I'm not sure that this will win the Boy Scout vote for Bush.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- The federal government and the state of Utah sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday for nearly $14 million to recover the costs of a 2002 fire at a Scout camp.

The lawsuit alleges that about 20 Boy Scouts ages 11 to 14 were left without adult supervision for a night outside an approved campground. Some of the boys built fires that were left to smolder and spread across more than 14,000 acres, the lawsuit says.

It was interesting to look at all the BSA related ads on this news site (CNN) showing boy scouts where they can buy uniforms, badges, wooden nickels, etc., off the internet after they had digested the story about the feds suing their organization.

This is a long article from the New York Times. I normally would defer to abridged or my own personal summation, but this article more than epitomizes everything that is going on with our current concerns for security. How many of our personal freedoms are we as a nation willing to give up for so-called protection from terrorists.

This is a Kafka-esque story about a poor Nepalese man who made the unfortunate decision to take pictures of New York City to send to his family. He was swept up in the post-9/11 over-reaction, was proven innocent by his FBI interrogator, and then sent to jail - three months of it in solitary confinement - because the bureaucracy of the Patriot Act prevented his release. He would still be in jail had it not been for his FBI interrogator wanting to set things right.

It's a sad story about why America is at its worst point in history since the Red scare days of the late-40s and 50s.

Has America lost its collective mind? I don't think so, but it's scary all the same. Ashcroft with his Gulags has a lot in common with Stalin. Damn, perhaps we should have elected him senator after all and spared the nation these atrocities of justice.

June 30, 2004
In F.B.I., Innocent Detainee Found Unlikely Ally
By NINA BERNSTEIN

It took no more than a week for James P. Wynne, a veteran F.B.I. investigator, to confirm the harmless truth that only now, more than two years later, he is ready to talk about. The small foreign man he helped arrest for videotaping outside an office building in Queens on Oct. 25, 2001, was no terrorist.

He was a Buddhist from Nepal planning to return there after five years of odd jobs at places like a Queens pizzeria and a Manhattan flower shop. He was taping New York street scenes to take back to his wife and sons in Katmandu. And he had no clue that the tall building that had drifted into his viewfinder happened to include an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Yet by the time Mr. Wynne filed his F.B.I. report a few days later, the Nepalese man, who spoke almost no English, had been placed in solitary confinement at a federal detention center in Brooklyn just because of his videotaping. He was swallowed up in the government's new maximum security system of secret detention and secret hearings, and his only friend was the same F.B.I. agent who had helped decide to put him there.

Except for the videotape — "a tourist kind of thing," in Mr. Wynne's estimation — no shred of suspicion attached to the man, Purna Raj Bajracharya, 47, who came from Nepal in 1996. His one offense — staying to work on a long-expired tourist visa — was an immigration violation punishable by deportation, not jail. But he wound up spending three months in solitary confinement before he was sent back to Katmandu in January 2002, and to release him from his shackles, even Mr. Wynne needed help.

The clearance process had become so byzantine that the officer who had set the procedure in motion could not hasten it. Unable to procure a release that officially required signatures from top antiterrorism officials in Washington, Mr. Wynne took an uncommon step for an F.B.I. agent: he called the Legal Aid Society for a lawyer to help the jailed man.

Now, for the first time, the F.B.I. agent and the Legal Aid lawyer, Olivia Cassin, have agreed to talk about the case and their unlikely alliance. Their documented accounts offer a rare, first-hand window into the workings of a secret world.

Within 10 days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department instructed immigration judges that all cases designated as "special interest" were to be handled in separate closed courtrooms, without visitors, family or reporters, and without confirming whether a case was on the docket. The secrecy left detainees with little access to lawyers.

Visa violators would be held indefinitely, until the F.B.I. was sure the person was not involved in terrorism. As a visa violator under suspicion, Mr. Bajracharya was among hundreds placed in the special interest category, and his case was wiped from the public record.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that though he was unfamiliar with the case, the system of secrecy Mr. Bajracharya encountered is lawful and necessary. "The idea that someone who has violated our immigration laws may be of interest on a national security level as well is an unfortunate reality, post-9/11," he said. Closed hearings are legal as long as due process is provided, he said, and all abuses will be dealt with.

But Ms. Cassin, of Legal Aid, argues that under this secret practice, there is no way to know whether other noncitizens are even now being unfairly detained. "By its very nature," she said, "it can happen again without our knowing about it."

Mr. Bajracharya was finally returned to Nepal on Jan. 13, 2002. By then he had spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24 hours a day. The unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was kept has become notorious for the abuses documented there by the Justice Department's own inspector general, who found a pattern of physical and mental mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees. Videotapes showed officers slamming detainees into walls, mocking them during unnecessary strip-searches, and secretly taping their conversations with lawyers.

Mr. Wynne would not comment on detention policies, and said that he should not be "held out as the one lone person who did the right thing." But during an extended interview approved by his F.B.I. superiors, he read aloud from phone logs documenting desperate messages from the man's family in Katmandu, his efforts to reassure the weeping detainee, and his own dawning recognition that no resolution was in sight.

"I told Purna that I would try to help him, that I wouldn't forget about him," Mr. Wynne explained. "I felt some - not responsibility, but I felt that there was no one else."

By telephone from Katmandu, Mr. Bajracharya recalled the fear, humiliation and despair he had experienced in prison. "I had nothing but tears in my eyes," he said through a translator. "The only thing I knew, I was innocent, but I didn't know what was happening."

He said he was stripped naked in the federal jail. "I was manhandled and treated badly," he said, becoming agitated. "I was very, very embarrassed even to look around, because I was naked."

