that could undermine the government's pretense of infallibility, and replace them with altered versions... Last month the Office of Management and Budget got sloppy: it issued a press release stating flatly that tax cuts were responsible for only 15% of the 10-year deterioration... [When it was caught lying], The O.M.B. reacted angrily, and published a letter in The Times attacking me. It attributed the misstatement to "error," and declared that it had been "retracted." Was it? It depends on what you mean by the word "retract." As far as anyone knows, O.M.B. didn't issue a revised statement conceding that it had misinformed reporters and giving the right numbers. It simply threw the embarrassing document down the memory hole... I don't think any previous U.S. administration has been this brazen about rewriting history to make itself look good."

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Tom Brazaitis observes, the Bush operatives claim to live in a world of personal responsibility -- except when the responsibility is their own. They're back to their favorite punching bag -- former President Bill Clinton. It is a wonder, writes Brazaitis, that anyone believes that nonsense, and yet Bush's corporate allies have done such a brilliant job at insulating Bush from his own job performance that there is no reason that blaming Clinton can't go on indefinitely.

At the press conference last week, King George said, "First, we will use the full weight of the law to expose and root out corruption. My administration will do everything in our power to end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws." Hmmm cooking the books... shading the truth... breaking the laws... that sounds so familiar. Wait, we know. He was speaking about his Administration!! Cooking the books - can we say hiding $30 Billion last year to save last years budget from looing like a complete mess? Shading the truth - besides everything King George does, where is our $5 trillion surplus? What about his DUI, Military service, Harken record etc? Breaking the laws - we would say the destruction of our Constitution is breaking the law! Remember, when you think of the destruction of capitalism, think George W. Bush. Impeach Bush Now!

Finally, evidence of the original promise that was made during the 2000 campaign to only allow a deficit during a time of war, national emergency, or recession -- the one Bush says justifies his offensive 'trifecta' joke -- has been found. But it wasn't Bush who made that promise -- it was Al Gore! Bush must really be delusional. Is he putting himself in Gore's shoes in a pathetic attempt to validate his illegitimate presidency?

First Bush blamed the SEC for his late filing of the required notice that he (suspiciously) dumped most of his Harken energy stock right before it tanked. The White House must have realized that that particular white lie wouldn't fly, so now Bush is passing the buck to Harken's attorneys. Former SEC officials state unequivocably that it was BUSH's responsibility to file the forms on time, NOT the corporation's lawyers. Bush's response to recent scandals - his "corporate responsibility" plan - is a pathetic joke. As much as he yammered about personal responsibility during his presidential campaign, this hypocrite just can't stop blaming others for his own unethical and/or incompetent actions.

MSNBC's David Neiwert writes, "Professional stand-up comedians know that Sept. 11 jokes are radioactive. Not even the bravest have tried to turn the deaths of some 3,000 people into a laughing matter. But President Bush has forged ahead anyway. Bush has now been telling the same, spectacularly tasteless joke to a variety of mostly Republican audiences as part of his stock stump speech for the better part of four months now... Never mind that it is perhaps the most tasteless and insensitive joke in the annals of the presidency, or that it is ultimately a falsehood. What’s really noteworthy about Tale of the Trifecta is that the in-your-face political opportunism it represents is not out of the ordinary for this administration." Impeach Bush Now!

Despite fact-checking challenges by several publications, Bush continues to repeat the lie that he campaigned on balancing the budget "unless the nation found itself in a war, a national emergency or a recession." The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reports, "the White House press office referred your correspondent to a Sept. 6, 2001, Bush appearance at the White House with President Vicente Fox of Mexico. 'I have repeatedly said the only time to use Social Security money is in times of war, times of recession or times of severe emergency,' Bush said. That was before war and emergency, but already in an economic downturn -- and it was well after the campaign. The White House also suggested supporting evidence might be found in GOP presidential primary debates on Jan. 7 and Jan. 10, 2000. But a search of the transcripts of those debates finds no exculpatory information." Bush is LYING - when will Bush dredge up his "honor and integrity" by admitting to his lie?

