YOU MIGHT THINK America's rigged system of congressional elections couldn't get much worse. Self-serving redistricting schemes nationwide already have left an overwhelming number of seats in the House of Representatives so uncompetitive that election results are practically as preordained as in the old Soviet Union. In the last election, for example, 98 percent of incumbents were reelected, and the average winning candidate got more than 70 percent of the vote. More candidates ran without any major-party opposition than won by a margin of less than 20 percent.

The south of the state now looks like a pinstripe suit, with narrow districts snaking from north to south in order to pack Hispanic-majority voters in just a few districts, including a new one. Dallas liberal Martin Frost, meanwhile, suddenly has a new district, 63 percent of whose votrs are Republican. The goal here is not subtle.

Do they really want a state with a white party and a minority party? Republican politicians are engineering it that way, whatever voters may want. For redistricting -- quite the inverse of elections -- is a process in which politicians get to choose their voters.

If the Bush Administration is so eager to catch the criminals who exposed Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA operative why don't they offer a reward for information leading to apprehension of these treasonous traitors?



Tony Blair chaired the crucial meeting which agreed how the name of the government scientist David Kelly would become public

If the Justice Department or anyone else wants to find out who blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who has been causing so much trouble for the Bush administration, they might ask Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative outfit closely linked to pro-Likud hawks in the administration.

The most startling mission is described as follows: "Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." The report depicts these potential wars as "large scale" and "spread across [the] globe."

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. . . . ."


On the day of his inauguration as the 43d President of the United States, George W. Bush directed his chief of staff, Andrew Card, to announce a plan to put on hold a number of regulations ordered by the Clinton Administration. These ranged from health insurance guidelines and meat safety standards to the designation of historical monuments.

But Bush was way ahead of us on that. At a news conference just before he released his energy plan, he pronounced, "The best way to make sure that people are able to deal with high energy prices is to cut taxes, is to get people more of their own money so they can meet the bills, so they can meet the high energy prices."

Undoubtedly, this is part of the grand plan the bushites have put into motion: sidestepping the *mainstream* media by having military personnel directly contacting their hometown newspapers. Who wouldn't print a letter from someone on the front lines? The second part of the plan has dubya giving interviews to smaller news outlets, sidestepping those nasty networks who might just show the other side of the story.This has Rove's fingerprints all over it...