The ordeal began when his videotaping aroused the suspicions of two detectives from the Queens district attorney's office, which has space in the same 12-story building where the F.B.I. occupies three floors. After taking him inside for questioning, they called upstairs to the F.B.I., and Mr. Wynne was dispatched to take over the interrogation. With no translator, Mr. Bajracharya tried to explain himself to half a dozen law enforcement officers, including two federal agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service who verified his illegal immigration status.

It was Mr. Wynne, as the lead F.B.I. agent, who sent him to the federal detention center in Brooklyn pending a thorough investigation. The F.B.I. agent, now 50, describes himself as a lifelong New Yorker who does not take illegal immigration lightly. His specialty is international art fraud, not terrorism. But at a time of heightened anxiety about another terrorist attack, he maintained, it was reasonable to suspect the worst until he could check the man's history, discrepancies in his identity documents and questions about money wired to Nepal.

The questions were resolved within days. The Nepalese man did not show up in any terrorist databanks, and Mr. Wynne soon confirmed his explanation for a $37,000 wire transfer to Nepal. The money was from a recent legal settlement for injuries suffered when he was hit by a car in 1999. His records, roommates and former employees all vouched for the detainee's honesty.

On Nov. 1, 2001, the day Mr. Wynne wrote his report clearing Mr. Bajracharya, he told him through a translator that it would take about a week to get the matter resolved.

Over the weekend, pleading messages arrived from the detainee's sons in Katmandu: "Please help his father; he's not that kind of person - meaning a terrorist, I suppose," the F.B.I. agent said. On Nov. 5, he discussed the case with the head of counterterrorism in the United States attorney's office, and on Nov. 7 and 8, with a lawyer at the immigration agency.

"Because he was willing to leave - he wanted to leave - it didn't seem to me that it was a big hurdle to move him out of there," Mr. Wynne said.

But the weeks dragged on. Learning that a secret immigration hearing was scheduled for Nov. 19, Mr. Wynne thought a resolution was at hand. Instead, in a second conference call to the detainee after the hearing, he found him confused and distraught. It turned out that official F.B.I. clearance from Washington had not yet come through, and the matter had been adjourned to another secret hearing on Dec. 6.

At this point, the agent said, he realized he had been too optimistic. "You have to understand one thing: I'm in the Queens office; in Manhattan they were running this whole initiative, and there was a whole procedure set up for the clearances," he said. "I wasn't aware that there were so many levels that needed to sign off on this thing, frankly, when I filed my report."

The Monday after Thanksgiving, the F.B.I. agent called in Legal Aid. "This guy needed some help - it's as simple as that," Mr. Wynne said, insisting that anyone would have done the same thing. Ms. Cassin says she knows of no other F.B.I. investigator who has.

But by the time she spoke with the detainee, through a thick plexiglass barrier and under the eye of a prison video camera, she said, he was weeping all the time.

On Dec. 6, in a secret hearing room in the prison, she said, she watched him carried in by three burly officers of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, shackled so completely that he could not move. "He's tiny," she said. "His feet didn't even touch the floor."

She said government immigration lawyers agreed that since her client had been cleared by the F.B.I., he would be permitted a "voluntary departure." She was instructed to buy him an airplane ticket to Katmandu through a deportation officer. She did, but the first departure date was canceled without explanation.

Meanwhile, like other "high interest" detainees, Mr. Bajracharya was still in solitary 23 hours a day. "After a month or two, I started to scream that I was going to die if I didn't talk to anybody," he later recalled.

Ms. Cassin said she pleaded with the prison doctor to put him in the general prison population, but the doctor said he was crying so much he would cause a riot. Instead, on Dec. 11, a Muslim detainee was sent to share his tiny cell.

Expecting his imminent departure, Ms. Cassin and Mr. Wynne tried to fulfill the detainee's most insistent request: to go home looking like a respectable person, not a criminal. An assistant warden agreed to accept a box labeled "release clothing," containing the good suit he had worn when he came to America. Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Wynne made a special trip to deliver it.

But when Mr. Bajracharya was finally taken to the plane on Jan. 13, he was in shackles and an orange prison jumpsuit. "I wanted to wait for my clothes, at least the shoes and the jacket," he said, "but they took me by force."

Mr. Bajracharya's accounts of mistreatment fit the pattern reported by the inspector general. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, Robert Nardoza, said the office recently declined to prosecute abuses detailed in the reports "mainly because all of the witnesses had been deported and were unavailable to be interviewed."

Back in Nepal, which is riven by civil war, Mr. Bajracharya said he would be willing to testify against those who mistreated him if he were asked, though he fears what the government would do to him if he did so. Nonetheless, he remains grateful that he experienced America.

"What happened to me could have been an isolated incident," he said. "I still believe the American government is the best in the world."

Weeks after Mr. Bajracharya returned to Nepal, Mr. Wynne and Ms. Cassin managed to arrange delivery of his possessions by mail, including his camcorder. But when he tried to show his wife his travelogue of New York, all that remained on the tape was the pizzeria and the flower shop.

Mr. Wynne, sounding a bit sheepish, allowed that he had "probably erased" the rest, thinking it might fall in the wrong hands.

"Just an abundance of caution," he murmured.

A sidebar to yesterday's big turnover of business in Irag. Bush was in Turkey with Blair on the NATO conference. Femonazi Rice passed Bush a note, he then whispered to Blair and they shook hands.

Later, Bush was so high spirited, that he passed the note to the media. It was the scribble read 'round the world. At the bottom of that note from Rice, Bush wrote with his big fat black Sharpie pen: "Let Freedom Reign."

Did he mean "Let Freedom Ring?"

