By George E. Condon Jr.
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE January 30, 2006 WASHINGTON – One year after
he delivered a speech meant to ignite a national movement to
overhaul Social Security, President Bush has a more modest agenda
for the tomorrow's State of the Union address.
This time, there will be little talk of crusades and more appeals to stay the course the president has charted domestically and internationally over the past five years. “This is more of a visionary and directional speech than it is a laundry list of proposals,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Friday, describing the address as “more thematic in nature” than what Bush has offered in his previous trips to Capitol Hill. Comment: Get out those
Signs sick bags, folks. You're probably goning to need lots of them
if Goerge is going to start talking "vision".
|
By Claudia Parsons
Reuters 30 Jan 06 NEW YORK - It's not hard to spot the
common theme in three New York theater offerings this season that
go by the titles "Bush is Bad," "Bush Wars: Musical Revenge" and
"Laughing Liberally."
The Web site for "Bush is Bad" features a grand piano falling on the head of President George W. Bush. "Bush Wars" promises what it calls a counterattack on "the disgraceful agenda of the Bush administration." It features a dance number with Bush and Osama bin Laden taking their mothers to lunch at the same restaurant, and another with New Orleans residents singing as they await help after Hurricane Katrina, in a dig at the Bush administration's slow response. Comment: "I used to get
booed (in Las Vegas) two or three years ago when I made a George
Bush joke. Now they laugh and nobody boos because things have
changed," David said.
Yeah, things have changed... and that's what worries us. The Neocons are just crazy enough to launch another attack on America to shut up the laughing... |
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, January 30, 2006 Emory University psychologist Drew Westen
put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain
scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about
various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency
and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed.
When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior. |
By GARY LANGER
ABC News Jan. 29, 2006 A weakened George W. Bush faces the
nation in his fifth State of the Union address beset by war
fatigue, persistent discontent on the economy and other domestic
issues, ethics concerns and rising interest in Democratic
alternatives in this midterm election year.
Bush's bottom-line job rating — 42 percent of Americans approve of his work, 56 percent disapprove — is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since Watergate hammered Richard Nixon. And Bush's is not a single-issue problem: More than half disapprove of his work in eight out of nine areas tested in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, from Iraq to immigration to health care. |
By PETE YOST
Associated Press Sun Jan 29, 4:10 PM ET WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's
former chief procurement official tipped off lobbyist Jack Abramoff
that the government was about to suspend the federal contracts of
an Abramoff client, newly filed court papers say.
David Safavian provided "sensitive and confidential information" about four subsidiaries of Tyco International to Abramoff regarding internal deliberations at the General Services Administration, say the court papers filed Friday in a criminal case against Safavian. |
NY Times
Editorial January 29, 2006 A bit over a week ago, President Bush and
his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral
justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that
has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar
mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation,
contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical
attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and
a couple of big, dangerous lies.
|
(Capitol Hill-AP) January 30, 2006
|
by Rob Kall
January 29, 2006 The poll produced a huge amount of
information. It's startling to realize, when you look at the
demographic data, how much more information is available in a poll
than just the simple percentages in response to the question.
More on that later. The poll came up with some powerful findings which this article will discuss. For starters 85% of Democrats are more likely to support a candidate who supports impeachment. 100% of the African Americans in the poll-- 109-- now believe that the Iraq war was unjustified. Zero percent of the African Americans polled support the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court. 80.3% oppose it and 19.7 percent are not sure. That helps explain the huge drop in support PA Senatorial candidate Bob Casey sees from African Americans when they learn his positions. How huge? Casey loses virtually 50% of his African American support (think Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) I was shocked until I checked the poll's issue question demographics and found how strongly the African American Community feels about those two issues. This gets even more interesting when we consider that Governor Rendell, Casey's biggest supporter, will be running against African American pro-football player Lynn Swann. Philly and Pittsburgh Blacks, who Rendell must retain, to win, will be choking on their vote for Casey, ready to find a way to punish the Democratic Insiders who betrayed them by fielding Casey. I think they'll abandon Rendell and support Swann in damaging numbers. Of course, if there's a solid progressive on the Democratic side, they will be much more likely to support the whole party line ticket. Tough dilemma for Rendell. The thing is, most poll reports just give the straight answer numbers-- Santorum vs. Casey... period. That's what the pollsters in Pennsylvania have been doing for months (shame on them for practicing polling that supports one candidate!) My goal was to work with a highly respected pollster who would help me get answers that would go deeper. My Goal for the People's Poll was to get straight answers and to find out how people really think if they don't get information filtered the way the right wing feeds it to the main stream media, and the way the main stream media pay pollsters to ask questions that set up answers which support the echo chamber. [Click HERE to read more] |
By Paul Craig Roberts
ICH 01/29/06 Two recent polls, a Los Angeles
Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate
why Bush is getting away with impeachable offenses. Half of the US
population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding
information.
