As George W. Bush and John Kerry continue to argue down the home stretch, the propaganda is simply gushing—it's a beautiful sight if you're an oilman. It's agit-prop for the Chief Prop.

The country's largest chain of TV stations—it reaches 24 percent of the population, including several swing states—will preempt regular programming to show the anti-Kerry "documentary" Stolen Honor, which accuses Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, The Washington Post reports this morning.

The major networks had already rejected the piece, but Sinclair's top execs are "strong financial supporters of Bush's campaign," the Post's Paul Farhi writes.

Meanwhile, if you're a dude with a sign that says "No War for Oil," you face arrest. Check out Jonathan M. Katz's Slate story, "An Old Law Turns Protesters Into Threats Against President," re-posted here on The Smirking Chimp. Katz, writing in late September, recites a litany of repression by authorities, like removing people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts from crowds.

One thing that won't even be mentioned in the campaign home stretch, of course, is the continuing tragic and deadly battle between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Why should it even come up? It's only the key to peace in the Middle East, as numerous sober commentators have pointed out.

Go back to this Bush Beat item about General Tony Zinni. If you've seen it, read Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery's current piece about Ariel Sharon's own brand of propaganda, "Don't Believe a Word." Avnery rips the covers off Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" in Gaza, saying that it's "really a right-wing plan for annexing most of the West Bank, burying the peace process, and deceiving public opinion in Israel and abroad."

Avnery says he's more convinced than ever that that's the case, now that Sharon confidant Dov Weisglass (the Israeli prime minister's version of Karl Rove) has basically confirmed it. As Avnery put it:

In an interview with Haaretz, [Weisglass] stated that the sole aim of the plan was to "freeze" the peace process. The real purpose of the "disengagement" is to block negotiations with the Palestinians for dozens of years and to prevent any discussion about the West Bank, while at the same time extending the Israeli settlements in a way that will put an end to any possibility of a future Palestinian state.

In the meantime, life in Israel—for Arabs and Jews—is hell. There's a blazing TV documentary series, Eye on Palestine, that's now airing in the Arab world, portraying how everyday life for Palestinians is crushing and humiliating and dangerous. Forget American TV "reality" shows. This is reality, tracking the normal lives of ordinary Palestinians. Read Palestinian activist Daoud Kuttab's smart piece on the TV series—it also includes lots of background for ignorant Westerners—here on Beirut's Daily Star site.

While you in America are bombarded with Vietnam bullshit, you won't see or hear anything in the next few weeks about John Ashcroft's disgraceful and unconstitutional roundup of Muslims right here in the U.S.A.—another black mark against the Bush regime.

The Sinclair chain of TV stations won't be running Persons of Interest, a real documentary that peers into that frightening idiocy. (I reviewed that film in the Voice; read it here.)

In the past few days, Indymedia, the international media network site of anti-globalization and social-justice activists, has had its servers seized, shutting down its network in many parts of the planet.

The strange and disturbing saga threatening to cripple this massive global dissent network may revolve around nothing more than photos of undercover Swiss cops that were posted on a French Indymedia site. The exact reasons for the court order or who actually holds the servers haven't been spelled out to officials in the Indymedia collective.

Indymedia was set up as an activist network in 1999 for planning and covering the WTO protests in Seattle. Since then, it has mushroomed into a planetwide clearinghouse for all sorts of independent newsgathering. The network of activists has not been accused of breaking any laws. But all of the material actually on some of its key servers and hard disks was seized. This current creepiness apparently is the work of the FBI, acting on behalf of Italian and Swiss authorities. Gee, what terrific cooperation.

On October 9, Indymedia reported that "the request to seize Indymedia servers hosted by a U.S. company in the U.K. originated from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland. More than 20 Indymedia sites, several internet radio streams and other projects were hosted on the servers. They were taken offline on October 7 after an order was issued to Rackspace Inc., one of Indymedia's Web hosting providers."

Agence France Presse had sorted it out a day earlier, reporting October 8 from D.C. that the FBI claimed to be only cooperating when it served a subpoena on Rackspace demanding the actual servers. The French press agency's article said, in part:

The FBI acknowledged that a subpoena had been issued but said it was at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

"It is not an FBI operation," FBI spokesman Joe Parris told AFP. "Through a legal assistance treaty, the subpoena was on behalf of a third country." The FBI spokesman said there was no U.S. investigation but that the agency cooperated under the terms of an international treaty on law enforcement.

Rackspace, a U.S. Web hosting company with offices in London, said it complied with a court order "pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering." The company declined to elaborate.

"The order was so short-term that Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the U.K.," the Independent Media Center said. Italian news reports said access to Indymedia had been cut as a result of an FBI operation at U.S. and British locations.

Mauro Bulgarelli, a member of Italy's Green party, called it a "provocation and intimidation effort" against the alternative media.

And sweeping, too. Plus, the timing is suspicious, considering that a major radfest is about to take place in London. Indymedia says—for now—on its U.K. site: "An additional server was taken down at Rackspace that provided streaming radio to several radio stations, including one covering the European Social Forum in London."

Indymedia workers paint a grim picture of recent events:

The last few months have seen numerous attacks on independent media by the U.S. federal government. In August, the Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the NYC IMC before the Republican National Convention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Last month, the FCC shut down community radio stations around the U.S. Two weeks ago, the FBI requested that Indymedia takes down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police, and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue.

The Guardian (U.K) reports that "American authorities have shut down 20 independent media centers by seizing their British-based Web servers." Many Indymedia outlets were silenced, in such outposts as Basque country, Uruguay, Marseille, western Massachusetts, Belgium, Portugal, Czech Republic, Brazil, parts of Germany. Silenced, at least temporarily, is the global Indymedia Radio site.

Confused? So is Indymedia's network of local activists and news gatherers. If you can still get on this Indymedia site, you can read statements from Rackspace, the Internet Service Provider that was ordered to turn over its servers. And there's this passage from Indymedia on its British site, which explains—kind of—what's going on. I'll quote it at length in case you can't get to Indymedia:

The FBI's latest anti-free-press actions began at the beginning of October, when they visited Indymedia's ISP demanding the removal of identifying information from photographs of undercover police officers that was posted on the Nantes Indymedia website.

When asked what the U.S. government was doing requesting the removal of information from a French-run website that contained information about Swiss police actions, the FBI stated that this was a "courtesy" to the Swiss government. The FBI agents stated that no laws had been broken, and no crimes had been committed. However, because no identifying information was posted on the website in question, it was unclear what actions the FBI was requesting.

FBI took the hard drives of Global IMC servers in the U.S.A. and the U.K. It appears that a court order was issued to Rackspace (Indymedia's service provider with offices in the U.S. and in London) to physically remove the hard drives from Global Indymedia servers (backup servers are now in place). Rackspace was given no time to defend against the order before it was acted upon and turned over the hard drives, both in the U.S. and the U.K. The servers hosted numerous local IMCs, and the reason for the seizure is not known.

Jennifer O'Connell of Rackspace, which is caught in the middle, sent this response to Indymedia a few days ago:

Unfortunately, we have received a federal order to provide your hardware to the requesting agency. We are complying at this time. Our datacenter technicians are building you a new server which will be online as soon as possible. Your account manager will notify you once the new server is online and available.

Friday's Bush-Kerry TV show was a Democracy™ infomercial, rather than democracy.

Dan Rather, in his brief intro on CBS to the debate, touted it as a return to the "town hall" glory days of early America.

That's absurd, considering that admittedly "soft" voters—anyone with strong opinions, not even necessarily partisan ones—was barred from the audience by the Commission on Presidential Debates, an unholy alliance we've already talked about that trumps democracy.

And it's silly to think of this as a "town hall," considering that Charlie Gibson—who elected him?—picked the softest of softballs to lob at the two candidates.

Sparks flew, nevertheless, and once again style triumphed over content when it came to analysis of what George W. Bush and John Kerry said.

The only hope is more education, right? But if you zero in on Friday night's discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), you get a frightening and depressing civics lesson. Once again, important issues and events are being discussed by the candidates—and at the same time they're not being discussed at all.

I'll get to the astonishing military-recruitment part of the law in a minute. But first, throw the red flag and go to The Washington Post's Debate Referee. As usual, even the replay this campaign season is inadequate.

Here's what was said:

KERRY: No Child Left Behind Act, I voted for it. I support it. I support the goals. But the president has underfunded it by $28 billion.

And here's what the Post's Debate Referee said:

Federal education funding has risen 58 percent under President Bush, from about $40 billion to about $66 billion. However, the Bush administration has not requested as much money for No Child Left Behind as the original 2002 bill authorized.

Kerry was right. But do you think he was just nit-picking? Wrong.

Take a look at this analysis of educators' opinions in a report parsed by Public Agenda, which notes:

Despite strong support for standards and accountability, school leaders have, according to the report, "complicated, ambivalent feelings" about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the most significant federal education legislation in decades.

Administrators are sharply divided over NCLB's purpose. Fewer than half of superintendents (40%) and principals (46%) think it is an effort to improve public schools. Another 22% and 29% say it is "motivated solely by politics," while 31% and 18% call it "a disguised effort to attack and destroy public education."

OK, maggots! Now hear this! The stringent rules of NCLB stupidly put even good districts at risk of losing funds, and more and more students are actually being left behind because they can't meet impossibly high standards when their districts' funds are being cut—in part, to pay for our imperial venture in Iraq.

Is the solution to spend more money on education?

No.

What's that? I can't hear you!

No, sir!

We'll let Sean Cavanagh of Education Week explain the law's basic training in "Military Recruiters Meet Pockets of Resistance":

Tucked into the massive "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 was language requiring any "local education agency" receiving money under the law to provide [military] recruiters with access to students' names, addresses, and telephone numbers—the same information schools typically give to colleges. Schools and districts that refuse to comply risk losing federal aid

For a story with more of an edge, read law prof Anita Ramasastry's "No Child Left Unrecruited?" on FindLaw. Writing in December 2002, she said:

When public high school opened their doors this fall, military recruiters converged upon them, seeking student data. Schools and parents, taken aback by these unprecedented requests—for thirty years, this private information has been closely guarded—were surprised to discover that the requests were actually authorized by statute.

As she shrewdly noted, there's a huge privacy issue. Parents have the right to "opt out" of giving their kids' names to military recruiters, but you have to jump through hoops to do so. In other words, your privacy is automatically being violated—by default—but if you take the trouble, you can change that.

As for school districts, they risk their funding if they don't go along with this creepy provision of the NCLB. Read this article from Veterans for Peace, which notes:

Critics of the requirement, like Heidi Siegfried, interim executive director of Capital Region Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, do not think a federal education law should grant military recruiters access to the nation’s schoolchildren.

"Schools are there to educate our children," said Siegfried. "Education is one of the few social goods provided universally in our country, and the idea that it should be somehow linked to recruitment efforts is not right."

When the Internet ether started crackling with stories about George W. Bush's mysterious "bulge," I thought people were talking about Dubya's dubiously stuffed flight suit—you know, the codpiece he displayed on the deck of the aircraft carrier last year when he crowed, "Mission accomplished!"

But that's not what George Carlin look-alike Dave Lindorff is talking about in today's Salon piece. (Thanks to colleague Erik Baard for the tip.)

This concerns a mysterious bulge on Bush's back. You can also read about it on Lindorff's own site, where he writes at length about whether the not-so-great communicator is using a furtive communication device. Giving credit to blogger Joseph Cannon, who first mentioned the bulge a week ago, Lindorff riffed on what appeared to be a squarish bulge on the president's back while Dubya was debating Kerry last week. Was Bush channeling Karl Rove? There's little question that Bush has been spotted wearing earpieces. Is someone prompting the POTUS?

Check out Cannon's lively blog, where he says, "I've offered 'Audiogate' as a name for this controversy, but I'm open to other suggestions. 'Gepetto-gate'? 'Radiogate'? 'Rovergate'?"

It may be too early to say whether there's something to this. But it was clear even before Bush entered politics that, left to his own devices as a bidnessman, he would some day wind up in receivership.

David Domke, a professor at the University of Washington, writes:

Read your piece a few weeks back on Bush and God ["The Christocrats"], thought you'd find this interesting:

Attached was an op-ed piece Domke and Kevin Coe wrote for the Seattle Times : "Bush's Fundamentalism: The President as Prophet."

It's another of Domke's excellent articles about Bush and religion, written on the left coast but from the perspective of a clean-cut Christian. Witness this:

Bush's fusion of a religious outlook with administration policy is a striking shift in modern presidential rhetoric. Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Put simply, Bush's language suggests that he speaks not to God, but for God.

Thank you for reading, David. And thanks for writing this piece about Bush and God. As you astutely note, Bush claims to speak "for God," and that's the message he'll increasingly give, via code words, to the evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Jews who are feverishly being registered to vote for him.

Be sure to count the number of coded religious references Bush makes during tonight's debate as he continues to address his congregants, especially in the South's battleground states.

Those coded messages won't work on everyone. The morning after the first presidential debate, Steaming Pile Of Bush wrote:

Mr. Harkavy!! Splendid work today at the Bush Beat!! Excellent research and plentiful links made for excellent reading!! Appreciate your effort.

By the way, Big John beat the Bushführer like a red-headed stepchild this evening—brought grins to all in the room watching!!!

Thank you for reading, Steaming Pile of Bush. It's clear that the president's coded religious messages won't work on your type. The only thing I would suggest for a heathen like you is that, as you prepare for tonight's debate, buy some Watermelon Pucker Schnapps, Jägermeister, and fruit punch—serve your guests a real Red-Headed Stepchild.

Who won the October 5 debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards? If you listened to, watched, or read the media accounts, you may think that both of them "stretched the truth" during their spirited and personal argument.

But that's not true. Cheney, the de facto POTUS, failed in the facts, and Edwards did not. Trying desperately to keep their balance, the media once again fell down.

Go ahead and take it point by point yourself, using The Washington Post's annotated debate transcript, in which it inserted what it called "Debate Referee" analysis. Both the Post and The New York Times also ran analyses that purported to list both veep candidates' misstatements (what we non-politicians would sometimes call "lies"). These analyses—the Post's is here, and the Times' is here—were falsely "balanced." The papers' refs tried to take Edwards to the woodshed, but he didn't deserve a whipping. Some examples follow. Here's the Post on Edwards's criticism of the Bush regime's tax cuts for the wealthy:

Edwards asserted that "millionaires sitting by their swimming pool … pay a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving" in Iraq. President Bush last year cut the tax rate on dividends to 15 percent, whereas most soldiers would be in a 15 percent tax bracket—and pay an effective rate much less after taking deductions for children and mortgages.

As a matter of fact, the "effective rate" is much less for the millionaires, let alone their after-tax income. How many times do we have to say this?

Respectable organizations such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have sliced and diced tax figures. The rich have many more options for deductions than the middle class's children and mortgages. The wealthy are getting huge breaks from Bush on how to handle their taxes on investments, capital gains, corporate bidness, and estates. And that's on top of a huge unfairness that already existed.

