For the rich, that is. In this post, Kevin Drum once again shows why he’s one of the only bloggers getting paid for this sort of thing :

But what really gets me is how they always present these things as if we need a flat tax because the tax code is too damn complex. Well, the tax code is too damn complex, but the least complex thing about it is the part where you look up your adjusted gross income in the tax table to figure out how much you owe. The complex part is figuring out your adjusted gross income in the first place, something that has nothing to do with whether the tax rate for millionaires is higher than the tax rate for those at the poverty line.

It is columns like this that cause me to lose patience with the tax jihadists on the right. It is dishonest to pretend that flattening tax rates has any connection to simplifying the tax code. It is dishonest to pretend that a flat income tax is “fair” while conveniently forgetting to suggest the same for Social Security taxes. It is dishonest to pretend that “income” is the same for everyone while failing to even mention capital gains, tax shelters, corporate perks, deferred compensation, pension contributions, stock options, or the thousand other options the wealthy have for making money that doesn’t quite count as “income.” It is dishonest not to mention that simple arithmetic guarantees that any flat income tax proposal would raise taxes for practically every middle class family in the country.

There are very few things that annoy me as much as wealthy people complaining about their taxes. Hearing endless variations of the “Why am I being punished for being successful?” argument drives me nuts. The tax code is skewed to favor the wealthy. Period. Every deduction, tax credit, loophole, etc. is designed to help people who make enough money to hire an expert to do their taxes for them, not the majority of Americans who resort to either TurboTax or the 1040EZ form.

Considering how popular his show is, this could do a lot to counter the notion that Republicans are good for the economy (via Kos):

BLITZER: Do you identify more as a Democrat or Republican?

TRUMP: Well, you’d be shocked if I said that in many cases I probably identify more as Democrat. And I think you’d probably be shocked…

BLITZER: On social issues?

TRUMP: You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been now around long — you know, I think of myself as a young guy, but I’m not so young anymore. And I’ve been around for a long time. And it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Now, it shouldn’t be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats…

BLITZER: Well, it certainly did well under Clinton. But I wouldn’t suggest it was so great under Jimmy Carter.

TRUMP: That’s true. That’s true.

BLITZER: If you remember, the interest rates…

TRUMP: No, I know. I know. Jimmy Carter was not in the same thing.

But certainly we had some very good economies under Democrats, as well as Republicans. But we’ve had some pretty bad disaster under the Republicans.

BLITZER: You want…

TRUMP: Including a thing called the Depression.

BLITZER: The Depression was bad, as we all remember.

And this reminds me of one of those stupid little Clinton/Bush comparisons I realized the other day that probably belongs on a coffee mug or a mousepad or something :

Dumbass Catchphrases

Clinton Era – “Show Me The Money”
Bush Era – “You’re fired!”

Really says all you need to know about Bush’s economy, huh?

Okay, well there were some weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we didn’t feel like guarding them :

Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency reported after reviewing satellite images and equipment that has turned up in European scrapyards.

The International Atomic Energy Agency sent a letter to U.S. officials three weeks ago informing them of the findings. The information was also sent to the U.N. Security Council in a letter from its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, that was circulated Thursday.

The IAEA is waiting for a reply from the United States, which is leading the coalition administering Iraq, officials said.

The United Sattes has virtually cut off information-sharing with the IAEA since invading Iraq in March 2002 on the premise that the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons have been found, and arms control officials now worry the war and its chaotic aftermath may have increased chances that terrorists could get their hands on materials used for unconventional weapons or that civilians may be unknowingly exposed to radioactive materials.

According to ElBaradei’s letter, satellite imagery shows “extensive removal of equipment and in some instances, removal of entire buildings,” in Iraq.

In addition, “large quanitities of scrap, some of it contaminated, have been transfered out of Iraq from sites” previously monitored by the IAEA.
. . .
The IAEA has been unable to investigate, monitor or protect Iraqi nuclear materials since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003. The United States has refused to allow the IAEA or other U.N. weapons inspectors into the country, claiming that the coalition has taken over responsibility for illict weapons searches.