Lost in the news shuffle of Iraqi "freedom" yesterday was the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court finally showed it had had enough of the Bush Administration's imperial edicts.

The SC's complicated holdings in the three cases involving detainees from the alleged battle against terrorism may not result in any prisoners going free, but it did spell out constitutional law - one letter at a time so even Bush might be able to understand - that we do have a tradition in this country about justice.

In effect, the rulings were nearly a unanimous repudiation of the Bush Administration's sweeping claims over those captives. The court roundly rejected Bush's assertion that in time of war he can order the potentially indefinite detention of anyone. If you want to be really stunned, read Antonin Scalia's opinion:

"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."

Scalia! I never would have believed it.

So, Dubya, you can't have your own personal Bastille, your own personal Gulag Guantanamo. Lucky for Stalin he didn't have a Supreme Court. I'm sure SS Stormtroopermeister John Ashcroft is wringing his hands today and muttering oaths against "activist" judges like Scalia.

Given that Bush and his neo-cons have claimed its war on terrorism might stretch over generations, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (oops, another conservative weights into the battle) wrote that the indefinite detention could actually make the dententions life sentences. And that, she said, is too long to do without the basics of due process.

The court took courage in addressing some very key post-9/11 issues. How can strength be balanced with liberty? Or, essentially, what are the limits on a president's power in a crisis? As Justice David Souter wrote:

"The defining characteristic of American constitutional government is its constant tension between security and liberty."

And as O'Connor wrote:

"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."

That of course was in regard to those few "terrorists" captured who were U.S. citizens, but the meat is still there.

And you have to love the liberal wing's (Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer) quote:

"At stake in this case (Padilla's) is nothing less than the essense of a free society. Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber."

The court did leave some loopholes, and I suspect John Ashcroft and his bully boys are working on getting around them right now. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi.

The U.S.yesterday handed over the reins, so to speak, to the Iraqis to run their government. And then Bremer did what 130,000 American troops would love to do: beat a hasty retreat out of the country. We have to assume he did not let the door hit him in the butt.

The New York Times editorial this morning says it far better than I can:

Two days early, with a veil of secrecy and a tight security lockdown, Washington's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer III, handed a hollow and uncertain sovereignty to Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist collaborator of Saddam Hussein who spent most of the past three decades exiled in London, the last one of those in the pay of America's Central Intelligence Agency. It goes without saying that this is not the sort of outcome the nation envisioned when we sent our forces to liberate Iraq last year.

Moving the transfer date was a sensible precaution against anticipated insurgent attacks. But it underscores how arbitrary the original date, June 30, was all along. Rather than being timed to coincide with a growing capacity of the new Iraqi authorities to take on the challenges of running the country and preparing it for democratic elections, the June date was fixed upon last November to ensure at least the appearance of progress as the American presidential campaign got under way. Dr. Allawi was chosen several weeks ago, in a process endorsed by the United Nations, as Iraq's interim prime minister. But nobody, including Bush administration officials, can seriously believe that Dr. Allawi and his cabinet are now in any position to run Iraq and prepare it for democratic elections.

Ready or not, Dr. Allawi and his colleagues will now speak for Iraq. But whether their words will mean anything will continue to depend largely on outsiders, like the generals commanding the roughly 140,000 United States troops now posted to Iraq indefinitely, and the American aid administrators and contractors, who control billions of dollars' worth of reconstruction work.

With all the emphasis on change, it is important to bear in mind how many important things are not changing. The violent insurgency continues unchecked, as was demonstrated by the stealthy arrangements surrounding yesterday's transfer ceremony. Until a more adequate degree of security is established, civilians, including United Nations officials and employees of private construction companies, will proceed warily, delaying Iraq's political and physical reconstruction.

Today, the primary military responsibility for fighting the insurgency remains as much in American hands as it did yesterday. It is thus ludicrous for administration officials to suggest that America's occupation of Iraq has now somehow ended. It has merely moved to a new stage.

Washington hopes that from now on, some of the most visible security assignments in major cities can begin to be passed to the Iraqi Army and police forces. NATO made a vaguely worded offer yesterday to help with training Iraqi forces. But the record so far is anything but encouraging. When asked to fight Iraqi insurgents, the local security forces have generally melted away.

Few Iraqis took to the streets yesterday to celebrate the new order, in part because they were as surprised as everyone else by the decision to hold the transfer ceremony two days early. But they are also understandably skeptical about whether anything important in their lives will now change. They will especially be looking to see whether the Allawi government can bring electricity to their homes and order to their streets without reverting to the dictatorial tactics reminiscent of 35 years of Baathist rule.

It's a daunting challenge that the occupation government, with all its resources, was unable to achieve. Dr. Allawi will face the same obstacles, like power-line saboteurs and the lack of trained and reliable Iraqi police officers. He already seems tempted to look for shortcuts — like imposing martial law. Another ominous suggestion attributed to him last week, but since repudiated, was to postpone the elections scheduled for next January.

It will be the job of Dr. Allawi's American allies to help him resist such impulses. This interim government's most important political responsibility is to make it possible for Iraq's rival political, religious and ethnic factions to negotiate a livable constitutional settlement, not to use force to impose a new dictatorial order.

Washington also needs to demonstrate that it is not pulling all the strings from behind the scenes. It must move sharply away from the overreaching micromanagement that characterized Mr. Bremer's tenure as the chief American occupation administrator in Iraq. Almost up to the moment of his departure yesterday, Mr. Bremer acted like an imperial proconsul with a mighty army to enforce his often arbitrary decrees instead of an increasingly weary and overtaxed occupation force.

