4. The Court anchored its knowingly fraudulent decision on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But wait. Since the electors in the fifty states weren't scheduled to meet and vote until December 18, and the Court's ruling was on December 12, if the Court was really serious about its decision that the various standards in the counties to determine the voter's intent violated the equal protection clause, why not, as Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer each noted in separate dissents, simply remand the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to establish a uniform, statewide standard and continue the recount until December 18? The shameless and shameful felonious five had an answer, which, in a sense, went to the heart of their decision even more than the bogus equal protection argument. The unsigned and anonymously written per curiam opinion noted that under Title 3 of the United States Code, Section 5 (3 USC § 5), any controversy or contest to determine the selection of electors should be resolved "six days prior to the meeting of the Electoral College," that is, December 12, and inasmuch as the Court issued its ruling at 10 pm on December 12, with just two hours remaining in the day, the Court said, "That date [December 12] is upon us," and hence there obviously was no time left to set uniform standards and continue the recount. But there are a multiplicity of problems with the Court's oh-so-convenient escape hatch. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, University of Utah law professor Michael McConnell, a legal conservative, pointed out that the December 12 "deadline" is only a deadline "for receiving 'safe harbor' protection for the state's electors" (i.e., if a state certifies its electors by that date, Congress can't question them), not a federal deadline that must be met. New York University law professor Larry Kramer observed that if a state does not make that deadline, "nothing happens. The counting could continue."
©2001 Vincent Bugliosi

Bush Gives Final Thumbs-Down To Kyoto Treaty
By Brian Williams

GOTHENBURG, Sweden (Reuters) - President Bush gave his final thumbs-down Thursday to the Kyoto climate treaty, ignoring entreaties by European leaders to throw America's weight behind the landmark agreement.

Despite efforts by Bush and EU leaders to portray it as a simple case of agreeing to disagree, the decision threw a heavy cloud over Bush's first summit with the European Union.

Bush described the environment talks in the Swedish city of Gothenburg as a "constructive discussion" that agreed to create new channels of communication.

"We don't agree on Kyoto but do agree that climate change is a serious issue and that we must work together," Bush said.

"We must be flexible in our solution."

But for many environmental lobbyists, U.S. refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty on limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" thought to cause global warming had symbolized the direction of policy under Bush, a former Texas governor with long-standing connections in the oil industry.

There were immediate denunciations from environmentalists.

"This is the first international environment agreement that the U.S. has walked away from and a very profound domino to fall," Greenpeace said in a statement.

In Gothenburg, security authorities worried it could further inflame thousands of protestors, many of whom traveled to Sweden to voice their support for the climate change treaty.

Hailed by the world when it was signed in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto in 1997 as the symbol of a cleaner and less polluted world, the treaty will go ahead -- but without the involvement of the United States, which French President Jacques Chirac has called the world's biggest polluter.

TREATY "UNFAIR" TO U.S.

Four years ago, Al Gore, the former vice-president whom Bush beat to the presidency last year, made a crisis dash to Kyoto to help save the marathon negotiations on the treaty from collapse.

But Congress has since refused to ratify the pact.

Bush has complained repeatedly that it would be harmful to the U.S. economy to scale back on burning fuel and that it does not sufficiently oblige developing countries like China and India to participate in addressing global warming.

In what critics regarded as a bid to paper over failure to agree on Kyoto, a joint communiqué on the EU-U.S. summit said there would be stepped up cooperation on climate-related science and research, a way forward favored by the United States.

"We disagree on the Kyoto Protocol and its ratification but we are determined to work together in all relevant fora to address climate change," the communiqué said.

"Our efforts must ultimately result in an outcome that protects the environment and ensures economic growth compatible with our shared objective of sustainable development for present and future generations." Summing up the results of the talks, the host, Swedish Prime Minister Persson, said the EU would stick with the Kyoto protocol even though the United States had abandoned it.

"We agreed to disagree on substance," Persson told a news conference also attended by Bush.

"Kyoto is not meaningless without the United States, because it is just the first step. We have to go ahead, beyond Kyoto. If we now begin to hesitate about the Kyoto protocol, we will start completely at the beginning again and again," Persson said.

"We are as disappointed as the environmentalists about the U.S. refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol."

ELECTORAL RISKS?

Persson also indirectly warned Bush of electoral risks for politicians who turn their backs on improving the environment.

"I trust him (Bush) because every politician who will not take climate change seriously will be punished by the electorate in the next election," Persson said.

Kate Hampton, international climate change coordinator for the environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, said:

"President Bush's decision to ignore scientific warnings and world opinion on global climate change is a total disgrace.

"The rest of the world will pay the price for the United States' selfish actions. And the millions of people around the globe who will suffer the consequences of an increasingly unstable climate will have good cause to curse the president."
©2001 Brian Williams

But as for seeing that meanness in coverage of President Bush, Mr. Tietz said, "Honestly, I haven't noticed it one way or another."
©2001 Blane Harden

GOP's Faith-Based Initiative Off To A Rocky Start
By Susan Crabtree

Members of Congress, religious leaders, civil rights activists and constitutional scholars may have spent last week clashing over President Bush's faith-based initiative, but trouble has been looming on the horizon for months.

In late April hundreds of religious leaders and clergy members were scheduled to descend on Capitol Hill for the first-ever House-Senate GOP faith-based Leadership Summit. They were ready to rally around the President's plan to help religious organizations obtain more federal grants and benefits from tax deductions.

However, only hours before the summit was set to begin, a representative of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives told House GOP organizers that the press conference was "too partisan" and threatened to sit out the event, according to GOP leadership aides and administration officials.

Staffers in the office of House GOP Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (Okla.) and other House leaders were flummoxed by the White House complaint. The sole reason for holding the summit was to drum up support for the President's initiative in order to lay a solid foundation for the legislation.

After several panicked phone calls, GOP aides persuaded White House faith-based czar John DiIulio, a Democrat, to show up for the event. But insiders say the flap was an inauspicious beginning to what they knew would be an arduous, uphill battle to get the legislation passed and signed into law this year.

"There's nobody in that entire office that has Hill experience," one GOP aide said. "It has definitely not been a smooth process."

When asked about the White House threats to dodge the event, Watts said he was unaware of them, but stressed that he made every effort to encourage Democratic politicians to attend. He invited Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), co-sponsors of the bills in the Senate and House, but they declined.