See the September 16 Bush Beat item "More Taxing News for Humans," which pointed out that from 1979 to 2001, "the average after-tax income of the top 1 percent of households rose by a stunning $409,000, or 139 percent, after adjusting for inflation." This compares with "the $6,300, or 17 percent, average increase among the middle fifth of the population, over this 22-year period, and the $1,100, or 8 percent, increase among the bottom fifth of the population."

As for the Bush regime's tax cuts? Practically every mainstream news outlet in the country referred to the late-September tax package approved by Congress as "middle-class tax breaks." What a howler! For another view, read Robert Greenstein's "New 'Middle-Class' Tax-Cut Bill Represents Cynical Policymaking." And take a gander at a fact sheet based on info from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Here's what the Tax Policy Center says of the recently touted "middle-class" tax-cut bill:

In 2005, two-thirds (68 percent) of the legislation's benefits would go to the top fifth of households, while only 10 percent of the benefits would go to the middle fifth of households, a peculiar outcome for a "middle-class" tax-cut bill.

While protecting corporate tax-abuse schemes, the Bush regime is cutting off the middle class at its knees. And most of the media go right along with it. Hey, if you make more than $250,000 a year, you should vote for Bush. If you don't make that much, you're a sucker if you vote for him.

For your reading displeasure, take a look at this trenchant analysis by Greenstein and Isaac Shapiro of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They shrewdly point out:

Although the ["middle-class tax-cut"] bill includes no "offsets" to pay for the cost of its tax cuts, sooner or later the federal government will have to cover these costs, either by raising taxes or by cutting programs. These financing measures ultimately will offset part or all the gains that many families receive from the tax cuts. Since the gains that many middle-class families will secure from these tax-cut provisions are modest, there is a substantial possibility that many, if not most, middle-class households will lose more from the measures that ultimately are adopted to offset the tax cuts' costs than they will receive in tax-cut benefits.

Congress could have cracked down on what economists call "abusive corporate tax shelters" when it also passed a series of "corporate tax-reform" measures. That didn't happen, y'all.

"Instead," say Greenstein and Shapiro, "Congress leaders made a decision to use the corporate tax-reform savings largely to finance an array of new tax breaks for corporations and other special interests, and to push through the middle-class tax package without paying for it."

Let's move on to Halliburton. Edwards excoriated Cheney, linking him to Halliburton's sweetheart deal in Iraq. The Post's judges, referring to Edwards's point that Halliburton has been fined and is under investigation for deeds that took place when Cheney was CEO, sniffed:

Cheney has not been directly implicated in any of the investigations. But the remainder of Edwards's characterizations of Halliburton's business practices are largely accurate.

How much more direct does it have to be? The SEC trashed the company for what it did while Cheney was CEO. Cheney tried to dismiss Edwards's allegations as a "smokescreen." The New York Times cooperated by blowing smoke up our asses with David E. Rosenbaum's point-by-point analysis of how both veep candidates "stretched the facts":

Mr. Edwards suggested an improper relationship between the Bush administration and Halliburton, the company with large contracts in Iraq that Mr. Cheney led before he ran for vice president.

Mr. Edwards was right that Halliburton holds a no-bid contract for services in Iraq, is under investigation for overcharges, and is still being paid by the government. But there is no evidence Mr. Cheney has pulled strings on Halliburton's behalf since becoming vice president. And the independent Government Accountability Office concluded that Halliburton was the only company that could have provided the services the Army needed at the outset of the war and was thus justified in having received the noncompetitive contract.

No evidence he pulled strings? The noted anarcho-Marxist-liberal rag The Wall Street Journal reported on that string-pulling. Read the Multinational Monitor's roundup of this and other Bushian matters. Here's an excerpt:

Although Bush administration officials say Cheney had nothing to do with the contracts, the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2003 that executives from Halliburton and other big oil companies had met with Vice President Dick Cheney's staff in late 2002 to discuss how to jump-start Iraq's oil production after the war. Details of that meeting, like the vice president's National Energy Task Force, remain a secret.

In June [2004], GAO investigators confirmed that Pentagon officials had broken competitive contracting requirements and overruled objections from an army lawyer to grant the first Iraq oil-related work order to Halliburton.

According to Representative Henry Waxman, D-California, Michael Mobbs, a neoconservative political appointee working under the direction of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, made the decision to award the oil contract to Halliburton. At the same time, an Army Corps of Engineers e-mail message surfaced, suggesting that the decision had been "coordinated w VP's office."

In a letter to Cheney asking for more information, Waxman described an October 2002 meeting in which Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was informed of the decision, along with other White House officials.

And Halliburton was the only company that could have provided these "services"? That's because the contract proposal was written that way. That's the oldest Pentagon trick in the business.

Read this June 2004 story in The Guardian (U.K.) about Libby, Cheney, and Halliburton. As for Waxman, his Government Reform site is a better online news source than 99 percent of all news sources. Check out the Iraq Contracting page.

Last and certainly not least, let's talk about dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Edwards: "We've taken 90 percent of the coalition casualties."

Cheney: "The 90 percent figure is just dead wrong. When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they've taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent.

Dead wrong? We're dead, Cheney, and you're wrong. Edwards was absolutely right. But both the Post and Times screwed this up. The Times' Rosenbaum wrote:

Mr. Edwards said 90 percent of fatalities, but that includes only foreign troops killed, and does not count approximately 700 Iraqi security forces said to have died.

The Post was not much better, allowing that Edwards's claim "stands up," but only after pointing out that "the U.S." doesn't release figures of dead Iraqis.

Are they insane? Edwards said "coalition" forces, and he said it for a reason: The Bush regime has refused to release any figures on Iraqi casualties—civilian, military, insurgents, grandmothers, children, police, anything. You have to go to sources like Iraq Body Count for that information. (Latest estimate of dead Iraqi civilians: 13,000 to 15,000.)

This was not nit-picking by Edwards. He was correct in saying that 90 percent of the coalition casualties are Americans. And his point was that this was no coalition, even though the Bush regime wants to paint the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by a "coalition of the willing" as analogous to World War II–brand "Allies" fighting the "Axis."

The point in dicing and slicing those who diced and sliced the truthfulness of Edwards and Cheney is that Edwards did not stretch the truth. Cheney, on the other hand, lied.

Cheney even erred when defending his lies. He told viewers to go to "factcheck.com," when he meant "factcheck.org." But that was an honest mistake. This is what factcheck.org had to say about Cheney after the debate:

Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small-business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals.

But factcheck.org headlined its piece "Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts," and that itself is not justified. This is what it said about Edwards:

Edwards falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.

Read this story by Edward Epstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, and then tell me whether Edwards was wrong about his point on combat pay. Epstein wrote in August 2003:

The White House quickly back-pedaled [August 14, 2003] on Pentagon plans to cut the combat pay of the 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after disclosure of the idea quickly became a political embarrassment.

As for Edwards's point about jobs? Exactly where he got his figure of 2.7 million jobs lost is unclear. But it could have come from this August 2004 report, which noted, among other grim news concerning the impact of Bush's tax cuts:

The Economic Policy Institute finds that the number of jobs created in the wake of the tax cuts has already fallen 2.7 million jobs short of Administration predictions made in 2003. EPI reports that through August, the economy has produced 1.6 million jobs since passage of the 2003 tax bill; this is just 38 percent of the 4.3 million jobs the Administration predicted would be generated over this period.

The point is that Edwards could have picked all kinds of bad news about jobs—figures worse than he cited. How is that error, if it was one, comparable to the bullshit that Cheney spewed at us?

OK, enough with the facts and figures. Why did The Washington Post and The New York Times, two excellent newspapers, run such drivel about the Cheney-Edwards debate's facts? I'm not sure why that happens, and I've written drivel for newspapers for almost 30 years. Some people, particularly paranoids and European pointy-heads, disdainfully talk about "consensus media."

FAIR, the leftist watchdog that does some righteous fact-checking of its own, has another name for it. Check out FAIR's "Finding Fault on Both Sides Can Be False Balance". Here's an excerpt:

While fact-checking is an essential media function, particularly during an election year, it's a hollow exercise if journalists start with the assumption that both sides must be found equally guilty of falsehoods.

It is, in fact, not always the case that both campaigns are responsible for deceptive claims to the same degree; coverage that insists on a false even-handedness, while pretending to expose political mendacity, actually gives cover for it by neutralizing criticism with the "they all do it" defense. Such coverage may protect news outlets from charges of bias, but it does a disservice to voters.

FAIR went on to point out, among several examples, a Washington Post piece on the first debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Here's FAIR's assessment:

The Post took issue, for example, with the Kerry statement, "The [Bush] administration misled America, the United Nations, and the world," saying, "There is little evidence the Bush administration purposely tried to deceive Americans and other world leaders about the threat posed by the alleged weapons."

While whether or not the administration "misled" is surely a matter of opinion, there's plenty of evidence to support the claim that it did so. To cite just one example, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his speech to the U.N. (2/5/03), prominently cited Iraqi defector Hussein Kamal's figures on chemical weapons produced by Iraq—without mentioning that Kamal had told U.S. and international authorities that these stockpiles had all been destroyed (Newsweek, 3/3/03).

FAIR took the Post to task for taking Edwards to task for using the figure $200 billion for the cost of the Iraq war. Kerry had scored the same point in his debate with Bush, but upon further review, the Post disallowed it. FAIR took yet another look and summed up the ruckus this way:

The Washington Post also complained that "in a recent line of attack, Kerry has said the cost of Bush's 'go-it-alone policy in Iraq is now $200 billion.' This is an exaggeration, because it combines the amount already spent—about $120 billion—with money that is expected to be spent in the coming year or requested by the administration." Surely, though, the "cost" of something is the total amount of money that one has to pay for it; no one would describe the down payment on a car as the "cost" of the car.

It's so risky fact-checking the fact-checkers, because everybody makes mistakes. I've pointed out before, and I'll say it again, I've made my share, and I'll continue to make them. It's the human condition, and that applies to journalists, too. But this striving for a false balance is a matter of judgment, not a matter of the facts themselves, for the most part. Where it comes from, I don't exactly know. But one of the best things to do is simply to get more facts and more analysis. For that, I'd strongly suggest reading Michael Massing, whose critiques of the press's performance before the invasion of Iraq are harsh, staggering, and sobering.

For Massing's work, go to The New York Review of Books, which has been leading the press in coverage of the Bush regime, anyway. You can also read the magazine's first part of Massing's monumental "Now They Tell Us" here.

In the meantime, you can get a peek at a good journalist's thought processes by reading Bob Kaiser's veep-debate blog in The Washington Post. Kaiser, a veteran reporter who's now an associate managing editor, engaged in a colloquy with readers. Here's what he had to say online, in part, the morning after Tuesday night's debate:

Edwards had the tougher assignment going in, I thought. As a man whose entire experience in public life consists of one term in the Senate, he was at risk of looking less informed than Cheney, or lighter-weight. His task was to convince voters he knew the issues, and was a plausible VP or, if needed, president. Personally I thought he met that requirement, but that's only my opinion. Everyone is entitled to his/her own conclusion about that.

Cheney has, by my lights, long been a persuasive and impressive figure. He oozes gravitas. He has a winning manner that was perhaps better displayed against Sen. Lieberman four years ago, but which I again saw last night. I'm not sure how he defined his assignment last night. Part of him I'm sure wanted to counter the impression that he is an eminence grise behind the throne, or some kind of dark force in the administration. Part of him wanted to convince voters of what has emerged, really, as the dominant theme of the Bush-Cheney campaign: that Kerry is ill-equipped and/or ill-suited to be president. Part of him, I sensed throughout, just wanted it over with. On my report card, he too got good grades.

And Kaiser added:

Finally I'd say that both men performed a public service by demonstrating to the millions who were watching that politicians running for the second-highest office can be smart, serious, and purposeful. Of course, both also engaged in some of the demagoguery that is so entrenched in our politics, but frankly, I was pleased that the amount of this seemed limited.

Your comment that Cheney "oozes gravitas" proves John Kerry's point at the first debate—that one can sound and be certain, but also be wrong. Cheney sounded convincing with his assertions about progress in Iraq, yet they are blatantly untrue, as any well-informed person realizes. The same can be said of Cheney's assertion that he did not try to link Saddam to 9-11. He sounded convincing saying he didn't—but he actually mentioned the two closely together many times. He also made the false assertion that Iraqi agents met with Mohammed Atta in Prague.

My point is: The way someone sounds does not really show how whether they are credible or not. Bush was so unimpressive at the first debate not mainly because he sounded unconvincing, but because he had nothing substantive to offer, and because his arguments were effectively rebutted by Kerry. He just repeated the same old, discredited platitudes about a "Free Iraq," progress in Iraq, etc.

Kaiser replied this way:

Thanks for posting. I'm not sure substance overrides appearances always. And of course, your sense of what constitutes substance may not be the same as your neighbor's.

Aside from the fact that I must have missed Edwards's "demagoguery," is Kaiser saying that "substance" is less important than "appearances"? In terms of the impact politicians might have on voters, I could understand Kaiser's saying that. But in terms of anything other than that, it's an absurd point. What counts when determining credibility—not impact on others, but credibility—is the substance. Journalists are the people who we count on to see through style and into the heart of the matter and then interpret both style and substance—juggling them, mixing them, analyzing them, and ultimately separating them.

One more thing: The "dominant theme" of a campaign isn't what the politicians themselves say. It's fine to say that a particular pol is trying to make such-and-such into a "dominant theme." But there's a difference. Just because the Bush-Cheney camp says Bush is a war leader doesn't make it so. Reporting on a campaign's strategy is one thing; swallowing it whole and regurgitating it for the populace is something else.

Finally, the Stewartstown person's point about Kaiser's "gravitas" statement concerning Cheney is right on the mark.

Who had more gravitas (sometimes) than Ezra Pound? And who was nuttier (sometimes) than a March hare? Ezra Pound. And who talked insane shit during World War II about Jews, economics, the West, and other topics? Ezra Pound. Smart people have to separate and weigh style and substance if they're to appreciate the wonderful things Pound did for poets, poetry, and communication in general, because the naked truth is that he was sometimes stark raving starkers.

Actually, in Dick Cheney's case, it's his style that one might say has "gravitas." The substance that Cheney "oozes" is something that we've already discussed.

If ever anyone needed an aggressive ambulance-chaser like John Edwards to argue on his behalf against Dick Cheney, it's Bisen Zhekenov, a former Halliburton oil-field worker in Kazakhstan.

Permanently damaged by toxic gas in a 1998 oil-field accident, Zhekenov was later fired because he was too ill to work—all of this during Cheney's watch as CEO—and has been futilely fighting the company in court ever since.