The new United States representative in Iraq, Ambassador John Negroponte, should try to defer to the Allawi government as much as possible. But Washington cannot shed its responsibility for what happens from here on out. The Bush administration has handed off the symbols of sovereignty. But if Iraq dissolves into dictatorship or civil war, the White House will not be able to hand off the blame.

From Al Gore in a speech in Philly:

"Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad is the Bush gulag."

It makes you wonder how Gore would have fared had he taken on Bush head-to-head rather than take the moderate stance in '00. Gore is a much more gutsy man than he portrayed in '00. Sometimes your political handlers can work against you. Gore in "earthtones" was one of the more ridiculous positions I have ever seen suggested in a political campaign.

Speak out Gore. You were elected president and it was stolen from you and the country may never be the same.

The Administration is getting a little thin skinned. They love to dish it out, but then gets indignant when it comes the other way.

I like the Washington Post reporting of the story. The AP never said what the obscenity was. NY Times just mentioned a strong "obscenity" seldom used on the Senate floor. But, here's the rest (whole) of the story:

Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity
Clash With Leahy About Halliburton

Friday, June 25, 2004; Page A04

A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.

On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Leahy's spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. "The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq," Carle said.

As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the "Defense of Decency Act" by 99 to 1.

Cheney's office did not deny that the phrase was uttered. His spokesman, Kevin S. Kellems, would say only that this language is not typical of the vice presidential vocabulary. "Reserving the right to revise and extend my remarks, that doesn't sound like language the vice president would use," Kellems said, "but there was a frank exchange of views."

Gleeful Democrats pointed out that the White House has not always been so forgiving of obscenity. In December, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry was quoted using the same word in describing Bush's Iraq policy as botched. The president's chief of staff reacted with indignation.

"That's beneath John Kerry," Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said. "I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language. I'm hoping that he's apologizing at least to himself, because that's not the John Kerry that I know."

This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, "major-league [expletive]." Cheney's response -- "Big Time" -- has become his official presidential nickname.

Then there was that famous Talk magazine interview of Bush by Tucker Carlson in 1999, in which the future president repeatedly used the F-word.

Tuesday's exchange began when Leahy crossed the aisle at the photo session and joked to Cheney about being on the Republican side, according to Carle. Then Cheney, according to Carle, "lashed into" Leahy for remarks he made Monday criticizing Iraq contracts won without competitive bidding by Halliburton, Cheney's former employer.

Leahy, Carle said, retorted that Democrats "have not appreciated White House collusion in smears" that Democrats were anti-Catholic for blocking judicial nominees such as William H. Pryor Jr. Democrats demanded that Bush disavow the allegations by conservative groups, but the White House did not.

The Democratic National Committee has declared this to be "Halliburton Week" to portray administration ties to the controversial company. "Sounds like it's making somebody a little testy," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said.

Republicans did their best to defend the vice president. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), while pointing out that he was unaware of the incident, described Cheney as "very honest" and said: "I don't blame anyone for standing up for his integrity."

There is no rule against obscene language by a vice president on the Senate floor. The senators were present for a group picture and not in session, so Rule 19 of the Senate rules -- which prohibits vulgar statements "unbecoming a senator" -- does not apply, according to a Senate official. Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

Fahrenheit 911. See it, take your friends. Take your conservative friends, if you have any. Take your yellow dog. It's finally time to call a spade a spade in regards to Bush. Besides that, it will be quite entertaining.

A column from the NY Times worth noting:

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 25, 2004

"Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible." Thus spoke President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union address. A White House fact sheet called the center "the next phase in the dramatic enhancement of the government's counterterrorism effort."

Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.

How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."

Credit for uncovering the report's errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.

All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll.

Was the report's squishy math politically motivated? Well, the Bush administration has cooked the books in many areas, including budget projections, tax policy, environmental policy and stem cell research. Why wouldn't it do the same on terrorism?

The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.

Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.

In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we're talking about the government's central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can't input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and botched by — private contractors.)

Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn't really serious about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack — well, never mind.

Ah, the lying liberal press! Oops, wait a minute. This is about the moony paper, the Washington Times.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, which spends election years fact-checking claims in newspapers:

"Since early April, Sen. Kerry has regularly told anyone that will listen that Americans are suffering through 'the worst job recovery since the Great Depression.'

"Then The Washington Times reported, 'Now that consumer spending is rising and voter confidence in the economy is growing, Mr. Kerry calls it "the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression." ' (italics added)

"Did Kerry slip up, or did the Washington Times misquote him? . . . The paper misquoted the man -- presumably to make it look like he was saying something in defiance of evidence to the contrary.

"That's no typo. That's an attempt to hang Kerry with words he never said."

From the Washington Post today:

President Bush yesterday pointed to Abu Musab Zarqawi as the "best evidence" of a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In so doing, he came to the defense of Vice President Cheney, who on Monday asserted that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaeda.

But he also risked putting himself at odds with the Sept. 11 commission and the intelligence community.

Even though Zarqawi is actively terrorizing Iraq today, and does appear to have a relationship with al Qaeda, his association with Hussein has never been established.

Communications between Zarqawi and al Qaeda that Bush alluded to yesterday took place several months after Hussein was removed from power.

And a new report released this morning by the Sept. 11 commission declares that there is "no credible evidence" that Hussein's government collaborated with the al Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States, including the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings.

President Bush restated his commitment on Tuesday to sharply limit stem-cell research, bucking renewed pressure from Nancy Reagan and others to loosen the restrictions in the aftermath of the death of former President Ronald Reagan.

Speaking from the White House via satellite to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush said:

"Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man."

For someone who believes. and has stated, that he knew God wanted him to be President, I guess we have to assume he has been in contact with God on this one, too. That's one hell of a cell phone bill, I bet.

Have I ever mentioned that this guy is a total idiot?