Watts also noted that Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) joined the festivities and even spoke in favor of the faith-based initiative at a luncheon in the Library of Congress that day.

Furthermore, he was pleased with the Democratic turnout."Eighty percent of the people at the conference were Democrats," Watts said of the hundreds of religious leaders who showed up for the event, many of them from inner-city churches. "I can only talk to what I can control. In the end we were going to do the summit regardless of whom participated. It was a great success, and hopefully now we can move on and get the legislation passed by the end of the year."

According to a knowledgeable White House official, the President remains deeply committed to the initiative, but wants to ensure that it is presented in an upbeat, bipartisan way.

"This is a positive, hopeful agenda that fortunately enjoys broad, bipartisan support," the official said. "Wherever possible, it should be presented in the most inclusive fashion, because it is an agenda that truly transcends politics."

Last week Republicans in both chambers were making every effort to revitalize the faith-based initiative following Bush's recent speech at the University of Notre Dame, in which he raised the issue that has thus far taken a backseat to tax cuts and education legislation.

Watts has started holding listening sessions on the topic and has worked behind the scenes with the White House and Hall to draft legislation and reach out to other Democrats interested in the bill. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), the lead sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, during which he disputed Democratic claims that the bill was unconstitutional and would jeopardize the division between church and state.

In the process, however, complaints have surfaced about the Faith-Based Office's failure to return House and Senate staffers' phone calls. There has also been grumbling about DiIulio's Democratic background and a perceived anti-evangelical bias.

For example, Republicans have had to mend fences with conservative religious organizations who were offended by DiIulio's comments at an evangelical meeting earlier this year, which conservative church leaders interpreted as making light of Protestant churches' commitment to the poor.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Wednesday, the passion that the issue generates was on display as various religious and civil rights groups squeezed into the room and opponents trumpeted the devastating effects the charitable-choice component of the bill would have on civil rights and religious institutions.

Bush's supporters defended the bill against claims that it would promote federally funded proselytizing and allow discriminatory hiring practices by faith-based organizations that accept government funds.

During a break in the hearing, Santorum called the discrimination argument "the greatest red herring that is in this debate."

"This is not an issue," he insisted. "To suggest that these churches are going to discriminate against people is just not based in any kind of fact."

The Senator, however, was more hesitant about the GOP's ability to move the bill now that Democrats control the Senate, saying only that GOP leaders retain the right to add amendments whenever they see fit.

Democrats made their presence felt during the hearing, the first one since Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) took hold of the Senate leadership reigns.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who had taken the helm at the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning, indicated that he was only holding the hearing to keep a commitment to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who had scheduled the hearing before the transfer of power. Leahy hinted that he might pull the plug on any future hearings on the issue.

"If my willingness to proceed with this previously scheduled hearing is used against us or against the efforts of the Majority Leader to reorganize the Senate and its committees without complication and delay, I will have learned that no good deed will go unpunished by the Republican opposition, and I will not make that mistake again," Leahy warned.

The Democratic Senate takeover is already leaving an imprint on the faith-based legislation. The House bill contains a component making it easier for those who give small donations to religious organizations to deduct them from their taxes, as well as a charitable-choice provision that would expand the number of federal grants available to faith-based groups. The Senate version, sponsored by Santorum and Lieberman, only contains the tax-deduction language.

Santorum has said he plans to introduce the so-called charitable-choice bill separately later this year, but Lieberman hasn't thrown his support behind it.

"We're taking a wait-and-see approach," Lieberman spokesman Dan Gerstein said of the charitable-choice bill. "There are some serious problems with the House version. It's pretty much a non-starter in the Senate."

Senate Democrats are also complaining that Bush has failed to outline exactly what he wants in the faith-based bill, and that has left an opening for the House to claim that it's producing the bill with the administration's seal of approval.

"We've had conversations with DiIulio, and he is not wedded to the House bill," Gerstein said. "The House bill is being perceived as the President's bill, and it's not."

Nonetheless, House lawmakers involved in drafting the legislation say DiIulio has not given them any indication that he believes they are on the wrong track.

Hall is working with Watts on the House version of the bill and has thrown his full support behind the charitable-choice provisions.

"The Senate is taking the easy route," Hall said. "The charitable-choice provision is what is really going to help these organizations and is going to make a difference in the lives of the poor."

A White House official denied that the administration has decided to back the Senate version in the wake of the takeover. The aide emphasized that the President remains 100 percent devoted to the charitable-choice provisions.

"There is zero retreat, zero equivocation, zero vacillation and zero postponement," the aide said.

Watts said he had not kept track of all the "inside mumbling and grumbling" and called DiIulio a "knowledgeable asset" on whom he is relying for navigation on the issue.

He further asserted that Lieberman has supported efforts to increase charitable-choice options in the past and does not understand why the centrist Democrat would not support them now.

Despite all the months of negotiations that lay ahead, Watts pledged to continue to push the comprehensive bill in the House and hopes to get it passed by late fall.

"We're going to be criticized by the right and the left on this," he said. "But if those people out there in the trenches, be it Protestants, Catholics or Jews, are out there trying to help people from welfare to work, to get off drugs and clothe the needy, we should do whatever we can to help them."
©2001 Susan Crabtree

Quotable Quote

PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM : 24 WORDS
10 COMMANDMENTS : 179 WORDS
GETTYSBURG ADDRESS : 286 WORDS
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDECE : 1300 WORDS
FEDERAL REGULATION ON THE SALE OF CABBAGE : 26,911 WORDS
Bruce Stephen Holms

"We really want to be free to look at all the possibilities," the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said yesterday. "And the ABM treaty has so many constraints in it, because it was intended to prevent you from bringing along defensive systems, that almost anything you do, in a sense, is not within the treaty. Now, there may be some minimal things that can be done, but that's not the approach that we want to take."
©2001 Steven Mufson

Asked during the PBS interview if it would make a difference to him that there is a Republican in the White House, Rehnquist did not answer directly but did concede that there had "traditionally" been a "slight preference" by justices to retire during administrations of the party that appointed them.
©2001 Charles Lane and Amy Goldstein

Let The Bush Administration Ethics Hearings Begin
By Mike Allen

Democratic officials said yesterday that they plan to mount a sustained effort to attack the ethics of financial dealings by leading Bush administration officials, and are considering using the party's new majority in the Senate to call hearings.