The sad story of this Kazakh worker—and others, as well—was reported on the other side of the planet by the Associated Press and The Moscow Times, but it barely got any play at all in America, of course. Read all about Zhekenov, whose lungs were ruined by hydrogen sulfide (the dangerous gas that smells like rotten eggs), and Halliburton (whose dealings with American taxpayers emit a similar odor) in this July 2004 story re-posted here by the trade journal Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections.

But first, imagine tonight's Cheney-Edwards debate in a different format. It's a courtroom. Cue up the theme music from Perry Mason (one of the TV shows that Edwards says helped inspire him to a career).

Cheney's on the witness stand, being cross-examined by Edwards about how Halliburton is still paying the U.S. vice president a salary and how Cheney was a member of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev's Oil Advisory Board. Edwards then grills Cheney about Halliburton's refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the toxic-gas leak at the huge Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan and thus won't shell out anything to workers who may have been harmed by it. Just then, Paul Drake hurries into the courtroom and whispers into his boss Edwards's ear, and the lawyer begs the court's indulgence while Bisem Zhekenov is wheeled in.

This drama is shot, of course, in Smell-O-Vision.

During tonight's debate, the grim story of Bisen Zhekenov won't come up. The stench of corruption may not even be directly discussed, but it should emanate from your TV set anyway. It could be interesting to see how a dynamic trial lawyer tackles a shrewd pol.

Cheney's the fearless draft dodger who's all about oil, no matter how dangerous the risk—to others. As he told a gathering of Texas oilmen in 1998, speaking of that risk, "You've got to go where the oil is. I don't worry about it a lot." (See this August 13 Bush Beat item.)

So many questions for Cheney: What exactly was talked about at those secretive meetings of your energy task force early in the Bush Error? For that matter, what about your role, before you led the search committee to find Dubya a running mate and chose yourself, as a member of Nazarbayev's cozy cluster of oil advisers? Ever talk to Jim Giffen, the central figure in the Kazakhgate scandal? The guy who's going on trial in January? And what about Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root and its juicy Iraq "reconstruction" contracts?

See this page on KBR from the Center for Public Integrity, plus other pieces of the center's mammoth Windfalls of War project. And search out the numerous references to Kazakhgate below in previous Bush Beat items. Perhaps the best recent piece on this is Ken Silverstein's "Oil Adds Sheen to the Kazakh Regime," published last May in the Los Angeles Times and re-posted here.

But be sure to read Seymour Hersh's July 2001 New Yorker piece, "The Price of Oil," which peers into U.S. oil companies' bidness in Central Asia. (The International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research re-posted the Hersh piece here.) Also check out the exhaustive links compiled by George Draffan for his Oil War News.

Don't believe the hype from the "tort reform" people that John Edwards is just another sleazy lawyer. Edwards is one of the most effective ambulance-chasers in recent years, and he has won fame and fortune representing human, rather than corporate, citizens.

Prep yourself for tonight's debate by reading FindLaw's profile of Edwards the litigator. It gives a rundown of his career as a trial lawyer, plus valuable links.

For a more thorough story, read Brooklyn Law School professor Anthony J. Sebok's well-reasoned defense of Edwards's ambulance-chasing. It's a savvy retort to the "tort reform" propaganda that gushes from our corporate fellow citizens.

The Boston Globe's Curtis Wilkie plants Edwards in the tradition of Southern white progressives, who often were lawyers, like one of our personal favorites, Atticus Finch.

What is the U.S. policy toward Iran? Doug Feith and his neocon nabobs, bent on protecting Israel's right-wing regime, seem to want to attack Iran next, now that Iraq is "conquered." There must be a hell of a fight going on among the puppeteers of George W. Bush over what to do with oil-soaked Iran: Halliburton does business with what Bush calls a spoke of the "axis of evil."

Dick Cheney is so central to the Bush regime—he's the chief puppeteer—that one hardly knows where to start in trying to figure out what we want from Iran (other than oil). Does the commander in chief (that was Cheney, not Bush, on 9-11) want to conquer Iran or just do business with it?

The alleged leak of Pentagon classified data on Iran to the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC has fallen off the front pages, but refresh your memory with this solid piece a month ago by The Washington Post's Robin Wright and Dan Eggen. And the Post's Jefferson Morley examined it further at the time with this roundup of stories from other countries.

Currently, Halliburton is under investigation for violating the sanctions against Iran by doing business there. The company insists that it's not directly doing business in Iran, that its activities are those of its foreign subsidiaries. Here's Halliburton's explanation from its August 3 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

We have a Cayman Islands subsidiary with operations in Iran, and other European subsidiaries that manufacture goods destined for Iran and/or render services in Iran. The United States imposes trade restrictions and economic embargoes that prohibit United States incorporated entities and United States citizens and residents from engaging in commercial, financial, or trade transactions with some foreign countries, including Iran, unless authorized by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Treasury Department or exempted by statute.

We received and responded to an inquiry in mid-2001 from OFAC with respect to the operations in Iran by a Halliburton subsidiary that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. The OFAC inquiry requested information with respect to compliance with the Iranian Transaction Regulations. Our 2001 written response to OFAC stated that we believed that we were in full compliance with applicable sanction regulations. In January 2004, we received a follow-up letter from OFAC requesting additional information. We responded fully to this request on March 19, 2004. We understand this matter has now been referred by OFAC to the Department of Justice. In July 2004, we received from an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas a grand jury subpoena requesting the production of documents. We intend to cooperate with the government's investigation.

And the company added:

Separate from the OFAC inquiry, we completed a study in 2003 of our activities in Iran during 2002 and 2003 and concluded that these activities were in full compliance with applicable sanction regulations. These sanction regulations require isolation of entities that conduct activities in Iran from contact with United States citizens or managers of United States companies.

This past spring, however, the pension funds of the New York City cops and firefighters, as holders of Halliburton stock, protested the company's dealings with Iran, particularly an office it opened there in February 2000. Halliburton tried to stop the pension funds from asking other shareholders to consider the proposal formally, but the SEC refused to block New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson from inserting it into the record. Thompson's protest, which the company's shareholders voted to reject, of course, contended that "Halliburton's use of its Cayman Islands subsidiary to establish operations in Tehran violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law."

Halliburton has been diligent in pointing out that only its foreign-based subsidiaries deal with Iran. But if you peer deep into the fine print of Halliburton's SEC filings, you find mysterious references. In a list of its astounding number of subsidiaries as of December 31, 1998, for example, there's a Kellogg Iran Inc. It's 100 percent owned by Halliburton and incorporated in Delaware, according to the company's own filing with the SEC.

That subsidiary still exists. In another SEC filing's "list of Halliburton current affiliates," as of September 12, 2003, Kellogg Iran Inc. is among them.

OK, I was wrong when I said Wednesday in my "Topical Storm Forecast" that somebody on last night's Bush-Kerry TV show would say the word "legacy." I checked the transcript; no one said it.

I guess my subconscious was fixated on what sort of legacy the radical Bush administration will leave us—if it ever indeed does leave us.

John Kerry is irrelevant. The best reason to vote for Kerry is that he simply is not George W. Bush. There's a ring of scum in the bathtub that will be difficult to scrub away once Bush is gone—no matter who's president. Might as well be Kerry. Because he's not Bush.

The oily stuff in the tub is from Dick Cheney; the red stuff is somebody else's blood spilled by Don Rumsfeld and his band of neocons led by Doug Feith; the green stuff could be from such idiotic Bush appointees as Kristin J. Forbes of the Council of Economic Advisers (she's someone who defends income inequality—refresh your memory with the February 25 Bush Beat item "Math Destruction"). Some of the other gunk in the bathtub looks like varnish chipped off the platform that Bush's party guests worked on in late August under the supervision of Colorado governor Bill Owens. (He's a stealth religious-right zealot, by the way—see my 1998 profile of Owens from my days in Denver.) John Ashcroft is America's self-designated cleanser, but he just makes that scum in the tub even harder to get out. On the other hand, if you spill a little bit of Ashcroft on, say, the U.S. Constitution, the words dissolve; if you don't rinse it off soon, that document won't be worth the paper it was written on.

I'll try anything, even guided imagery involving a bathtub. I don't pimp for candidates, but I will point out that another term for Bush means Supreme Court appointments, more bad appointments elsewhere, no hope for peace in the Middle East, more fights to pick around the world, a widening gap between rich and poor, more intrusion of religious zealotry into our lives, continued excessive profit-taking, and so on. Kerry, lame as he is, would look like Franklin Friggin' Roosevelt in comparison.

No matter what people may want to think, this election is a referendum on George W. Bush. Digging down to the root of the matter, Bush himself is irrelevant—he's simply a front man, and he's stupid. But the people around him aren't.

Speaking of bathtub scum, it's ludicrous that the most fanatic partisans are co-chairs of the Commission on Presidential Debates and have this power to say which moderator is "neutral" and what kinds of questions should be asked in front of what kind of audience.

The League of Women Voters did fine with this job before the mid '80s, when Congress, the networks, and the parties stepped in and took it over. Now the debates, said to be so crucial, are run by a commission co-chaired by the most partisan people possible, Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. and Paul Kirk, former heads of the GOP and Democrats. See this Disinfopedia background piece on the commission.

Kirk's nothing but a party hack. Fahrenkopf is considerably more. He's the most prominent attorney and lobbyist for the casino industry, particularly when the GOP is in power.

As for last night's moderator, Jim Lehrer? The Los Angeles Times trumpeted him this way in a headline Thursday morning: "Lehrer Known as Earnest Voice Dedicated to Neutrality."

Not so fast. See Cynthia Cotts's Voice piece on Lehrer's dispute last spring with guest Christian Parenti for an example of Lehrer's practicing something a little less than "neutrality" and a hell of a lot less than journalism. Also see this piece from the watchdog group FAIR, which wrote:

Parenti raised the possibility that corruption and mismanagement of the rebuilding contracts in Iraq were contributing to the insurgency against the American-led occupation of the country. Those comments apparently provoked a response from Lehrer, who explained two days later (3/4/04) that "a discussion about Iraq ended up not being as balanced as is our standard practice. While unintentional, it was our mistake, and we regret it."

A NewsHour producer told the Village Voice (3/17/04) that Parenti's response to the question "was not reportage, this was giving his opinion, and that's not why we brought him on."

No, Lehrer, it was not a "mistake" for Parenti to say what he said, especially because it's likely true and has been said by many people. Journalists aren't supposed to be secretarial workers; they observe, report, and, yes, they sometimes interpret. (Read Parenti's latest piece on our "reconstruction" of Iraq here.)

That incident between Lehrer and Parenti happened after the invasion. Take a look at this FAIR piece from September 2002 about Lehrer's failure to hold Don Rumsfeld accountable for pre-invasion bullshit about Iraq. Lehrer didn't correct a misstatement from Rumsfeld that even CNN pointed out.

This is not backbiting from fellow journos. Listen to English teacher Susan Ohanian, winner of her profession's George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. The Parenti-Lehrer tiff, plus her own experience with Lehrer's PBS show, led her to write a piece on journalists called "Stenographers to the Powerful." Speaking of Parenti's difficulty with Lehrer, Ohanian contended:

The people representing the government Standardisto policy can say anything they damn well please, and it is regarded as news. When anyone opposed to government Standardisto policy tries to speak up, their words are regarded as bias and they are either ignored or treated as lunatic fringe.

That's why, Ohanian said, "it is so hard for the voices of teachers and parents to be heard above the cacophony of government shills."

Last night, during the Bush-Kerry show, Lehrer was sometimes more of a teleprompter than a moderator.

Lehrer's first two questions were not really questions. They were setups for each candidate to spout some introductory pap, and each "debater" got one perfectly tailored to his campaign. Here was Lehrer's first question to Kerry:

Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9-11–type terrorist attack on the United States?

Well, no shit, Jim! I believe I can. At the very least, Lehrer could have narrowed this open-ended question a tiny bit by phrasing it like this: "Specifically why do you say you could do a better job … ?" At least that way, Kerry couldn't have started his answer with the obvious "Yes."

Likewise with Bush. Lehrer's first lob to Dubya was this:

Do you believe the election of Senator Kerry on November 2 would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9-11–type terrorist attack?

What a setup! And unfair to Kerry too, in that it expressed Bush's own negative theme in Lehrer's "neutral" voice even before Bush had to. Lehrer might as well have asked Bush, "Do you believe that Kerry is a flip-flopping motherfucker?" In the interest of the "balance" that Lehrer claims to crave, and so he wouldn't actually be the first person to voice Bush's negative view of Kerry, Lehrer could have asked Bush, "You've said you've made the world safer and that Kerry's election would increase our chances of being attacked. Specifically, how so?"

In each case, the first questions to Bush and Kerry required nothing more than an obvious and simple yes. That's a big mistake on the moderator's part, because every time you ask a politician a question that can be answered with a simple yes, you've just given him a setup—and one that he can easily append a canned blurb to. The door is open for him to blather. The key is to ask questions that can't be answered with a "yes." At least that way you can try to force a person to explain in uncanned words.

Lehrer deserves to have some slack cut, because this Bush-Kerry miniseries is not really a set of debates and because the commission's rules would hamstring any moderator. But Lehrer's former PBS partner, Robert MacNeil, would have done better. Or maybe Susan Ohanian.

As national elections approach in our Iraq colony, you can almost feel the electricity in the air. Not that there's much actual electricity—power service ranges from nine to 15 hours a day in most of the country, and electricity generation in Baghdad has fallen off by 20 percent in the past week, according to the latest U.S. report.

On second thought, that crackle in the atmosphere is probably gunfire. It's certainly not from the upcoming elections. As Borzou Daragahi of Beirut's Daily Star put it this morning in his dispatch from Baghdad:

With 100 days to go before elections are scheduled to be held to decide Iraq's future, no posters adorn the capital's streets, and no names are being bandied about. There have been no debates scheduled, no candidate forums, no voter education guides. Instead, Iraqi and American officials are raising serious doubts as to whether legitimate elections are possible.

Daragahi rightly noted that under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, politics in Iraq "became a dark and secretive enterprise rather than a forum for solving common problems."

Thank God that's not the situation here in the U.S. of A., I say, as I wait impatiently for the release of records of deliberations by Dick Cheney's energy task force, of the White House–censored 28 pages from the congressional report on Saudi Arabia's connection to 9-11, of a full account of what Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia talked about while they were killing ducks this past January, and of the U.S. military's own reports on what kind of Abu Ghraib–like behavior has taken place in Guantánamo Bay's military prisons. Seymour Hersh, who's been kicking the Bush regime's ass in The New Yorker and elsewhere, predicted on The Daily Show last night that "when we learn all there is to learn" about Guantánamo Bay, "we're going to be mightily ashamed. … It's a blot on all of us." We already have a 115-page report from three former prisoners, plus other allegations, including a claim from former prisoner Tareq Dergoul that he was "beaten like a beast" and had his head shoved down a toilet—while a video camera recorded it.