A Bush administration joke making the rounds:

How many Bushies does it take to change a light bulb in the White House? The answer is seven:

* One to deny that a light bulb needs to be replaced.

• One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the light bulb.

• One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new light bulb.

• One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of light bulbs.

• One to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton one million dollars for a light bulb.

• One to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the light bulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag.

• And finally, one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

REAGAN AND AIDS. One of Ronald Reagan's most shameful legacies was his indifference toward the then-emerging AIDS epidemic. This press briefing, conducted by Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes in 1982, is a good reminder of what things were like then.

Granted, Reagan doesn't appear personally in this briefing, and much of this has more to do with what some people thought was a laff riot at the time. But the Reagan White House's lack of interest in a disease that would soon decimate the gay community is palpable.

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

PRESS BRIEFING BY LARRY SPEAKES

October 15, 1982

The Briefing Room

12:45pm EDT

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement - the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

MR. SPEAKES: What's AIDS?

Q: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?

MR. SPEAKES: I don't have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

Q: No, I don't.

MR. SPEAKES: You didn't answer my question.

Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President -

MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)

Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

MR. SPEAKES: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.

Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: I don't think so. I don't think there's been any -

Q: Nobody knows?

MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.

Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping -

MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he's had no - (laughter) - no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.

Q: The President doesn't have gay plague, is that what you're saying or what?

MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn't say that.

Q: Didn't say that?

MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn't you stay there? (Laughter.)

Q: Because I love you Larry, that's why (Laughter.)

MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don't put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)

Q: Oh, I retract that.

MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.

Q: It's too late.

This transcript is taken from the prologue to Jon Cohen's 2001 book, Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine.

Props to Nancy Reagan. She has successfully orchestrated her husband's life into legend. She has been determined to rewrite history to preserve his alleged legacy, and unfortunately, she seems to have accomplished it. I will forgive her if she will at least take a strong position on stem cell research. Ronnie didn't do squat for AIDS, but maybe his widow can make some amends.

Meanwhile, is Bush the heir to that Reagan "legacy"? Here is a very astute column (actually abridged for your easy reading) from the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum:

"The problem with comparing Bush to Reagan is that Bush comes off as a mediocre painter trying to emulate Picasso. He sees the brushstrokes on the surface and knows how to copy them, but because he doesn't understand their underlying purpose he ends up being only a clumsy and ultimately damaging imitation when he tries to craft a painting of his own.

"No analogy is perfect, but in a lot of ways Bush strikes me as being to Reagan what LBJ was to Roosevelt. It's true that LBJ made some powerful and original contributions to the country, particularly in the area of civil rights, but in the end his legacy has been overshadowed by a pair of signature failures. The Great Society and the Vietnam War, consciously modeled on FDR's New Deal and his leadership during World War II, adopted the surface characteristics of FDR's great achievements but ended up as failures because LBJ didn't have Roosevelt's instinctive feel for public opinion or his grasp of why some things worked and some didn't.

"Much the same can be said of George Bush. He learned Reagan's lesson that tax cuts could be powerful political symbols, but then turned that lesson into a blind rule that tax cuts are the answer to every economic problem. Likewise, on foreign policy he saw that Reagan was admired for his steadfast anticommunism, but failed to learn when and where to turn down the volume. As a result, he's a man with only one gear, overreliant on military solutions whether they're appropriate or not.

"Like LBJ, Bush is a man who knows the notes but not the song. He learned the surface lessons of Reagan's presidency -- tax cuts, hawkishness, unyielding rhetoric -- but because he doesn't have the political sensitivity to understand what to do with them he has no choice except to simply offer more tax cuts and more hawkishness, whatever the problem. As a result, he overreaches in a way Reagan never did and will likely be the prime cause of the one thing he most fears: a liberal backlash."

Thanks to the Patriot Act and our nation's collective fear of its own shadow, we are becoming more and more like pre-World War II Germany! Isn't about time to stop being fearful and show some courage. The whole world must be laughing at us. I am embarrassed for our nation!

Welcome to America

When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...

Saturday June 5, 2004
The Guardian

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. "What do you want?" he yelled. I said I didn't feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

None of this had been on my mind the night before, when I boarded my United Airlines flight from Heathrow. Sitting next to an intriguingly silent young man who could have been a porn star or a well camouflaged air marshal, I spent most of the 11-hour flight daydreaming about the city where he so clearly belonged and that I had never visited. My America had always been the east coast: as tourist, resident, journalist, novelist, I had never ventured much past the New York-Boston-Washington triangle. But I was glad that this brief assignment was taking me to sunkissed LA, and I was ready to succumb to LA's laid-back charm.

The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.

"I'm here to do some interviews," I said.

"With whom?" He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. "So you're a journalist," he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. "I have to refer this to my supervisor," he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be "processed". Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I'd have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, "It seems that we will probably have to deport you."

I'm not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? "Why?" I asked, incredulously.

"You came here as a journalist, and you don't have a journalist's visa." I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media ("You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program").

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. "You don't care, do you?" I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be "interviewed", and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents' names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue - I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, "You are Russian, yet you claim to be British", an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, "Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I'd have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me. In the middle of this, my husband rang from London; he had somehow managed to locate my whereabouts, and I was allowed briefly to wipe the ink off my hands to take the call. Hearing his voice was a reminder of the real world I was beginning to feel cut off from.