Democrats said they had resisted such a strategy for the past five months because of polls indicating voters are turned off by political bickering, even though many party activists have been eager to turn the tables on the Bush administration following years of Republican investigations of the Clinton White House.

But Democratic Party officials said they have been emboldened by recent disclosures about the finances of some members of the new administration, and many hope they can use the cases to portray the Bush White House as beholden to special interests.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) launched the effort yesterday by requesting a congressional hearing into the propriety of a meeting by Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, with the chief executive of Intel Corp. at a time when Rove owned more than $100,000 in stock in the company.

"This is exactly the type of situation that you would have investigated had it occurred in the Clinton administration," Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to the chairman, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).

Burton did not immediately say whether he would hold a hearing.

Democrats say they also are focusing on the failure of Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill to complete the sale of his $100 million in stock and options in Alcoa Inc., of which he was chairman before he joined the administration. O'Neill promised to sell his holdings during a television interview on March 25.

Dan Bartlett, a deputy assistant to President Bush, said the administration hopes Democrats will not engage in "politically motivated fishing expeditions."

"We understand that there have been past, partisan battles over investigations, but these were battles and investigations this president and this administration were not involved in -- this president was off in Texas being governor," Bartlett said. "We understand that the temptation to retaliate may be there, but we would urge members from both parties to try to keep what was in the past, in the past."

During the swearing-in of his White House aides on his first business day in office, President Bush said he expected every member of his administration to behave legally and ethically. Then he added, "This means avoiding even the appearance of problems."

Now, Democrats say they hope to use those words against him. After news accounts about Rove's March 12 meeting with Intel chief executive Craig R. Barrett and two Intel lobbyists appeared this week, the Democratic National Committee scheduled conference calls with talk radio hosts and state party officials in an effort to draw attention to the matter.

White House officials said Rove had been waiting for months for clearance from ethics lawyers to sell his individual stocks, and has since done so. The officials said Rove talked to the Intel executives about ways the company could support the president's policies and referred them elsewhere when they began to discuss a merger in the semiconductor industry.

On the O'Neill matter, Michele A. Davis, a Treasury spokeswoman, said the treasury secretary began divesting his Alcoa stock in April and will sell all of it by next Friday. "It's a very large amount of stock to sell, so they're doing it in pieces," Davis said. "You want to be careful about volume on any given day."

For now, the top feature on the Democratic Party's Web site is the "O'Neill/Alcoa Stock Tracker," which purports to graph the soaring value of the treasury secretary's holdings and shows his photo in the middle of a big bag of money.

Several Democratic officials said they recognize the possibility of causing a public backlash. Doug Schoen, who polled for President Bill Clinton, said the party should be cautious and would be better off focusing on issues such as health care.

"That meeting undeniably had the appearance of a conflict of interest," Schoen said. "At the same time, I don't think there's been any showing that there was an impropriety. For most voters, who owns what stock is a pretty abstract question, absent some showing of malfeasance."

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) expressed concern about going too far. "We've had enough, in my view, of the kind of ongoing, never-ending investigation that went on in the Clinton administration," he told radio reporters yesterday.

Nevertheless, several Democratic officials said the party is working on ways to keep attention on administration ethics over the next weeks and months.

For instance, officials said energy hearings being held by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), the new chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, could include an examination of whether Rove's former stake of more than $100,000 in Enron Corp., a Houston energy conglomerate, could have affected the administration's energy policy. White House officials said Rove was not involved in developing the energy policy, although he helped determine how it would be marketed.

A Democratic official maintained that the "sheer breadth and width of Karl Rove's stock holdings make this a target-rich opportunity for us."

"Couple that with the fact that his hand is in everything Bush does," the official said. "If the Rove stuff dies down, O'Neill will kick up."

Jim Jordan, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the cases "underscore the biggest weakness of this administration, which is that it is too closely tied to special interests."

"This gives the lie to the administration's contention that this is a different kind of government, or more ethical and mature," Jordan said. "In all the Clinton investigations, there was no suggestion that people were acting to personally enrich themselves. This is a different kind of scandal."

Democrats maintain that Rove put himself in an untenable position simply by scheduling the meeting with Intel and said they plan to raise questions about his extensive holdings until June 7 of stocks that could have been affected by administration policies on defense, energy and health care.

A financial disclosure form released by the White House on June 1 showed Rove owned holdings worth more than $100,000 each of Boeing Co., one of the nation's three largest defense contractors; General Electric Co., a supplier for nuclear and fossil fuel power generators, among myriad other products; and Pfizer Inc., a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

A White House official said Rove offered to sell his individual stocks before the inauguration, but the Office of Government Ethics directed him not to buy or sell anything. The official said Rove made more than a dozen requests to ethics lawyers and finally was told that one of his options for his holdings was to sell his stocks.

Lawyers advised Rove to apply to the Office of Government Ethics for a certificate of divestiture, which allows deferral of capital gains taxes on sales that are made to avoid conflicts. The official said Rove was given his certificate on June 6 and sold his stocks June 7. Another official said Rove's holdings would have been worth much more if he had been able to sell them when he first asked to.

"This is a situation where bureaucracy got the best of the process," said Bartlett, the White House official. "But in the meantime, Karl was diligent in being careful to not put himself in a position of conflict of interest."
©2001 Mike Allen

Right Wing Revisionists Still Peddling Pearl Harbor Lies
By Judith Greer

December 7, 1941 was "a date that will live in infamy," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared before Congress after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but a recent book (new in paperback) wants us believe that it was also a red-letter day for political depravity.

Robert B. Stinnett claims in "Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor" that Roosevelt not only consciously provoked the Japanese attack, but that he knew ahead of time when and where it would occur. (Stinnett's previous adventure in fictional non-fiction was a brown-nosed view of the World War II career of his naval boss, George Bush the elder.) In "Day of Deceit" he claims that FDR embarked on a secret, eight-point plan that was specifically designed to force the Japanese to attack, deliberately withheld crucial intelligence to make sure the Hawaiian forces would be sitting ducks, and directed US vessels to stay out of the way of the approaching Japanese carriers. There's more, of course, all of it adding up to quite a catalog of evil.

Stinnett purports to be in possession of new, recently declassified documents to support his monstrous charges (apparently a few scattered clues escaped Roosevelt's post-war cleansing). Yet, despite "Day of Deceit's" surface appearance of being a well-researched investigation of the issue, a careful reader quickly sees that it amounts to little more than a pile of buffalo chips.