The New Republic writes, "Back in Houston last week, President [sic] George W. Bush again told what is gradually becoming his favorite political anecdote: "You know, when I was one time campaigning in Chicago, a reporter said, 'Would you ever have a deficit?' I said, 'I can't imagine it, but there would be one if we had a war, or a national emergency, or a recession.' Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta." Even we're getting a little tired of pointing out that this story is almost certainly untrue... the key policy issue that divided Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 race was the Texas governor's massive tax cut proposal. Bush claimed there was enough money to continue paying down the debt, fund any additional spending needs that might arise, and still afford his tax cut; Gore claimed there wasn't. Gore was right."

Brad Carlton writes that on 9/11, Bush "reportedly gloated to his budget director, Mitch Daniels, 'Lucky me -- I hit the trifecta!' At the time, this comment (a variation of which is being recycled for laughs at current GOP fundraisers) seemed merely offensive. But in light of revelations that Bush's August 6 briefing memo was titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.,' Bush's 'luck' and weird prescience are worth more than passing scrutiny... extraordinary coincidences have gone unremarked in the media, who have entirely missed that the terms of the 'trifecta' -- note that the word connotes something you bet on -- was never mentioned until two-and-a-half weeks after Bush's August 6 briefing and days before 9/11. (He has since claimed the 'trifecta' was a campaign promise. This is a lie.)"

Spinsanity writes, "It takes a brazen politician to make up a story that can be proven false and then to keep lying about it after being busted repeatedly. [Bush's claim] that during a 2000 Chicago campaign stop he listed three exceptions under which he would run deficits - war, national emergency or recession - is blatantly false. No one has found any evidence that Bush made such a statement, and the White House has pointedly failed to provide any. What makes this revisionist history so egregious is that Bush had actually promised that he would protect the Social Security surplus and not support deficit spending... In August 2001, Bush and his aides began listing exceptions the president [sic] had 'always' supported that justified dipping into the Social Security surplus. Then, in October, Bush began using the mythical Chicago statement to defend himself against criticism of the overall budget deficits that seemed imminent." Bush's sick joke that he "Hit the Trifecta" is a Big Lie.

ABCnews.com's the Note writes, "Let's face it: Democrats and the press do not trust the White House to tell the truth about the war on terror, and do not trust the White House to not play politics with the war on terror... Based on all the available evidence since President [sic] Bush was sworn in, we feel secure in saying that the White House doesn't really want to change the tone. By now they have proven that mantra from the 2000 campaign -- and a successful one at that -- to be an almost purely political attempt to capitalize on the country's disgust with the increasing partisanship and politics of personal destruction of the '80s and '90s in Washington. The political wars today are almost as fierce as they were in the Clinton era, albeit not centered on personal scandals. [Democrats reflexively think] the Bush Administration is full of perpetually campaigning liars." Guess what? They are!

It turns out that Bush didn't even READ the EPA climate change report confirming the human effects of global warming, even though he had dismissively said, "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy." Nobody should be surprised that a) Bush didn't read it (does he read ANYTHING?) and b) that he lied about it. Ari Fleischer laughed it off as if it's a joke, but it's none too funny to be stuck with this son-of-a-Bush who shirks his leadership responsibilities, lies about it, and obviously couldn't care less about the destruction of the planet. Where is the outrage?

Jonathan Chait writes, "Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, is famous. But I knew him back when he was merely infamous, as chief Republican spokesman on the House Ways and Means Committee... What Fleischer does, for the most part, is not really spin. It's a system of disinformation--blunter, more aggressive, and, in its own way, more impressive than spin. Much of the time Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises--or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether."

Robert Kuttner writes, "the voters of this country could have been forgiven for sizing up George W Bush as a cross between a moderate Republican and DLC Democrat. Here are some of the things he said while campaigning: 'To seniors in this country. [Bush] will keep the promise of Social Security -- no changes, no reductions, no way.' [On the environment, Bush said] he would be unusually green for a Republican... 'we must continue developing renewable energy.' [He promised] to 'leave no child behind' [literally plagiarizing the] slogan of the Children's Defense Fund... All of these declarations were, of course, lies. [What's interesting is that Bush's] multiple lies are something very rare in politics: They are ideological lies. [Hypocrisy] is the homage that vice pays to virtue. In the case of Bush, campaign lies are the homage that Republican sloganeering paid to the popularity of Democratic ideology."