See this Washington Post story on Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, the former Colonel Klink of Camp X-Ray. He's the guy who told Abu Ghraib officials that guards should be "actively engaged" in extracting information, an order that got a "thumbs up" from Lynndie England.

But for those unarmed Iraqis who aren't in jail, shooting at our troops, or cowering in the rubble of their homes and who want to get away from all the pre-election excitement, there's good news from Baghdad: Iraqi Airways resumed international flights this month, after being grounded for 14 years by war and sanctions and then more war.

The airine will fly to Syria and Jordan twice a week and has already sold "dozens of tickets," officials said. It's a little pricey, though. Like if you want a return flight to Baghdad from Amman, Jordan? It'll cost you $750, says CNN, compared with $40 for the same trip by road. If you're driving, be sure to load your rifle before you go.

You may have to drive anyway. A U.S. Department of Commerce report says that only one plane in the Iraqi Airways fleet is operational.

The odds are against finding a blogger who does more than screech, but I'll give it to a chap named Lounsbury, whose June posting on Live Journal screeches to the tune of journalistic dispatches, in a sort of transmogrified call-and-response style that John Kerry should take as gospel on the eve of his first debate with George W. Bush.

Lounsbury's Live Journal profile identifies him as being a "Middle East/North Africa specialist in asset management and risk capital." (Further research indicates that he may currently live in Jordan.)

In any case, he zooms in on U.S. pasha Jerry Bremer's disastrous Coalition Provisional Authority "reconstruction" of Iraq, parsing a couple of Washington Post stories to discuss just the competency of what we're doing over there. Let's focus on Lounsbury's back talk to the info in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears," published June 20. Like this passage:

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Lounsbury's riff:

Squandered is bloody right. Nothing had to be this bad. Not even after the looting, but again, the current [U.S.] administration's blind mendacity, its extreme preference for sycophants over skilled and pragmatic operators is deadly. … Opposition to this administration is a duty for anyone who cares about competency. I am not pleased with the concept of a Kerry White House, but I would rather have the occasion to vote out a mediocre Kerry than suffer through the disasters these incompetent fools are wreaking out of pure blind hubris.

Then Lounsbury comes upon this sentence:

U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis.

Call Father Karras! Lounsbury's head is spinning! He writes:

What the fuck these idiots think the Iraqis should be grateful for I don't know, but certainly merely toppling a dictator is not enough. The motherfuckers in Iraq know bloody well that toppling dictators does not make the fucking pie in the end, so no reason to congratulate the chef for simply having bought the motherfucking ingredients, he's gotta fucking make the pie in order [for us] to fucking congratulate him. Mindless idiots, these stupid fucking American "reconstruction" idiots in the CPA, full of their bloated farts of empty pompous "liberation" posturing.

Before Lounsbury's head explodes all over our keyboards, he stumbles on this paragraph:

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment, and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

To which Lounsbury calmly notes:

I rather think that says all there really needs to be said about this "liberation."

Thursday's debate: Mostly mild, with heavy gunfire halfway around the planet In a futile gesture, thousands of Americans are apparently sending in questions they want asked during tomorrow night's first Bush-Kerry debate. The questions are a project of MediaChannel.org, and you can fill out some right now if you want.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, however, has battened down the hatches: It's trying to ensure that nothing comes up that's more blustery than, say, the on-air personality of Weather Channel anchor Marshall Seese.

See Monday's Bush Beat for an analysis of the sluggish system currently stalled over America.

The updated forecast for Thursday night's viewers: Calm early, with irritation expected to steadily increase. Put on your hip boots; the shit's going to get deep.

As for the questions? Softball-sized. Oh, and the word "legacy" will be used by somebody.

Sounds like we need to import some of that good ol' American "tort reform" to Iraq. Mohammed Ridha al-Jashami, the governor of Wasit province, in northern Iraq, has refused to accept compensation offered by the U.S. occupation forces after residents were killed and houses were pulverized.

"Jashami said the amounts don't match the extensive damage and losses suffered in poor neighborhoods," Al-Mutamar, the daily paper of the ungrateful Iraqi National Congress, wrote. The INC, you'll recall, was set up by neocons and funded by U.S. taxpayers so that Ahmed Chalabi could return to Iraq to the sound of one hand clapping and then be disowned by us.

How much dough are we talking about, anyway? The U.S. "allocated only $1,500 for each martyr," the paper said, "and nothing to others whose houses were destroyed." The guv has asked for $15,000 for each person killed and $10,000 for others "adversely affected by the fighting."

Now they're probably thinking of lawsuits. (Check out Corp Reform's page on tort reform. But the good news for the Bush regime is that we don't believe in the International Criminal Court.)

And here the U.S. of A. is already spending about $4 billion a month in Iraq. And we're going to be spending $1 billion a year just to maintain our beautiful new embassy in Baghdad, and it's going to have a full-time psychiatrist for in-house counseling and drugs for our own people.

I mean, what do these Iraqis want from us?

Maybe the Bush regime ought to dispatch campaign prop Rudy Giuliani to Iraq to emphasize that, after all, none of the dead Iraqi civilians in Wasit were altar boys. It is believed that not a single one of the 13,000 to 15,000 dead Iraqi civilians, practically all of whom were Muslims, was in fact an altar boy, unlike Patrick Dorismond.

Go to Iraqi Press Monitor and click on September 29 to see an excerpt of the Al-Mutamar story. While you're there, look at the "cartoon of the day," which carries this explanation, courtesy of the dedicated people at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting:

A number of small people are carrying banners proclaiming their "rights," but a much larger U.S. soldier tosses them into a waste basket marked "Terrorism." The cartoon suggests that the Americans label countries that ask for their rights as terrorist, especially powerless countries.

So ungrateful of the INC, which the CIA financed and Judith Miller of The New York Times egged on.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait until this stupid election is over so I can go out to California on November 19 to watch Rush Limbaugh receive the Statesmanship Award at the Claremont Institute's annual Winston Churchill Dinner.

That may be the only time I'll ever write the words "Rush Limbaugh" and "Winston Churchill" in the same sentence. (Damn, I did it again.)

Limbaugh was supposed to get the award last year, but he had just gotten out of drug rehab and had to cancel. So Claremont, a severely right-wing think tank that features Pat Sajak on its board, took a gamble and brought in another addict, Bill Bennett, the "Bookie of Virtue" guy, to sub for him.

Wallow in this with me, won't you? Go to Anecdotage.com's Limbaugh page for Mr. Microphone's pre-drug-scandal comments on druggies:

"If people are violating the law by doing drugs," rabid Republican radio host Rush Limbaugh declared in 1995, "they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."

"I actually think that we've gone soft on punishment in this country," he remarked on another occasion.

Then he was unmasked by The National Enquirer as addicted to prescription pain-killing drugs that, under federal law, are no different from cocaine. As Rick Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last October:

The suggestion that he became addicted to them under a doctor's care is almost certainly false. So is the suggestion that he wasn't taking them "recreationally"—i.e., to get high. The prescribed dose of Oxycontin, one tablet every twelve hours, is usually sufficient to relieve severe pain. The Enquirer has Limbaugh purchasing nearly twelve thousand during a four-month period in 2001—enough to soothe his back troubles for sixteen years.

Limbaugh deserves compassion no less (and no more) than any other drug addict. It would be a travesty of justice to lock him up for ingesting chemicals, an activity whose only victim, if any, has been himself. But the 450,000 Americans already in jail for breaking the drug laws also represent a failure of justice, and an even bigger failure of policy. (The United States imprisons more people for drug violations than the European Union imprisons for all causes combined, and the E.U.'s population exceeds the U.S.'s by a hundred million.)

At least Claremont was consistent in picking Bennett to fill in last year. Joshua Green's "Bookie of Virtue" story in the June 2003 Washington Monthly (see the link above) noted:

As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use, arguing that individuals have a moral responsibility to own up to their addiction. … Few vices have escaped Bennett's withering scorn. He has opined on everything from drinking to "homosexual unions" to The Ricki Lake Show to wife-swapping. There is one, however, that has largely escaped Bennett's wrath: gambling. … On July 12 of [2002], for instance, Bennett lost $340,000 at Caesar's Boardwalk Regency in Atlantic City. And just three weeks ago, on March 29 and 30, [2003], he lost more than $500,000 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. "There's a term in the trade for this kind of gambler," says a casino source who has witnessed Bennett at the high-limit slots in the wee hours. "We call them losers."

Spin the wheel yourself and go to Strange Cosmos to read Claremont board member Pat Sajak's 2002 speech about Hollywood to the students of Michigan's strange little Hillsdale College. He says Hollywood is "clueless." You might want to take a cue from Dick Cheney and say to Sajak, "Buy a vowel, but first, why don't you go fck yourself."

Sajak really did deliver the speech about Hollywood. But if you want to step into a parallel universe, check out George W. Bush's appointment of Bennett as U.S. Slots Czar on the Bizarro World site whitehouse.org:

Bush told him, "I have some complimentary cocktail coupons and a free upgrade to the Lincoln bedroom to make you feel right at home, sir."

Caution: Enter that alternate reality at your own peril. It's no Willoughby. And when you return, you'll be faced with even more bullshit. Just yesterday, in a typical election-eve ploy by our incongruous lawmakers, Capitol Hill roasted Hollywood for too much sex and violence. A Los Angeles Times account, re-posted here by the San Francisco Chronicle, absurdly led with this: "Reacting to growing public concerns about sex and violence in the media…."

Yeah, right. Heard about the sex and violence in Iraqi prisons and streets lately?

The leader of this latest crusade is Kansas senator Sam Brownback, the 2000 Distinguished Christian Statesman, an honor bestowed by Fort Lauderdale preacher D. James Kennedy's powerful D.C. outlet, the Center for Christian Statesmanship, which evangelizes inside government buildings.

Previous winners of this award include John Ashcroft—read my piece "The Gospel According to the A.G." from April 2001, in which Ashcroft, the 1996 Distinguished Christian Statesman, was quoted as saying that the government "gives only half a gift when it doesn't give the spirit of Christ." I wrote that story when Ashcroft was just a threatening religious crank in a new and bumbling Bush administration. That was before 9-11 gave him the Great Commission to sweep us off our feet and into detention.

Face it: We've just got too many of these statesmen running around.

I already see a problem with the Kerry-Bush debates, which begin this Thursday between the two not-ready-for-prime-time players: Page four of the "Memorandum of Understanding" between the candidates and the Commission on Presidential Debates specifically forbids "props." How's Bush even going to get past the security guards?

It doesn't matter that these two master debaters will be having more of a circle jerk than a real argument—critics like Open Debates point out that follow-up questions are restricted, for instance—or that the viewership for such events has declined since the '60s. (Bill Moyers covered some of this territory on his PBS show Now—thanks to colleague Dan Adkison for the tip.) Pundits keep saying that the debates will be crucial. Considering that so much of TV is "reality," that makes perverse sense.

And like those carefully managed "reality shows," these debates have a host of TV-only rules guaranteed to blandify everything, like this one: "The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions." As for questions from the audience, which will be allowed on October 8, the moderator "shall develop, and describe to the campaigns, a method for selecting questions at random," but they can't be "inappropriate." So the moderators are under the thumb of this stultified process, too.

The October 8 debate is officially described in the memorandum as a "town hall." But the strict rules say that the "live audience" of 100 to 150 people are to be only those "who describe themselves as likely voters who are 'soft' Bush supporters or 'soft' Kerry supporters as to their 2004 presidential vote." One more thing:

The moderator shall ensure that an equal number of "soft" Bush supporters and "soft" Kerry supporters pose questions to the candidates.

Look for some hard questions. And the Gallup pollsters will pick the audience—after first clearing their methods with the two campaigns.

Ought to be exciting, huh? As for the first debate, this Thursday evening at 9, the scheduled competition looks more interesting: "Origins," on Nova, examines how life begins; CSI, on CBS, examines how life ends.

Continuing his relentless crusade against the forces of evil, Attorney General John Ashcroft is trying to give cops an easy, built-in system to spy on practically all Internet communications.

As if we weren't all busy enough, the public comment period on this sweeping, draconian plan opened September 23 and closes November 8—as if the Federal Communications Commission has much sympathy for any objections to it.

The plan is to extend the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which orders that U.S. telephone networks put surveillance back doors in their networks, to Web-based phone service (the Voice Over Internet Protocol) and the rest of the Internet.

The FCC voted unanimously in favor of the plan last month, the British computer journal The Register notes, quoting FCC Chairman Michael Powell as saying, "Our support for law enforcement is unwavering. It is our goal in this proceeding to ensure that law enforcement agencies have all of the electronic surveillance capabilities that CALEA authorizes to combat crime and terrorism and support homeland security."

Basically, all the FCC wants to hear from the rest of us is how to implement this Internet snooping, which will be run by the FBI.

Privacy groups are very public in their outrage. "Instead of making the Internet look like the telephone system of the past," said the Center for Democracy and Technology's Jim Dempsey, "the FBI and other law enforcement agencies need to acquire in-house capabilities to analyze digital communications. They should use the Internet, not try to control it."

Dempsey's energetic group says this is "one of the gravest threats in years" to the Internet.

As the equally hard-working Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) notes, Congress specifically excluded e-mails and Internet access from the bill when it was passed in 1994. Now the FCC wants to bypass Congress for authority to broaden CALEA to include the Web. (Eavesdrop on wiretapping issues at this EPIC site.)

What do you expect from these second-generation schnooks? The prime mover on this in Congress is John Sununu, whose daddy was George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff. The FCC chairman, Michael Powell, is the scarily arch-conservative son of George Bush Jr.'s secretary of state.

As for Ashcroft, well, his daddy was a preacher, but considering his track record, especially his penchant for "Godly reformation" and his inability to control his own radical bad self from, say, sweeping ordinary Muslims off the streets and detaining them like so much rubbish for as long as he likes, his political daddy seems to be Oliver Cromwell.

Man, the pressure on us Americans is getting unbearable. Imperialism is hard work. I mean, we've got our own elections coming up in a few weeks, but the rest of the world just won't leave us alone. Like Jonathan Street, a Bush Beat reader in Buenos Aires, who writes:

Do you have any idea who in the fuck the Iraqis are supposed to vote for come January? Allawi: yes/no, or what? Who are the candidates in this deal, if any? I would love some help in trying to understand this magic democracy that is supposed to have appeared in the last year. According to Rumsfeld, the elections will go ahead in the parts of the country that are secure, but I didn't know that American soldiers in the Green Zone were allowed to vote.

Well, I'm pretty sure that American soldiers will be too busy either killing or getting killed to be able to go to the polls in Iraq.