The idea that Roosevelt gleefully set up the thousands of deaths at Pearl Harbor for his own political purposes is not a new one, and given FDR's status as a towering icon for the left, the right has made a thriving cottage industry out of tarnishing his legacy, all the way from the1940s to the present. Strom Thurmond (R-SC), for example, is one of the many conservatives who can't let the "FDR Knew" fantasy go, and he instigated the tenth official investigation of Pearl Harbor in 1995. The late unlamented Republican-led Congress recently passed a resolution absolving the military commanders in the field, Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, of any culpability whatsoever for the unpreparedness of the Pearl Harbor forces, in spite of the fact that a "war warning" was issued to them more than a week before.

It's true that some of the crucial disconnects that contributed to the Pearl Harbor disaster are traceable to the Roosevelt administration. But there is nothing sinister in any of the cascade of miscalculation, miscommunication, redundancies and lacunae that contributed to the debacle. It was, in effect, a kind of "Titanic" situation, a collapsing convergence of arrogance, stupidity and bad luck (i.e., business as usual) that added up to a "cumulative" catastrophe, which still might not have happened—r not have been so bad—f even one of the situational dominoes had remained upright.

But Stinnett's book tries to make a dark and intentional conspiracy of this sad sequence of events, and to do so he resorts to a series of rhetorical machinations and deception that puts all of Roosevelt's sometimes-less-than-pristine political maneuvering to shame.

For me, Stinnett's integrity bucket began to smell in the breathless first chapter, where he tells the (hearsay) tale of a huge, mysterious scoop Edward R. Murrow supposedly got during a private conversation with Roosevelt the night after Pearl Harbor, a fantastic news story that the famous broadcaster never revealed to the public.

Suitably primed by this picture of an icon of journalistic integrity shaken to his noble core by an encounter with FDR, we are then offered the first of Stinnett's "explosive" documents. A memo entitled "Estimate of the Situation in the Pacific and Recommendations for Action by the United States" was drawn up on October 7, 1940 by Lieutenant Commander (04, the equivalent of an Army Major) Arthur McCollum, the Far East expert in the Office of Naval Intelligence. It was, according to its routing list, sent to two people, and one of them was Captain Walter Anderson, the director of ONI, who was a presidential advisor with direct access to FDR.

The first thing I noticed when I turned to the photostat of the memo reproduced in the book was that it was originally stamped "CONFIDENTIAL." This is the lowest level of classification, a protected but relatively insignificant category, well below SECRET and TOP SECRET in its importance to national security. The classification seems incongruously lax for a document that Stinnett claims is advocating a "shocking" and "startling" new foreign policy, an eight-point "action plan" of deliberate provocations designed to draw Japan into open warfare.

In any case, there is nothing particularly "shocking" about it. McCollum laid out the strategic situation of late 1940: Britain, which was then suffering the terrors of the Blitz, was standing alone against the Axis in Europe. If she collapsed, her naval assets would fall into German hands, and the Atlantic threat against the United States would be instantly magnified. Meanwhile, a land attack by Germany against the Suez Canal, combined with a Japanese attack on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and the British colony at Singapore, would create a European supply line for Japan, and a sea route for raw materials to reach Germany from the east. (None of this analysis could have been news to FDR.)

Given this reality, McCollum noted in pie-in-the-sky fashion that "prompt aggressive naval action against Japan" would be the ideal way to ensure that the oil, rubber, metals and other riches of the Far East didn't fall into Axis hands, and that Japan did not gain more material strength to threaten us from the Pacific. However, McCollum acknowledged, a quick pre-emptive strike on Japan was out of the question because of the climate of anti-war opinion in the United States—nd of course there was always the chance that diplomacy could slow them down or, as he put it, "change their attitude."

Still, McCollum said, there were things the U.S. could do right away to enhance military readiness in the Pacific, discourage Japanese adventurism, and buy time for the British. These included making deals with the British and Dutch for American use of some of their facilities, giving "all possible" aid to Chiang-Kai-Shek (who was usefully holding down the Japanese in China), deploying submarines and cruisers to the Pacific, stationing most of our naval assets forward at Hawaii, and encouraging the Dutch (whose territory was under Nazi occupation in Europe) not to grant Japanese demands for "undue economic concessions" in the East Indies. Finally, McCollum said, we could completely embargo all our own trade with Japan, to deny them the means to move on the British and the Dutch colonies. He closed with a paragraph that seems to have galvanized Stinnett: "If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war."

The key phrase, of course, is "so much the better." It means, contrary to Stinnett's imaginative reading, that the preceding list of action suggestions was not designed primarily to incite Japan into hostilities, but that if it ultimately had that effect, that could be a bonus. The memo is also endorsed by the other addressee, Captain Dudley Knox, a military strategist and head of the ONI library, who writes, "We ought to make certain that [Britain] at least gets a stalemate. . . . We should not precipitate anything in the Orient that would hamper our ability to do this."

This memorandum is a pathetically thin reed to hang a conspiracy on, but Stinnett tries. Oh, how he tries. A couple of examples of the uses he makes of this memo will give you a feel for his egregious habits of argument.

Stinnett writes, "Although the proposal was addressed to Anderson, no specific record has been found by the author indicating whether he or Roosevelt actually ever saw it." This didn't surprise me. In my own experience as a staff officer preparing reports and memos for higher-ups, it was not unusual to have them derailed at some point in the chain of command, especially if their glacial routing had caused them to be "O.B. E.'d," Overcome By Events, before they reached their destination.

"However," Stinnett goes on, "a series of secret presidential routing logs plus collateral intelligence information in Navy files offer conclusive evidence that they did see it." I eagerly turned to the footnote to find out about these "secret logs" that offered the "conclusive evidence" that both Anderson and Roosevelt saw McCollum's memo. Unfortunately, the footnote makes no reference at all to any such sources. Instead it launches into a brief statement of the "proof" that Stinnett develops in the text itself, which is that Roosevelt did (or—ops!—ad already initiated) six out of eight of the "provocative" things on McCollum's list. So, Stinnett says triumphantly, obviously Roosevelt not only saw the memo, but immediately took its advice!

