The United States maintained its dominance in the international arms market last year, especially in sales to developing nations, according to a new Congressional report.

The United States was the leader in total worldwide sales in 2002, with about $13.3 billion, or 45.5 percent of global conventional weapons deals, a rise from $12.1 billion in 2001. Of that, $8.6 billion was to developing nations, or about 48.6 percent of conventional arms deals concluded with developing nations last year, according to the report. (via the New York Times)

Apparently, selling arms is okay as long as they're not being sold to or by certain nations. But we're willing to bet that the U.S. has financed its share of terrorists.

Blowback's a bitch.

From "More Americans in Poverty in 2002, Census Study Says" via the New York Times.

The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.7 million last year, and the median household income declined by 1.1 percent, the Census Bureau reported today.

It was the second straight year of adverse changes in both poverty and income, the first two-year downturn since the early 1990's.

'Guess the Bushes feel they don't have to work for those who are poor. They get all those big-government entitlements, anyway.

Under George W. Bush's leadership, Texas ranks number one in a many categories of pollution and environmental degradation. For example, Texas is:

#1 in the Emission of Ozone Causing Air Pollution Chemicals
#1 in Toxic Chemical releases into the Air
#1 in use of Deep Well Injectors as method of Waste Disposal
#1 in counties listed in top 20 of Emitting Cancer Causing Chemicals
#1 in Total Number of Hazardous Waste Incinerators
#1 in Environmental Justice Title 6 complaints
#1 in production of Cancer causing Benzene & Vinyl Chloride
#1 Largest Sludge Dump in Country

Texas air quality has worsened significantly under Gov. Bush's administration. The Houston-Galveston area has had eight of the top ten ozone (smog) peaks in the nation, far surpassing Los Angeles. But as concern over the health and environmental consequences rise, the governor's policy has been only to fight the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's attempts to impose stricter air quality protections.

When confronted with the option of enforcing regulations or bypassing them, Gov. Bush has consistently chosen the latter. After research showed that 1,000 unregulated, "grandfathered" industrial plants accounted for a huge proportion of Texas air pollution, Bush opposed legislation that would force the companies to clean up and instead cut a back room deal to install a "voluntary" program. The heads of these companies include some of the Governor's largest campaign contributors.

- From the Public Employee’s for Environmental Responsibility website. Visit, and while you’re there take the Toxic Texas Tour.

From today’s New York Times, "The Presidential Bubble":

Four progressive political groups sued the Bush administration this week, charging that the Secret Service is systematically keeping protesters away from the president's public appearances. They make a serious point about free speech rights, but they also point out a disturbing aspect of the Bush White House: the country has a chief executive who seems to embrace the presidential bubble.

Security concerns make it inevitable that a modern American president will be somewhat cut off from the country he leads. He cannot insert himself into any part of normal life without a phalanx of security guards.

Protesters cannot be permitted to get close enough to pose a threat, but they ought to be able to get close enough so the president can see that they are there. Sometimes seeing a glimpse of placard-wielding demonstrators is as close as the commander in chief can get to seeing the face of national discontent.

At Mr. Bush's public appearances, his critics are routinely shunted into "protest zones" as much as a half-mile away. At the Columbia, S.C., airport last year, a protester with a "No War for Oil" sign was ordered to move a half-mile from the area where Mr. Bush's supporters were allowed to stand. When the protester refused, he was arrested.

Mr. Bush and his aides also seem to go to great lengths to underline the degree to which the president closes himself off from the news media. In an interview with Fox News this week, the president said he learned most of what he needs to know from morning briefings by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card.

As for newspapers, Mr. Bush said, "I glance at the headlines" but "rarely read the stories." The people who brief him on current events encounter many of the newsmakers personally, he said, and in any case "probably read the news themselves."

At least that explains how he’s able to insist we’re making progress in Iraq.

AG John Ashcroft wins again with a new policy directive that furthers his drive to take control of the the U.S. judicial system by forcing federal prosecutors to operate in an ever narrower ideological box.

Attorney General John Ashcroft today made it tougher for federal prosecutors to strike plea bargains with criminal defendants, requiring attorneys to seek the most serious charges possible in almost all cases.

The policy directive issued by Mr. Ashcroft is the latest in a series of steps the Justice Department has taken in recent months to combat what it sees as dangerously lenient practices by some federal prosecutors and judges.

The move also effectively expands to the entire gamut of federal crimes the attorney general's tough stance on the death penalty, which he has sought in numerous cases over the objections of federal prosecutors.