As for Iraq's prime minister, Ayad Allawi, well, the Bush regime just paraded him before Congress yesterday as a prop for the U.S. elections, and he won Best in Show. The New York Times ran a front-page picture of him actually exchanging kisses with members of Congress. The Washington Post's headline writers described him as "Iraq's Dynamo," a guy with a "can-do aura," but the story itself, by Lynne Duke, was considerably more shrewd. Gee, Allawi is so kissy-face with Bush and Congress, I wonder how the Iraqis feel about him? (You'll find out if you keep reading.) To start, why don't we see what Iraqi newspapers have to say about their upcoming election. If they're like U.S. papers, they'll be full of campaign bullshit. I'm an American, so I don't speak that there Iraqese. I'll have to rely on the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Iraq Press Monitor. Let's see . . . kidnappings . . . attacks on mosques . . . ah, here's an election story. The daily Al-Sabah's September 12 editorial says:

I hope that members of the interim National Assembly work on the basis that they hold their posts temporarily until January 31. I also hope they remember they are entrusted with keeping the country's election schedule on track. They should not make the possibility of their own electoral victory or loss the basis on which to shape their stands. The government and all other political powers are responsible for the political process, but the National Assembly's share of responsibility is the largest.

But who the hell is running for president or whatever?! It doesn't say. The U.S. installed former CIA stooge Allawi as the interim prime minister. He's supposed to guide Iraq through these January elections, which will set up a "transitional" government, which will then, according to this BBC overview, "draw up a new constitution for the holding of full elections by the end of 2005."

A sizable number of Iraqis want a "strongman" to stabilize the country before the January elections are even held, according to polling by Oxford Research International and the BBC.

So that would be Allawi, right? Wrong. The meticulous June 2004 Oxford/BBC poll asked Iraqis, "Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most?" Only 14 persons got more than 0.2 percent, and Allawi wasn't one of them. Muqtada al-Sadr, however, was fourth, and a guy named Saddam Hussein was 10th. Hussein dug himself into a little hole last year and is currently unavailable. As for Muqtada, well, there's a slight problem. One of American pasha L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer's last acts before "turning over" Iraq to the puppet Allawi regime was to ban Muqtada from the elections—even if Muqtada immediately disbanded his militia.

Bremer's reign was disastrous anyway. See, he appointed U.S. stooge Ahmed Chalabi's son, Salem Chalabi, as head of the tribunal trying Saddam Hussein. Salem Chalabi, however, is now suspected of assassination plots against officials in the new Iraq finance ministry. Previously, Salem Chalabi, a former Princetonian and Yalie, set up a consulting business to help broker oil deals in the "new" Iraq. And the consulting business was using the offices of the international law firm Zell Goldberg, whose senior partner is Marc Zell, a fervent West Bank settler who also is head of the Israel chapter of Republicans Abroad, which is frantically getting out the expatriate vote worldwide to re-elect the Bush regime. If you don't believe me, read this fascinating account by Judy Lash Balint in the September 14 installment of her Jerusalem Diaries about a campaign appearance by Zell on behalf of Bush in Israel and the importance of overseas votes for the U.S. presidential race.

Zell's former law partner is Doug Feith (the two of them lobbied on behalf of defense contractors). Feith is the prominent Pentagon neocon who wants to overthrow Iran next, but Dick Cheney's Halliburton is still doing business with Iran even though that apparent violation of U.S. sanctions is under investigation, and one of Feith's aides, Larry Franklin, is also under investigation after being accused of spying for Israel by leaking Pentagon memos on Iran, so Feith has to concentrate on Iraq, but it's hard to concentrate because he takes kids from his son's private school in D.C. on a tour of the Pentagon (and Rumsfeld's private office) on the very day the Abu Ghraib scandal is breaking, and everyone wants to talk to Feith because he set the policy on handling prisoners in Iraq, but Feith had already banned discussion of Abu Ghraib even within the Pentagon, but the school kids he'll take to the Pentagon because Feith used to be president of the school, which got money from Bush supporter Joe Allbritton, who was at the time (until this summer, in fact) a bank partner of Dubya's uncle Jonathan Bush and whose Allbritton-owned Riggs National Bank sheltered oil money from Equatorial Guinea dictator Teodoro Obiang, whose brother tortured prisoners with stinging ants and bought a house in Virginia after Allbritton's bank called him a "valued customer," but that house wasn't as nice as the mansion Obiang himself bought in Maryland—wait, this is getting out of hand. I told you imperialism is hard work. It's complicated too.

We'll get back to Allawi, I promise. But one of the most entertaining recent stories about Zell, Feith, Bremer, the Chalabis, Iraq, Israel, and U.S. defense contractors—whew!—is this Haaretz piece, "Theater of the Absurd," by Zvi Bar'el.

Absurd is the word for Bremer's reign of error in Iraq. He shut down Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper in April, an act that did nothing but inflame a bad situation. As for Bremer's last stupid act regarding Muqtada—banning him from holding office even if he disbanded his huge militia—see this Guardian story.

Bremer banned all members of militias from running for office. The problem is, Iraq is nothing but militias these days.

Well, then, whom do the Iraqis distrust the most? Back to the Oxford/BBC poll for that answer. And that would be Ahmed Chalabi, the runaway leader in more ways than one. Of the Iraqis who mentioned someone whom they distrust, he got 42.1 percent of the vote, far outdistancing second-place finisher Saddam Hussein.

Now think about it for a moment. Ahmed Chalabi is the former CIA stooge who was used by the Bush regime to justify our unjust invasion of Iraq. He's the guy whose lying prattle was the source for New York Times reporter Judith Miller's WMD scare stories that helped convince many Americans to support the Iraq invasion. Even the U.S. government has finally disowned him—except for a hard core of neocons.

The Bush regime and Congress financed this guy, and you American taxpayers footed the bill. Isn't he an issue in our elections as well?

Oh, I forgot. We're supposed to be talking about Iraq's elections. What about Ayad Allawi? We've already said that he didn't even appear on the list of leaders whom Iraqis trust. Of the leaders they distrust, he finished a strong sixth.

American journalists who want to stop whining and start running things themselves—not me; I want to continue whining—should head to Kazakhstan, the Central Asian "republic" whose violations of human rights and civil rights are easy to swallow if, like the Bush-Cheney regime, you wash everything down with oil.

Last Sunday's parliamentary vote in Kazakhstan was judged farcical by Western observers, as we noted Monday. The Organization for Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had 300 observers, from 33 countries, on hand, but many were apparently barred by Kazakh officials from observing the polling, according to stories filed by Eduard Poletaev of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. OSCE's official verdict? "The parliamentary elections that were held on September 19 did not match the standards of the OSCE and Council of Europe."

The Council of Europe's Tana de Zulueta, an Italian pol, noted that "the seemingly politically motivated convictions of two prominent opposition leaders and lack of political balance in the composition of election commissions were worrisome, as well as evident media bias in favour of the pro-presidential parties."

Final results won't be revealed until September 25, but dictator Nazarbayev's Otan (Fatherland) Party claims to have dominated the balloting, with a centrist party finished a distant second and a party headed by Nazarbayev's daughter, Dariga, finishing third.

The election campaign was itself pretty comical too. In the scramble by opposition political parties—the ones not shut down by Nazarbayev—to field well-known candidates, some of them recruited journalists to run for Parliament. That prompted other parties to do the same. As of mid August almost 50 journos and other media figures were running, either in Nazarbayev's party, his stooges' parties, the opposition parties, or independently. That's also according to the IWPR's Poletaev.

Of course, some opposition journalists were simply locked up—one of them was charged with rape, which many observers said was simply a trumped-up excuse to get him out of the way. And opposition politicians were jailed too. It's an old story in Kazakhstan. And it's in a 2002 report by the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, posted here by Internews. The report recounts how the 25-year-old daughter of an opposition journalist died of injuries she suffered in police custody. Another journalist, TV anchor Artur Platonov, was brutally beaten to a pulp by three ex-cops in an incident that outside observers agreed was in retaliation for his public-affairs program. In August 2002, barely seven months after Nazarbayev visited D.C. as an honored guest of the White House and posed with Bush for photo-ops, yet another journalist/activist in Kazakhstan was nearly killed for criticizing the dictator. Here's how Online Journalism Review described the incident:

On August 28, [2002,] Sergei Duvanov, online commentator and editor in chief of a human rights bulletin published by the nongovernmental organization Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, was beaten unconscious by three unknown assailants as he returned to his Almaty home in the evening. This was no petty mugging: Duvanov's attackers left his keys, wallet and mobile phone untouched, telling their victim, "You know what this is for—next time we'll cripple you."

The 49-year-old Duvanov had already fallen afoul of the authorities for his online work and is currently being prosecuted for "harming the honor and dignity" of Nazarbayev in his May 6 article "Silence of the Lambs" on kub.kz.

Back in '99, Dick Cheney was an honored member of the dictator's Oil Advisory Board, and New York business consultant James Giffen was Nazarbayev's official "counselor to the president." Now Giffen is the central figure in the Kazakhgate scandal and is scheduled to go on trial in January on charges of money laundering and other corruption involving $78 million from big oil companies that wound up stashed in Switzerland, part of it in an account controlled by Nazarbayev. Cheney? Well, you know what he's doing these days. Anyway, back in '99, Nazarbayev allowed only one opposition party: the Republican People's Party, headed by former prime minister Akejan Kazhegeldin. But the ex-PM's slogan was "Kazakhstan Without Nazarbayev," and on the eve of the election, his party was bounced from the ballot. David, Chet, Walter, Dan, Peter, Tom? Let's call that race early: It looks like Nazarbayev in a landslide.

This time around, the opposition parties toned it down, hoping to stay on the ballot. But toning it down made them all sound the same. So they needed well-known figures to run. Hence the journalists.

"The opposition is not full of radical slogans at these elections, and several pro-government parties are advancing democratic initiatives themselves," Andrei Chebotaryov, coordinator of the Kazakh National Research Institute, told IWPR before the voting. "In these conditions, to work effectively with the masses, it is necessary to draw journalists into politics."

That doesn't seem to have worked too well for CBS in our elections. Maybe Rather can afford a summer home on the Central Asian steppes so he can stay involved in electoral politics after his imminent retirement.

You're a moron . . . you're nuts . . . you're a nut case . . . Chechnya is nuts

Robert Hicks of Linden, Virginia, writes:

The fact that the rest of the world wants Bush out is the best reason to keep him in.

Thank you for reading.

Jan Mider writes:

We are America, and WE vote for our leaders. We do not, by any means, have to see what the rest of the world thinks we should do. If we thought like this in the past, we would have English or German accents.

Thank you for reading, Fräulein Mider.

Mike Manuel writes:

Hey, moron, the rest of the world doesn't get to vote in the American elections—in case you didn't know, you fucking moron. Thank GOD for that. If more people in the U.S. like Kerry, then they should have registered to vote, but of course they are too stupid and lazy. Again, thank GOD for that.

Thank you for having someone read my column to you.

Kyle Towers, a manufacturing engineer in Avilla, Indiana, writes:

I was bowled over by the indignation regarding "conservative schemes to make the states, instead of the federal government, responsible for the general social welfare." Apparently Mr. Harkavy is less than familiar with the Constitution of the U.S. . . . If Mr. Harkavy can find where the Constitution enumerates the power of Congress to administer the "social programs" that he believes "go begging," I will be mightily impressed. Assuming that he cannot (a reasonable assumption), then any efforts directed toward shifting such responsibilities can only be interpreted as being moves to restore constitutional government to the U.S. That doesn't deserve to be derided and dismissed as "conservative schemes."

Thank you for reading. I guess I just don't understand, Kyle, why the Constitution's "promote the general welfare" has to mean "promote corporate welfare."

Mike Callis of Tennessee writes:

Y'all are a bunch of nut cases.

Thank you for reading. Well, Mike, some of us are. But at least that's better than being a pod person.

Neil Tessler writes:

The preeminent source of quality information on Chechnya—that gives you the full measure of the mead, without your actually having your ear sliced off before you're garroted—is the Yahoo group Chechnya-sl.

I have been following this collection of readings from all sides of the conflict for four years, from about the time the Russians rocketed the Grozny public market, killing several hundred people (denying they ever did it) as the prelude to the carpet bombing of Grozny (which also never happened). From beginning to the present, to read the harrowing reality vs. the endless string of Russian denials is an enormous political education. Lazy Western journalists and indifferent politicians simply don't have a clue as to the significance of what is occurring, who this Putin is with whom they are all kissy-face. The Russians take America's lead but go the next step with language and action as total as that of the Asiatic hordes of the Dark Ages.

Thank you for reading. And Neil, thanks for the suggestion. I signed up for Chechnya-sl (Chechnya Short List), and e-mail started pouring in, much of it invaluable translations into English from European papers and TV. Run by Norbert Strade out of Denmark, the site is much more of a news service than a typical moderated discussion list. And what stories! Whew! Frightening, absurd, eerie, sad. A real tangle of political and human drama, from all sides.

Mixed with the more dramatic stuff are snatches of background material that may help people try to understand what's going on over there. On September 21, for example, members of the newsgroup received a translation of some fascinating history, part of it a 60-year-old text written by Caucasus historian Abdurahkman Avtorkhanov. (For a fascinating modern perspective on this major figure, see this Chechen Times piece.) Plus, there was the added background of how Stalin, who had revived the Chechnya-Ingushetia region and had even given it some autonomy, suddenly reversed himself in the mid '40s. He uprooted all the inhabitants of what was Chechnya-Ingushetia and expelled them to what is now Kazakhstan, liquidating overnight their "republic."

(Digression: In 1957, many of the exiles were allowed by Khrushchev to return; they were, and are, brimming with bitterness. When the Soviet empire collapsed, Chechnya declared independence, but hardly any other country recognized it. In 1994, Boris Yeltsin sent troops there to prevent secession—southern Chechnya has valuable reserves of oil. Between 1994 and 2002, almost 40,000 people have been killed in the warfare between Russian federal troops and various feuding Chechen factions, by some accounts. What a tragic mess. End of digression.)

The September 21 Chechnya-sl post continued:

It is well-known that the Bolsheviks considered the struggle of oppressed peoples for their national liberation and independence as justifiable when it took place before the establishment of the Soviet regime. Any national liberation struggle in the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was not only condemned but mercilessly quelled.

Russia is Russia, in other words, whether it's Soviet or post-Soviet. Russian President Vladimir Putin is eager to portray the present Caucasus turbulence as part of "international terrorism" and somehow tied to the Bush-Cheney "war on terror." But the revolt Putin faces has deeper roots than that.

You'll find a link to Chechnya-sl on this Danish page of English links to Chechnya info. You can also go to Wikipedia's Chechnya page to get a ton of other links and info. It's worth the trouble, if for no other reason than Putin is a player in American politics and business. And he's a pal not just of Republicans, but also Democrats. More on that later.

Why bother with phony documents? There's plenty of real stuff for John Kerry's advisers to pick through in their scramble to nail the Bush regime. All they have to do is think about the Americans dying in the current idiotic war. They're finally doing so, but they're not taking full advantage of what's out there to point to the Bush-Cheney team's disastrous handling of a bad situation.

