"baby school stuff"

forget it kids.... no naptime anymore. That's baby school stuff.

Preschool naps may become a thing of the past. The Washington Post reports, some education leaders want to end the practice of even the littlest students taking an afternoon nap during pre-kindergarten programs. Prince George's County schools chief Andri Hornsby recently told lawmakers he wants to get rid of "all the baby school stuff." If he gets the funding to make the pre-K program in Prince George's full day, Hornsby says he'll end napping. Anne Arundel County has already done the same in that district's pre-K program. Supporters of ending naps say students today need all the study time they get. But those who want to let the kids sleep say young children need 10 to 12 hours of sleep to function well, and many aren't getting that at home.

Huh?

Press Ignores 9/11 Widow's Bush Treason Suit The attorney files(sic) a 62-page complaint in federal district court (including 40 pages of prima facie evidence) charging that "President Bush and officials including, but not limited to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft and Tenet": 1.) had adequate foreknowledge of 911 yet failed to warn the county or attempt to prevent it; 2.) have since been covering up the truth of that day; 3.) have therefore abetted the murder of plaintiff's husband and violated the Constitution and multiple laws of the United States; and 4.) are thus being sued under the Civil RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organization) Act for malfeasant conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wrongful death. The suit text goes on to document the detailed forewarnings from foreign governments and FBI agents; the unprecedented delinquency of our air defense; the inexplicable half hour dawdle of our Commander in Chief at a primary school after hearing the nation was under deadly attack; the incessant invocation of national security and executive privilege to suppress the facts; and the obstruction of all subsequent efforts to investigate the disaster. It concludes that "compelling evidence will be presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power, and testimony [that] Defendants failed to act and prevent 9/11 knowing the attacks would lead to an 'International War on Terror' which would benefit Defendants both financially and politically." "Ellen Mariani's RICO suit against Bush, et al." is available online here.

Bill Maher on Washington 'outsiders'

New rule... You can't be a Washington outsider if you're already president.

Hearing President Bush these days constantly complain about "the politicians" and John Kerry being part of a "Washington mind-set," and saying things like "I got news for the Washington crowd" is like hearing Courtney Love bitch about junkies. "Washington insider" is by definition a function of one's proximity to the president. That's you, Mr. Bush. You're ground zero. Ever wonder, sir, why everyone stands and they play music when you enter a room? When you're given check-writing privileges by the Federal Reserve, you just might be a Washington insider. Lemme try to explain it to you in a different way: You're not "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" -- you're the Washington part. We need a Mr. Smith to mess with you. You're not on a mission you reluctantly accepted, like the old farts in "Space Cowboys." You campaigned for this job, and now you're doing it again. And having been the Grand Poobah for three years, it's a little late to be selling yourself as some fish-out-of-water cowboy visiting the big city on assignment. You're not McCloud, you're the grandson of a senator and the son of a president and CIA director. For 15 of the last 22 years you've had a key to the White House. The last thing that happened in Washington without the Bushes getting a piece of it was Marion Barry's crack habit. "The Exorcist" happened in Georgetown, but Satan had to run it by Jim Baker first. So knock off the regular-guy act -- and by the way, that also goes for John Forbes Kerry, the other white meat. Two Skull and Bones preppies, these guys are, from Nantucket and Kennebunkport, who use the word "summer" as a verb and probably had monogrammed beer bongs in college. Please, John Kerry: Stop rolling up your sleeves at campaign rallies like you're about to man a register at Costco. You're a Boston Brahmin who married not one but two eccentric heiresses -- you're not Joe Sixpack, you're Claus von Bulow. I think your current wife is great, but hello, she inherited the Heinz fortune! She's the ketchup lady! -- which explains why sometimes he's gotta smack her on the bottom to get her to come. Look, fellas, we've got almost eight months till the election. That's a long time to hold in your gut. To pretend you're something you're not. Let's just be real and admit that finally, and unfortunately, true class warfare has come to America. Yale class of '66 vs. Yale class of '68.

Firefighters to go after Bush 'loudly and aggressively'

from The Hill.com Firefighters to go after Bush 'loudly and aggressively'

Going negative

a piece from Salon.com about the man (and the firm) with the mission of scaring the American public into voting for George W. Bush.

