Mr. Bush and friends are offering us an “ownership” society. But he didn’t mention who already owns it. The richest fifth of America owns 83% of all shares in the stock market. But that’s a bit misleading because most of that, 53% of all the stock, is owned by just one percent of American households.

And what does the Wealthy One Percent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they’re squeezing it from the bottom. Median paychecks have gone down by 5.9% during the current regime, but Americans in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes sliced by 20%.

At the other end, CEO pay at the Fortune 500 has bloated by 51% during the first four years of the Bush regime to an average of $8.1 million per annum.

As recently as two weeks ago, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Sadddam Hussein’s regime “did not have a relationship, harbor, or even turn a blind eye toward Mr. Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.

Turning to the bill before us that the Chairman negotiated with the White House, in my view it contains several fundamental flaws:

The bill makes compliance with FISA entirely optional, and explicitly validates the President’s claim that he has unfettered authority to wiretap Americans in the name of national security. In other words, it suggests that FISA is unconstitutional – a claim for which there is no judicial precedent and very little academic support – and invites the President to ignore it.

The bill abandons the traditional, case-by-case review contemplated by FISA and introduces the concept of “program warrants.” If that novel concept is constitutional – which I doubt -- a single FISA court judge could approve whole programs of electronic surveillance that go far beyond the President’s program.

The bill immunizes from prosecution anyone who breaks into a home or office in the United States to search for foreign intelligence information, if he is acting at the behest of the President. I would have thought that electronic surveillance is a large enough area to address in one bill. But apparently, the Administration was unwilling to address electronic surveillance without also reaching for new powers to break into Americans’ homes.

And, the 16 pages of fundamental revisions to FISA contained in Section 9 create gaping loopholes in FISA’s current court order requirement by redefining key terms and making other changes.

I was disappointed during the Committee’s debate last week to witness Republican members close their minds on these matters. It appears that no amount of debate will make any difference and that no amendments will garner a single Republican vote.

When his bill was stymied in the Senate, the New York Times reported that "Specter grumbled that without his legislation the White House would continue its domestic wiretapping program virtually unchecked by the courts." With all due respect, Sen. Specter is simply wrong on the facts. Our CCR case has had full briefing and an oral argument. The ACLU won its spying case at the District level and is currently on appeal. There have also been partial decisions rendered in the case EFF brought against AT&T, and the Al Haramain case in Oregon, where the judge issued a cautious but favorable opinion on state secrets privilege last week. All of these constitute the very check by the courts that Sen. Specter claims will only occur if the rest of Congress accepts his "deal" with the administration. The judges, human rights attorneys and plaintiffs in these cases are not asking for legislative interference. In fact, the party most concerned about changing the law is the defendant accused of breaking it: President George Bush.

The President's scare tactics came a day after a Republican-led Senate committee defied the White House and approved legislation to ban abusive treatment of detainees. The bill, which the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed 15-9, also would revise Mr Bush's rules of evidence for trials of suspected terrorists.

The House of Representatives seems disposed to approve his approach, but the Senate is likely to oppose him. That may leave the issue unresolved before November's congressional elections.

Of the three major flaws in the bill Bush originally presented to Congress, only one has been removed: suspects will have the right to examine the evidence against them, subject to existing rules designed to protect national security. Protection against arbitrary and indefinite incarceration was not part of Bush's proposal, nor is it in the compromise bill. And despite powerful rhetoric about "the integrity and the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions," Bush got his way on that as well. Abuses which were never under discussion --- murder, mutilation and rape, for example --- are now explicitly prohibited; otherwise the President decides what can happen. In other words, this bill would explicitly allow the interrogation practices used at Abu Ghraib, so long as George Bush approved them.

You’d think George Bush would get down on his knees and kiss Hugo Chavez’s behind. Not only has Chavez delivered cheap oil to the Bronx and other poor communities in the United States. And not only did he offer to bring aid to the victims of Katrina. In my interview with the president of Venezuela on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing offer: Chavez would drop the price of oil to $50 a barrel, “not too high, a fair price,” he said — a third less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently posted on the spot market. That would bring down the price at the pump by about a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.

"This is a provocation from Mr. Devil," Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told Venezuelan state television, using a name he called President Bush at the U.N. General Assembly this week. Maduro had also been attending the U.N. meeting.

You know that the president and his closest advisers are in a lot of trouble when the “intelligence” agencies of his government will no longer provide the backup he needs to sell his foreign policy to the people.