Anne Kornblut writes in the Boston Globe, "In between the war on terrorism and Middle East violence, the White House has found time to worry about the fate of an almost-defunct gold mine in South Dakota. State officials had hoped to see the Homestake Gold Mine tranformed into a government-run science laboratory, but first its corporate owner demanded federal protection from environmental lawsuits. The project quickly became a poker chip in South Dakota's Senate race." Senator Tim Johnson worked for years on transferring the Homestake Gold Mine to the National Science Foundation. The Bush White House encouraged their South Dakota challenger to take the credit -- he even issued press releases and aired a campaign ad taking credit. All we can say is -- South Dakota, Beware.

Jonathan Chait writes in the New Republic, "The latest in what has become a steady stream of bad budgetary news arrived last Friday, when newspapers reported that this year's deficit is estimated to be about $100 billion--twice as large as previous forecasts had suggested. President [sic] George W. Bush immediately offered a multilayered defense packed with jaw-dropping mendacity. First came denial... Next Bush offered up [his all-purpose escape clause]. But this escape clause is not only a falsehood; it's actually a revision of a previous falsehood, which itself was consciously designed to cover up the fact that the budget is in far worse shape than Bush lets on. A little history is in order. Bush's original promise on the budget was extremely clear: He would devote the entire Social Security surplus to debt reduction... Not only did Bush make no exception for emergencies, but he specifically promised that even if emergencies arose, they would not force him to break his pledge."

"In the 2002 elections, all 435 House seats, 34 Senate seats and 36 governorships will be on the ballot. 'The Republicans are going to try to blur the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans on issues that are critical to American families,' said Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the DNC. Bush is 'trying to return to his campaign themes of compassionate conservatism.'" A new "Democratic video includes candidate Bush saying: - His proposed tax cuts would not cause deficits. Democrats note that budget deficits have returned and may continue until 2005 at least. - He would make sure the Social Security Trust Fund was not spent for other budget needs. Democrats say the administration is on schedule to spend more than $1 trillion of the trust fund over the next decade. - He would pay down a record amount of the national debt. Democrats say he has been forced to request an increase in the debt limit of hundreds of billions of dollars." So reports ABCNews.

William Safire writes, "Back in the presidential campaign of 2000, I asked candidate George W. Bush a specific question: On the issue of consumer privacy, did he favor 'opt-in' or 'opt-out'? He had been well briefed on the terminology. To my delight, candidate Bush took a position that was foursquare on the side of the customer and patient: 'I'm for opt-in,' he said firmly, repeating the word 'consent,' promising all us libertarians help against the intruders. That was then. This year, with White House approval, his health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, did exactly the opposite. He eliminated the mild privacy rules put in place by Bill Clinton's Donna Shalala to require hospitals to get the written consent of patients before disclosing sensitive medical data to insurers, drug firms or others. The Boston Globe reported Thompson's spokesman telling patients scornfully, 'You never did have federal privacy rights.' Bush's retreat was a triumph for the intrusion lobby."

Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate, asserts that every presidential administration lies in one way or another, but Bush lies so much and so badly, he creates his own alternative realities to suit every occasion. Bush doesn't care if those realities don't mesh, nor does he care to be bothered with the complexities of the real world. "The characteristic Bush II form of dishonesty is to construct an alternative reality on some topic and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with 'nuance,' which the president of this class, I mean of the United States, has more important things to do than worry about." This is just one of many characteristics that make Shrub barely qualified to be dog catcher, much less the leader of the western world.

Have you seen all those article and pictures of Bush "at home on the ranch" in Crawford - the ones that imply that he is "just an ole ranch hand" more comfortable on the family homestead than in the "Big City," be it Austin or D.C.? Well, if you bought this image, you've been royally snuckered. The Bush family homestead in Crawford is nothing more than an elaborate set. The house, built in 2000, was designed to be ready for Bush to step into - like a set awaiting an actor - during the 2000 presidential election. Not only was the "ranch" created in 2000 - so, essentially, was the "town" of Crawford! The original completion date of the house was November 7 - election day 2000. In other words, the curtain went up on the set on schedule for "show time." The very timing of this event indicates that Bush was absolutely confident that the election would be successfully engineered in his favor.

According to the AP, "Bush collected $2.6 million for Republican Senate candidates in two states Wednesday, hours after signing a campaign finance bill that will restrict political fund-raising. 'I'm not going to lay down my arms,' Bush said." Say WHAT? Didn't Bush promise to "change the tone" in Washington? Is Bush declaring WAR on the Democratic Party - which has supported almost every single proposal of his administration, including 1000% support for the war against terror? If Bush views US politics as war, does that justify using the full powers of the state - including the FBI and the CIA - or even weapons, including nukes? Where is the outrage???