Three female officers arrived to do a body search. As they slipped on rubber gloves, I blenched: what were they going to do, and could I resist? They were armed, they claimed to have the law on their side. I was an anonymous foreigner who had committed a felony, and "those were the rules". So I was groped, unpleasantly, though not as intimately as I had feared. Then came the next shock: two bulky, uniformed and armed security men handcuffed me, which they explained was the "rule when transporting detainees through the airport". I was marched between the two giants through an empty terminal to a detention room, where I sat in the company of two other detainees (we were not allowed to communicate) and eight sleepy guards, all men. I would have been happy to spend the night watching TV with them, as they agreed to switch the channel from local news (highlight: a bear was loose in an affluent LA neighbourhood) to sitcoms and soaps. Their job was indescribably boring, they were overstaffed with nothing to do, and so making sure I didn't extract a pen or my mobile phone from my luggage must have seemed a welcome break. I listened to their star-struck stories about actors they had recently seen at LAX. We laughed in the same places during Seinfeld, an eerie experience. I was beginning to think I could manage this: the trip was a write-off, of course, but I could easily survive a night and a day of this kind of discomfort before flying back. But then I was taken to the detention cell in downtown LA, where the discomfort became something worse.

Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."

On a more practical level, this obsession, when practised with such extreme lack of intelligence (in both senses of the word), as in the case of my detention, must be misdirecting valuable money and manpower into fighting journalism rather than terrorism. Ordinary Americans, rather than the powers that be, are certainly able to make that distinction. According to an editor at the LA Times, there has been a "tremendous" response from readers to the reporting on my case, and I have received many emails expressing outrage and embarrassment. The novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote, "On behalf of the non-thuggish American majority, my sincere apologies."

These would have been comforting thoughts the following morning when I was driven back (in handcuffs, of course) to the communal detention room at LAX, and spent hours waiting, without food, while the guards munched enormous breakfasts and slurped hot morning drinks (detainees are not allowed tea or coffee). I incurred the wrath of the boss when I insisted on edible food. "I'm in charge in here. Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? This isn't a hotel," he screamed.

"Why are you yelling?" I asked. "I'm just asking for some decent food. I'll pay for it myself." A Burger King fishburger never tasted so good. And it occurred to me that a hotel or transit lounge would have been a better place to keep travellers waiting to return home.

As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?

Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."

Thanks for my buddy Russ McCorkle for finding (and providing) a bit of humor on this dreary Reaganesque day.

Poetry from Secretary of Defense Rummy:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

There are a lot of reason why I am totally appalled at the new media's gushing reports on the death of Ronald Reagan. Other than NPR, I have seen few, or heard few, commentaries on many of the evils that his administration perpetrated on the poor, the disadvantaged and, of course, on the environment. Throw in Iran-Contra and you see a president that if not totally detached from what was going on around him, certainly would fall into the category of one of our worst presidents.

There was also one other aspect abot him that I also have not seen mentioned, and frankly, I had forgotten or repressed. But a gay friend forwarded me an Agente France story about Reagan and his administration's approach to AIDS, one of the great horrors of the last century and one that persists as a major problem today. Here is the story. Read it, and then remember the real Ronal Reagan.

BYLINE: GILES HEWITT

DATELINE: NEW YORK, June 8

The death of Ronald Reagan has gone largely unmourned by America's
gay community, which still harbours bitter memories of the former
president's indifference to the emerging AIDs epidemic in the 1980s.

Even as the eulogies poured in at home and around the world, gay
activists offered a sharply divergent verdict on the Reagan
presidency, which they see as tainted with the blood of thousands of
victims of the HIV scourge.

"It wasn't just that he ignored the AIDS crisis," said Mark Milano,
an HIV treatment educator who has been living with the virus since
1981. "What was so unconscionable was that he and members of his
administration actually took a pro-active decision to do nothing
about it."

Initial public awareness of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome)dates back to the early days of Reagan's first term, with the publication of a New York Times article in 1981 that detailed a rare cancer being seen in the homosexual community.

The acronym AIDS was first used in 1982 when more than 1,500
Americans were diagnosed with the disease.

Reagan, as gay activists still angrily point out, never mentioned the word in public until 1987, by which time some 60,000 cases had been
diagnosed, of whom half had died.

The lack of major federal funding to combat AIDS as the disease took
hold is cited by many as a major factor behind its dramatic spread.

In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House
physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and would go away."

Lou Cannon, one of the most respected of Reagan biographers, wrote in his authoritative "President Reagan," that the president's response
to the epidemic was "halting and ineffective."

And in a 2001 speech at a national symposium on US AIDS Policy, C.
Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, said that due to
"intra-departmental politics" he was cut out of all AIDS discussions
for the first five years of the Reagan administration.

"Because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the
homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the
advisors to the president, took the stand, they are only getting what they justly deserve," Koop said.

Many gay activists refrain from labelling Reagan as personally
homophobic, focusing instead on the record of his administration and
the conservative agenda of the "New Right" and "Moral Majority" that
flourished under his presidency.

"The government's response was dictated by the grip of evangelical
Christian conservatives who saw gay people as sinners and AIDS as
God's well-deserved punishment," said Matt Foreman, executive
director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"I don't think that Reagan hated gay people," Foreman said. "But I do know that the Reagan administration's policies on AIDS and anything
gay-related resulted -- and continue to result -- in despair and
death."

Others voiced irritation with the media reaction to Reagan's death,
arguing that the former president's inaction on AIDS had been
forgotten in the rush to praise the victor of the Cold War.

Christopher Babick, a former executive director of the People with
AIDS Coalition, wrote a letter published in The New York Times on
Monday, sharply criticising the newspaper for failing to mention the
AIDS epidemic once in its front-page obituary of the president.

"For years, we begged, we pleaded, we lobbied and we marched in the
streets to get the attention of the 'Great Communicator'. Alas no
support came," Babick said.

"AIDS, not the fall of the Berlin Wall, may very well be the marker
by which Ronald Reagan's presidency is judged," he added.