Aren’t “dirty bombs” still a threat?? If the whole damn point of the war was to protect us from weapons, why the hell did they leave nuclear facilities unguarded?

[Note : This isn't the first time we've heard about this, either.]

There’s only two things certain in this world : Death and Taxes! Am I right??

Man, these tax forms are so complicated nowadays, you’ve gotta be a rocket scientist to figure em out! Zing!!

But seriously folks, I went to my accountant the other day and I gotta say that this guy is a genius. How else can you describe somebody who’s able to get blood from a stone. HAW HAW HAW

Hello?? [tap, tap] Is this thing on??

Now that we’ve got all the IRS humor out of our systems, here’s something else that isn’t funny :

From face-to-face audits to criminal and civil penalties, tax law enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service last year continued its slide, according to new data that question recent Bush administration claims of a more vigilant IRS.
. . .
Only 0.73 percent of business tax returns were audited in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, down from 0.88 percent in the previous year, TRAC found. In 1997, 2.62 percent of business filers were audited.

Among corporations with assets of at least $250 million, audit rates slid to 28.98 percent last year from 33.68 percent in 2002. In 1995, more than half were audited.

From 1999 to 2003, the number of civil negligence penalties aimed at corporations fell from 62 to 12. Civil fraud penalties dropped to 170 last year from 247 in 1999. Tax prosecutions fell last year to 538, from 563 in 2002. Ten years ago, more than 1,000 cases were prosecuted.
. . .
The rate of face-to-face audits of individual taxpayers has not changed in the past three years, remaining at 1.6 audits for every 1,000 returns. High-income individuals did face a slightly higher chance at being audited: 4 returns per 1,000 were audited last year compared with 3.8 in 2002.

But individuals identified by the administration as small-business owners or entrepreneurs — those who file Schedule C forms to claim business income — saw their audit rates dip to 11 returns per 1,000 in 2003 compared with 11.4 per 1,000 in 2002.

If your tax burden hurts today, keep in mind that Bush’s tax cuts for the rich have been accompanied by huge spending increases. Anyone with half a brain can realize that if you increase your debt while decreasing your income, you’re headed for a disaster. When you go on a shopping spree, eventually you gotta pay the bills.

Since I get hate-mail so rarely, I thought this one would be fun to respond to here :

Hi, I was just looking at your this site and saw that you posted something calling Bush a bastard and Thomas Jefferson a chriatian hater. I don’t think so sir. I hope your not planning on voting Kerry in. Just in case you are he saying to everyone on the news that he’s going to raise gas prices fifty cents higher than it already is. So really i think your jerk.

First of all, lemme just get the grammar critiques out of the way. I’m assuming you mean “you’re a jerk”. Writing “your jerk” is a reference to my jerk (which in this case is you).

The last point though, that Kerry wants to raise gas taxes, is false :

Several of the ads charge that Kerry supported a 50-cent increase in the gas tax. While it is true that Kerry did declare his support for such a measure in 1994, he never proposed or voted for legislation that would do so and has since stated his opposition to it.

But Republicans have transformed this 10-year-old statement into suggestions that Kerry actually proposed such legislation in the past and continues to support it today. For example, at a GOP rally on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.) said Kerry “wants to raise the gas tax by 50 cents a gallon.” Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot said on Fox News Channel’s Hannity and Colmes that Kerry once “proposed an increase of 50 cents a gallon.” And on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bush campaign adviser Tucker Eskew said that “Kerry doesn’t have a plan” to respond to rising gas prices; instead, Eskew claimed, “He has a 50-cent-a-gallon tax increase.”

But you know who does support raising gas taxes? Dick Cheney :

In October 1986, when Dick Cheney was the lone congressman from energy-rich Wyoming, he introduced legislation to create a new import tax that would have caused the price of oil, and ultimately the price of gasoline paid by drivers, to soar by billions of dollars per year.

“Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States,” Mr. Cheney, who is now vice president, said shortly after introducing the legislation.

And to go back to an earlier point, here’s some of what Jefferson had to say about Christianity :

“Christianity…(has become) the most perverted system that ever shone on man. …Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and imposters led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.”

“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.”

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity [of opinion]. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

“The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves…these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.”

And finally, Bush really is a bastard.

I know he probably wasn’t a big fan of evolution, but this is a classic case of what we call “Darwinism” :

A preacher bitten by a rattlesnake as he handled it during an Easter service at a rural church died after refusing medical treatment, authorities said.

The Rev. Dwayne Long died a day after being bitten on a finger during a service at his church, where members believe ritual serpent-handling is a form of obedience to God, said Sheriff Gary Parsons.

“We don’t anticipate any charges,” he said. “That’s their belief.”

No one attending the service at the Pentecostal church sought medical help, Parsons said. Members believe when people die from a snakebite during a service, it is a sign that it was their time to go.

Well, that’s one we can probably all agree on. It was definitely his “time to go”. Let’s just hope, for the sake of the human race, he wasn’t able to reproduce before passing along his “so damn stupid he ignores his own survival instincts” genes.

Kevin Drum has a post that is the most concise assessment of the Bush Administration’s Iraq folly yet. This is most of it, but I strongly recommend reading the whole thing :

Let’s start at the beginning. A few weeks before the war started, based on well known experience in Kosovo and other wars, the Army chief of staff warned that a successful occupation of Iraq would require “several hundred thousand” troops. George Bush ignored that advice and accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s view that the job could be done with only 150,000.

A couple of days later Pentagon #2 Paul Wolfowitz defended the lower troop estimate. There was, he said, no history of ethnic strife in Iraq and Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force. At the same time, the Pentagon was downplaying the cost of the war, suggesting that estimates of $100 billion were far too high.

This was all happening in late February 2003, and two things were becoming increasingly obvious even to war supporters. First, despite confident statements that Saddam Hussein had WMD and we knew exactly where it was, the UN inspectors couldn’t find it. Even when we sent them to specific sites based on our own intelligence they couldn’t find anything. Obviously something was fishy.

Second, the president and his advisors seemed delusional in suggesting that a Christian superpower could invade a Muslim country and be greeted as liberators. Ethnic and religious strife was inevitable, and the administration’s estimates of 150,000 troops and $100 billion were simply ludicrous.
. . .
But the mismanagement didn’t stop there. Jay Garner, the first proconsul of Iraq, tried to bring in a team of genuine Iraq experts. The experts were blackballed by the Pentagon and Garner was fired. He wasn’t ideologically pure enough.

A month later, Garner’s replacement, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi army. There was no need for them. In June the former Secretary of the Army said publicly that the administration was “unwilling to come to grips” with what it would take to succeed in Iraq. He was ignored.

In November, after the Ramadan carnage, the story on troop strength stayed the same. In fact, rather than admit to a problem, Bremer and the administration decided to speed up the training of homegrown Iraqi police in a slapdash way and accelerate the handover of authority to Iraqis. Getting out seemed more important than succeeding.

And today, even after weeks of bloody uprisings have given the lie to practically everything they’ve said, the June 30 handover date is still sacrosanct and Rumsfeld is still unwilling to increase troop strength by more than a few thousand.

I am/was strongly against the Iraq war. Not because I’m an unabashed pacifist or that I underestimated the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but that the timing was wrong. Despite promises to the contrary, the Bush Administration scaled back their “war on terror” in order to overthrow Saddam. After the tragedy of 9/11, scaling back the hunt for al Qaeda and allowing them time to regroup seemed like borderline treason. This coupled with the almost certain ulterior motives behind the White House’s lust for warfare was enough to change me from a far left-leaning moderate to a flower waving peacenik (no, I never actually waved flowers, but you know what I mean.)