For example, Reconstructing Iraq, a report released earlier this month by the sober, serious International Crisis Group, politely but firmly rips the hell out of U.S. occupation officials not only for screwups and not only for wrongheaded policies but for letting ideology get in the way. More frightening for the health of our troops over there, the Bush administration's monumental mishandling of Iraq's economic "recovery" after its deceitful invasion is feeding the violence and insurgency and practically assuring that the country will devolve into full-fledged civil war.

Understand that these aren't "anarchists" criticizing the Bush regime. The non-profit Brussels-based ICG is anything but wild-eyed. Its board chair is Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland. The vice chair is former New York City congressman Stephen Solarz, hardly a radical, and for every Democrat like Wesley Clark and Zbigniew "Zbig" Brzezinski on its board, there's a Carla Hills or some big muckamuck from another country, like Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland.

So listen when the ICG says that the Coalition Provisional Authority "made a hard job harder." Here's more:

For the most part, the occupation forces came without a plan. What strategy they had benefited from little if any Iraqi input, was heavily shaped by ideology and repeatedly subject to Washington's political deadlines. CPA plans for complete economic overhaul quickly encountered stiff opposition by Iraqis intent on their own long-term strategy; shifting course, the CPA took ad hoc decisions, leaving unresolved crucial policy questions for fear of triggering even greater discontent. Thus, it was originally fixated on large-scale privatization but, facing Iraqi hostility, neither privatized nor relinquished the objective. As a result, it failed to devise an alternative approach that might have revived ailing state companies so they could be used to find temporary jobs for the unemployed.

Looks like the only things we brought with us that have made a smooth transition were our Halliburtonian economic principles. "Inadequate transparency and accountability in the contracting process," the report says, "combined with real or alleged corruption, have fed distrust of both occupation authorities and Iraqi institutions."

And of course, the report makes clear that the current Iraq "regime" is not only plagued with problems but is also nothing more than a puppet of the U.S., a fact that the American press continues to play down:

Many issues that vexed the CPA remain. The Interim Government, for example, will be reluctant to make broad economic changes lest it be accused of usurping an elected government's prerogatives. As Lebanon's precedent shows, allocating power and positions along ethnic/sectarian lines risks encouraging a parallel apportionment of public jobs and resources, with corruption and malfeasance as by-products. Nor have the occupation authorities truly disappeared: The U.S. remains powerful and, importantly, controls most reconstruction funds.

Last fall, of course, things really started breaking down. The U.S. media were full of words and pictures about all the economic "progress" that was being made, but hardly anyone was paying attention to the hard facts and figures. The Pentagon's weekly PowerPoint reports, more depressing than any slide show you've ever had to sit through, were freely available on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Export.gov site.They told a different story. Under the Pentagon's pasha, L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, we were spending basically zero on health care. And the reports showed that oil-rich Iraq was steadily increasing its imports of basic fuels like gasoline. Our exports of oil were sluggish even before widespread sabotage of the oilfields and refineries started.

These days, those weekly reports are being issued by the State Department. The latest report shows that we're still spending basically nothing out of what we've committed to health care, but we're increasing our spending on "private-sector" development. The State Department, not in thrall to the neocon nabobs who still infest the Pentagon, has at least added a small dose of rationality to the weekly reports. On the slide listing "Stability Contributors," the latest report says there are 33 countries (including the U.S.) plus NATO "potentially supporting Iraqi stability and humanitarian relief." Note the word "potentially."

As to the specifics of security, the families and friends of U.S. troops fighting to stay alive over there will be pleased to know the latest figures on a "Civilian Intervention Force" set up to take over some security duties for your loved ones. There are zero "on hand," zero "already trained," and zero "in training." But there are 4,800 "planned."

It looks like we've spent money to bring Iraqi journalists to the U.S. so we can explain our political campaigns to them. I'm happy to have them join us, but how about letting the American people in on the explanation?

According to a State Department weekly update of our "progress" in Iraq, the U.S. Media and Political Campaigns International Visitor Program, running from September 5 to September 25, is designed to help Iraqi journalists "examine the role of the media in U.S. political campaigns and the particular symbiosis between the media and the candidates they cover."

Yeah, there's a symbiotic relationship going on between the U.S. press and U.S. pols, and the first analogy that springs to mind is the relationship between "slug" and "host" that's personified by the character of Lieutenant Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Free Dictionary explains:

Dax is a Trill symbiont, a very long-lived slug-shaped entity that is hosted by a succession of humanoid Trills, a process called "joining."

Don't listen to the campaign words. Look at what the U.S. State Department was saying two months after 9-11: A "Network of Terrorism" web page called "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated", posted November 10, 2001, and still on the official government site as of this afternoon, lists 45 countries, but not Iraq—or Syria, for that matter. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia made the list, of course.

Fellow writer Laurel Maury tipped me off to this page, but word is coursing around the Internet, so who knows how long the government will leave it up. Hurry! Get your government facts while they're hot.

The page is part of an elaborate package on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, led off by an essay attributed to George W. Bush called "An Attack on the Civilized World." He doesn't mention Iraq, either.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was blazingly hot—chaotic protests, berserk cops, old pols shaking their fists at impertinent youth.

Among other memorable chronicles (like the saga of the Chicago Seven), that convention produced cinematographer Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), which brilliantly threaded a fictional narrative into documentarian footage.

Now, 36 years later, in an era in which disobedience in the face of another unjust war is far too civil, we're still trying to recover from the totalitarian frostbite of the chillingly cold Republican National Convention—protesters abandoned by their natural allies in the national Democratic Party and subjected to pre-emptive plastic handcuffery practiced by thousands of troops before a mostly complaisant press corps.

But coming soon to a theater near you will be Medium Hot, the working title of a fact/fiction project on the RNC by New York filmmaker Charles "Chip" Krezell. In a way, it will be a riff on Wexler.

Judging by Krezell's notable 28-minute video Not My President, a nice slice of protest life at the January 2001 coronation in D.C. of George W. Bush, Medium Hot ought to be worthwhile. (See Not My President here, courtesy of the Free Speech Network.)

From what Krezell tells me, Medium Hot, "shot in a guerrilla style," is a properly 21st-century update of Wexler: "Two guys come to NYC to shoot video of the convention," they meet a girl, a romance follows. After things heat up in the street, Krezell says, "the two guys get radicalized."

Krezell's actors mixed with "real" people during the convention protests, and the shooting went well, he tells me. "Things were pretty crazy," he says. "We ended up with 43 tapes, and more are coming in."

Immediately after the convention, he took his actors back out onto the streets to finish the shooting.

Going with the flow, Krezell altered his story line "to reflect the police tactics." He adds, "It wasn't much different than I had imagined—with the heavy-handed, swarming cop squads—except that it didn't erupt into violence. The effectiveness of police actions frustrated people trying to protest, and the pre-emptive arrests and prolonged detainments used until Bush left town are all part of the story line now."

But don't mistake this for a strict homage either to Wexler or to Marshall McLuhan.

"My idea for Medium Hot," he says, "was to take the original story as a reflection of the times—with the digital accessibility of media to the masses, the medium has passed from McLuhan's cool to hot, with everyone embedded in their own movie. The notion of objectivity that Wexler played with doesn't wash anymore. Everything is subjective, for better or worse. To find a middle ground is much more difficult now than it was even in '68."

You probably thought that with Katherine Harris now a member of Congress, she could do less harm to the small-D democratic process in that mostly moribund D.C. bunch than she did in 2000 as Florida's secretary of state.

Maybe that's true, but the election chicanery has already started, and of course some of it's from her successor and some of it's from Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon. I mean, you can't properly influence an election without troops.

Expatriate American Marina Mecl writes to us from Munich with a plea for help. The Pentagon, using the excuse that it's worried about hackers, is blocking overseas Americans' access to the Federal Voting Assistance Program's website, where U.S. voters living abroad can go to download voting forms and get information on registering to vote. (The deadline in most states is October 2.) In "Pentagon Blocking Web Sites," the International Herald Tribune's Jennifer Joan Lee points out that ISPs in at least 25 countries—including Japan, France, Britain, and Spain—have been denied access to the site. And, yes, the humorously named FVAP is indeed under the aegis of the Pentagon, because the site focuses on reaching our hundreds of thousands of imperial troops around the planet.

Asked by Lee whether other government websites have been blocked, the Pentagon declined comment. Her thorough story quotes Annalee Newitz of the watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying, "It's extremely ironic that the government is doing nothing to address the security of electronic voting machines" in the U.S., "which have been proven to be vulnerable to hacking, yet they block websites for expatriate Americans."

Mecl suggests Overseas Vote 2004, a site set up by the Kerry campaign, for you scattered Americans to register and request absentee ballots. Hurry up and do it, because it looks as if Florida is once again going to try to enforce our Founding Fathers' original aim of considering each black person only three-fifths of a human being.

Florida's secretary of state this time around is Glenda Hood, and there's little evidence that this Glenda will turn out to be a good witch. The former Orlando mayor, Hood was appointed secretary of state (Florida's chief elections officer) in February 2003 by Governor Jeb Bush. She no doubt qualified for that job by, among other things, contributing $1,000 to the Republican Party of Florida on June 26, 2002. She and Harris each tithed to the Florida GOP on January 8, 2001, just before the start of George W. Bush's term—Harris gave $300 that day, and Hood chipped in $900, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Almost exactly four years ago—on September 25, 2000—Hood poured in $5,000 to the Florida GOP. This time around, she'll have a chance to prove her love of the party in a different way.

Just yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department is probing alleged intimidation of elderly black voters by Florida state cops this past spring after Democrat Buddy Dyer won a narrow victory to become Orlando's new mayor.

Intimidation of voters seems to be working well in one of Dick Cheney's favorite countries, Kazakhstan. The AP reported today that "Kazakhstan voted for a largely toothless Parliament on Sunday in an election marred by low turnout, widespread irregularities, and a climate of intimidation." See this previous Bush Beat item for background on Cheney's link to the bubbling Kazakhgate scandal, and check out Eurasianet's latest story on the phony Kazakhstan vote engineered by dictator and Cheney pal Nursultan Nazarbayev.

This was no surprise. Before the election, Human Rights Watch criticized the dictatorship for harassing its political opponents.

By the way, that Kazakhgate scandal, in which major U.S. oil companies and pols are likely to get ink, won't start gushing in the mainstream press until after the November 2 election: As expected, the trial of James Giffen has been delayed until January, much to the relief of Cheney, who was on Nazarbayev's Oil Advisory Board before becoming Bush's Geppetto.

Rick Lyman of The New York Times wrote a pretty funny piece Sunday about trying to get close to Dick Cheney. Ha-ha.

In "Desperating Seeking Dick Cheney", the Timesman was miffed that the vice president wouldn't give a seat on the official plane to a representative of the Paper of Record.

Average citizens have the same problem just trying to attend one of the stump speeches by this 21st century Dr. Strangelove. On TV, Cheney appears to have everyone at his campaign appearances enthralled. But that's because his adoring crowds are carefully screened.

Faithful correspondent Jimmy Moore of Fairfield, Iowa, tells me that just before a Cheney speech last week in nearby Ottumwa, protesters showed up with such props as a Halliburton lemonade stand selling drinks for $45 a glass and a woman "in Arab clothing" holding a sign that said, "Four More Months."

The Cheney event was called a "town hall meeting," but you needed a "ticket" to get in, Moore says. It was clear that the guy with the sign "Here's Your Hat—What's Your Hurry?" was not going to get one of those tickets to Cheney's speech in a industrial park hangar five miles from downtown Ottumwa and carefully roped off from everyone but the screened guests. Some "town hall" meeting this was. The guy's sign prompted queries from reporters, so he told them, according to Moore, "I'll bet you the First Amendment that it'll look homey inside the hangar." He added, "Bullheadedness is not leadership. Elephants die when they rush into tar pits. And Iraq is a tar pit."

It turns out that this "town hall" meeting was worse than a ticketed event. Iowa GOP officials told grumbling locals that there were tickets, but Ottumwa GOP officials said there were no tickets. There was only a list, as the Ottumwa Courier later described the undemocratic situation in "Questions Linger About Cheney Access". If you weren't on the list, forget it.

And of course the national press corps fell for this crap. The Washington Post's Lisa Rein, for instance, described this carefully staged Ottumwa event as a "town hall meeting."

And so did the White House, whose official transcript starts this way:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Morning. (Applause.) Morning, everybody. (Applause.) Good morning. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Sit down, please.

Cheney fielded five questions—if you can call them that. They were clearly set-ups. The first one focused on them there liberal judges:

Q: We see judges taking the laws and just getting away with them, and they're making laws instead of enforcing them. How is that going to be addressed?

The second one was about our heroic "war on terror":

Q: Do you see Russia taking a more aggressive stance and standing more strongly with us as we continue to fight terrorists around the globe?

The third one was a lob to Cheney about jobs:

Q: With all the jobs that are being exported, what are we doing to try to conserve—bringing those jobs back into the United States, and keeping jobs here?

Cheney's reply, which would have been hooted down if he said it at a real town hall meeting, was this:

Well, the most important thing I think we can do here in the United States is to make the U.S. the best place in the world to do business.

The next question was the softest possible query about the Iraq morass:

Q: Mr. Vice President, I would like to know what we can do as a community to help our military overseas, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan?

That gave Cheney a chance to say this:

Well, the remarkable thing is to get a chance to spend some time with our folks who are serving, or have served, or are just back from over there. It's the most remarkable group of people you're ever going to want to see.

Which was the perfect setup for the final "question":

Q: Mr. Vice President. I'm in the United States Army. I just spent six months in Iraq, and I was injured there in June. And I have been home for about three months now. And I just wanted to say I left supporting you guys, and after being there, I support you guys even more—after seeing what those people had to go through and how they lived. And I ran missions handing out food and water to people there. And having those people—and be there with them for six months is—it was amazing. And I truly understand what we're doing over there. And I thank you for doing what you did.

To which Cheney replied:

Well, thank you very much for doing what you did. (Applause.) I can't think of a better note to end on than that one.

Commander of CENTCOM during Bush the Elder's Gulf war last decade, retired general Anthony Zinni of the U.S. Marine Corps has the cred to talk about what's going on now. He was even Bush Junior's envoy to the Middle East early on, trying to restart the Israeli-Arab peace process as the key to promoting stability in the region. Until, that is, the neocons and oil-hungry Dick Cheney combined to shove him aside.

Three years later, what is happening is that, right in the middle of the fragile Middle East, Iraq is plummeting into full-fledged civil war, and Americans are dying over there for nothing. On Wednesday, the Iraqi daily paper Addaawa noted, "The wave of violence overwhelming Iraq is central for those who care about the country. What is astonishing in the bloody scene of Iraq is the intermingling of political and criminal aspects."