Does the Bush administration think we're all idiots? For months, investigators have worked night and day to close in on the anthrax terrorist. Just days ago, it was revealed that the perp was one of our own, possibly even with the military or the CIA. Now, SUDDENLY, an official in the Bush Adm. 'remembers' that a wound on one of the terrorist's hands looked suspiciously like anthrax - implying the evil swarthy people did it ALL. Anyone who believes this "instant evidence" probably still believes in the Tooth Fairy, too.

"American flag sales soared, along with President Bush's approval ratings," says Tim Jones of the Chicago Tribune, "But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11...did not trigger a surge in military enlistment. The four major branches of the military--Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines--say their recruiting numbers have changed little in the past six months...'We've seen a minimal impact since Sept. 11,' said Douglas Smith, the civilian head of Army public affairs at Ft. Knox, Ky." These facts are in stark contrast to the propaganda being pushed by the Bush machine, which earlier wanted us to believe that recruits were beating down the doors of the military, CIA, and FBI! This "little discrepancy" is no doubt why this article goes on to spin the facts into Bush's corner, claiming the administration never had any real expectations anyway...yeah, right!

"My advice to fellow liberals who are approached by beaming conservatives with the 'Clinton lied' story is as follows: Pose this question to the offender: Suppose we had the opportunity to put George W. Bush on the stand. He would be sworn in and asked the following questions: 1. 'Please give a full accounting of your alleged cocaine use during your college and Texas Air National Guard years.' 2. 'Is it true that you were suspended from flying during your last two years of Texas Air National Guard service for refusing to take a physical examination that might have revealed illegal drug use?' 3. 'Is it true that in the winter of 1971, while dating a woman whose initials were R. L., you arranged for her to have an illegal abortion at the Twelve Oaks Hospital in Houston?' 4. 'Besides the 1976 DUI arrest that America learned of days before the 2000 election, how many other times have you been arrested for driving while intoxicated?'" So writes the Angry Liberal in BuzzFlash.

"U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said Bush's prescription drug plan supports about 30 percent of older Americans, but does not cover about 7 million members of the middle class. Rockefeller said Bush's budget provides less money for prescription drugs than Congress approved last year, even though prices are climbing at five times the rate of inflation. 'The dreams of millions of seniors are threatened by the runaway cost of prescription drugs,' Rockefeller said. 'They know that a single chronic illness could steal their retirement savings.' Rockefeller said Bush promised to provide prescription drug coverage for 'every senior' during his presidential campaign. 'I am saddened that the president [sic] has broken a critical campaign promise to protect older Americans,' Rockefeller said."

"George W. Bush has lately become accustomed to a certain amount of deference. Since Sept. 11 it is politically incorrect to speak to or about him without a glowing tribute to his war leadership. But he got none of that from Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who steamed into the Oval Office on Feb. 7 and delivered 'the unvarnished truth' that Vice President Dick Cheney craved for his secret energy huddles. The president [sic], Reid told him, had lied to the people of Nevada about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which the state vehemently opposes... You think this land is your land? Dick Cheney doesn't think so. How he formulated plans for the environment is classified. Thank heaven Reid disagrees." So reports Mary McGrory, columnist for the Washington Post.

The Pentagon claims to have abandoned its plan to feed outright lies to the media. But as Alan Balch reports, in January several branches of Rupert Murdoch's evil global media empire reported the same lie, which was obviously concocted by the Pentagon. Murdochnews claimed US forces killed 15 Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers in Hazar Qadam - which was the tip of the iceberg of 5,000 Taliban soldiers with 450 tanks who were "regrouping" after they were routed in December. In reality, there were no Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters in Hazar Qadam - it was simply a massacre now blamed on "faulty intelligence." This means the Pentagon HAS been lying to the foreign media. We demand an investigation by the Armed Services Committees!

