Duty to Warn

AUSTIN, Texas -- Living proof that the Democrats haven't gotten any smarter since the last time they ran a candidate for president. Much huffing (and a huffy Democrat is a terrifying sight) over the fact that George W. Bush used images of 9-11 and of the firefighters at Ground Zero to tout his candidacy in his first campaign ad. How crass, said the D's. Exploiting a national tragedy for political purposes -- oh, how tacky.

Dammit, the problem is not that the ad is in bad taste, the problem is that Bush screwed the firefighters in a famous case of his favorite bait-and-switch tactic, and now he has the chutzpah to exploit them anyway and that, my friends, is gall. Bait, switch and then claim credit anyway.

AUSTIN, Texas -- So the Democrats have a candidate at last, and he is about bent over double with gravitas. I think that means he doesn't a have humorous bone in his body. It's a good thing there's at least one serious person in this race -- the Bushies are getting sillier and sillier.  

            Just when you thought no one could top Rod Paige calling the teacher's union "a terrorist organization," along comes Veep Cheney with this gem, "If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two-to-three years, the kind of tax increases both Kerry and Edwards are talking about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had."  

            Uh, in the first place, Kerry and Edwards are not talking about tax increases at all, but about repealing part of Bush's tax cuts -- so we would have had no tax cuts, not tax increases. And in the second place, if losing 2.3 million jobs is "job growth," Dick Cheney is a laugh riot.

 AUSTIN, Texas -- Anyone see any reason to think Haiti will be better off without Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Just another little gift from the Bush foreign policy team, straight out of the whacko-right playbook.

            Jesse Helms always did think Aristide was another Fidel, not being able to distinguish between a Catholic and a communist. We know the main armed opposition group is a bunch of thugs and that they have been joined by old Duvalierists, including members of the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous torturers.

            The Bush administration wanted this to happen -- it held up $500 million worth of humanitarian aid from the United States, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and International Monetary Fund. Without U.S. or multilateral help, the country spiraled downward.

            So here we are, reduced to hoping for the best again.

March 1 st , 2004 marks the 50 th anniversary of the 1954 US "Bravo" hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands that unexpectedly turned out to be the largest US nuclear test ever exploded. "Bravo" gouged a crater about a mile wide in the reef of Bikini Atoll. Within seconds of the blast, the fireball was nearly three miles in diameter. On Rongerik, an island 135 miles east of the blast, the illumination from "Bravo" was visible for almost one minute. Physicist Marshall Rosenbluth, located on a ship about 30 miles away, stated that the fireball "just kept rising and rising, and spreading.it looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like on the surface.and the air started getting filled with this gray stuff, which I guess was somewhat radioactive coral."

      Human Fallibility

Tony Blair and George W. Bush want the issue of spying at the United Nations to go away. That’s one of the reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday (Feb. 25). But within 24 hours, the scandal of U.N. spying exploded further when one of Blair’s former cabinet ministers said that British spies closely monitored conversations of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq last year.

The new allegations, which have the ring of truth, are now coming from ex-secretary of international development Clare Short. “I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations,” she said in an interview with BBC Radio. “In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking ‘Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.’” Short added that British intelligence had been explicitly directed to spy on Annan and other top U.N. officials.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have gone and gotten themselves in big trouble. For those of you who do not follow the business pages, I only wish we were talking about pregnant teen-agers. Fannie and Freddie are the two government-sponsored mortgage companies that help most of us buy homes. Trouble is, they've run themselves into big-time debt -- they've doubled the amount they owe in just the last five years. When I say big-time, try $2 trillion. And guess who's on the hook if these things go under? Congratulations, taxpayers.

            This week, Alan Greenspan, the Great Pooh-Bah of the financial world, opined in his usual Delphic style before the Senate Banking Committee, "To fend off possible future systemic difficulties, which we assess as likely if the expansion continues unabated, preventive actions are required sooner rather than later." The Wall Street Journal helpfully translates this as, "Act quickly." Hard to tell with Greenspan: I yield to the Journal's long experience in Greenspan translation, but it could also mean, "Push the panic button now!"

If "Building Seven" says nothing to you, you have lots of company.  On 9/11 it caught fire and fell to the ground, all 47 stories.  Yet today, two and a half years later, no one knows why--that is, unless they are privy to some inside knowledge.  When World Trade Center Tower One (WTC 1) collapsed so inconceivably at 10:28 a.m., WTC 7, to its north, began sprouting fires that could be seen through windows, here and there.  Seven hours later it was a heap of smoking debris that looked exactly like a demolition by use of explosives, a pile of rubble within its own footprint.  

AUSTIN, Texas -- With so many delights on our political plate, it's hard to know where to begin. Take that knee-slapping joke by Education Secretary Rod Paige: He called our largest teachers' union "a terrorist organization." In fun, of course. Gosh darn, HEE-HAW! All over the nation, teachers are just chuckling away.

            Paige is upset with the National Education Association because it is lobbying in Washington to give states more flexibility and more money in meeting the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. If that makes the NEA a terrorist organization, what does it make the Utah legislature, where its House of Representatives voted 64 to 8 not to comply with any provisions of the law not fully financed by the federal government? And how are we to categorize the Virginia House of Delegates, which voted 98 to 1 to ask Congress to exempt Virginia from the law?

"It's my right to run."  

This is Ralph Nader's core case in announcing his 2004 presidential candidacy. Yes, Nader has a legal right to do this. He also has a legal right to donate $100,000 to the Republican Party and become a Bush Pioneer. That doesn't make it a good idea.

So much of Nader's career has been built on reminding us of our common ties. It's not ok, he's argued, for companies to make unsafe cars, pollute our air, or pillage shared resources. Actions have consequences, he's pointed out with persistence and eloquence.

The saga of Howard Dean is a cautionary tale about politics and the Internet. His campaign rode a big wave of cyberspace hype -- and then sank.

There are valid complaints to be made about Dean’s rough handling by major news outlets this winter. Sometimes the coverage was unfair. But what gained him media prominence in the first place was journalistic infatuation with his campaign’s successful use of the Internet for outreach and fund-raising.

Actually, Dean burst onto the nation’s front pages because of money. As far as political journalists were concerned, Dean came into his own as a presidential contender midway through 2003. In the second quarter of the year, he raised $7.5 million -- including $800,000 on a single dramatic day.

In sync with the aphorism that money is the mother’s milk of politics, the former Vermont governor seemed to have found a cash cow on the Internet. The ability to raise large sums from many online devotees caused the political press corps to sit up and take notice.