Much of the problem is the media itself, which serves as a disinformation agency for the Bush administration. Fox "News" and right-wing talk radio are the worst, but with propagandistic outlets setting the standard for truth and patriotism, all of the media is affected to some degree. Comment:
Why does any American think that spying without a warrant has any more effect in reducing the threat of terrorism than spying with a warrant?The simple answer is what the author himself points out: the US media is tightly controlled and manipulated to back the Bush administration. But the problem is even deeper than that. Many Americans are arguing not over whether spying on the American population should be allowed at all, but whether it should be done with or without a warrant. No real debate occurs because the Bush gang uses the complicit media to feed the people the debate that deflects attention away from the administration's nefarious activities. Furthermore, many Americans simply don't want to think about what a government that spies on them actually means for their future and that of their children. It is the same problem that we see with the state of the US economy and many people's denial of even the possibility that the whole system could come crashing down - and hard. Wishful thinking is an "illness" that has been transferred by the psychopathic American leadership onto the people. While the people have been engaging in a nice distracting debate that avoids the core issue of a corrupt administration, that same administration has marched on the judicial system and effectively taken it over. Americans need desperately to comprehend that if Bush attacks Iran and Syria, as he intends, terrorism will explode, and American civil liberties will disappear into a thirty year war that will bankrupt the United States.An attack on only Iran would certainly have devastating consequences for the US. Iran is no Iraq. It is a far more capable country militarily than Iraq. The only feasible "solution" to the "problem" would involve weapons of mass destruction - and we all know where that will lead. |
By Troubled Neighbor
ICH 01/29/06 Please take notice that the
administrators of our union may be leading us into ruination.
Although the ranks of our employ are many, few are able to fulfill
the duties required to safeguard the trust left us by our
forbearers. In our carelessness, it seems, we have hired mostly
those skilled in the art of persuasion, a temperament unsuitable to
the promotion of our general welfare.
|
By IAN JAMES
The Associated Press Jan 29, 2006 CARACAS, Venezuela - Cindy Sheehan, the
peace activist who set up camp near President Bush's Texas ranch
last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen.
Dianne Feinstein to protest what she called the California
lawmaker's support for the war in Iraq.
"She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops," Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists. |
Matthew B. Stannard
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, January 29, 2006 Pike County, Ky. -- The photograph hit
the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a U.S. Marine
in Iraq, his face smeared with blood and dirt, a cigarette dangling
from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes.
It was an instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing the anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man." The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined. He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers. The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. |
By Josh Meyer
LA Times Staff Writer 01/29/06 WASHINGTON - Despite protests from other
countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to
kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues
an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.
Comment:
"However, there are a few countries where the president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government." [...]Don't you just love how casual US officials are when they talk about murdering a "terrorist suspect" along with a number of other civilians - including women and children? |
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer January 29, 2006 WASHINGTON - Hundreds of available
trucks, boats, planes and federal officers were unused in search
and rescue efforts immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit because
FEMA failed to give them missions, new documents show.
Additionally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency called off its search and rescue operations in Louisiana three days after the Aug. 29 storm because of security issues, according to an internal FEMA e-mail given to Senate investigators. |
By MICHELLE R. SMITH
Associated Press Fri Jan 27, 10:23 PM ET PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The city of New
Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if
people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to
damaged neighborhoods, according to an analysis by a Brown
University sociologist.
Professor John R. Logan, in findings released Thursday, determined that if the city's returning population was limited to neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, half of the white population would not return and 80 percent of the black population would not return. |
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