Does it get any more lame than this? Oh yes. A paragraph or two later (we are only on page 9 here, folks), Stinnett claims that McCollum's "Action D" was fulfilled by Roosevelt's endorsement five months later of "pop up" cruises near the Japanese islands, designed to "keep the Japs guessing." Now this could certainly be considered provocative behavior (although it could also be meant to induce hesitation), but the problem for Stinnett's little evidentiary cauldron is that McCollum's Action D advocates nothing of the kind. Action D reads, "Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines or Singapore." I have to conclude that Stinnett is either being dishonest (say it ain't so!), or he is so intellectually limited that he doesn't know the difference between ships ("cruisers") and what ships do ("cruises").

This is no isolated example. The book is riddled with similar misdirections, misstatements and wormy insinuations, but in most cases they are so confidently stated that they might easily be missed by an uncritical reader.

Stinnett's evasive maneuvering becomes most problematic when he ventures into the murky world of signals intelligence, an area where he can count on the ignorance of most of his audience. The largest part of Stinnett's "case" against FDR rests heavily on two propositions: that we had broken the main Japanese operational code before the attack, and that the Japanese did not keep radio silence on their way to Hawaii, as they themselves have always maintained they did.

The idea here is that Roosevelt was not only reading material culled from diplomatic traffic (we HAD broken the "Purple" consular code, and the information from it was designated "MAGIC"), but that he had access to Japanese naval communications as well. Combined with their supposed chattering over the airwaves on the way to Pearl Harbor, Stinnett says, it's obvious that FDR knew they were coming and where they were headed, and that means he deliberately didn't tell his poor sacrificial lambs in Hawaii.

The "5-Num" code that Stinnett refers to—ith a great pretense of authority—as known as "AN" to cryptographers who worked feverishly on it from the time it first appeared in June 1939, and it was later designated JN-25. (Stinnett regularly remarks, irrelevantly, that several of his sources "erroneously" call the "5-Num" code JN-25. Stinnett's "5-Num" and JN-25 are one and the same code.)

In an article for the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Stephen Budiansky, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, told how he found evidence that rebuts Stinnett's contentions while researching his own book, "Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II." [October 2000, out in paperback this fall.]

Budiansky discovered a cache of documents in March of 1999 that had been declassified some years ago but not yet processed by the National Archives staff. The papers turned out to be month-by-month, date-stamped reports from 1940 and 1941 on the progress of the Navy codebreakers. The reports showed, Budiansky wrote, that the first JN-25 code (designated "Able") WAS agonizingly cracked in the fall of 1940 with help from new IBM card-sorting machines (and the laziness of some Japanese cryptographers who kept using code additives from the first few pages of their code book).

But we had access to the operational code for only a couple of months. The Japanese switched to a new version of the code in December 1940 ("Baker"—tinnett ignorantly claims at one point that there was no such thing as a JN-25-B code), a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the codebreakers once again lost all ability to read the radio traffic. Starting over at square one, and with the aid of a super-secret partnership with British codebreakers in Singapore, the Allies managed to recover about 10 per cent of the code groups and additives by December 1, 1941, but most of what they could read by then wasn't words but numbers.

Obviously unaware of these facts, Stinnett jubilantly reproduces a March 1941 message from Admiral Thomas Hart, Commander-in-Chief of the US Asiatic Fleet, which Stinnett claims proves that "solutions" to the 5-Num (JN-25) code were being shared with the British. Clearly, however, what is being shared is only preliminary data and some bits and pieces recovered from an accumulation of old radio traffic in earlier additive groups. The Admiral, encouraged by the prospect of British help, directs his code-breakers at Cavite (Corregidor) to work exclusively on JN-25. The only thing this document proves—ther than Stinnett's significant deficiencies in the logic department—s that the Japanese naval code was not definitively solved in 1940.

Stinnett's slimy approach to the truth continues in other areas of his discussion of signals intelligence. He routinely implies, for example, that intelligence reports based on radio traffic analysis are proof that the radio messages themselves were being read. Traffic analysis is a type of intelligence that is culled from call signs (the radio "addresses" of various installations, commanders and ships), the sound signatures of specific radio sets, the direction of the signals and the volume of the radio traffic, which are compiled and analyzed to (more or less accurately) tell the interceptors who is talking to who, how much, and to a certain extent from where—ut the one thing it can't tell is what they're saying.

The idea that radio silence was not being enforced by the fleet approaching Hawaii, and that the Japanese were heard in the North Pacific at the time, is another crucial factor for Stinnett's argument. He leans hard on the idea that bearings taken on the supposed Japanese communications by different radio direction finders around the Pacific showed exactly where the signals originated, and therefore their position and movement was known.

The problem is that a bearing from a single RDF cannot tell you a location. It only indicates the direction of the signal from your position. It takes two simultaneous bearings from two widely spaced receivers to get a "fix." Certainly if you can coordinate your intercept bearings in real time, or if they can be assembled later by time, frequency and direction, you can pinpoint the source, but the procedures for doing this in the Pacific in 1941 were fragmentary and unreliable.

Stinnett reproduces a handwritten record of a dispatch from radio direction finders at Corregidor to the TESTM group, who were attempting to consolidate bearing information from different stations into useful intelligence. Stinnett says that the dispatch proves that call sign 8 YU NA (which he associates with the main carrier of the Hawaii-bound fleet) was broadcasting on December 3 somewhere on a bearing of 30° from Corregidor. This would indicate, however, that 8 YU NA was barely out of Japanese waters at 1200 hours on 3 December. If that was indeed the case, the entire carrier task force would have had to make a preposterous speed of around 32 knots—n disgusting weather—o reach the launch site four days later, on the morning of December 7.

This dispatch also tells us two more things. It is dated December 5 and gives bearings on traffic from 3 and 4 December. This indicates that the information that TESTM was obtaining from such dispatches was generally more than a day old. It also indicates that no traffic at all was being intercepted at that time from the area of the sea at about 5055° from Corregidor, which is where the Japanese fleet really was on those dates.

But in fact, this dispatch seems to be less a regular report on signal bearings than a part of the frantic effort to reconstruct the Japanese system of call signs after they suddenly changed on December 1. The text of a series of traffic analysis reports presented to the Clausen Investigation clearly shows how much trouble the interceptors were having in trying to match broadcasts with ships, because of the change in call signs. If 8 YU NA was the main carrier's call sign before December 1, as Stinnett claims in an earlier discussion of the assembly of the fleet, it couldn't have still been 8 YU NA on December 3.