Zinni also can't be accused of being a Monday-morning quarterback. In a powerful speech this past May at a Center for Defense Information dinner, the general recalled his Senate testimony just before last year's invasion of Iraq by the Bush regime:

I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one month before the war, and Senator [Richard] Lugar asked me: "General Zinni, do you feel the threat from Saddam Hussein is imminent?" I said: "No, not at all." It was not an imminent threat. Not even close. Not grave, gathering, imminent, serious, severe, mildly upsetting, none of those.

Zinni's speech laid out what he called "10 crucial mistakes," and he suggested solutions, starting with a sincere, "mature" effort to enlist the U.N., instead of just "dropping paper" on the other nations with our own list of what we're going to do.

This is not the sort of thing that Doug Feith and other fanatical neocon supporters of Israel's right-wing government want other Americans to hear, but the tragic battle between Israelis and Arabs is one of the keys to peace in Iraq. Zinni recalled the insane patter during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true: The road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of other things will work out.

The idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms. The idea that we will have people that will glom on to democracy overnight. The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape, and change the Middle East by this action—we've changed it all right.

So we had a basic flawed strategy. All those that believed this was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change out there, or some sort of revolutionary change in the region, I think got more than they bargained for, and didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation, and the issues, and the effect that what they were about to do was going to have on those.

Once we got to Iraq, of course, we kept hanging on to our ignorance of the region the way an inexperienced stagecoach driver with a runaway team of horses jerks the reins tighter and tighter. One of the most telling episodes was in July 2003, before we offended Arabs worldwide by poking fun at their johnsons and riding their grandmothers like donkeys. Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a battle with U.S. soldiers, but it was the aftermath of their deaths that pointed to U.S. political strategists' lack of shrewdness in not getting the monkey off our back. Zinni recalls it this way:

When we went through that, you know, Weekend at Bernie's session with the sons of Saddam. After we got those two guys, I would've turned those bodies over to the Governing Council. Immediately.

And I would've said to the Governing Council, "You own them. You can bury them according to Muslim tradition within 24 hours. You can show them on Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. You can bury them and tell the people you verified who they are. They're yours."

What did we do? We kept the bodies. We violated Muslim traditional burial. We showed them out to the world. We owned the problem, and that was a small problem that could've been put on their back, to begin kind of transferring that monkey.

And as for the military intelligence that justified our invasion? "The books were cooked, in my mind," Zinni said. "The intelligence was not there."

In Zinni's case, however, that's not true. The general's nothing if not web-friendly, but here's one more piece of evidence from elsewhere. In October 2002, Zinni sorted through our country's options during a speech at the Middle East Institute in D.C. This is how Salon put it:

Zinni stressed the need to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track, build a broad coalition against Iraq, create trust among allies in the region—and put Saddam Hussein's threat in perspective.

He also took issue with hawks in and around the administration who downplay the importance of Arab sentiment in the region. "I'm not sure which planet they live on," Zinni said, "because it isn't the one that I travel."

Now that is true. Bush thinks it's his own planet.

He's not playing with a full deck, but you can

Tough-talking George W. Bush, who spent some of his National Guard tour on the harrowing front lines of Alabama's Battle of Blount, wears on you after a while. At least, that's the only explanation you can think of for the fascination of the W Deck of playing cards that meticulously morphs mugs of Junior onto an astonishing array of photos of gowns, swimwear, and other garb from decades past.

He's a veritable Suzanne Lenglen on the six of clubs and a cheesy '50s covergirl on the jack of hearts. The joker is wild: Imagine J. Fred Muggs (with Bush's face), dressed in a darling little jumpsuit.

As the presidential campaign heads into its final six weeks, artistic minds are apparently entering Dada-land, where the operative words are "deliberate irrationality, cynicism, and anarchy." Does that mean another invasion of those darn anarchists?

This crazy and crucial (but still unnamable) moment in American history deserves even more questions:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

A new Waxman report shows that Bush is not just running, but also hiding

While the mainstream media take most of us on a Swift boat ride to nowhere, the Bush regime has dropped some of us off in a harsh, deadly desert. What's going on? We may never know, if California congressman Henry Waxman is right.

He just released Secrecy in the Bush Administration, a report analyzing how the Bush regime has expanded and refined the memory hole. Here's part of the intro:

The report analyzes how the Administration has implemented each of our nation’s major open-government laws. It finds that there has been a consistent pattern in the Administration’s actions: Laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.

The feisty Waxman's Government Reform Committee Minority Office is one congressional operation that's still functioning. Particularly handy, especially now, is Iraq on the Record, a March 2004 catalog of "a searchable collection of 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq" made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.

Survey of beings on third planet from the sun indicates rejection of Texan

The Pecksniffian editors over at The New York Times apparently don't care whether Americans know this, but the rest of the planet has endorsed John Kerry over George W. Bush.

I know, I know, that's no big surprise—especially because the rest of the planet doesn't depend on the mostly simplistic and jingoistic U.S. press and TV. Those of you who have ever watched CNN International know that Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper are featherweights compared with the likes of Jonathan Mann or Monita Raipal.

The U.S. media didn't exactly give major play to this serious-minded poll, at least as far as I can tell. And it's not because some peaceniks conducted it. More than 30,000 people were surveyed this summer by Canadian research firm GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland. The results indicated that Kerry was favored by more than a 2-1 ratio overall.

"Only one in five want to see Bush re-elected," said PIPA director Steven Kull. "Though he is not as well-known, Kerry would win handily if the people of the world were to elect the U.S. president." Support for Kerry, says PIPA, was greater among those with higher education and incomes. Check out the details at PIPA's interesting site.

You'll discover that Bush's strongholds, such as they are, seem to be Poland, the Philippines, and Nigeria. Don't ask me why.

Kerry, said PIPA, was "strongly preferred among all of America's traditional allies." In Norway, the Kerry-Bush split was 74 percent to 7 percent. Even in the United Kingdom, Kerry trounced Bush, 47-16.

In fact, PIPA noted, "Interestingly, among countries that have contributed troops to the operation in Iraq, most favored Kerry and said that their view of the U.S. has gotten worse with Bush's foreign policy."

The only country to give Bush more than 50 percent was the Philippines, where he won 57-32. "Bush's post–9-11 aid to the Filipino government's efforts against the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf may have engendered significant goodwill," PIPA said.

Attention, my Latino brothers and sisters in the U.S.: "Latin Americans went for Kerry in all nine countries polled," said PIPA.

NYC filmmaker sentenced in Afghanistan

CBGB oh my fucking unbelievable God, I'm in an Afghanistan prison. Eddy Caraballo, a Bronx-born, Emmy-winning filmmaker who famously documented the '80s punk scene on the Lower East Side, just got an eight-year bid from an Afghan judge for allegedly participating in torture. He was in Afghanistan filming mercenary Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a former Poughkeepsie felon who was a loose-cannon, Green Beret mercenary supposedly on the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Check out this Los Angeles Times story on the trial and sentencing. It points to a lot that's fishy, including complicity by U.S. officials—none of whom testified, incidentally, on behalf of Idema, Caraballo, and others who were convicted. Authorities had busted them in July, discovering tortured Afghans with them. (Rumsfeld probably decided that it wouldn't be such a good idea to have U.S. officials stand up for Americans accused of torturing Arabs.) The story notes:

The defense presented several videotapes shot by Caraballo, including one showing Idema meeting a man. The man, who Idema said was an American Army captain coordinating counter-terrorism activities in Kabul, said Idema's group was "rolling up AQ [Al Qaeda] like it's nobody's business."

The defendants presented video footage showing them being greeted at Kabul airport by senior Afghan government officials, including the city's security commander, the airport manager, and an aide to the former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah.

As for Idema, he's a big-talking tough guy who brags about killing and claims that he was "chief tactics and firearms instructor" for Ron Reagan Jr. in 1984. See Richard S. Ehrlich's extensive Asia Times interview, "Idema: Trigger-Happy and Troublesome."

Arab prediction from 2002 comes true

Almost exactly two years ago, when everyone knew that the Bush regime had already decided to invade Iraq, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa warned that such a move would "open the gates of hell in the Middle East."

Much of the U.S. press was already tumescent by that time, having been prepped by New York Times fluffer Judith Miller about Saddam Hussein's big and long weapons of mass destruction. So the reaction to Musa's words was predictable. The New York Daily News sneered at Musa and daydreamed of the "tempting opportunity" of "taking out a half dozen tinpot Middle Eastern dictators at one blow." The paper also spewed vitriol at the chickenshit French and Germans, as in this passage:

The best contribution the Fourth Reich can make is to serve as a role model for the Arab Axis: Germany is living proof that even the most debased society, led by the even most fanatical dictator, can—once it is militarily squashed—simulate civilized behavior.

What else would you expect from Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman? He's chairman of the war-hawk Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which sadly is under the control of right-wingers in this particularly dangerous era.

Well, it's two years later, and Amr Musa, at an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, declared, "The gates of hell are open in Iraq."

Open for business, too, as we've previously noted. (See Halliburton, Dick Cheney, Joe Allbaugh, and Richard R. Burt in previous Bush Beat items for examples of that.)

But leave those profits for a second and listen to these prophets rounded up by The Herald Sun in Melbourne. In "Iraq Anarchy Grows," Australia's biggest daily paper quotes a variety of analysts who agree with Musa.

Hasni Abidi of Algeria, for example, says, "There is a risk of a Somalia-ization of Iraq. Each political party has its own armed militia; the country is in the hands of gangs."

Remember the "Green Zone" the government troops set up around Madison Square Garden to protect the Republican National Convention delegates from their fellow Americans? Well, there's one of those in Baghdad, encompassing the U.S. embassy and the puppet regime we installed, and it's just one piece of evidence, says Abidi, that "the transfer of sovereignty was illusory."

Abidi is director of the Geneva-based Study and Research Center for the Arab and Mediterranean World. But don't listen only to Arabs. The paper also quotes Mark Heller, an analyst with Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, as saying that the only options in Iraq are either "brutal repression" or what the paper called "some sort of power-sharing deal between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds."

As if the current U.S. government is interested in sharing power of any kind. And the other option noted by Heller isn't necessarily under anyone's control. "Brutal repression" isn't just a policy. It also just happens when you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take last Sunday in Baghdad, when a U.S. chopper launched rockets and fired machine-gun rounds into a crowd.

Big-footed non-human citizens would get a huge tax break if this House bill sneaks through

While Iraq is being savaged by civil war, America is being pillaged again by a "Fifth Column"—actually a column in corporate financial ledgers.

The watchdog Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has issued a new warning of a current U.S. House bill that would savage state budgets already devastated by conservative schemes to make the states, instead of the federal government, responsible for the general social welfare.

I guess the federal government can't take care of its citizens if it's spending—this is literally a conservative estimate, courtesy of Don Rumsfeld—$4 billion a month in Iraq.

While U.S. companies scramble to profit from that misadventure, social programs at home go begging—that burden continues to shift to the states. Meanwhile, a bill is expected to quietly creep through the House Judiciary Committee in the next few weeks that would drastically reduce the ability of states to tax U.S. companies. (Don't worry; if you're a corporeal citizen, instead of a corporate citizen, you will still be taxed.)

The bill, H.R. 3220, has a hilarious name: “Business Activity Tax Simplification Act of 2003." It was introduced by Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, a co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus. He touts the bill as a "common-sense solution to nonsensical tax schemes." Goodlatte says it would help Internet-based businesses.

Oh, it's "schemes" he's against, huh? Among other things the bill would do to help corporate citizens, the center notes:

The legislation would cause state and local governments collectively to lose substantial tax payments from out-of-state corporations that would be freed from their current obligations to pay taxes on their profits and gross sales to particular jurisdictions. A significant share of currently taxable corporate profits would go untaxed by any state, leading to a net revenue loss for the states as a whole.

A whole wave of new corporate tax shelters would be possible. This kind of monkey business is so typical of a dangerous trend to reduce corporate taxes. New York Democratic congressmen Greg Meeks and Joe Crowley (usually a fighting liberal) are, for some reason, among the bill's 30 co-sponsors. Maybe they think this bill will help small businesses instead of big corporations. They're dead wrong, according the center, which also notes:

The most significantly affected taxes would be the corporate income taxes levied by 45 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City.

Check out the center's crystal-clear explanation by staffer Michael Mazerov of the horror of this bill. "Horror" is not too strong a word, as you'll see. The Republicans are always talking about "tort reform." They claim to hate lawsuits. Well, this bill would create an avalanche of lawsuits against your state governments by big businesses seeking tax breaks.

Mazerov says the bill "would reward major multistate corporations that have the resources to engage in aggressive tax-avoidance behavior with much lower tax burdens than their small, locally-oriented competitors." He gives real-world examples that drive his points home:

¶ A bank would not be taxable within a state even if it hired independent contractors there to process mortgage loan applications and the loans were secured by homes located within the state.

¶ A restaurant franchisor like Subway or Dunkin' Donuts would not be taxable in a state no matter how many franchisees it had in the state and no matter how often its employees entered the state to solicit sales of supplies to the franchisees.

It's doubtful that the House members who signed on as co-sponsors realized the bill's implications. To check out the full list of co-sponsors, and for other information, go to the official Congress site. If you're pissed enough, go to Congress.

Bush's cuts? You'll feel the pain

A grim update from, once again, the really good bad-news bearers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Scrambling to crunch the numbers, the center has recalculated the impact of George W. Bush's tax cuts. The new news is even worse.

Here's an excerpt from the center's reconfigured report analyzing an August report by the Congressional Budget Office:

The top one percent will gain by far the most from the tax cuts even though it has already been the main beneficiary of income trends since the 1970s. Data from a separate CBO study, released in April of this year, indicate that between 1979 and 2001 (the latest year CBO examined), the average after-tax income of the top one percent of households rose by a stunning $409,000, or 139 percent, after adjusting for inflation.[1] This dwarfed the $6,300, or 17 percent, average increase among the middle fifth of the population, over this 22-year period, and the $1,100, or 8 percent, increase among the bottom fifth of the population.

Added to that not-quite-old news is that the center's revised report also notes that "the Economic Policy Institute finds that the number of jobs created in the wake of the tax cuts has already fallen 2.7 million jobs short of Administration predictions made in 2003."

And what about this Economic Policy Institute, which the center so graciously credits? Just today, it released a report by Elise Gould entitled "Employer-Provided Health Insurance Falls for Third Consecutive Year." Yes, we're talking about what the report calls a "widespread loss of coverage."

Electoral college faces threat of destruction in November

Amid all the obsessing about what may disrupt the November 2 election—a terrorist attack, a phony terror "alert," computer fraud, voter fraud—the most cataclysmic event may occur inside voting booths in Colorado.

Legal beagle Rick Hasen breaks it down on his (surprisingly) readable and lively Election Law site, which focuses on "the law of politics and the politics of law."