Going negative He's the father of the modern attack ad, and he's behind the Bush campaign's new wave of anti-Kerry spots. Alex Castellanos is known as vicious, irresponsible -- and effective. By Eric Boehlert March 15, 2004 The Bush campaign launched its first negative attack ad on television late last week, earlier than in any presidential race in history. For an incumbent president to abandon the elevated surroundings of his White House Rose Garden so speedily reveals anxiety about an opponent ahead of or tied with him in the polls. Bush's 30-second spot portrays Sen. John Kerry as "wrong on taxes, wrong on defense." It claims that he would raise taxes by $900 billion. (A Kerry spokesperson says the $900 billion number was "made up"; Kerry's plan is to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.) Then the ad paints Kerry as weak on terrorism.

About time

that liberals fought back.

America's liberals to 'bash Bush' with talk-radio network By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 13 March 2004 After a decade of battering from the right on the airwaves, America's liberals will finally have their first ever talk radio network later this month, featuring an array of celebrated and less celebrated Bush-bashers, spearheaded by the comedian Al Franken. Air America Radio, owned by Progress Media, will launch on 31 March on stations covering four of the biggest US media markets, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. By the end of the year the project's backers plan to be on the air in a dozen markets across the country, offering an ideological alternative to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, who have long had the field to themselves. "We are going to stick it to Bush," Mr Franken said as final plans for the network were announced this week. "Bush is going down in November, and then we're putting it to the rest of the right-wing media." The kingpins of right-wing radio however seem notably unimpressed by the upstart challenger, saying liberal radio will never take root. "It's a very tough job," Mr Savage said. "It sounds easy, you get up there and attack Bush. But it's a phenomenal demand that no one can understand until they try it." Media specialists also point out that the stations where the network will launch have much lower ratings than those of the established right-wing stars - meaning that Air America will have to spend heavily on promotional advertising. But Air America, which says it has $20m of financial backing, insists it is in for the long haul. It promises "compelling and entertaining programming" - in other words that it will take on the conservatives at their own game, avoiding the liberal tendency to nuance and political correctness, qualities which may be worthy but tend not to make riveting radio. The clearest pointer to the intended future direction is Mr Franken himself, comedian, author and perennial baiter of the right. Last year, he was briefly taken to court by Fox News, as Rupert Murdoch's TV network tried to gain an injunction to block distribution of Mr Franken's best-selling book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Fox's objection was that Mr Franken had stolen the network's tagline "Fair and Balanced" to mock it. The move backfired however as Fox became a laughing stock, and sales of the offending volume soared. The suit was quickly dropped. Air America Radio's weekday programming will run from 6am to 11pm with a separate weekend line-up. Mr Franken's flagship show will be called The O'Franken Factor a title deliberately echoing Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, anchored by its top-rated conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly. Among the new network's other big names are Janeane Garofalo, the actress, who will co-host the main evening show, and Chuck D, a hip-hop artist, who will co-anchor a morning programme. The weekend hosts include Robert F Kennedy Jr, environmentalist and nephew of former President John F Kennedy. And for all the predicted difficulties ahead, Air America Radio may yet surprise everyone. The country is politically polarised as rarely before, and the success of anti-Bush literature suggests a market for left of centre views may exist on the airwaves as well. In addition to Mr Franken's diatribe, the New York Times top 10 non-fiction bestsellers included three other books which criticise Mr Bush: Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country; the recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill; and Kevin Phillips' portrait of the Bush family's wheelings and dealings, American Dynasty.