But what Kevin Drum has laid out in his post is what I think is the war’s biggest flaw. Like a guy who reacts to loud noises coming from under the hood by purchasing a louder stereo, Bush and his advisors seem to think that they can pretend their problems don’t exist and hope they go away. If we just take them at their word and don’t jump to any (logical) conclusions about their plans, then the White House is still full of people who are so optimistic and naive that they’re willing to ignore the advice of anyone who disagrees with them even slightly.

So, war supporters, how do you reconcile support for a war when it’s being run by simpletons? Many war opponents have described this as “the right war at the wrong time”, but are you willing to admit that this might be “the right war with the wrong leaders”?

And to push home the point even further about how inadequate Bush’s leadership in Iraq has been, compare the Bush’s public strategy of denying the obvious with this John Kerry op-ed :

In recent weeks the administration — in effect acknowledging the failure of its own efforts — has turned to U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi to develop a formula for an interim Iraqi government that each of the major Iraqi factions can accept. It is vital that Brahimi accomplish this mission, but the odds are long, because tensions have been allowed to build and distrust among the various Iraqi groups runs deep. The United States can bolster Brahimi’s limited leverage by saying in advance that we will support any plan he proposes that gains the support of Iraqi leaders. Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq’s transition to a new constitution and government. We also need to renew our effort to attract international support in the form of boots on the ground to create a climate of security in Iraq. We need more troops and more people who can train Iraqi troops and assist Iraqi police.

We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander. This would help us obtain more troops from major powers. The events of the past week will make foreign governments extremely reluctant to put their citizens at risk. That is why international acceptance of responsibility for stabilizing Iraq must be matched by international authority for managing the remainder of the Iraqi transition. The United Nations, not the United States, should be the primary civilian partner in working with Iraqi leaders to hold elections, restore government services, rebuild the economy, and re-create a sense of hope and optimism among the Iraqi people. The primary responsibility for security must remain with the U.S. military, preferably helped by NATO until we have an Iraqi security force fully prepared to take responsibility.

Finally, we must level with our citizens. Increasingly, the American people are confused about our goals in Iraq, particularly why we are going it almost alone. The president must rally the country around a clear and credible goal. The challenges are significant and the costs are high. But the stakes are too great to lose the support of the American people.

By contrast, Bush’s bold prime-time press conference last night was full of fluffy rhetoric about how wonderful “freedom” is, further demonization of a guy we’ve already got in jail, and a continuing misunderestimation of the hell that Bush has let Iraq become.

In case you missed it, click here to check out Bush’s press conference from yesterday. The best part is this question at the 50:48 mark :

Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

THE PRESIDENT: I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet.
…
[Two and a half minutes about how horrible Saddam Hussein is.]
…
I hope I — I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t — you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

The transcript doesn’t do this one justice. In the clip, he’s like a deer caught in the headlights (The Daily Show is gonna have a field day with this one). Salon referred to him as “a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework”.

So here’s my question : Is he this oafish and retarded in person or just on TV? Is he going to duck questions from Ariel Sharon today respond with half-assed ramblings about Iraq? When he’s coordinating discussions between members of his cabinet (say, relaying high-level information between the Justice Department and FBI), doesn’t he fully grasp what he’s talking about? Does he realize that Donald Rumsfeld isn’t the Secretary of State??

Bush has coasted for years on his charm and I think it’s finally reaching its end. It’s obvious that his Jimmy Stewart – meets – Forrest Gump thing has never worked on non-Americans, but the cracks in his folksy know-nothing shtick are finally starting to show up. He’s inarticulate, he lacks a full grasp of the details he needs to know in order to perform his job, and he’s unable to admit any sort of wrongdoing, ever. In short, he has all the qualities that he needed to become the president, but none of the ones he needs to be the president.