If Gore had won Nevada's 4 Electoral College votes, Florida's results would not have mattered. BushCheney won Nevada by under 22,000 votes after Cheney visited Nevada and promised NOT to approve the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain. Why did BushCheney break their promise? Because of the $$$ raised by Edison Electric Institute chief Tom Kuhn. Hey Nevadans - join the 12,000 citizens who have signed our impeachment petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/ddc12/petition.html)

According to the NY Times, "The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said... Little information is available about the Office of Strategic Influence, and even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans. Its multimillion dollar budget, drawn from a $10 billion emergency supplement to the Pentagon budget authorized by Congress in October, has not been disclosed. Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the new office has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations." Will NO ONE stand up to the ever-expanding LIES - personal and official - of the Bush dictatorship?? Where is the outrage???

The GOP hounded Al Gore over one or two mild exaggerations, smearing him as a "liar." But now Bush's deceit - blatant, calculated lies, not exaggerations - are coming out. Like the big lie he told the people of Nevada and their governor Kenny Guinn in exchange for their support in 2000. Bush said, I won't OK Yucca Mt. without first going over all the info personally. But Bush never had any intention of NOT rubberstamping Yucca Mountain - after all, he took the largest chunk of nuclear industry money in 2000 of any candidate running! So, in good faith, Nevadans voted for Bush, handing him the election. Now Bush is thumbing his nose at the state, while his buddies in the nuke business laugh all the way to the bank.

"The concentric-ring strategy quieted the Enron scandal after four days of smoke but little fire. But at a cost... The president's [sic] Oval Office performance has even been condemned by pro-Bush stalwart George Will as 'Clintonian.' And mounting media cynicism is affecting issues beyond Enron. Some in Washington greeted the White House version of Bush's fainting episode with disbelief. Coverage of Bush on the road is more critical than it has been since 9/11. On Tuesday The New York Times busted him for misstating the facts surrounding China's entry into the World Trade Organization, and The Washington Post corrected his assertion that the tax cut is permanent (by law it expires in ten years). And all this comes just as the White House is starting its p.r. campaign to sell its new budget-- a document that will call for some painful cuts and would benefit from a more credulous public." So writes Ryan Lizza in The New Republic.

As West Wing fans know, President Bartlet was censured by Congress for failing to disclose his medical condition. Well guess what - Bush has been lying about his own medical condition, a heart arrhythmia called bradycardia, which is a resting heart rate below 60 beats per minute. KPCC reporter David Robb suspected bradycardia caused Bush to faint after gagging on the pretzel, and after repeated calls to White House physician Dr. Richard Tubb, Robb finally got confirmation that Bush's "resting heart rate is 38 to 49 beats per minute." Once again, Bush has violated his promise to bring "honor and integrity" to the White House. We demand a Congressional censure!

In November, Ari Fleischer said, "You are saying, 'we don't trust you.'" "No, Ari, we don't. None of you made it easy from the word "go." Air Force One was never trashed nor was it ever a target but you said those things. Your boss said there were things we were never going to know and you're all doing your best to distract people so you don't get caught lying. The sordid pasts of so many in your little club make for fertile ground for many of us to get caught up in conspiracy theories. Some aren't too bad while some seem crazy. But you know what? The more time that goes by and the more heated those press conferences become, the less crazy some people feel. As heartening as that may be, it's really sad as well. So much for "honesty and integrity" but, as I recall, most Americans didn't buy that lie either on Election Day 2000." So writes David Jenkins.

"Rove told his audience about Bush's sense of command on Sept. 11, after Rove received word that the first tower of the World Trade Center had been struck. 'The president came walking in the room, took one look at the television set and said, 'We're at war. Get me the vice president. Get me the director of the FBI.'" Hey, wait a second! This contradicts what Bush himself told the Florida audience -- that he SAW the FIRST plane strike! What is Rove trying to pull? He is obviously covering up Bush's comments. But Rove's account also contradicts the New York Times report on 9/16: "He arrived (at the school) just before 9. Right before the event, Karl Rove, one of his most trusted aides, whispered news of what appeared to be a chilling accident, a plane crash into the upper floors of the North Tower of the WTC. Mr. Bush was briefed by phone by Condoleezza Rice...calling from the White House. He decided to go ahead with the short school event."

During a town hall meeting in Florida on 12/4, Bush said: "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower - the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, 'A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack.'" Say what? Bush saw the FIRST plane hit, when there wasn't a live news camera trained on the World Trade Center until AFTER the first strike???? Remember - the footage of the first plane was only available AFTER a citizen's video footage was given to the news networks. Is Bush really that confused? Or is he lying? Or was Bush watching a secret video channel that was forewarned about the attack?