That’s what is happening right now between Bush and all the secret police agencies of the U.S. government, from the CIA on down.

The National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document, was recently leaked to the press. The New York Times and the Washington Post broke the news about it on Sept. 24. The document had been kept under wraps since its finalization in April and is “the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government,” according to the Times.

The President stood at the podium. He had been asked about the National Intelligence Estimate that suggested the Iraq War has worsened our fight against terrorism.

"I think it's naïve," the President responded. "I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm against the American people makes us less safe."

Fair enough. He's the President. He's in a position to know. After all, he gets briefed about this stuff.

It's just...well, it's just that the people who brief him are the 16 spy organizations that put together that NIE. So, the President is calling naïve and mistaken the very people who make him informed enough to call them naive and mistaken.

Bush isn't really looking to win what he calls his 'war on terror' at this point, so much as he wants to be 'perceived' as winning. He's terrified that he'll be revealed to the world as a pathetic loser who's squandered everything that was given him (again) and destroyed everything he's touched. Bush can't decide which excuse for his failures he should choose from the slim thread of lies he has left, so he's just throwing them all together to see if any will give him cover from the heightening scrutiny on his poor and negligent conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on his failed 'hunt' for bin-Laden and his accomplices.

Bush opened his defense of his presidency Saturday in his radio address quoting the National Intelligence Estimate, which has concluded that his occupation of Iraq is spawning and fueling 'jihadists' bent on harming the U.S., our interests, and allies. He told Americans when the April report was revealed to the public that they didn't have the entire picture; that the news accounts of the NIE left out key passages in his defense. He said in his address that the leak of the Iraq report had created "misimpressions." Bush wanted to clear things up.

In fact, he repeatedly let Bush off the hook, twice telling King the reason for the president's serial dishonesty about Iraq is his sunny outlook: "Bush is an optimist," he said. So the explanation for Bush b.s.-ing the American people is his optimism?

The human cost of the war in Iraq could be far higher than previously thought. A new survey says more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a consequence of the invasion by the United States and Britain, with an estimated 200,000 violent deaths directly attributable to Allied forces.

For instance, while the researchers give as their best estimate for excess Iraqi deaths due to the war the number 654,965, they also say it falls within the range of 392,979 to 942,636 deaths. That's a pretty large range.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

Last December, Democratic congressman John Conyers issued a press release citing President George W. Bush for possible impeachable offences relating to his administration's conduct of the Iraq war.
Few took the missive that seriously and it received little attention. But in a little more than three weeks Conyers, who serves as the most senior Democrat on the House of Representatives judiciary committee, could be the leader of that committee if the Democrats win back the house after the mid-term elections on November 7.

And the judiciary committee is where any impeachment starts. Is it going to be payback time? Are the likes of Conyers going to start prosecuting the Bush administration from Congress, the so-called first branch of US government, designed for an oversight role of the White House? Will Conyers lead the push to impeach the President?

The generals who told President George W. Bush before the war that Donald Rumsfeld's shock-and-awe fantasy would not work were not enough to persuade him to change his strategy in Iraq. The rise of the insurgency did not do the trick. Nor did month after month of mounting military and civilian casualties on all sides, the emergence of a near civil war, the collapse of reconstruction efforts or the seeming inability of either Iraqi or American forces to secure contested parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, for any significant period.

So what finally, after all this time, caused Bush to very publicly consult with his generals to consider a change in tactics in Iraq? The president, who says he never reads political polls, is worried that his party could lose some of its iron grip on power in the congressional elections next month.

Many of us have been saying since before the war began that corporate interests have taken precedence over those of the Iraqi and American public. Reconstruction—that is, the lack thereof, has become an increasingly recognized cost of the Bush administration’s corporate agenda. Another “big cost,” although one receiving far less attention, may in fact be the “big prize:” Iraq’s oil wealth, which is poised to change hands from the Iraqi public to U.S. oil corporations. And, since saying, “I told you so” is inappropriate during wartime, I’m instead going to suggest that we can repair both of these situations by ending both the U.S. corporate and military occupations of Iraq.

"The Real Security Act of 2006 marks a major change from status quo Bush Republican policies that have left America less safe than it must be," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in introducing the plan. "Unveiled against the backdrop of a new White House media offensive, the legislation spells out the tough and smart path to make America more secure and to deal more effectively with threats that confront America at home and abroad."