With the backing of many Republicans in Congress, the Justice Department has sought to impose greater uniformity and "accountability" in federal cases.

In addition to the expanded use of the death penalty, Mr. Ashcroft also announced a plan last month to track data on judges who give lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe.

But dissenters attacked the monitoring plan as a judicial black list, arguing that denying judges and prosecutors the discretion to analyze the facts of a case is a mistake.

A decade ago, Attorney General Janet Reno enacted a policy to give federal prosecutors more discretion over how their cases should be handled by allowing for an "individualized assessment" of the facts and circumstances of the case.

But Mr. Ashcroft's directive effectively scales back that initiative in an effort to restrict the use of plea bargains and create what the Justice Department said would be more "transparency" in federal prosecutions.

Makes you wish he hadn't lost his Senate seat to the dead guy.

Bush heads to the United Nations today to ask for money and troops, but don't expect any mea culpas. That wouldn't poll well.

President Bush will tell the other members of the United Nations Tuesday that the organization is relevant after all -- at least when it comes to helping the United States finish what it started in Iraq.

It would have been difficult in any event to hold out much hope for Bush's success in prying troops and money out of an organization at which he thumbed his diplomatic nose. It'll be a fool's errand if, as predicted, the president will be unrepentant on his decision to go it alone in Iraq. (Seattle P-I)

According to the officials involved in drafting the speech, for an audience they know will range from the skeptical to the angry, Mr. Bush will acknowledge no mistakes in planning for postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq. Privately, however, many officials are acknowledging that the Pentagon was unprepared for the scope and duration of the continuing guerrilla-style attacks against the American-led alliance and the newly appointed Iraqi Governing Council. (New York Times)

U.S. President George Bush says his series of record tax cuts is helping American small businesses stimulate the economy. The president used his weekly radio address to call on Congress to ease regulations that he says are hurting profits. (via VOA, the closest thing America has to Xinhua)

Like regulations that safeguard workers, lessen environmental impacts and protect consumers.

God help us, it's Reagan all over again.

Apparently undermining the Clean Air Act in this country just isn't toxic enough. From today’s Independent (UK), "Bush steps up fight against European safety testing":

President George Bush is mounting an intensive campaign to force European countries to drop safety tests expected to save thousands of lives each year, internal US government documents seen by The Independent on Sunday reveal. Britain, which has been generally supportive, last week denounced the measures as "disastrously wrong".

The documents - which include diplomatic cables signed by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell - show that the Bush administration has threatened Europe with trade sanctions if it goes ahead with the tests, which are designed to protect workers and the public from highly toxic chemicals.

Oh, and let’s not forget the "global" in global warming.

From today’s AP wire, "Bush is often in states that could decide '04":

If you live in Pennsylvania or Florida, your chances of catching a glimpse of President Bush are pretty good. Missouri, Ohio or Michigan, too. He has been to each more than 10 times as president, and he's sure to be back again soon.

Though Bush says he's not yet campaigning for re-election, he's beating a well-worn path through a handful of states likely to be presidential battlegrounds next year.

But if you live in states he carried overwhelmingly in 2000, or lost by a similarly large margin, don't expect to see Air Force One anytime soon, unless it's 30,000 feet up.

Bush has yet to visit Rhode Island, Vermont or Hawaii, states where Democrat Al Gore won handily in 2000. Nor has he been to Idaho or Kansas, states he carried comfortably.

"The political season will come in its own time. I've got a job to do," he told a Philadelphia-area fund-raiser earlier this week. That was during his 22nd visit as president to Pennsylvania.

Even while claiming that politics remain out of season for him, Bush has attended more than two dozen such fund-raisers since June, collecting nearly $65 million of an estimated $200 million goal for a primary season in which he has no opposition.

Yes, we've said it before. But now someone bipartisan and a former Reagan administration official is saying it. And he says it's much worse than we think.

The federal government's budget is in far worse shape than most Americans realize, and the fiscal hole is deepening, the head of Congress' non-partisan watchdog agency said yesterday.

"Our projected budget deficits are not manageable without significant changes" in taxes or spending, U.S. Comptroller General David Walker said in a speech to the National Press Club. "We cannot simply grow our way out of this problem."

Watchdog sounds alarm over deficit, warns it's 'not manageable', Seattle P-I

From today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bush: No Iraq link to 9/11 found":

President Bush, having repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said yesterday there is no evidence that the deposed Iraqi leader had a hand in those attacks, in contrast to the belief of most Americans.

