july03
The plan is very simple, but not obvious on first blush. Make sure that all the money is gone from the U.S. treasury, make sure the deficits are so great that all social and educational programs are cut, increase the military and security budgets to "protect our nation" with all these monies going to corporations and security firms who are extra-national (not tied to any country, but actually more than multi-national in that they are outside the purview of any nation at any single moment) and stave in the social security fund by allowing it to go to private corporations for "investment"-and you have the perfect scenario for saying, "only the private sector can save us-we're broke and they have the money to run every program, fund every program, but of course, at huge costs and profits for the private corporations."

Some said L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, was pushing the council members to finish the constitution before daybreak on Sunday. He was prepared, they said, to keep them working until they did.
"Bremer is really pressing us," said Mahmood Othman, another Governing Council member. "Everyone is hungry and sleepy. This is not the way write the law of a country."

SAN FRANCISCO - Mayor Gavin Newsom accused President Bush of political showmanship and discrimination because of the Social Security Administration's decision to not accept any marriage licenses from San Francisco ? gay or straight ? until the same-sex issue is resolved.
"The president is not only now discriminating against gay couples, he's discriminating against straight people," he said.


Reacting to an AP story earlier this week, the FBI ordered agents to determine why some documents did not properly reach the bureau's Oklahoma City task force during the original investigation or get turned over to McVeigh's lawyers before he was executed in 2001.

Democrats contend that the White House wants to use five-year numbers to hide the huge and continuing deficits in later years.
By making only five-year projections, he said, the Bush plan "left most people thinking we will cut the deficit in half and it will keep on declining. But in truth, we see in the C.B.O. projections that the deficit gets worse over the long term. We simply don't have a plan to eradicate it."


"It took the administration a week to inform the Postal Service about the ricin letter, nearly three months to tell the public, and another three weeks to disclose detailed information about the letter," Waxman said in a statement. "These delays arouse suspicions rather than reassure the public."

A possible explanation for the positive reading also has emerged. The sources said that investigators have determined that non-toxic byproducts of the castor bean plant ? the raw material for ricin ? are sometimes used in making paper.

Why is the Bush administration not held accountable for their deceptive practices? There are three significant reasons. The first is the political skill of members of the Bush administration. The second is the lack of investigative reporting by the media. The third, and possibly the most significant, is the failure of the American people to investigate and understand the depth of the Bush administration deceptions.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I?m told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz? having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Each nation?s economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, ?The IMF riot.?

What the brilliant De Villepin missed utterly was that American conservatives don?t care when their arguments are refuted.
In his erudite, principled opposition, De Villepin thus sold the war to Americans far more effectively than did Bush himself. Indeed, had the foreign secretary of any other nation led the fight against the US, the war might not have happened. If Bush is really smart, he?ll engineer a repeat confrontation with De Villepin just before the elections.


(Robertson's take on feminism gives a flavour: he called it a 'socialist anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians'.)


PALAST: You're getting warm. The answer is Irwin Stelzer. He is the guy who is a good friend of George Bush from the Hudson Institute, and the most powerful lobbyist in Britain representing British-American interests and, by the way, chief lobbyist for Rupert Murdoch. As soon as Bush seized the White House, Stelzer walked into Blair's office and said ?we noticed that you were supporting Mr. Gore during the Presidential election' - even though clearly that didn't carry many states. Blair's effective endorsement of Al Gore did not go unnoticed. And there was a price to be paid. Blair was given a list of the things that would befall Britain from military subsidies and equipment, to a reduction of value in the dollar versus the pound, which would destroy England's exportability. And Blair was basically told get in line, stand up and salute or "here's your last cigarette, Tony."