But criticizing Reagan was a tough course even before the outpouring
of emotion that followed his death.

In November, the CBS network was pressured into pulling a
controversial mini-series about his presidency. The original
screenplay quoted Reagan in a private conversation about AIDS as
saying: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."

The series was finally aired on the pay-cable channel Showtime, but
without the controversial line which, while almost certainly
fictional, was seen by many in the gay community as an accurate
representation of the Reagan adminstration's stance.

"I shed no tears at the passing of Ronald Reagan," Philip Hitchcock,
an openly gay sculptor from Venice, California, wrote in another
letter published Monday in The Los Angeles Times.

"My tears are and were for the hundreds of thousands of Americans
with HIV on whom Mr. Reagan turned his back," he said. "I weep for
the scores and scores of men whose names, one by one, I blacked out
of my address book."

Excuse me if I sound tacky, but seriously folks, equating Ronald Reagan as one of the three great presidents of the past century? GOP'ers with too much time on their hands are all over the airways listing Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and Ronald Reagan as the greatest. I think their order is RR, TR and FDR. The latter choice is probably out of sympathy. Reagan liked FDR and was an FDR Democrat.

But here's the latest - putting Reagan, the creater of Voo-doo economics (Remember George Bush's comments in the 1980 primary?).

Here's the tacky bit. Put him on rolls of toilet paper so that we can see him every day. I told you it was tacky.

Here is what CNN is writing:

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Ronald Reagan's face could one day adorn the $10 bill or half the dimes minted in the country, if fans of the late president get their way.

On Tuesday Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed that he is considering sponsoring legislation in the Senate to have Reagan's image replace that of Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, on the $10 bill.

Meanwhile, an effort is underway in the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), to put Reagan's face on the $20.

If either effort is successful, it would represent the first change of a person on U.S. currency since 1929, when the nation's paper money was standardized in size and general design. Although various anti-counterfeiting measures have altered the look of paper notes since then, the principals depicted have not changed.

The proposal has the support of Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which is headed by Grover Norquist, an influential conservative activist.

Democrats in Congress may not be ready to embrace the idea, though none has publicly declared opposition after Reagan's death Saturday.

A change would require majority votes in both houses of Congress.

In the Republican-dominated House, passage of a bill seems achievable, according to Washington sources. In the Senate, however, cloture rules would allow the Democratic minority to block any legislation.

Proponents of Reaganized money, however, are proposing an alternative to paper: coins. Unlike decisions about notes, coins can be changed at the discretion of the Treasury Secretary.

Over at the Treasury Department, however, lips are tightly pursed on the notion of honoring the 40th president on money.

"It's premature to get into any discussions about it, including discussions of process or timing," said Ann Womack Colton, a Treasury spokeswoman.


But GOP activist Norquist has said he has already had discussions with Snow and senior White House staff about the idea, and found no opposition.

If Reagan is not put on the $10, an alternate proposal is to have half the nation's dimes carry Reagan's face, with the other half continuing to honor Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The idea of removing Roosevelt from the dime altogether in favor of Reagan had enough opposition, even from Nancy Reagan, to be dropped, USA Today reported.

But the Gipper's fans think giving equal time to Reagan and FDR strikes an appropriate compromise.


One person opposed to removing Hamilton from the $10 bill is Ron Chernow, author of an acclaimed biography of the revolutionary war hero and founding father.

He told USA Today that he believed even Reagan would have objected to the snub of Hamilton.

"Hamilton was the prophet of the capitalist system that Ronald Reagan so admired," he was quoted as saying.

On Saturday, the "Great Communicator' died. Today, the airways are filled with tributes to Ronald Reagan. There were also tributes to Richard Nixon when he died.

Ronald Reagan was not my favorite president. Not even my favorite Republican president. But he also wasn't the worst Republican president. So, rest in peace, Ronnie, though I doubt that the neo-cons will allow you to do so. Let's hope they do not intend to preserve you like Lenin on the White House lawn.

It's amazing that I have so little feel for his presidency. Frankly, I never took him seriously. He was an actor reading his lines. His administration initiated Star Wars, one of our worst military disasters (Lebanon) and a truly scary controversy (Iran-Contra) with a list of characters who rivaled the Watergate burglars.

Here is how the NY Times calls it:

"Ronald Reagan, who died on Saturday after his long battle with Alzheimer's disease, projected an aura of optimism so radiant that it seemed almost a force of nature. Many people who disagreed with his ideology still liked him for his personality, and that was a source of frustration for his political opponents who knew how much the ideology mattered. Looking back now, we can trace some of the flaws of the current Washington mindset — the tax-cut-driven deficits, the slogan-driven foreign policy — to Mr. Reagan's example. But after more than a decade of political mean-spiritedness, we have to admit that collegiality and good manners are beginning to look pretty attractive.

"President Reagan was, of course, far more than some kind of chief executive turned national greeter. He will almost certainly be ranked among the most important presidents of the 20th century, forever linked with the triumph over Communism abroad and the restoration of faith in free markets at home.

"He profited from good timing and good luck, coming along when the country was tired of the dour pedantry of the Carter administration, wounded by the Iranian hostage crisis, frustrated by rising unemployment and unyielding inflation. Mr. Reagan's stubborn refusal to accept the permanence of Communism helped end the cold war. He was fortunate to have as his counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev, a Soviet leader ready to acknowledge his society's failings and interested in reducing international tensions.

"Mr. Reagan's decision to send marines to Lebanon was disastrous, however, and his invasion of Grenada pure melodrama. His most reckless episode involved the scheme to supply weapons to Iran as ransom for Americans who were being held hostage in Lebanon, and to use the proceeds to illegally finance contra insurgents in Nicaragua.