Of all the 9-11 Commissioners, Slade Gorton has the coolest name. With a name like that, couldn’t you just imagine him having a sword-fight on a spiral staircase? Or swinging from a chandelier to save a damsel in distress? Or maybe as a hardboiled detective whose best friend is a flask full of gin?

By contrast, the name Richard Ben-Veniste is just retarded.

Is anyone else watching or listening to Ashcroft right now? Did he just use the terms “evil chemistry” and “evil biology”?? That’s gotta be the dumbest jargon I’ve ever heard. Even worse than “suiciders”.

That’s what I assume is the message of this item from the Drudge Report :

Campaign 2004 turns extreme in Florida with the placement of a newspaper ad calling for physical retribution against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld!

“We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days,’ and pull the trigger,” the ad reads.

The call-to-arms fundraising ad, placed by the St. Petersburg senate Club in the current issue of the GABBER, a local St. Petersburg paper, asks readers to make an urgent donation to the John Kerry campaign.

Club Vice President Edna McCall told the DRUDGE REPORT Tuesday morning: “We want to get our country back. In Iraq, we’re in deep trouble. If we don’t try to get this situation cleared up, we are finished.”

When asked if the ad was a challenge to inflict violence on Rumsfeld, McCall explained: “‘Pull the trigger’ means let Rumsfeld know where we stand, not to shoot him!”

“We are getting raped, and they are planning to steal the election again.”

Man, this election is already an uphill battle without having to deal with fools like this making us all look like goddamn loonies.

I just caught my first peek at the DVD from the Bush in 30 Seconds contest. The funniest thing about it (other than all five parts of the “If Bush Was Your Roommate” series) is the fact that Margaret Cho is completely absent from the awards ceremony video. For those that missed it, she put in two cringe-inducing performances. Near the beginning of the ceremony, she gave a semi-coherent speech about gay rights (which only mentioned Bush in passing) and later on she performed as her rappin’ nurse alter ego, MCMC :

Ouch.

Man, if you thought Condi Rice’s verbal gymnastics last week were fun, wait til you check out the 9/11 Commission’s agenda for the next two days. Reno, Freeh, Tenet, and Ashcroft. This one should be exciting.

Speaking of Ashcroft, here’s a few sample questions for the commissioners from Salon :

1) If counterterrorism was a top priority for the Justice Department prior to 9/11, why did Ashcroft ignore the FBI’s specific request in August 2001 for additional counterterrorism resources?

That month the FBI submitted its internal budget request to the Department of Justice, seeking 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff, 54 translators to review a backlog of foreign language intelligence, and 200 professional intelligence researchers to analyze the intelligence. Yet when Ashcroft submitted his final budget request to the White House on Sept. 10, 2001, 24 hours before the al-Qaida attacks, he did not request funding for any of the FBI’s urgent needs. In fact, Ashcroft proposed cuts in counterterrorism efforts, including a $65 million reduction for counterterrorism equipment grants, a $20 million reduction for border control, and a $1.4 million reduction for the National Domestic Preparedness Office. Of the 68 programs where Ashcroft proposed increases, not a single one involved counterterrorism. In Attorney General Janet Reno’s budget for 2000, counterterrorism was her first priority. What was Ashcroft’s thinking that led him to remove it as a priority and to propose extensive cuts?

2) Why wasn’t counterterrorism one of the seven strategic goals Ashcroft outlined in a May 2001 memo to his division heads?

In that memo, he outlined his major goals for the upcoming budget year. Among his priorities: reducing gun violence, protecting the rights of crime victims, and strengthening internal Justice Department financial systems. Counterterrorism was not mentioned. By contrast, Attorney General Janet Reno’s budget guidance of April 2000 listed counterterrorism as the area where “up-to-date human and technological infrastructure” was critical.