"Remember how, amid the horror of September 11 and its aftermath, the White House press office gravely announced that terrorists had targeted either the White House or Air Force One or both -- and that some suspicious figure had managed to get hold of the presidential plane's code number? Well, the White House press office has now been forced to confess that at least parts of its story were untrue. And, on those parts of the story it has refused to recant, the press office's attempts to save face have led to baldfaced efforts to deny abundant evidence that refute their claims." So reports the ever-vigilant Media Whores Online.

It has become Shrub's stock routine: To shut critics up and trick key groups into doing what he wants, he makes great promises. Then, as soon as the purpose has been served, the promises are "forgotten" or mysteriously (and indefinitely) delayed. The elderly, teachers, stem cell researchers, moderate Republicans, and soon, the Teamsters, are all on the list of Bush "suckers." Now Bush has put a freeze on his promise to help low-income families pay their power bills caused by outrageously inflated energy costs. Back in May, Bush pledged $150 million for such aid. Today, as families carrying huge, largely overdue power bills head into another winter, there's no help in sight. What makes this particularly disgusting is that it's thanks to Bush's greedy friends at Enron, et al. that these families are struggling. What a prince! Machiavelli, that is.

These days, there are damn few newspapers doing real journalism - a craft that should be synonymous with the public interest. But this week, the New York Times did some true investigative journalism for a change. The paper first exposed Bush's intention to ease up on nursing home inspections, while softening penalties for shoddy care. Then a hard-hitting follow up demolished each of Ari the Egg's deceitful coverup tales.

Columnist Bill Press writes, "As a candidate, [Bush] insisted there was enough money to cut taxes, increase military spending and pay for prescription drug benefits without dipping into the Social Security surplus. As president, he vowed he would never, never touch the Social Security surplus. He's lucky his nose didn't grow... Which would you rather have, a president who lies about sex, or a president who lies about the budget? Frankly, I'd rather have a president who lies about nothing. But lying about the budget is a lot more serious than lying about sex, because it hurts a lot more people. Impeachment hearings, anyone?" You said it, Bill!

"A day after Bush aides said Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri had already been invited to the White House, the two lawmakers got their invitations by telephone... The White House calls came a day after Daschle and Gephardt sent a letter to Bush asking for a meeting with him to discuss how he plans to pay for a variety of initiatives in the face of a suddenly shrinking budget surplus... White House spokesman Scott McClellan was quoted by The New York Times on Thursday as saying that 'the letter was odd' since Bush already had meetings scheduled with Daschle on Tuesday and Gephardt [next] Friday... The Democratic leaders... first learned of the meetings from the morning newspaper... The two later got White House invitations by telephone. 'This is a perfect metaphor for how the White House has dealt with the Democratic leadership,' said Gephardt spokesman Eric Smith. 'Rhetoric first, action second.'"

In the 1960s, the CIA engineered the ouster of Indonesian leader Sukarno, who was anti-western. The CIA directly aided the despotic Suharto, who slaughtered and tortured hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. After the bloodbath, in swarmed the US corporations, throwing thousands of natives off their ancient lands and trashing the environment to drill for oil and dig for gold. One of those leading this exploitive charge: HENRY KISSINGER. Now Bush wants to make this ugly history disappear by recalling every single truthful State Dept. history book from hundreds of libraries. Why? Could it be some of the names on Cheney's "secret list" may also be mentioned in this damning history, including Kissinger. HK helped Mobil forge a deal with Suharto in the mid-60s, then set up the Freeport McMoran gold mine for which he is now majority shareholder as well as anti-environmental legal counsel.

Here's the scenario: First, Bush makes an unexpected visit to Johns Hopkins the same week the stem cell debate really heats up. JH just happens to be one of the world's leading stem cell research facilities. Inside word has it Shrub came to pressure the higher ups into supporting his anti-patient rights bill stance (JH has mucho clout in the healthcare world) in exchange for his promise to get behind stem cell technology. Word also has it JH said "No deal!" Next, JH suddenly has ALL funding for its human research pulled over an incident that occurred over a month before. There is an outcry, and Dems.com runs the story that Bush is punishing JH for failure to cut a deal. Final scene: suddenly, Washington restores JH funding using some feeble pretext. Conclusion: Either Bush FORCED a deal with JH in exchange for restoration of funds or, more likely, having had the whistle blown on his scam and fearing another Salvation Army-type blowout, Mr. "Let's Make a Deal" beat a strategic retreat.