Smearing the messenger

from Salon.com

Smearing the messenger The Bush machine aims its poison darts at another military hero -- Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. By David Talbot March 15, 2004 | There they go again. Whenever the Bush machine is put on the defensive, it immediately goes on the offensive, and character assassination is one of its favorite weapons. I'm not talking about the attacks on John Kerry's patriotism. I'm talking about the poison-tipped assault on another military veteran, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, whose damning eyewitness account of how neoconservative zealots in the Defense Department bulldozed the facts and drove the country to war was published in Salon last week ("The New Pentagon Papers"). Kwiatkowski's right-wing critics could not challenge her facts, not a single one, so they immediately reached for the tar brush. The Wall Street Journal smeared her as "something of a right-wing crank." Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Los Angeles Times, trashed her as "flaky." Then Clifford May, a hit man for the Republican National Committee, was given free reign by John Gibson, host of Fox News' "The Big Show," to drag the 20-year Air Force veteran through the mud after Fox turned off her microphone -- one more bold display of the network's commitment to fairness and balance. Once she was silenced, Gibson and May smeared Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski as an "anarchist" with "radical associations" to political weirdoes like Lyndon LaRouche. The truth -- never an interest of these right-wing hatchet men -- is that the former Air Force intelligence officer comes from a politically conservative family and subscribes to a libertarian philosophy. She once gave an interview to a LaRouche publication -- the full extent of her "association" with this political fringe. By the RNC man's strained logic, the fact that she also spoke to Fox News should make her a Rupert Murdoch acolyte. If I were part of the Bush reelection team, I would want to cloud reality too. The disturbing reality that Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski presented was of an administration driven by ideologues so determined to rush into an Iraq war that they would not let intelligence or expertise or facts get in their way. We are all now paying for the folly of these men, none more than Kwiatkowski's former colleagues in the military, who are fighting and dying in Iraq. The fact that many of Kwiatkowski's neoconservative opponents have never served their country in uniform makes the Bush machine's personal attacks against her all the more repellent. Unlike Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski's character assassins, she served her country honorably for 20 years -- and she is serving America again by bravely telling the truth about the policies of deceit that led us to war.

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Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons (washingtonpost.com)

Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons (washingtonpost.com)

Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A20 The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents.

Mr. Wilson will out Mrs. Wilson's outer

Ambassador's book to reveal who he thinks leaked wife's CIA identity, publisher says

By Curt Anderson ASSOCIATED PRESS 2:55 p.m. March 2, 2004 WASHINGTON – Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson will reveal the name of the person he thinks leaked his wife's identity as an undercover CIA officer in a book due out in May, his publisher said Tuesday.

Click here for more on the book.

Which came first?

reproduction..... ? or marriage?