The president's comments came in response to a reporter's question about Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" program that Iraq was the "geographic base" of the terrorists behind the attacks on New York and Washington.

Bush said yesterday there was no attempt by the administration to try to confuse people about any link between Saddam and Sept. 11.

"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said. "What the vice president said was is that he (Saddam) has been involved with al-Qaida.

"And al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaida operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. ... There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties."

Most of the administration's public assertions have focused on the man Bush mentioned, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior Osama bin Laden associate whom officials have accused of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe, running a terrorist haven in northern Iraq -- an area outside Saddam's control -- and organizing an attack that killed an American aid executive in Jordan last year.

Security analysts, however, say al-Zarqawi made his way to Iraq, where his leg was amputated. . Unconfirmed reports claim he then visited northern Iraq, where a militant Islamic group affiliated with al-Qaida is encamped not far from the border with Iran.

The group, however, far from being an ally of Saddam, sought to replace his secular government with an Islamic regime.

A senior intelligence official, who asked not to be identified, said the information linking the group, Ansar al Islam, to Saddam comes "almost exclusively from defectors produced by the Iraqi opposition. They are not uniformly credible."

The Bush administration named Syria and Libya yesterday as "rogue states" whose weapons of mass destruction must not just be controlled but must be eliminated by whatever means necessary. (Newsday)

So this is how we calm things down in the Middle East? Now that Syria and Libya (along with Cuba) are second tier “axis of evil” states, it was only a matter of time before they got slapped with the WMD designation as well. Apparently, our inability to find WMDs in Iraq and our total mismanagement of the post-war reconstruction hasn’t kept Bush from going ahead with his diplomatic mission of over-heated rhetoric and flat-out intimidation.

Once again, we sound like the Soviet Union in the 1980s. And we know what happened to that regime.

From comments by Tom Ridge to the Christian Science Monitor:

... the fact is that our level of security at yellow today is better than it was a year ago, and our level of security at yellow today will be better a year from now. So the threshold to go from yellow to orange will be higher. That does make a difference.

So if we’ve got this straight - and frankly we’re not sure we do, or if we’re even supposed to - as the level of security improves, we shouldn’t expect the threat advisory to drop to blue ("guarded", for those of you who don’t have it memorized), or even green ("low"), but rather to stay at yellow, albeit a safer yellow?

You’d almost think the Bush administration has a vested interest in keeping us afraid.

From "Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington", via the New York Times.

When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents.

Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known.

Should Washington reconstruct Iraq's schools and hospitals, lawmakers are asking, or America's? Should it pay for more than 100,000 American troops to stay in Iraq, or for 40 million seniors to be offered prescription drugs through Medicare? And if it tries to do it all, should it keep cutting taxes?

The Bush administration says it can do all of the above, once the tax cuts inaugurate a burst of economic growth. Democrats and virtually every mainstream economist say that something will have to give, very possibly the government's retirement promises to millions of aging baby boomers.

Yep, we're still waiting for that burst of economic growth.

From "America set to torpedo trade talks", via the Guardian (UK):

Fears are growing that the United States could effectively walk away from crucial trade talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun aimed at solving the deepening economic and social crisis afflicting billions of the world's poorest people.

As the World Trade Organisation negotiations entered their final hours, business leaders feared that efforts to strike a ground-breaking deal on trade distortions harming the developing world were in the balance.

A high level source in the UK delegation told The Observer said: 'It's difficult to know what the Americans want. They're staying in their hotel. They're behaving like the Soviet Union in the Eighties. It's making it difficult to know what they want.'

If the US walks away from the talks it would plunge the world into a disastrous financial crisis as it sought to strike trade deals on its own terms with individual nations.

Apparently, Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" doctrine applies to world trade as well as disastrous military missions.

President Bush commemorated the September 11, 2001 attacks yesterday by calling for increased measures to investigate, detain and, if need be, kill those suspected of terrorist activity. Yes, you heard correctly. He wants to expand the USA PATRIOT Act because, apparently, it did not go far enough to deprive individuals from (or appearing to be from) the Middle East their rights:

President Bush, in a speech marking today's anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, called on Congress Wednesday to "untie the hands of our law enforcement officials" by expanding authorities' ability to probe and detain terrorism suspects.

Hailing the passage of the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which expanded federal police powers, Bush said those changes did not go far enough. He called for empowering authorities in terrorist investigations to issue subpoenas without going to grand juries, to hold suspects without bail and to pursue the death penalty in more cases. (via the Washington Post)

Next thing we know, he's going to ask Congress for the authority to just shoot brown people on sight.