By August 2001, Ashcroft had created a “strategic plan” document to spotlight his priorities. Out of 36 “objectives” Ashcroft highlighted 13 in yellow. The document explained “Highlight=AG Goal.” Although objective 1.3 was “combat terrorist activities,” it was not highlighted. Tellingly, in November 2001, Ashcroft released a revised strategic plan that contained the same seven strategic goals as the original and one addition. Now his No. 1 goal: “Protect America Against the Threat of Terrorism.” But who had neglected it before 9/11?

3) Between Jan. 20 and Sept. 11, 2001, were the FBI field offices instructed to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists? If so, why hasn’t Ashcroft been able to provide any evidence to the commission proving it?

In her public testimony, Condoleezza Rice said, “The FBI tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists and to reach out to known informants who might have information on terrorist activities.” But commissioner Jamie Gorelick rejected Rice’s claim as not factual, saying, “We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings … special agents in charge around the country, Miami in particular, no knowledge of this.” According to a Newsweek report, Ashcroft rebuffed specific requests by the FBI to discuss counterterrorism with special agents in charge. At a spring 2001 meeting with special agents in charge in Quantico, Va., Ashcroft told then FBI director Louis Freeh that his priorities were “violent crime and drugs,” and when Freeh said that those were not his priorities and began discussing counterterrorism, “Ashcroft didn’t want to hear about it.” This confrontation may be particularly significant in light of commissioner Tim Roemer’s comments during Rice’s public testimony: “The FBI is the key here. Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices.” Can Ashcroft recount his conversations and meetings with FBI officials about counterterrorism?

4) After 9/11, why did Ashcroft slash almost $1 billion from an emergency FBI request to bolster counterterrorism efforts?

Immediately after 9/11 the FBI made a $1.5 billion request for emergency resources to combat terrorism. But Ashcroft refused to provide two-thirds of these resources. Roughly $1 billion in funding was denied for items such as security improvements, communications equipment and technical support. Why? Where did the money go instead?

5) Beginning in the summer of 2001, Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and traveled exclusively by private jet because of an FBI “threat assessment.” What, exactly, did the threat assessment say? Why is the threat assessment still being withheld from the public?

In July 2001, CBS News revealed that Ashcroft, on the advice of the FBI, “was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines.” At the time, the FBI refused to identify “what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.” Eight months after 9/11, in an attempt to deflect criticism, Ashcroft said his decision to stop flying commercial airlines was “because of personal threats on his life, not out of fears about terrorist hijackings.” When Ashcroft was asked by a reporter to explain further he “walked from the room without comment.” Curiously, when Ashcroft’s behavior was initially reported, a top official at the CIA said “he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member.” Whatever the rationale, Ashcroft’s use of private jets cost taxpayers more than $1,600 an hour. Was he aware of threat warnings? Will he now urge their immediate declassification?

Man, these hearings are exciting as watching the debates (and much less repetitive).

Jeez, I hope they don’t schedule this one opposite American Idol :

President Bush will hold his first solo news conference of the year on Tuesday night to update Americans on U.S.-led efforts in Iraq after a tough week of fighting militant Shi’ites and Sunnis, the White House said on Monday.

Bush’s last solo news conference was Dec. 15. It will be only his third news conference in the White House East Room.

“We are at a critical period in Iraq and the president looks forward to talking to the American people and updating the American people where we are in Iraq right now and where we are headed,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Bush has been under increasing pressure in Washington to add U.S. troops to Iraq to help stabilize the country in the face of insurgencies as well as possibly delay plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30.

He is also being urged to outline a clear vision of his plans for Iraq given the ongoing bloodshed and no clear exit strategy.

McClellan said Bush made the decision last Thursday to hold the news conference.

Think about this for a moment. This article doesn’t speculate about the specifics of what Bush might say or anything like that, yet this is one of the top news stories on Yahoo news. Why? Because our President is so afraid of the press that the very fact that he’s going to hold a press conference is newsworthy.