The Diminishing of John Ashcroft

by Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice

The Diminishing of John Ashcroft When I read some of those descriptions [of me in the press] I get scared of me. —Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. News & World Report, January 26, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In January of 2003, I, hardly known as a conservative or Bush admirer, was invited by David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, to appear at its annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was the first time a Voice writer had been asked to speak at this center of conservative activism. Joining me at the panel on civil liberties, the Constitution, and the Bush-Ashcroft Patriot Act was Bob Barr, an authentic conservative Republican but also a libertarian. He and I led the attack on the attorney general's dismantling of parts of the Bill of Rights. Before us was an audience of Bush enthusiasts, but some seemed to be rather receptive to what we were saying. Preceding the 2004 Conservative Political Action Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, the president, in his January 20 State of the Union speech, emphasized that sections of the Patriot Act were due to expire on December 31, 2005. At that point, pleased to hear the expiration date, some members on both sides of the aisle applauded. Despite that applause, the president went on to urge Congress to be sure to renew those sections of the act. At the conservatives' conference, Vice President Dick Cheney echoed Bush, but, as David Kirkpatrick reported in The New York Times (January 25): "Mr. Cheney drew a less enthusiastic response when he called on Congress to extend the anti-terrorism law. . . . Many conservatives fear that the act and other administration moves give the federal government too much power. In recognition of a new alliance on the issue, the American Civil Liberties Union set up a booth at the conference for the first time this year." The presence of the ACLU is considerably more telling than the debut of a Voice writer at the main event of the American Conservative Union last year. Also, significantly, Bob Barr has become a privacy consultant for the ACLU while working for the American Conservative Union. As the Times reported, before Dick Cheney was at the podium, "Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee, vowed that extending the [Patriot] act before reviewing its results by 2005 would happen 'over my dead body.' " It is through the very conservative Sensenbrenner's committee that all of Ashcroft's legislative proposals must clear. But its chairman, who deals only with legislation, couldn't stop Ashcroft's executive order in May 2002 that greatly loosened FBI surveillance guidelines, allowing agents to covertly attend and monitor public meetings without any prior specific leads indicating that anyone present was engaged in anything that might be related to an investigation of terrorism. At the time, however, Sensenbrenner said publicly and angrily that he didn't want this country to go back "to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King." The conservative-libertarian opposition to Ashcroft has been building steadily around the country, and in this session of Congress, a number of bills to roll back parts of the Patriot Act without waiting for December 31, 2005, have been introduced by Republican conservatives and co-sponsored by some libertarians on the Democratic side of the aisle. A growing number of members of Congress have been listening to more and more of their constituents across the land who have been telling their representatives to undo some of the damage the attorney general and the president have perpetrated against the Bill of Rights. Due to the organizing efforts of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union, there are now 250 cities, towns, and counties and three state legislatures (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont) that have passed resolutions instructing their members to protect the civil liberties of the residents of those places, and many more resolutions are in progress elsewhere. By 36 to 13, the New York City Council passed its resolution on February 4, requesting that Congress report periodically any data on New Yorkers that federal agencies have scooped up under the Patriot Act. To find out how to organize a resolution in your own town or city, go to bordc.org/tools.htm. In a resounding news article in the January 20 Boston Globe, ("Resistance to Patriot Act Gaining Ground: Foes Organizing in Communities"), Thanassis Cambanis reported: "More than two centuries ago, the patriots of Brewster [Massachusetts] shut down the Colonial courts on Cape Cod in one of the first acts of resistance against the tyrannical rule of King George III. "Now, deliberately evoking its Revolutionary history, Brewster Town Meeting has formally condemned the antiterrorist USA Patriot Act, united against the laws of a different leader named George. . . . The grass-roots opposition has forged an unlikely alliance of people angry at Washington's domestic handling of the war on terror." In Brewster, anger at the Patriot Act has drawn together libertarians, an anti-tax group, and a Unitarian congregation, as well as a more traditional coalition of civil libertarians and anti-war activists. A similar story has played out in 16 Massachusetts communities, and 16 more, including Salem, Waltham, Watertown, Gloucester, Beverly, and Bedford, are preparing measures against the Patriot Act this spring. "[This] bipartisan groundswell in communities across the nation," the Globe continues, "will reshape the national debate if it continues to accelerate with support from disparate groups, from gun owners to librarians to fiscal conservatives." There is even support for revising some of the language of the Patriot Act from Marc Racicot, chairman of George W. Bush's re-election campaign! The November 3 Weekly Standard quotes Racicot as saying: "I'm not aware of any act, or any piece of legislation . . . that has ultimately ended up in a situation where it did not have to be refined." Racicot added that he expects there will be "refinements [to the Patriot Act ] . . . so that it does not end up invading the civil rights of any American." Tell that to the president and the attorney general! So why isn't the Democratic Party making the Bush-Ashcroft war on the Bill of Rights a central part of the presidential campaign—joining the groundswell extending from Brewster all across the country?

C.I.A. Admits It didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.

Another Bush administration lie exposed. from the NYTimes.... Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.

"The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons. "Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as 'high value and moderate value' in the weapons hunt."

Republican Terrorists

Chris Nelson shows irrefutable evidence that the GOP actually does create little terrorists, and then follows it up with some very good suggestions to the Left on how to counter these lame-brained constructs of conservative ideology. Because these are issues I find personally aborrhent, I'll keep most of my choice comments to myself. But I'll leave a couple of passing thoughts: -are people REALLY so foolish that they honestly think liberals hate America? -is driving a wedge through the middle of the American voting public still a winning strategy for the folks at the RNC? Check out this email from the level-headed right.

From: "Baker, J." [liberalbasher@sbcglobal.net] To: [webmaster@awolbush.com] Subject: Comments . . . Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 22:33:11 -0500 You people are beyond evil. George W. Bush will be re-elected to a second term, and hopefully it will drive die-hard idiotic leftists to commit suicide, that would be the bonus round! Instead of bitching about how much you hate George W. Bush and how he stole the election and went AWOL from the National Guard, why don't you rotten cocksuckers spend your time and money and offer up a candidate who isn't a god-damned America-hating lunatic? You people are utterly useless to humanity and wholly better off dead, burning in eternal damnation. Ya know, I think it's too bad that we can't follow Saddam's model of dealing with opposition - just open up mass graves and start torturing, maiming, and murdering liberals and leftists by the millions - toss them into the ground, and fill the holes up with dirt. I would love to volunteer for such duty! Eat shit and die, all of you! J. Baker Phoenix

Nice. See what happens when you peddle filth?

Ben Franklin... on the Patriot Act

a man ahead of his time.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759