The "town meetings" being held to push the Bush energy plan have been "invitation only." That means anyone unfavorable to the plan sneaked in by mistake. Eyewitness accounts, run in many papers, say the Tom DeLay meetings were the most outrageous and reminiscent of environmental "lynch mobs." Now, in the wake of bad press, the rightwingers have managed to induce freeper reporters to spin the tale. In the meeting described here, DeLay in reality led a cheering majority of Bushies in his call to drill anywhere and everywhere, drowning out the one or two voices of reason present. Now get a load of this account of the same event in a Texas paper! The article quotes DeLay as saying that the meetings were designed to bypass the media. So how did THIS guy happen to be there? By invitation, of course!

Bush's real popularity is so far from being like the illusion the mainstream media works overtime to preserve that he now must maintain a "cast of thousands." Lucky for him, there's no lack of freepers without a life out there, who can be called into action at a moment's notice to play the roles of "protestors" (35 were flown in specially to Bonn to make a lot of noise in a staged "Anti-Kyoto Rally"), Bush supporters (the unwitting BBC, when it asked for "letters to George Bush" was inundated with freeper drivel - probably from the same folks staging the "protest"). Computer polls are a lost cause, too, with freepers always on standby - the pre-election Net polls, for example consistently showed Bush with an 70-80% share of the votes! Here's one eyewitness account of how a real visitor to an historic site was hustled off so he could be replaced by bussed in hired visitors for photo ops. Not TOO pathetic for a "world leader!"

"You wanted it, George. You wanted it so badly that you campaigned for months as a moderate, a 'compassionate conservative' who wished only to return dignity and honor to the White House while performing the bidding of the people. Any fool with eyes and a functioning mind can see today the depths of your campaign lies. You are no moderate, and nothing about your agenda is compassionate. The honor you swore to uphold does not exist within your shriveled corporate soul. There will be a reckoning... We come for you, George. You wanted it so badly that you took it, and now you must face us. We are legion. There shall be a reckoning, George. Woe unto you because of it. As God is my witness, there shall be a reckoning." So writes William Rivers Pitt in Online Journal.

We predicted beforehand that Bush's test would be a success, because he seemed a wee bit too eager and confident in light of the real world odds of success. The movie "Wag the Dog" came clearly to mind. Now, the world is expected to take the Pentagon's word and their own video as "proof" of their success. We call on progressive researchers with access to spectroscopic instruments (the kind that can "read" what type of materials were involved in an explosion and what the likely source of an explosion was) to investigate! There will without doubt be satellite and telescopic data for that sector of the sky available for analysis. So, help us keep the world a more honest - and safer - place! Was there a real explosion?

Isn't it reassuring to know that the "leader of the Free World" acts first, then worries about the consequences later? For example, first Shrubmeister rams his tax cut through. Now, after the fact, he's trying to explain why the budget is shot to hell. Now, after sending a big fat check ($43 million) to the Taliban, he's trying to figure out ways to keep their terrorist activities in check.

Want a good laugh? Remember how Bush, while wandering friendless around Europe, acted like a lost puppy when finally thrown a crumb of kindness (or at least tolerance!) by Putin? The photos of the two together say it all - Bush looks undyingly grateful while Putin looks tolerant, if not a bit long-suffering. Now Bush says that what he was REALLY doing was "looking out for" Putin because he felt protective of the younger leader. We laughed till the tears came (with Bush, you have to either laugh or cry or both). Of course, Bush doesn't seem to recall that before the European trip he and his sidekicks were talking tough re: Russia and showed every sign of giving them a 1950s-style cold shoulder. The rest of Bush's retelling (or should we say reinventing) of his encounter with Putin goes from good joke to incoherent babble - a pattern we know all too well now.