These days, you would never know that such a plan exists for two reasons. The first it that it was killed by the Senate GOP leadership on September 13, 2006 on a roll-call vote that went almost straight down party lines. The same Republicans who killed the Democratic plan now walk around saying the Democrats have no plan.

Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

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

President George W. Bush's approval rating fell to 31 percent, declining 4 percentage points in the week were he saw his Republican Party lose control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, according to a Newsweek magazine poll.

Following the election, the poll found that large percentages of those surveyed said they supported programs that had been mentioned as part of the Democratic legislative agenda, with 92 percent saying negotiating directly with drug companies for lower prices should be a priority. Of those surveyed, 89 percent said raising the minimum wage should be a priority, and 86 percent said there should be new laws to limit the influence of lobbyists, according to the poll.

An effort to restore habeas corpus rights for enemy combatants could be the first test of the Democrats' resolve to change course in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is expected to become chairman, confirmed Thursday that he is drafting a bill to undo portions of a recently passed law that prevent terrorism detainees from going to federal court to challenge the government's right to hold them indefinitely.

Legislation aimed at President Bush's once-secret program for wiretapping U.S.-foreign phone calls and computer traffic of suspected terrorists without warrants shows all the signs of not moving ahead, notwithstanding President Bush's request this week that a lame-duck Congress give it to him.

Senate Democrats, emboldened by Election Day wins that put them in control of Congress as of January, say they would rather wait until next year to look at the issue. "I can't say that we won't do it, but there's no guarantee that we're going spend a lot of time on controversial measures," Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois said Thursday.

In Senate parlance, that means no.

The Justice Department is launching an internal review of its participation in the Bush administration's controversial domestic eavesdropping program, the department's inspector general told congressional leaders on Monday.

The review, which congressional Democrats have sought for nearly a year, will examine the Justice Department's role in the warrantless domestic spying program run by the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said.

Under the Clinton presidency, the EPA took the line that it did have the authority to regulate CO2. But the Bush administration reversed that policy and, in 2003, the EPA announced that the gas was not a pollutant under the clean air act, and consequently it had no right to regulate it.

Twins mania - including tabloid tales of nude hotel romps and serious security lapses - has gripped the media in Buenos Aires, where Jenna and Barbara Bush celebrated their 25th birthday over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that he would subpoena Bush administration officials if they refused requests for documents and testimony, including two long-sought memos detailing its detention and treatment of terrorism suspects overseas.

The comments by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) represent the strongest and most specific statements yet directed at the White House on the investigative agenda of the Democratic leaders poised to assume control of Congress in January.

The interview with Ford, who died on Boxing Day, was embargoed until his death.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the President made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said.

"I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Why is Baker, ordinarily such a tough guy, so coy with the Saudis? Baker Botts, the law firm his grandfather founded, became a wealthy powerhouse by representing Saudi Arabia. But don’t worry, the Iraq Study Group is balanced by Democrats including Vernon Jordan of the law firm of Akin, Gump which represents … Saudi royals.

Baker is more than aware that, two weeks ago, Dick Cheney dropped his Thanksgiving turkey to fly to Riyadh, at the demand of the Saudis, for a dressing down by King Abdullah. The King wants US forces to stay to baby-sit the Shias in Iraq’s army. The Saudis have made it clear that, if the US pulls out our troops, Saudi Arabians will crank up payments to their brothers, the Sunni warlords in Iraq, and Baghdad, or the entire region, will run with blood.

What gives King Abdullah the power to ghost-write the Iraq Study Group recommendations? It’s not because the Saudis sell us broccoli.

The Conspiracy to Defraud the United States

16. Beginning on or about a date unknown, but no later than August of 2002, and continuing to the present, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the defendants,

GEORGE W. BUSH,
RICHARD B. CHENEY,
CONDOLEEZZA RICE,
DONALD M. RUMSFELD, and
COLIN M. POWELL,

and others known and unknown, did knowingly and intentionally conspire to defraud the United States by using deceit, craft, trickery, dishonest means, false and fraudulent representations, including ones made without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth or falsity, and omitting to state material facts necessary to make their representations truthful, fair and accurate, while knowing and intending that their false and fraudulent representations would influence the public and the deliberations of Congress with regard to authorization of a preventive war against Iraq, thereby defeating, obstructing, impairing, and interfering with Congress' lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and making appropriations.