But Stinnett really takes the cake in his caption to this dispatch: "This [call sign] information could only be generated from radio broadcasts in the 5-Num code, additive version 7." He seems to forget what he himself told us earlier in the book, when he was strutting around pretending to be an expert in these matters: the Japanese navy's call signs were not in the 5-Num code. Sheesh.

One of Stinnett's most contemptible scams comes during his extremely confused and porous discussion of whether the Japanese maintained radio silence during the approach to Hawaii. He is such an Intrepid Investigator, you see, that he alone, of all the previous researchers, was able to discover 129 radio intercept reports that indicate that the Japanese didn't maintain radio silence on the way to Pearl Harbor. (None of them are reproduced in the book.) Stinnett then brazenly states that these radio transmissions came from the three weeks prior to December 7. In other words, all of them could have been intercepted before the fleet ever left Japanese waters, and before radio silence was imposed. It was suddenly clear why Sinnett didn't offer us a look at any of them.

More outrageous yet is what Stinnett calls the "Vacant Sea Order," which he claims was an official order to clear the North Pacific of all American vessels to enable the undetected passage of the Japanese fleet. The term "Vacant Sea" might have originated with Brigadier General Sherman Miles's testimony before the Clarke investigation, where he notes that Pacific shipping tended to move in two general arcs, north and south, leaving a great deal of the ocean vacant much of the time.

Stinnett says flatly that "Navy officials declared the North Pacific Ocean a 'Vacant Sea' and ordered all US and allied shipping out of the waters." To back up this extraordinary contention he quotes a couple of sentences of Admiral Richard Kelly Turner's testimony before Congress in 1945: "We were prepared to divert traffic when we believed that war was imminent," Turner said. "We sent the traffic down via Torres Strait, so that the track of the Japanese task force would be clear of any traffic." In a footnote, Stinnett sounds surprised that neither Congress nor the press recognized the significance of this "startling admission."

A look at a map to locate the Torres Strait above the northernmost tip of Australia might have given him a clue. In consonance with his previous sleights of hand, Stinnett is quoting this material completely out of context. Turner was talking about shipping on the southern route, which could have encountered the Japanese force that everyone expected to move toward the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies in the event of war (which of course it did). The last place you'd want to be when the Japanese sailed for Singapore was in the Strait of Malacca. Sending southern shipping via Torres was a way of keeping it out of harm's way.

Stinnett footnotes this discussion with the charge that Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll was the "author" of the "Vacant Sea Order," and then provides us with a very pretty National Archives locator for it . . . but he doesn't reproduce the order itself or its text in the book (even as he does show us page after page of other irrelevant but very "important"-looking documents). Given Stinnett's propensity for pretzeling his evidence, forgive me if I doubt that that Ingersoll's so-called "Vacant Sea Order" is anything of the kind.

I've barely scratched the surface of Stinnett's opus here. In fact, it would be easy to write my own book tracking down all his outrages against the rules of evidence and common sense. But in the last analysis most of his little tricks are simply laughable.

What isn't so funny is is Stinnett's bald dishonesty about his own motives, starting with a "forgiving" prologue about how he was angry at first about what he discovered, but that he came to "understand" why Roosevelt felt forced into deliberately destroying a good proportion of his own Pacific Fleet to just to sway public opinion. This is a classic propaganda tactic, of course, the "more in sorrow than in anger" gambit, intended to make you believe that Stinnett is only interested in The Truth. This eyewash would have gone over a great deal better, though, if it hadn't been followed by so much unblushing falsity and personal innuendo.

One example of his routine—nd completely irrelevant—udslinging is the arty juxtaposition of the details of the November 25/26 departure of the Japanese fleet with a wink-wink account of the comfortable evening FDR spent in the company of Princess Martha of Norway, whose country had been overrun by Hitler the year before. "On many occasions in 1941, Princess Martha turned up at the White House on the eve of momentous world events," Stinnett writes portentously, "most often when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was out of town." I'm sure Stinnett thought he was being very subtle and clever here. But those who don't know that Princess Martha was rumored to be having an affair with the President will probably scratch their heads over Stinnett's highlighting of yet another trivial event.

Perhaps Stinnett's most overt and ugly besmirching is of Captain Walter Anderson, who was named Commander Battleships at Pearl Harbor after his stint at the head of the ONI (prestigious operational commands are often given to officers who have endured the purgatory of "sailing a desk" in demanding staff positions). Stinnett reminds us that Anderson was an addressee on the supposedly notorious McCollum Memorandum, and then tries to make us believe that the only reason he was sent out to Hawaii afterward ("he was not a distinguished sailor") was to ensure the Japanese sank all the battleships under his own command!

Anderson was FDR's "intelligence gatekeeper," Stinnett says, because J. Edgar Hoover directed his staff in the Islands to back off on their espionage investigations in favor of Navy Intelligence. Hoover— fellow conspirator! Whodathunk it?—nlisted the aid of Walter Anderson in talking down the FBI's over-eager Honolulu agents (the concern was not just about duplication of effort, but that our ability to read the "Purple" consular code might be revealed by the G-men's enthusiastic tailing of certain diplomatic attachés).

Even Anderson's choice of home, on the other side of Diamond Head from Pearl Harbor, is suspicious to Stinnett, who gives us to understand that Anderson knew the danger of sleeping too near his doomed ships. The blameless Admiral Kimmel, on the other hand—tinnett tells us several times—lept in a house within view of Battleship Row.

Yes, it's outrageous. Yes, it's ugly. But in the last analysis, why should we care about a house of cards like "Day of Deceit"? Does it really matter?

I think it does. Stinnett's book is another entry in the growing list of blatant Big Lies being promoted by the right wing in this country. Even people who should know better have been taken in by Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory. The fact that stuff this ridiculous and unsubstantiated can worm its way into the consciousness of otherwise intelligent people is more than merely worrisome—t's terrifying.

Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor
Format: Paperback, 416pp.
ISBN: 0743201299
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks
Pub. Date: May 2001

Judith Greer is a former USAF Logistics Plans Officer and a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of International Relations.
©2001 Judith Greer

Dead Letter Office

Heil Bush,

Dear Gruppenfuhrer Breaux,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year’s winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.

With your vote to weaken workers safety laws and thereby save your corporate masters billions of dollars, while eliminating useless, worn out workers from corporate responsibility, you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new world.