We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that when Bush delivers his speech on the second anniversary of 9/11, he’ll once again point to Iraq as a victory in the war on terror. We won’t belabor the notion that what’s happening in Iraq right now is hardly a victory. We will remind everyone that the Bush administration never could produce evidence that Iraq supported al Qaeda, which is why it propagated the falsehood of an imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

We’re ready to bet that he’ll bring up Iraq in the context of the war on terror in part because he’s done it before, apparently working on the premise that a lie repeated often enough will eventually be accepted as truth. Sadly, the lie is also becoming truth in reality, as the conditions in Iraq create more willing volunteers for terrorist organizations every day.

He’ll also point to Iraq because he has little else to point to: Afghanistan is a mess, and many of the leaders of al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, are still at large.

As he has before, he’ll call for sacrifice. He’ll urge us to stay the course his administration has contrived for us. He may even use this opportunity to once again ask us to acquiesce to the Patriot Act. And he’ll do it all in memory of the victims of 9/11.

He could have given them any number of legacies: vengeance against the people actually responsible for the attacks; a country that is truly safer and more secure; progress in international relations grown out of the goodwill of the nations who rallied around us after the tragedy. Instead, he’s creating a legacy of failure and deliberate, cynical misdirection.

They deserve a more worthy memorial.

From yesterday’s editorial on Yahoo! News by William F. Buckley, "Bush Is Evil":

In a private forum the question arose, Why do they hate Bush so? And ... what will they do with that hatred? How far can they carry it? How will it affect the next presidential election?

The participants agreed that it is a singular hatred, greater by far than what was felt by dissenters against Ronald Reagan in 1984, and rivaling what was felt for Nixon in 1973-'74. It supplies a useful context here to recall that hatred of Nixon was very much alive in 1972, but he carried 49 states in his re-election bid. The decapitation of Nixon was in due course effected, but required his cooperation.

Bush, by contrast, is not ever going to engage in suicidal activity of an extra-political character. Does this mean that the animosity toward him will wash away in the flood tide of a re-election victory? An examination of this point needs of course to acknowledge that you don't have to do a Watergate to end your career. George H.W. Bush ended his without any brush with felony.

The inquiry continues: Why the feelings toward Bush? The answer, as agreed upon in this improvised study, was: 1) He is not legitimately president of the United States. The other guy got more votes. Bush slipped in because of capricious conduct by the courts. 2) Bush is a Christer. He takes every opportunity to inform the American people that he is in touch with the Lord and therefore that, by deduction, what he does is the Lord's work.

3) He gravely miscalculated the onus of what he set out to do in Iraq. The consequences of that miscalculation are deaths unending, and more money spent than King Solomon dreamed of. 4) The economy lacks the kind of resiliency it might have shown if more resourcefully tended. 5) His truckling to the rich in his tax cuts shows a callous disregard of civil adjudications between America's poor and America's rich.

And finally, 6) He is a liar. He specifically informed the public that Iraq had in hand instantly deployable weapons of mass destruction. These, it proved, did not exist.

The question then was: How will the opposition communicate this animosity? When Democratic Candidate X faces President Bush in the televised debate, how will he express, or capitalize on, the odium? One participant recalled the deep, histrionic sighs of Al Gore when confronting Bush in debate. But of course the consensus was that Gore was hurt, not helped, by the body language.

Will the average voter wish to hear about the evil of Bush? What is the good of hating Bush if you can't interest your neighbor, and his neighbor, in hating Bush? That, after all, is the point of this exercise -- to send Bush back to his ranch, permanently.

Say whatever else you like about Bill Buckley, the man sure is articulate.

And he offers a useful reminder: while we often fail to resist the urge to vent our frustration over the more outrageous acts of the Bush administration, venting our frustration isn’t the point.

The point is to remind the majority of voters that Bush has given them good reasons to kick him out of the White House.

When the time comes, vote against him because the lying and manipulation have gone too far, or because you want your kids to breathe clean air and drink clean water and not be saddled with debt, or because you think corporate interests have too much power in Washington.

Hell, do it for sheer, unmitigated financial self-interest, because the money he’s spreading around isn’t getting to you.

Sarcasm aside, Buckley’s right (no pun intended - well, okay, maybe a little intended): Bush didn’t have the support of the majority last time. We don’t need our neighbors to hate Bush - we just need a few of them to help widen the margin of his defeat beyond the assistance of the electoral college system and the Supreme Court.