It's creepy enough that states and cities around the country have switched to largely untested electronic voting machines. Check out this September 13 Wall Street Journal roundup on electronic voting. Ominously, oil capital Houston in Bush's home state is one of the cities that has switched to it. (Watch out for that black-white on-off switch.) This story points out that this election "will be the first major test of the technology," and adds:

Detractors say that states haven't had enough time or money to fully implement new federal standards for the machines. As a result, the critics say, the machines are vulnerable to tampering. Although voting equipment has long been subject to abuse, the critics say the electronic machines pose a new set of challenges because much of the software isn't designed to ward off attempts at manipulating an election outcome. They also say the machines are also prone to breakdowns because the technology is so new.

Then there's voter fraud. For that issue, Hasen points to, among other stories, Jeffrey Toobin's "Poll Position: Is the Justice Department Poised to Stop Voter Fraud—or to keep voters from voting?" in The New Yorker.

But it's Hasen's own op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Nov. 2 Debacle in the Making," that points out an even newer "nightmare scenario": A Colorado ballot initiative, Amendment 36, asks voters to divide up the state's electoral college votes proportionately, instead of winner-take-all, which 48 states now follow. And the measure directly says that it "is intended to apply retroactively" to the 2004 presidential vote. So if it passes, and the Bush-Kerry vote is close, another courtroom snarl is in the making. Frighteningly, if Colorado voters approve Amendment 36, and the state's electoral college votes are split, and the Bush-Kerry race is so close (Bush won by only five votes last time) that Colorado's votes matter, the entire national election could all hinge again on the Rehnquistian Supreme Court. Hasen explains it this way:

The most interesting and trickiest legal question has to do with Article II of the Constitution, which allows each state Legislature to set the rules under which electors are chosen and allocated. When the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the 2000 Florida controversy, supporters of Bush argued that the Florida Supreme Court, in extending the deadline for Al Gore to contest the election and later by ordering a recount, had violated Article II. The argument was that the court had usurped the Legislature's power.

In its first decision in the Florida controversy, the Supreme Court suggested that such an argument might be plausible, though it failed to decide the issue conclusively. In the second decision, Bush v. Gore, three justices—Chief Justice William Rehnquist and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—embraced the view that the Florida Supreme Court's actions violated Article II. Dissenting justices argued that the Florida court decision was simply an interpretation of the Legislature's existing rules. There is little doubt that opponents of Amendment 36 will make a similar argument in the Colorado case because the initiative will have been passed by the voters of Colorado and not the Legislature. How will the Supreme Court handle the issue if it arises again?

Wall Street Journal ace John Harwood also weighs in on the Colorado situation in his September 13 story, "Challenge to Electoral College in Colorado Could Have Big Impact." Harwood points out that Republicans "are scrambling to defeat the measure," but that it "enters the election homestretch with a strong edge in public opinion." That's because it's the ol' "one man, one vote" dream. Guess our civics teachers shouldn't have taught us that myth about American democracy. Now we want to actually implement it.

Which may make us kneel once again before Rehnquist, the Cardassian who is Chief Archon of the entire friggin' country. We already know that he follows the "one black, no vote" principle. (See Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dennis Roddy's December 2000 story about Rehnquist's harassment of minority voters decades ago in Phoenix.) Maybe hunting partners Scalia and Dick Cheney will invite Rehnquist to join them on their next duck-killing trip so they can chat about this while they're reloading and work it all out before the election.

While this all brews, Hasen's site is the place to go. He links to Harwood's and everyone else's coverage of election law and politics. Hasen's not some mindless blogger. He's a young Loyola Law School–Los Angeles professor who just last year wrote The Supreme Court and Election Law, published by NYU Press. He's also the co-author of a casebook on election law and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed Election Law Journal. And he can write about this dense subject, always pointing out the real-world politics between the lines of legalese.

A perusal of Hasen's blog reminds you that it's the small-D democrats who are really in trouble.

You're going to hell . . . we're all going to hell . . . Baghdad is hell . . . name the kleptocrats

Bob Schaeffer writes:

Why bother writing this crap? No evangelical, or for that matter, no honest Believer of any kind reads this socialist rag. You're singing to the Godless choir. Hope that will soothe your soul when you realize just how long eternity truly is.

Thank you for reading. As far as my soul is concerned, Bob, nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows but Dick Cheney.

Roger Bradshaw, editor at 21st Century/China Daily, writes from Beijing:

Bush Beat is without a doubt the most amazing collection of stories on this outrageously ridiculous man that I have read. You are really to be commended for this magnificent piece of work.

Thank you for reading. But let's thank George W. Bush because, Roger, you just can't make this shit up. Earlier this month, for instance, as pre-eminent Bushism collector Jacob Weisberg notes, the president told a crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania:

That's why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental—supplemental—funding, which is money for armor and body parts and ammunition and fuel.

That seems like a waste of money, Dubya. There are plenty of fresh body parts in Baghdad after this morning's bomb blast.

Joe Young writes:

This statement [in the September 3 Bush Beat] is very telling: " . . . the two parties divide up the spoils by gerrymandering the U.S. House of Representatives." But the issue is deeper than Bush, Kerry, Clinton, and Cheney. There is only ONE major party in the United States. It is called "The Democratic Party and the Republican Party." This party is the party of big business and big government. For example, rhetoric aside, Bush greatly INCREASED the size of government!

Thank you for reading. Yes, Joe, there does seem to be one party, but let's call them the Plutocrats or the Kleptocrats—something catchy. I'm open to suggestions.

The big media, definitely a part of this crew, are also to blame for blinding themselves to this blurring of party lines. For example, the rapidly declining New York Times, once the nation's finest paper but now far behind the likes of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, recently ran a piece by Floyd Norris that excoriated the board of directors of Hollinger International (owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, and until recently, The Daily Telegraph in London). The media conglomerate's own appointed investigative panel (which included a former SEC chairman) said the company was looted by its former CEO, Conrad Black. (Norris's September 1 Times story was re-posted here by the Australian Financial Review.) Norris rightly pointed out that the devastating critique of the Hollinger board—a must-read for all Americans because of its literate description of how big business works—particularly skewered top neocon warmonger Richard Perle. Problem was, Norris added this:

Democrats were not left out, with the board including Robert S. Strauss, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Richard R. Burt, a former United States ambassador to Germany.

Yes, Strauss was a Democrat. Yes, Strauss was even Jimmy Carter's campaign chairman in 1976. But he was Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, and it's Strauss's business connections that have helped Republicans (and some Democrats) profit from Russian plunder following the collapse of the "evil empire." Some Democrat he is.

As for Richard Burt, well, bear with me for a rather long-winded discussion:

A week after Norris's story ran, the Times ran a correction that noted it "misstated the political affiliation of a director, Richard R. Burt. He was an official during a Republican administration, that of Ronald Reagan, not a Democratic one."

We all make mistakes (I certainly do), but what the Times neglected to say is that Burt was a former Times reporter, and not just some anonymous hack but the guy on the paper's national-security beat in the late 1970s until he went to the State Department near the end of the Carter administration. Reagan made him an assistant secretary of state of European affairs in 1982 and then, in 1985, sent him to West Germany as ambassador. In 1989, George Bush the Elder picked Burt as the strategic arms talks negotiator. On all three occasions, by the way, cracker senator Jesse Helms raised questions about what was termed at the time Burt's former "social relationship" with Times reporter Judith Miller. Helms claimed that Burt leaked stories to Miller, including one in June 1979. (At the time, it was reported that Burt acknowledged a friendship with Miller but denied leaking stories through her.)

If you recall, Judith Miller's "wretched reporting" (as Slate's Jack Shafer termed it) trumpeted CIA stooge Ahmed Chalabi's WMD tales in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Considering that many of America's middle-management media muckamucks (especially the TV tyros) blindly follow the Times' news judgment in deciding what's "important," you have to give some props to the Times for convincing the populace to support our unilateral invasion of Iraq.

OK, you're saying that Richard Burt's stint as a Times reporter was a long time ago. Well, it's still relevant for the paper that employed him to point out that connection when writing about him. Besides, Federal Election Commission records indicate that Burt has given money only to Republicans. So where did this "Democrat" bit come from?

These days, Burt is a co-chair of an outfit called Diligence, which is also being run by Bush's 2000 campaign manager Joe Allbaugh. Diligence is working hard to make money consulting and providing security to businesses interested in profiting from rebuilding the Iraq that the Bush administration is currently bombing into rubble. (See how that works?)

Diligence describes itself as "the premier global risk consulting, corporate intelligence, due diligence and strategic business information gathering firm founded by former members of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's MI5 Intelligence Service." Burt's company opened an office in Baghdad in July 2003. Douglas Jehl of the Times wrote a story last September about Allbaugh's setup, and Burt rated only a mention, with no word of his having once been a prominent Times reporter. (ToppleBush.com re-posted Jehl's story here.)

Now if you also want to profit from Iraq's misery, read this sales-pitch letter from both Burt and Allbaugh.

Yes, Burt is some Democrat, all right. I'd like to ask him how anyone could think he's a Democrat, but no one from Diligence replied to my e-mail.

Want more blurred party lines? The consulting firm Kissinger McLarty Associates is an amalgam of Nixon/Bush Junior confidant Henry Kissinger and Mack McLarty, Clinton's chief of staff.

So we know that the party lines blur where profit is concerned. There are still some differences between the parties, of course. Another four years of Bush would give him power to shape the Supreme Court—read Michael Dorf's sober, exhaustive analysis of the impact of the next POTUS on the aging SCOTUS. And dismantling the corporatist kleptocracy would be even more difficult after another Bush term, assuming we don't provoke a nuclear war somewhere on the planet we're trying to conquer.

But the basic problem will remain: What do we call this imperialistic corporate-welfare party made up of Republicans and most of the so-called centrist Democrats like the Clinton-Gore-Lieberman DLC types? What are they? Other than schmucks, I mean.

Need an air freshener? Kerry does.

Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix reported in late July that a Massachusetts marketer of gewgaws named Blue Q tried to get the Boston Cab Company to put George Bush's Dumbass Head on a String car fresheners in its 500 taxis during the Democratic National Convention. But the cab company balked at the partisan nature of the extremely funny item.

Turns out, though, that John Kerry's dumbass head has been the one on the string, yanked around depressingly easily by Bush's puppetmasters.

The car freshener is almost as clever as Karl Rove, and as for its warning—"Don't let it touch your voter registration card"—don't let Rove touch it either.

Something is needed to clear the air. For the millions of anti-Bush Americans, the Kerry campaign is stinking up the place. Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote Sunday that the Democrats' battleground is shrinking from nearly two dozen states where they were spending money to perhaps only two key ones: Florida and Ohio.

That must make the the Bush regime chuckle, especially when it comes to counting votes. Florida's run by brother Jeb, and we all know what happened there in 2000. Ohio is the home of Diebold, one of the biggest suppliers of those newfangled computerized voting machines. Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, a major fundraiser for Bush, said a year ago, in an invitation to a GOP fundraiser in his Columbus mansion that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president." (You can read that story here, on Diebold's own website.)

Donnie Ray Rumsfeld was counting votes on Saturday's three-year anniversary of 9-11. Answering the call of "Be there! Be there! Saturday! Saturday! Richmond International Raceway! Richmond International Raceway!" Rummy took his Princeton ass to his first NASCAR race, the Chevy Rock 'n' Roll 400 in Richmond, Virginia. He led the crowd of 107,000 in the Pledge of Allegiance and got a T-shirt and everything.

Do Kerry's advisers realize that they could break some China over the heads of the Bush campaign in these Southern states that pundits have already conceded to the Republicans?

Take a look at David R. Francis's "Will China Clothe the World?" last month in The Christian Science Monitor, about the expiration at the end of this year of textile import quotas. Francis writes:

Some 600,000 jobs [of American workers] could be lost, reckons Karl Spilhaus, president of the National Textile Association. That's out of the current total of 702,000, a number much reduced in recent decades by foreign competition. Since January 2001, the nation has lost 344,300 textile and apparel workers.

Francis points out that "most remaining textile firms are located in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia."

Now there's some dirty laundry that Kerry could air out.

Our deaths top 1,000. Theirs? Don't ask, don't tell.

Media pipe-puffers made such a big deal over the weekend about the fact that U.S. casualties in Iraq hit the 1,000 mark.

"How many deaths are too many?" James Dao asked in the top think piece in the Sunday New York Times Week in Review.

There was not one word in Dao's story about the number of Iraqis killed in this senseless invasion and occupation. The Department of Defense, of course, has steadfastly refused to release body counts.

For that info, you have to go to sites like Iraq Body Count, which reports that the number of civilians killed in Iraq ranges between 11,797 and 13,806.

By the way, Iraq didn't commit terrorist acts in the United States, and four times the number of innocent Iraqis have been killed by us than the total number of innocents who died in the WTC attack. Did we mention that those hijackers were Saudis? The Times' Dao matter-of-factly writes that, according to "military experts and historians," "the stark experience of 9-11 and the belief among many Americans that the fighting in Iraq is part of a global conflict against terrorism have made this war seem much more crucial to the nation's security than Vietnam." He neglects to say that many "military experts and historians" dispute that our invasion of Iraq was justified. And of course, the source of that "belief" was, at best, public-relations bullshit to justify a pre-emptive strike.

It's sad enough that many of our own troops in Iraq have either died in noncombat situations or killed themselves. (See my April Voice story, "Day by Day, Death by Death.") But enough talk. What exactly is this democracy we're forcing on the world? It's time for more statistics, thanks to NationMaster.com, where you can type in your own topics and create your own rankings, charts and figures—from established sources, not out of thin air. (Yes, yes, all of the following stats can be disputed, but at least these numbers are the result of what looks like a credible effort by the NationMaster people to find legitimate sources.)

Here are a few:

¶ Presidential election turnout: The U.S. ranks 19th—from the bottom—at 49.3 percent of the voting-age population in 2000. That's in a list of 100 countries. We're just ahead of Ireland (47.7) and Burkina Faso (46.9); we trail the likes of Mexico (60.0) and South Korea (92.5).

¶ Prisoners per capita: We're No. 2! In the U.S., 7.15 out of every 1,000 persons is a prisoner, trailing only Rwanda (14.34).

¶ Exports of conventional arms: We're No. 1! But that's only in the grand total of dollar figures. Per capita, we're 10th; Sweden is first, followed by Jordan, Norway, Israel, and Angola.

¶ Education spending: We're No. 47! We spent 4.7 percent of our gross domestic product (1990–99), compared with No. 1 Moldova's 10.3, No. 3 Denmark's 7.7, and fellow arms exporter Sweden's 7.1, which ranks eighth.

¶ Reading literacy: We're No. 15! We trail such countries as No. 1 Finland, No. 6 South Korea, and No. 14 Norway.

¶ Murders with firearms (per capita): We're No. 8! South Africa is No. 1, followed by Colombia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Costa Rica, Belarus, and then—yay!—us.