The President Vanishes (washingtonpost.com) By Richard Cohen

Historians may someday say that the beginning of the end for Bush came last April when Time magazine’s John Dickerson asked the president at a televised news conference, “What would your biggest mistake be . . . and what lessons have you learned from it?” Bush, who said the question took him by surprise, said he could not come up with one.

Essentially the same question was asked by Linda Grabel, an ordinary voter, at the St. Louis debate. This time, it could not have been a surprise. But this time, too, Bush could offer not a single substantive example. Aside from making “some mistakes in appointing people,” everything had gone swimmingly.

This was a preposterous, dishonest answer. It was either the response of someone who is vastly deluded or sticking to a political strategy conceived by people who do not value truth.

[Thanks, Anne!]

Anti-terrorism agency threw $461,745 party, report says Associated Press

Awards were presented to 543 Transportation Security Administration employees and 30 organizations, including a “lifetime achievement award” for one worker with the 2-year-old agency. …

The investigation by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, also found the TSA gave its senior executives bonuses averaging $16,000, and failed to provide adequate justification in more than a third of the 88 cases examined.

The report said lower-level employees were shortchanged, with a far lower percentage receiving bonuses.

In today’s paper, a Bush supporter writes the following — compare it to the exchange cited AND to the truth that follows. mjh

Kerry says that Bush says things, but the president never said those things. — Bush supporter

washingtonpost.com: Third Presidential Debate — President Bush and Sen. John Kerry

Kerry: Six months after he said Osama bin Laden must be caught dead or alive, this president was asked, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” He said, “I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.”

We need a president who stays deadly focused on the real war on terror.

SCHIEFFER: Mr. President?

BUSH: Gosh, I just don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. It’s kind of one of those exaggerations.

Of course we’re worried about Osama bin Laden. We’re on the hunt after Osama bin Laden. We’re using every asset at our disposal to get Osama bin Laden.
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[I]n a news conference on March 13, 2002, Bush said when asked about the search for the al Qaeda leader: “So I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him. . . . We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.”
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This isn’t some obscure point. Bush’s comments in March 2003 were shocking and widely reported. Now, Bush lies (“I never said…”) and his followers believe him as gospel. You can’t break that cycle of ignorance. mjh

ABC News: Injured Iraq Vets Come Home to Poverty By BRIAN ROSS, DAVID SCOTT and MADDY SAUER, ABC News

Following inquiries by ABC News, the Pentagon has dropped plans to force a severely wounded U.S. soldier to repay his enlistment bonus after injuries had forced him out of the service.

Army Spc. Tyson Johnson III of Mobile, Ala., who lost a kidney in a mortar attack last year in Iraq, was still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he received notice from the Pentagon’s own collection agency that he owed more than $2,700 because he could not fulfill his full 36-month tour of duty.

Johnson said the Pentagon listed the bonus on his credit report as an unpaid government loan, making it impossible for him to rent an apartment or obtain credit cards.

“Oh man, I felt betrayed,” Johnson said. “I felt, like, oh, my heart dropped.” …

Many of the severely wounded soldiers returning from Iraq face the prospect of poverty and what they describe as official indifference and incompetence.

As Oprah Slaps Bush / With 30 states poised to smack down women’s rights again, the one true savior emerges By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Here’s the bottom line: 50 million eligible women didn’t vote in 2000, and 22 million of them were single and nearly every one of them probably thought their vote doesn’t matter and it isn’t really worth it and who cares anyway because no matter who wins, everything’s still pretty much run by rich powerful men anyway. …

[W]hat so many women don’t seem to know. That the Bush administration has already, in just a few short years, managed to roll back a truly astounding number of their basic rights, making it more difficult, for example, for doctors to perform abortions, or making it illegal for schools to discuss contraception or for hospitals to discuss pregnancy-termination options.

From demeaning and ineffectual abstinence-only programs to biased counseling to cutting all funding for international women’s health organizations that provide care to poor women in third-world nations (hell, Bush hacked that one away in his first month in office), Dubya has done more than any president in the last 100 years to smack women upside their sexually empowered heads. … Bush has already upheld the ban on abortions for servicewomen stationed overseas, even if they were raped, even if they pay for it themselves. …

Hello, 1950s. Hello, coat-hanger surgery. Hello, millions of despondent daughters of uptight parents. Hello, dead or mutilated teenage girls who suffer botched procedures. Hello, a fresh national nightmare, revisited, regurgitated, reborn. And hello again to smug right-wing males who’ve wanted to put women back in their place for the past 50 years. Check that: 200 years. Check that: forever.

Just a silly nightmare? Utterly impossible? A ridiculous liberal daydream? Not even close, sweetheart.

It’s all about the Supreme Court, of course. Fact is, our next president will almost surely get to appoint a number of new high-court justices to replace those who will likely retire after enduring Bush’s toxic first term. They hung in there, these few — especially stalwarts Sandra Day O’Connor and moderate, pro-choice John Paul Stevens — hoping to disallow the nation’s highest judiciary from becoming overly stacked with homophobic self-righteous right-wing neocon wingnuts (hi, Justice Scalia!) who would have us revert — morally, sexually, spiritually, misogynistically — to 1953. Check that: 1853. Check that: 1353.

With the exception of nearly useless neoconservative sycophant Clarence Thomas, not a single justice now serving on the court is under 65. Many insiders say Stevens, O’Connor and bitter old man William Rehnquist (almost 80) are all likely to retire before 2008. BushCo’s chosen replacements could easily tip the scales of the court the other direction, from its very precarious 5-4 progressive tilt to a very sneering 6-3 conservative one, a court that would then very easily overturn parts or even all of Roe v. Wade. Talk about a malicious legacy.

It gets worse. It gets nastier, more widespread. Because should Shrub swipe another term, he will also be on his way to naming more federal trial and appeals judges — hundreds, by most counts — than either Clinton or Reagan, the last two-term presidents. Bush could, in short and for all intents and purposes, stack the nation’s courts with enough neoconservative, antichoice, antiwomen crusaders to make Strom Thurmond giggle in his grave.
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Reproductive Rights Steadily Eroded in the States

A majority of state legislatures, along with both houses of Congress and the White House, are allied against a woman’s right to make personal and private decisions about her reproductive life. A lone appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court — one more Supreme Court justice who will not affirm Roe v. Wade — is all it would take to bring victory to those who will deny women this fundamental human right.