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala party in das Fuhrer Bunker, formerly the White House on 7-4-2001. We salute you Herr Breaux! Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Deputy Fuhrer Cheney

Heil Bush

Shrub Goes To Europe
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN -- Look at it this way: The president hasn't barfed on anyone yet, and he's only mispronounced one world leader's name so far. The bad news is it was the only guy over there who likes us, and he has only two syllables in his name.

I think we can assume George W. will skate through this trip because he'll turn out to be not as bad as they thought. The soft bigotry of low expectations works for him every time. But it was probably a mistake to schedule him for Slovenia-Slovakia -- that's just asking for trouble.

In case you were wondering just why the Europeans are so upset about our death penalty (MYOB, Yuripeens), it's because it's clear to everyone but us that the main crime that gets you sentenced to death in this country is being poor. This seriously undercuts our moral authority to speak on human-rights issues. The unfortunate case of the Spanish citizen who was sentenced to death here until the folks back home raised enough money to buy him some decent lawyering does not help.

National Missile Defense is a hard sell anywhere because it's one of those bizarre notions -- like the flat tax and school vouchers -- that the right wing gets hipped on and won't let go. It's a crummy idea because: A) it doesn't work, and B) it encourages paranoia among our non-allies, who think it's a reach for protected first-strike capability. It doesn't help to have President W. informing our allies, "The Cold War is over," as though they hadn't previously twigged to the fact. To have noticed that the Cold War is over without picking up on the news that the globe is getting warmer must seem odd to those who are not accustomed to President Cognitive Dissonance.

Bush's last-minute attempt to put together a lame initiative on global warming was embarrassing. Now he's back to voluntary pollution control, which we have tried in Texas -- and it does not work worth a blue-bellied damn.

To give you an idea of how ineffective voluntary controls are, when Bush was elected governor, Texas had 850 plants with grandfather exemptions to the state's clean air act -- they had been grandfathered 23 years earlier and no one had done anything about them. These plants produce 36 percent of the state's total air pollution, and Texas' air is worse than any other state's.

Even the ineffective Texas environmental protection agency finally concluded something had to be done about the old plants. But Bush jumped in and supported a voluntary plan hatched by two dozen of the biggest polluters in the state (also major Bush contributors). The plan was put into a bill written by a lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council, and Bush pushed it through. The results after two years ---- of the 850 grandfathered polluters, 28 had gone so far as to come up with a plan to reduce their pollution in the future, and three had actually done something. This kind of genius scheme is not going to save us from global warming. Neither is National Missile Defense.

Those with a realistic grasp of global warming believe the Kyoto Protocol itself is inadequate, and here's Bush acting as though it is the worst idea since the Treaty of Munich. He's already broken his campaign promise to cut carbon dioxide emissions, one of the main greenhouse gases, because it made the coal and oil industries unhappy.

Europeans, being understandably interested in self-preservation, are unlikely to comprehend Bush's solicitous concern for polluters. Whining, "But India and China don't have to do anything" (under the Kyoto accords) is beside the point. India and China don't produce that much pollution. We do -- 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the greenhouse emissions.

The smart thing to do would be to research and develop both energy-efficiency and pollution-control equipment, and then sell the stuff to India and China. What's good for the environment is, actually, good for the economy.

Bush appears to the Europeans, as a senior White House official put it, "a shallow, arrogant, gun-loving, abortion-hating Christian fundamentalist Texan buffoon." To dismiss this misimpression as a function of European snobbism, leftism or anti-Americanism (as did a splendidly ludicrous essay in The Wall Street Journal) misses the point. We are supposed to be the pragmatists, the shrewd Yankees, but Bush has embarked on two courses of folly simultaneously -- ignoring global warming and National Missile Defense.

As for why we should care what Europeans think of us, as was said at the beginning, "A decent respect for the opinions of Mankind" lays that responsibility on us.
©2001 Molly Ivins

Media Delusion
By Tally Briggs

The collective media in this country has become so delusional they really must believe they are the center of their own universe. Is it me, or has this week become more bizarre by the day? Maybe I should've stayed in Vegas. It was bad enough there was a guy on one of my flights reading At Any Cost : How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election. When I saw it, while standing in line to check in at the Southwest counter at Burbank airport, I couldn't help laughing out LOUD. (And I mean LOUD.) Thank god most of the reviewers are saying it's a pile of crap.

On my second trip in a month to and subsequently return from, Eden in the Desert, I was so exhausted and stressed from job hunting and talking to a million different people, that when Sunday night rolled around and I needed to get my proverbial shit together to go to work the next day, I found so much running through my brain I couldn't get it to shut up long enough to fall asleep. Sidebar: I get up at 4am, to drive the lovely L.A. freeway system at 5am to boogey down to LAX before the morning Starbucks junkies make it on to the road and cause most of the "Sig-Alerts" (major accidents that cause tie ups that last at least 30 minutes).

So, at 4:30am, after I realize I am so sleep-deprived I can barely stand without feeling dizzy and have no business walking to my Jeep, let alone actually driving it, I sat down and turned on the television. Up to this point I had managed to almost completely obliterate Timothy McVeigh from my mind and file him into the NON-STAR file. Oh well, so much for that. As most of the world now knows, there was not a news or major broadcast station on that was NOT covering the execution. The execution that was not to be televised. No, instead we were treated to non-stop endless detailed descriptions from a mile long parade of media folk who even went as far as recounting the color of the curtains in the chamber, along with every head movement and breath McVeigh took. Who needs it televised?

I sat there watching in utter disbelief at the sheer weirdness of the whole thing. It was as if nothing else of any importance was happening anywhere else on the entire planet. No hostages in the Philippines, nothing happening in the Mideast, no subpoenas about to be issued and investigation about to commence on the utility price gouging in California, and certainly no non-elected president about to make an ass of himself on his first visit overseas.

