Global

Countless crippled inches of soul crave release
     from civilization’s circular marching herd,
     metal shoed hooves pounding dirt and grass
     like ten-thousand Sioux drumming war
     punishing the silent ears of their enemies
     choking on screams for mercy as their heads implode;
     Under Bill Gates’ trance swarms of ants sit staring
     through monitored Windows stained
     waiting for God to appear on their computer screens
     via www.heaven.com …
         …Something’s gone so very wrong;
The truth is blurred and hidden
     lost in sounds and television
     masked by textbooks facts and proofs,
Look into the reflection pool at foolish eyes
     blind to the depths
     beneath the rippling wet portrait

            AUSTIN, Texas -- "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that." George W. Bush, diplomat extraordinaire, to Ariel Sharon, The Washington Post, June 3, 2003.

            The effort to find peace in the Middle East is something on which all Americans can support the president, whether we think he knows what he's doing or not. He has recently been getting some criticism for letting his religious beliefs into the process. According to the New Yorker, he told Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: "I think God loves me. I think God loves the Palestinians. I think God loves the Israelis. We cannot allow this to continue." This is good news: It seems to me Bush's attention span is longer and more focused when his religious convictions are involved.

Power plant pollution is taking an enormous toll on public health and the environment. But the Bush administration's so-called "Clear Skies Initiative" would do more for powerful utilities than public health. Despite the name, the proposal relaxes key provisions of the Clean Air Act, including its mercury protections, and would worsen global warming.

Earlier this year, thousands of people responded to our e-mail on this issue in support of cleaner air, but now I need your help again.

The Clear Skies bill is expected to come up soon either in a Senate subcommittee or directly on the Senate floor. Please take a moment to urge your U.S. Senators to oppose the White House's Clear Skies proposal. Then, ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

Take action: www.pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=9&id4=OHFreep

Merely from the whines and howls of his numerous enemies on the right, you can tell that Sid Blumenthal has drawn blood in his book, "The Clinton Wars," within which many pages are spent detailing what his pal Hillary Clinton famously referred to as "a vast right-wing conspiracy." The only word I'd quarrel with here is "vast," since the prime players seem to have numbered under 20. And, of course, these days, Senator HRC rather strongly resembles a largish right-wing conspiracy herself.

            Blumenthal's is an awfully long book, but the chapters that I have thus far worked my way through do make a pretty good case in buttressing HRC's claim. Blumenthal's chapter on the Hitchens affair is vivid, too, on the latter's disgusting behavior.

   It's hard to choose which deserves the coarser jeer: the excited baying in the press about the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the wailing in the press about the 3-2 decision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this week to allow corporate media giants to increase their domination of the market.

            Actually, they're all part of the same binding curve of nonsense, and if we meld the two, we're left with the following proposition, mostly promoted by Democrats eager to impart the impression that only greedy Republicans are serfs of the corporate media titans and that the Telecommunications "Reform" Act of 1996 was actually a well-intended effort to return the airwaves to Us the People.

            The proposition: Until the FCC vote this week, we the people, surfing through the TV channels or across the AM/FM radio dial, were afforded diversity of choice, the better to form those reasoned political judgments essential in the functioning of this democratic republic.

Here's what we know so far about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction: of the 600 or so sites identified by United States intelligence and Iraqi officials as places where the country biological weapons may be hidden, about 100 of these sites have been searched over the past six weeks and not a single spec of anthrax or other WMD has been uncovered.  

Two skeletal trailers that may have been used to develop anthrax or botulism, scrubbed from top to bottom when it was found, leaving no biological weapons traces behind, according to the Department of Defense, is the only evidence the U.S. has found so far to justify it's preemptive strike against Iraq. But this is far from a "smoking gun and the prospects for finding any WMD in the months ahead are becoming grim.  

The media is peppering U.S. military officials in Iraq on why WMD haven't been found yet. The responses are short and to the point.  

"I honestly don't know," said Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for U.S. intelligence, during a briefing May 30.  

While the hawks in the Bush administration attempt to justify the logic behind a preemptive strike against Iraq now that its become clear the country's alleged weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found, the true reasons for going to war are finally coming to light.  

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said intelligence reports from the CIA and the FBI indicated that Saddam Hussein "had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," which put the United States in imminent danger of possibly being attacked sometime in the future.  

Two months later, despite no concrete evidence from intelligence officials or United Nations inspectors that these weapons existed, Bush authorized the use of military force to decimate the country and destroy Saddam Hussein's regime.    

Now it appears the weapons of mass destruction will never be found and many critics of the war are starting to wonder aloud whether the community was duped by the Bush administration.  

Hey you! Tom Daschle. WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You've been taking Tylenol PM again haven't you? I knew it. I told you that stuff makes you groggy. Get your punk ass out of bed and get back to work. And this time don't forget to dust off your balls, you piece of crap.  

What are you laughing at Nancy Pelosi? You suck too. Big time. You call yourself a whip? You should take that whip and hang yourself. I'm sorry. Did you say something Dick Gephardt? You didn't? Gee, I'm not surprised.  

You gutless, spineless, brain-dead, paralyzed, sorry excuses for human beings, don't you know that Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant, that gnome Paul Wolfowitz, are trying to take over the world? You think that by ignoring them they're just going to go away?  

What was that Carl Levin? Aliens abducted you? What's your excuse Russ Feingold? How about you Joe Biden? Oh for crying out loud. He peed his pants again. Biden, how many times do I have to tell you that I am not President Bush? Helloooooooooo Barbara Boxer? Are you with me? Would somebody tap that cow on the shoulder and make sure she's still alive. Jeez.  

  By now, millions of Americans are sick and tired of the spam that's flooding their in-boxes with unwanted e-mail messages -- mostly offering products, services and scams that tell of big bargains, implausible windfalls, garish porno and dumb scenarios for bodily enhancements. In 2003, we're routinely slogging through large amounts of junk e-mail.

     These are aggressive advertisements that won't quit. They're doing a lot to pollute the Internet environment.

     Various technological and legal remedies have been developed. Filters on e-mail programs can screen messages. Some servers try to limit mass e-mailings. Legislators propose crackdowns on spamsters. But many of the proposed "cures" are apt to damage cyberspace more than improve it.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I rarely find fault with Washington journalist Josh Marshall and his thoughtful Blog "Talking Points Memo," but I beg to differ on this occasion.

            "My God," writes Marshall, "when they say down the memory hole, they ain't kiddin'! There now seems to be a secret competition -- perhaps it was announced and I just didn't hear it -- for the Iraq-hawk who can come up with the most ingenious, Orwellian, up-is-down rewriting of the history of the year-long lead-up to the Iraq war."

            Marshall goes on to discuss a few entrants in the secret contest but then votes, prematurely I believe, to award the palm to Bill Safire of The New York Times. Safire's recent column about "hyping the 'hoax' charge" is the most elegant of its kind: Suddenly those who ask, "So where are these weapons of mass destruction we went to war to over?" are the problem.