"Mr. Reagan showed little appetite for power, even less for the messy detail of politics. He joked about his work habits. "It's true hard work never killed anybody," he said in 1987. "But I figure, why take the chance?" His detachment from the day-to-day business of government was seductive for a nation that had tired of watching Mr. Carter micromanage the White House.

"The nation's 40th president was absent from the public eye for a long time before his death, but his complicated legacy endures. Although Mr. Reagan did reverse course and approve some tax increases in the face of mounting deficits — in stark contrast to President Bush nowadays — he was still responsible for turning the Republican Party away from its fiscally conservative roots. The flawed theory behind the Reagan tax cuts, that the ensuing jolt to the economy would bring in enough money to balance the budget, is still espoused by many of the Republican faithful, including President Bush.

"One of Mr. Reagan's advisers, David Stockman, later wrote that the real aim of fiscal policy was to create a "strategic deficit" that would slam the door and reduce the size of the federal government. Such thinking is far too prevalent in Washington to this day, and helps explain why plenty of conservatives don't seem all that bothered by the government's inability to balance its books.

"When Ronald Reagan was elected, the institution of the presidency and the nation itself seemed to be laboring under a large dark cloud. Into the middle of this malaise came a most improbable chief executive — a former baseball announcer, pitchman for General Electric, Hollywood bon vivant and two-term California governor with one uncomplicated message: There was no problem that could not be solved if Americans would only believe in themselves. At the time, it was something the nation needed to hear. Today, we live in an era defined by that particular kind of simplicity, which expresses itself in semi-detached leadership and a black-and-white view of the world. Gray is beginning to look a lot more attractive."

Bad news out of Baghdad:

From CNN: Five U.S. soldiers were killed today and five others wounded when an explosion ripped through a Humvee in eastern Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said. The deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq to 825 since the war began, including 605 in combat.

Good news from Italy:

The Pope reminded Bush that his war is not something Jesus would do, and also noted that the prison episodes are abominable. Meanwhile, estimated crowds of more than 500,000 protested in the streets, preventing Bush from another photo-op.

The Bushmobile wheels are a little wobbly.

George Tenet "resigned" as CIA Director, even though Bush said in his interview with Tim Russert that his job was secure.

Then there is Mr. Chalabi, the darlin' of the neocons. An Iranian agent?

Oh, yeah, and then there are the presidential lies. Also from the February 8, 2004 Russert interview transcript:

Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?

President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

But Tuesday in the Rose Garden, Bush distanced himself from Chalabi:

"My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him."

Whoa. Wait a minute. How about that trip to Irag to serve turkey to the troops?

From the text of Bush's remarks to reporters in Air Force One on his way back from the Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad (this on the official White House website):

"Q: Mr. President, we were told you got to see Mr. Chalabi today?

"THE PRESIDENT: I did see Chalabi. . . . I shook a lot of hands, saw a lot of kids, took a lot of pictures, served a lot of food and we moved on to see four members of the Governing Council -- the names are here. Talibani is the head of it right now, so he was the main spokesman. But Chalabi was there, as was Dr. Khuzaii, who had come to the Oval Office, I don't know if you all were in the pool that day, but she was there -- she was there with him, and one other fellow, and I had a good talk with them."

And if that is not enough, remember Freedom Fries? Remember Freedom Toast? Remember when the White House would not allow anything on the menu that carried the french name. (I wonder if George frenchkissed Laura, he called it freedomkissing?)

From today's New York Times:

PARIS, June 2 — In an effort to repair the rift with France over Iraq, President Bush is calling President Jacques Chirac a friend and saying that he was never angry with the French for opposing the American-led war and occupation in Iraq.

In an interview with the weekly magazine Paris Match that appears as its cover article on Thursday, Mr. Bush also said that not all of the Iraqis attacking American and other foreign troops in Iraq are terrorists.

"They don't like to be occupied," he said. "And neither would I. And neither would anybody."

Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, will be in France this weekend to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6 and dine at Élysée Palace with the Chiracs. His remarks in the Oval Office interview seem calculated to rewrite the tortured history of almost two years that has been marked by the most serious divide between the United States and Europe in decades.

I've got a few questions for Mr. Bush. Perhaps they will ask these during the debates (if they have them at all):

Dear Mr. Bush:
You advocated tax cuts in order to create jobs. In 2003 you and Vice President Cheney together earned more money in 2003 than you did in 2002. Due mainly to the tax cuts, the Republicans pushed through, you paid $129,276 less in federal taxes in 2003 than you did in 2002.

Here are my questions.

- How did putting an extra $129,276 in your pockets help U.S. employment?
- Did you use the windfall to hire anyone?
- Or maybe, it's as the White House Web site describes, tax cuts are to increase 'consumer spending . . . to boost the economic recovery and create jobs.' So what did you and Cheney buy with the money?
- Did you buy something that was made in the USA or China?

A Bush story from the Washington Post today:

"Bush will try to generate further momentum behind his Iraq policy today at the Air Force Academy commencement address, when he delivers the second of a weekly series of Iraq speeches until the transition. He will detail his view of how Iraq fits into the broader war on terrorism and why the stakes are high. He plans to argue that the war is a clash of ideologies between the civilized world and al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, and will describe similarities and differences between this war and World War II, U.S. officials said."

Hmmm. Does this mean we are on the eve of becoming the Greatest Generation II? Will Tom Brokow write a book about us?

A new Bushism . . . this from the Washington Post today:

"Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."

So spoke the president, pointing out Sen. Bill Frist's wife in Nashville on Thursday.

How did Al Gore lose to this idiot?