This testimony before the House/senate 9/11 Inquiry by Kristin Breitweiser is one of the most moving things I’ve ever read :

I would like to thank the families of the 3000 victims for allowing me to represent them here today before the Joint Intelligence Committee. It is a tremendous honor. Testifying before this committee is a privilege and an enormous responsibility that I do not take lightly. I will do my best not to disappoint the families or the memories of their loved ones.

Toward that end, I ask the members present here today to find in my voice the voices of all the family members of the 3000 victims of September 11th. I would also ask for you to see in my eyes the eyes of the more than 10,000 children who are left to grow up without the love, affection and guidance of a mother or a father who was tragically killed on September 11th.

I would now like to thank the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Eleanor Hill and her staff for giving the families this opportunity to be heard. It has been an excruciating and overwhelming 12 months, and it is now time for our words and our concerns to be heard by you. My three-year-old daughter’s most enduring memory of her father will be placing flowers on his empty grave. My most enduring member of my husband Ronald will be his final words to me. “Sweets, I’m fine, I don’t want you to worry. I love you.”

Ron uttered those words while he was watching men and women jump to their deaths from the top of Tower One. Four minutes later, his tower was hit by United Flight 175. I never spoke to my husband again. I don’t really know what happened to him. I don’t know whether he jumped or he choked to death on smoke. I don’t know whether he sat curled up in a corner watching the carpet melt in front of him, knowing that his own death was soon to come. Or if he was alive long enough to be crushed by the buildings when they ultimately collapsed. These are the images that haunt me at night when I put my head to rest on his pillow.

I do know that the dream that I had envisioned, that I desperately needed to believe, that he was immediately turned to ash and floated up to the heavens, was simply not his fate. I know this because his wedding band was recovered from Ground Zero, with a part of his arm. The wedding band is charred and scratched, but still perfectly round and fully intact. I wear it on my right hand it will remain there until the day I die.

September 11th was the devastating result of a catalogue of failures on behalf of our government and its agencies. My husband and the approximately 3000 others like him went to work that morning and never came home. But were any of our government agencies doing their job on that fateful morning? Perhaps the carnage and devastation of September 11th speaks for itself in answering this question.

I know emotional appeals are a little cheap, but this really does go to the heart of why we need answers about the domestic failures that stopped us from preventing 9/11. We’ll never be able to stop every nutcase out there who wants to kill us, but there are clearly defensive things we can to to make it harder to pull off.

As far as 9/11 is concerned, I’m not pissed that the Bush Administration didn’t stop it. While I think the “nobody could have stopped it” line is a clear effort to spread the blame, I really do think that it’s a little unfair to blame Bush for something that (a) he didn’t do and (b) most of us couldn’t have predicted. (I do think Bush’s messed up priorities made it easier for 9/11 to happen, but that’s a topic for another post). While vilifying Bush and co., we do need to remember that the terrorists are the real bad guys here.

The biggest reason that I’m so dismayed about the Bush administration’s conduct on terrorism pre-9/11 is that post-9/11 Bush is doing everything in his power to block efforts to fix the problems that we’ve all acknowledged need fixing. What are the institutional problems within and between the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, etc. that stopped information from getting into the hands of those who need it? How was the threat of terrorism prioritized by everyone involved? What intelligence and warnings were received and what can be done to make them more useful?

In my industry, whenever we have a major screwup, we get everyone together and have a “post-mortem”. During these often tense meetings, we go through everything that broke, how we fixed it, and what steps can be taken to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future. That’s what the 9/11 Commission (and it’s little sister the Congressional Joint Committee) are there to do. And that’s why it’s so important that we get through this process and quickly and efficiently as possible.

But the Bush Administration since day one has stood in the way of that effort. They’ve refused to testify, choked off funding, withheld documents, and played chicken with the deadline. Are they doing this because they’re allergic to transparency? Of that they see more value in reducing political embarrassment than in the 9/11 Commission’s mission? I’m not sure, but it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than their motivations are self-serving and ultimately hurt our effort to fight terrorism.