From the Washington Post, July 30, 1999: "Bush Name Helps Fuel Oil Dealings":

Thanks to his and his family's ties to wealthy investors around the country, including prominent Republicans, Bush was repeatedly able to raise money to invest in oil drilling, especially when prices were booming and tax breaks were inviting in the late 1970s. But connections could not help with the tricky business of picking profitable holes to drill, and Bush never made a big score.

In fact, Bush lost money for most of his well-connected investors. At the same time, the management fees and other expenses he collected from them kept him in business and enabled him to buy oil reserves for his company's own account, including the reserves that eventually attracted Harken's attention.

Three times during his years in Midland, Bush was saved from financial trouble or stagnation by the appearance of new partners or financial angels who gave him a fresh start. One was a Princeton classmate and friend of James A. Baker III, who was to serve as his father's secretary of state; another was a fellow Yale man who shared Bush's love for baseball.

The third was Harken, which was to save Bush from humiliating failure but also create a target for later criticism. Reporters would scrutinize the deal as early as 1990. Led by then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards, Bush's opponent in the 1994 gubernatorial election, his political critics have asked whether Harken used Bush's name to obtain oil business. Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So basically, George has always had a knack for 1) raising money, and 2) creating tax breaks for the wealthy. No wonder he expects the U.N. and the American people to bail him out of the mess he and his cronies made in Iraq - to him, it's just business as usual.

Unfortunately for us all, one element of the Bush business model appears to have changed since then:

Bush said he made the move [i.e., sold Harken stock] because he wanted to pay off a $500,000 bank loan he had obtained in 1989 to buy his slice of the Texas Rangers. "I didn't need to pay it off," he said in an interview. "I did it because I just don't like to carry debt."

...in Which to Catch the Conscience of the King

Bush's address to the nation last night concerning Iraq did have one highlight: there wasn't a smirk to be seen on the visage of our famously smirky president.

All of a sudden, the administration is admitting that the war in Iraq is not progressing as promised last March:

After a string of setbacks, President Bush had to confront the obvious last night, that the postwar conflict in Iraq is not going well and that it will take considerably more time, money and sacrifice for the United States to prevail than he had told the country when he launched an invasion last April.

The war in Iraq that the president described last night is a far cry from the shock-and-awe power of the spring offensive that drove then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power in little more than a month. What he talked about in his nationally televised address was a dangerous and more grinding conflict in which sheer force and technological prowess may be less conclusive to the outcome than will, resolve and patience. ("A Blunt Blow to Postwar Realities", via the Washington Post)

The "we have liberated the Iraqis from tyranny" rhetoric was still there, but it was tempered by the absence of the usual boasts about our accomplishments thus far.

Did the White House finally see the light and decide to level with the American public? Nope, they saw the poll numbers and decided some perspective might encourage Americans to be a bit more patient.

Sure, Bill Clinton may have been a philanderer and Al Gore was drier than dust, but they were also wicked smart; and when it comes to matters of utmost importance, we want someone who doesn't have to ask his daddy's friends what to do.

Here's one small example, from a September 2 White House press release:

Nomination Sent to the Senate
David L. Lyon, of California, a Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service, to serve concurrently and without additional compensation as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Kiribati.

Now, this item may not contain matters of extreme national import, but we'd be willing to bet a cold $1k that our president can neither identify the Republic of Kiribati on a map nor define "plenipotentiary".

Yes, we know you're asking: "Why does he need to?" Well, this statement is released under the President's name, as are hundreds of releases daily, and it gives us the heebie-jeebies to know that our president is clueless about his own administration's goings-on. It may not be important when it comes to the Republic of Kiribati, but it is extremely important when it comes to things like, oh, departments overruling each other on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or how a tax cut might impact the sagging American economy.

We prefer a president who doesn't have to trust daddy's friends to tell him these things. What if they're wrong, or totally in cahoots? Bill Clinton would have known the difference. Hell, George H.W. Bush would have known the difference.

George W. is dumb, and when it comes to our lives and the well-being of our country, we don't trust dumb.

From "Rumsfeld Hails 'Wonderful Start' to New Iraq", via Reuters

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lauded the "wonderful start" to rebuilding Iraq on Saturday even as guerrillas attacked his troops and hundreds of protesters marched to demand jobs.