Beginning his European tour in Spain, Bush issued his familiar orwellian platitudes that "there is 'much more that unites us than divides us'…[meanwhile] the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, denounced the president's new proposals on climate change as 'short on action' and demanded anew that he back the Kyoto Protocol on global warming...Several hundred protesters gathered across the street from the U.S. Embassy [in Spain] as Bush met with U.S. diplomats and their families." Bush made scary statements that Kyoto is "flawed" and that the ABM Treaty is a "relic of the past." He also declared that "democracies represent the will of the people, and the death penalty is the will of the people!" But Bush, Scalia and co. have already exacted the death penalty -- on OUR Democracy! Ever the hypocrite, Bush condemned "extremists, such as those in Macedonia, who subvert the democratic process through the use of violence." Now don't get any ideas about your next election theft, George!

The centerpiece of Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism" was his promise to allow 85 million non-itemizing taxpayers to deduct their charitable contributions. In July 1999, Bush said, "We will encourage an outpouring of giving in America, encouraging giving by everyone in our society, not just the wealthy." "The main provision was listed by the White House as one of the six 'highlights' of Bush's tax cut proposal, and Bush touted the idea as recently as May 20 in a speech at the University of Notre Dame." But when the final tax bill was negotiated, this key item was deleted. "In reality, the bottom line was that their priorities were in [lowering the top] rates, the death tax, marriage penalty and the child credit," according to a senior Republican staffer. Major charities are angry, and fear the tax bill could reduce charitable contributions by $21 billion each year.

It started innocently with the 'W' keyboard story reported by the Washington Post. "But within two days, Grove's playful item had morphed into one more full-blown Clinton scandal" - thanks to gossip mongers Matt Drudge and Rich Galen, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, and Mike Allen in the Washington Post, who wrote a baseless front-page story that was enthusiastically picked up by the rest of the news media. Now that the GAO has proved it was all a lie, the media refuses to apologize. Protest media bias!

"Dorothy was an ardent believer in social justice, the rights of workers, and care of the disenfranchised. Her life’s work was dedicated to picking up the pieces of human wreckage, the result of policies that continue to be perpetuated by the Bush administration. It is shameful to have her efforts associated with an administration that gives priority to corporate profiteering over human needs. Dorothy understood that a just system was as equally important as her ideal of personalism, where each takes individual responsibility for the well-being of all. The speech writers for George Bush have distorted her message regarding the works of mercy by using her words in their arsenal of deceit." So write Tamar and Martha Hennessy, Day's daughter and granddaughter.

"The White House's flat-out wrong prediction of severe power troubles ahead for New England in general and New Hampshire in particular was no ''mistake.'' Nor was it the ''typo'' some officials suggested. Instead, it was a metaphor for an energy ''policy'' whose all-out support for fossil fuels and fuel that should be a fossil (nuclear power) required painting a false picture of a country facing energy catastrophe." So writes Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant. Imagine how the media would have reacted if Al Gore had gotten his facts this wrong - why is Shrub treated like a child?

No one who voted for Shrub expected the oily weasel to push for filthier, more toxic air by easing regulations and promoting hundreds of new coal-fired power plants. No one expected conservation to be scoffed at as a minor "backup plan." Why? Because Shrub lied. He lied all the way into the White House and is only now revealing the deadly truth of his real agenda. Let's back up several months and take a look at some of these lies....

It's quite simple. Bush lies about things that matter: a patient bill of rights, vouchers, guns. The man just can't tell the truth about issues that will affect millions of people. And he can't tell the truth about his personal life: going AWOL from the National Guard, drug use, and drunken driving. How could anyone vote for him? It's hard to believe, because you can't trust the man.

Appearing on "Meet the Press" on November 11, 1999, Russert asked Bush: "If someone came to you and said, 'Governor, I'm sorry, I'm going to go public with some information.' What do you do?" Bush replied, "If someone was willing to go public with information that was damaging, you'd have heard about it by now. You've had heard about it now. My background has been scrutinized by all kinds of reporters. Tim, we can talk about this all morning." Please do! Here are a few suggestions: 1) Did you skip your annual flight physical in 1972 because you feared you would fail the drug test? 2) If you reported for National Guard duty in 1972 and 1973, how come your commanding officers never saw you - and no one has claimed over $5000 in rewards? 3) Did you ever use cocaine or any other illegal drug? 4) Did your girlfriend have an illegal abortion in Texas in the early 1970's? Hey - we could talk about this all week!

How do I count the ways that Dubya is disingenuous. There are the big whoppers, like his lie about the last two years of National Guard Service that he never fulfilled. Then there are the smaller fibs, like the one detailed here. For George Bush, not telling the truth is like breathing air.