The detail that was spent on this was absolutely mind-boggling. I still can't figure out what they think is a story and what isn't. Please don't get me wrong, I do think it is a story, and it has hurt the heart of most Americans, but it is certainly not the only act of violence or terrorism on American soil by an American. What about the countless workplace and school shootings? Yes, this man blew up a federal building and killed 168 people. Yes he was a cold-hearted freak. Yes, it was one of the most horrific things a single person has done to his own people, and no, I cannot imagine what my relatives in Kansas, who live only a short drive away have gone through since this happened and how it has effected them. Perhaps I can liken it somewhat, in a small teeny-tiny way, to how Princess Diana and John John's deaths affected me. Or the well planned out Columbine shootings, but again, not exactly. I know that is not even remotely close, since this was a blatant act of violent terrorism by an ex-soldier. But is he the biggest 'mass murderer in US history'? Cigarettes kill far more people; perhaps the CEO of Phillip Morris should be held so accountable. Yes, there were over 1000 people hurt in the bombing. But the entire nation's vote was taken away when the Hive of Five illegally placed GW in the Oval Office. Where were the details on CNN, et al, about that? I'm still waiting.

Why does the press find it necessary to give a monster such star treatment? Why glorify such an horrific act? Why give someone so vile, even 15 seconds of fame? Why spend such time on such insipid detail of the killing of this man? Is it to "give closure"? Was it really "justice"? Who actually has the right to say? Does the nation feel better now that we ended his life in such a humane way? He certainly had nothing to do with such a humane act, nor did he seem to have an ounce of remorse. Perhaps that is something that comes with time and maturity, when you grow up enough to take responsibility for your own actions. Tim McVeigh will never get there now.

So for the rest of the day it was difficult to not find anything but a constant rehashing from the witnesses. I must say I have the utmost respect for the victims who watched, and for those who elected not to let McVeigh take up one more second of their lives. We each deal with tragedy in our own way.

Finally there was a report on a local affiliate about one of the American hostages in the Philippines who had reportedly been beheaded. Perhaps the reason such a minor (non-McVeigh) story was actually reported was because it was a local Southern California man who had reportedly been executed. There was no more than three minutes spent on such a minor blip on the radar. As the week has worn on, it's only grown more bizarre. For the last two days on the radio I've heard quite a bit about the protesters overseas at every place Bush has appeared so far, along with his completely botching his so called 'Spanish' and even mispronouncing the Prime Minister's name. Oh, so OVERSEAS protests will be covered, but the ones here at every appearance not only of GW, but the Hive of Five, Cheney, et al, and even some just for the sake of protesting like VoterMarch, are NOT. Foreign equals news, Domestic does not. I see!

I keep trying to figure out just exactly what kind of animal the modern media has morphed into. When The National Enquirer starts to be one of the few sources of truth, you realize the entire world, as we know it, is no longer recognizable. I'd just like to know when they are going to spend time reporting on the Bush family instead of Jessie Jackson's. And when is a responsible news source going to report on all of the violent threats posted on a daily basis over on freerepublic.com? Enough with the harassment of the Chuy's manager who was only doing her job and protecting her business along with her entire staff's livelihoods. Obviously none of these people have ever worked in a restaurant where liquor is being served, or if they have it wasn’t their only means of financial survival.

Does the modern media think we only know what they tell us? That we don't have access to other forms of news? Can they be that self-delusional? Are they beginning to catch the GW stupid disease where they believe that the rest of the world including Europe is one big ignorant backwater neighborhood? Is it their intent to make the protestors overseas look silly and naive? I don't believe I'm alone in that I've always looked at Europe as being a bit more civilized and sophisticated than we here in the US. Perhaps I formed that opinion from attending school there. After all, they've had a bit more practice at it than we have. They've been at this civilization thing longer, say by hundreds of years.

Just now on the local ABC affiliate, there was a story about a four year old who went from his babysitter’s apartment to his own in the same small complex to get a jacket, (it’s close to the ocean), and got locked into his apartment. So he called 911, like his mother who was on a business trip had taught him to do, if anything bad every happened. This is somehow news, since the babysitter didn’t want to get into trouble that she had let him out of her sight for five minutes while she was caring for the six-month-old baby, all of which had resulted in a call to 911, she had denied she was in charge of the child. Child protective services got involved. Why weren’t this child, and the mother congratulated for doing the right thing? Why was blame immediately assigned to people, instead of an inanimate object? For four years old, this child has amazing presence of mind. THAT should be the story.

Why can’t we have Voter Protective Services, or Citizen Protective Services? When did our priorities get so askew that a babysitter is in fear of telling the truth, assuming she will be blamed, and a mother is taken to task for supporting her family, and being responsible for arranging care and teaching her child to not panic?

Or that our media, once revered as one of the most principled of estates in this country, is now one of the most reviled?

So many questions. I wonder if the answers will ever come?
©2001 Tally Briggs

The Cartoon Corner

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of Tom Tomorrow.

Sleaze Is The Word

Sung to the tune of "Grease"
With apologies to Frankie Valli

(instrumental intro)

Bush has big problems, he can't see the light.
He can't solve anything, he's got to feed the Right.
He sees no danger in going too far.
So don't believe him now; he'll never be up to par.

Sleaze is the word (is the word, is the word, is the word...)

We think more Shrub will make us go insane.
For him to rule this land, makes us all cry "For shame!"
His lips are lying; he's a heel, a heel.
Let's stop the Right right now; we've got to see how they steal...

Sleaze is the word (sleaze is the word, is the word, is the word...)
It's approved by Dick Cheney.
Sleaze is their crime, it's their ace, their devotion.
Sleaze is the way they are stealing.

They take with pleasure, and they throw away
All rationality; they see Big Business' way.
There is a chance Bush-Cheney will go too far.
But don't believe them now, for we can see who they are...

Sleaze is the word (sleaze is the word, is the word, is the word...)
It's approved by Dick Cheney.
Sleaze is their crime, it's their ace, their devotion.
Sleaze is the way they are stealing.

(instrumental break)

This regime lives through collusion.
Wrapped up in trouble, laced with confusion.
What are they doing here?

(instrumental break)

They take with pleasure, and they throw away
All rationality; they see Big Business' way.
There is a chance Bush-Cheney will go too far.
But don't believe them now, for we can see who they are...

Sleaze is the word (sleaze is the word, is the word, is the word...)
It's approved by Dick Cheney.
Sleaze is their crime, it's their ace, their devotion.
Sleaze is the way they are stealing.

Sleaze is the word (sleaze is the word, is the word, is the word...)
It's approved by Dick Cheney.
Sleaze is their crime, it's their ace, their devotion.
Sleaze is the way they are stealing.

Sleaze is the word (is the word, is the word, is the word.)
New lyrics by W.K Tong