We're not sure exactly what Rumsfeld's definition of "wonderful" is, but we're pretty sure that, when applied to Iraq, the word wouldn't be used by anyone on the planet outside of the Bush administration.

From today's New York Times, "Industry Fights to Put Imprint on Drug Bill":

In the thick of the 2000 presidential campaign, executives at Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the nation's largest drug companies, received an urgent message: donate money to George W. Bush.

The message did not come from Republican campaign officials. It came from top Bristol-Myers executives, according to four executives who say they donated to Mr. Bush under pressure from their bosses. They said that they were urged to donate the maximum — $1,000 in their own name and $1,000 in their spouse's — and were warned that the company's chief executive would be notified if they failed to give.

Bristol-Myers said no one was forced to donate. But elsewhere in the drug industry, the message about the election was much the same. At some companies, officials circulated a videotape of Vice President Al Gore railing against the high price of prescription drugs. A torrent of contributions for Mr. Bush and other Republicans resulted. And the money kept flowing, right through the elections of 2002.

Those donations may soon pay off handsomely for the pharmaceutical business. Four years ago, a Democrat was in the White House and the industry was bitterly fighting a prescription drug proposal that it said would have led to price controls. Today, a Republican-controlled Congress is preparing to send a Republican president a measure with a central provision — the use of private health plans to deliver Medicare prescription drug benefits — that is tailor-made to the industry's specifications.

The story of how pharmaceutical manufacturers helped shape the Medicare drug benefit is, in part, that of a calculated decision by a lucrative industry to throw its financial weight behind one political party — with $50 million in campaign contributions over the last four years, the vast majority to Republicans. It is also the story of a dogged, mostly unseen campaign that included a small army of lobbyists in Washington and a network of industry-financed groups, which carried the drug makers' message to the public.

Throughout, the industry had a single goal: to defeat any legislation that would let Medicare negotiate steep discounts on the prices of medicines for its 40 million beneficiaries.

Instead, if there had to be a prescription drug benefit, industry executives agreed that it should be administered by the private sector, where insurance companies would negotiate on their own, without Medicare's influence. That is precisely what will occur if bills passed by the House and Senate are reconciled and a law is signed by President Bush. Both measures envision taxpayers spending $400 billion over the next 10 years on the drug makers' products, while banning government officials from even seeking volume discounts.

"The drug lobby has just emasculated Congress with tons of money," said Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, whose Republican leaders wrote the House Medicare bill. "They bought themselves a deal."

This is only a portion of the article. You really should go read the whole thing, but you may want to make sure you have medication for high blood pressure - and the insurance or cash to pay for it - on hand when you do.

From Thomas Oliphant's editorial in yesterday's Boston Globe, "Muscling government out of air safety":

[President Bush] could not prevail if the privatization issue were put to a specific vote in Congress. In fact it was put to a vote in the Senate two months ago as part of the process of reauthorizing the functions of the aviation-supervising Federal Aviation Administration. With 11 Republicans joining in, the Senate in a 56-41 vote specifically forbade any privatization. In the House, a ban of only marginally less sweeping nature was made part of the legislation it approved.

But when representatives of the two bodies met to iron out differences, the White House went to work to undo what each had already done. Promising a veto for reauthorization legislation that restricted his agenda, Bush insisted that the final version allow for-profit air traffic control to proceed in stages. Rubber-stamp Republicans on the conference committee then folded like cheap suits and the result was legislation that permitted what each house had forbidden.

Lest anyone think that serious legislating on an important public policy issue was occurring, consider the actions of the top Republican member of the House-Senate committee, Representative Don Young of Alaska, who also chairs the House Transportation Committee. Young went along with the White House ploy, but the resulting legislation magically exempted two traffic control facilities from privatization. Not surprisingly those two facilities are in Alaska, Young presumably being willing to inflict for-profit public safety on the rest of us but not so willing to inflict it on his own constituents.

The Republicans did what they could to disguise what had happened. Young's committee statement buried the privatization scheme in a blizzard of information about the overall bill. It was made to seem small, that no major steps could be taken until late 2007, that only traffic control towers already operated privately were exempt -- along with new ones and "certain other" functions. The administration chipped in with the observation that only "rural airports" were involved.

In fact, 2,000 of the system's 15,000 controllers would be affected, along with assorted certification and maintenance employees. The number of towers involved would increase to 71, including Van Nuys, Calif. (the eighth-busiest airport in the country), and 11 of the 50 busiest. The accurate way to summarize the overall traffic control situation is to note that after 2007 the entire system could be privatized.