From yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Most states not fully compliant - Optimism premature on Bush's program":

President Bush's message sounded so upbeat that state education officials who had flown in from across the country broke into applause repeatedly when he delivered it in the White House Rose Garden.

"Every state, plus Puerto Rico and the District [of Columbia], are now complying with the No Child Left Behind Act after one year," Bush told them in the televised ceremony June 10.

The chief state school officers were understandably pleased, because each jurisdiction is supposed to comply with the education reform act in order to get its full share of the $11.7 billion in Title I funds for disadvantaged students distributed this year.

Looking back to his first days in office, Bush said, "Keep in mind that in January of 2001, only 11 states were in compliance with a 1994 education law."

As an example of "significant progress," he mentioned that in the past five months, Education Secretary Rod Paige had approved the accountability plans of 33 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Nearly two months after that afternoon of euphoria, the path toward perfection in K-12 education is looking a little rockier.

So far, only five of the 52 accountability plans have been "fully approved," just as only 11 plans for academic standards and tests had been fully approved under the old law by January 2001. A sardonic headline in Education Week, a national newspaper about K-12 education, reads, " 'Approved' Is Relative Term for Ed Dept."

More Ashcroft antics via the Washington Post:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has ordered U.S. attorneys across the country to become much more aggressive in reporting to the Justice Department cases in which federal judges impose lighter sentences than called for in sentencing guidelines.

The directive, contained in a July 28 memo from Ashcroft, is the latest salvo in an escalating battle over how much discretion federal judges should have in handing down sentences in criminal cases. The more extensive reporting will lay the groundwork for the Justice Department to appeal many more of those sentencing decisions than it has.

Some federal judges have spoken out forcefully against what many of them see as a congressional and Justice Department assault on their independence. U.S. District Judge John S. Martin Jr. resigned from a federal court in Manhattan in June and accused Congress of attempting "to intimidate judges."

"For a judge to be deprived of the ability to consider all of the factors that go into formulating a just sentence is completely at odds with the sentencing philosophy that has been the hallmark of the American system of justice," Martin wrote in an op-ed page article in the New York Times.

So much for judicial independence. Apparently, John Ashcroft knows better than everyone who to damn to hell (Arabs) and who to let off easy (Halliburton). So no need for that checks and balances thing.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A car bomb has exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday[.]

Crowds rushed the embassy after Thursday's explosion, looting parts of the facility and burning pictures of Jordan's present King Abdullah II and his father, the late King Hussein. (via CNN)

No doubt the Iraqis responsible for this blast are unhappy about Jordan's cooperation with the U.S. in allowing American troops to operate from Jordan in the latest war. But when the Iraqis start attacking their own Arab brothers, we know we are in for a long, chaotic road ahead.

As the instability in Iraq threatens to rage out of control, we can only hope that the Bush administration doesn't move on to something new - as they did in Afghanistan - leaving civilians no better off than they were under dictatorial regimes, the remaining American soldiers in grave danger, and increased bitterness and hatred in its wake.

And let's hope that Election 2004 is not the something new that Bush moves on to in avoidance of the intractable problems in Iraq for which we are directly responsible.

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 5 -- A powerful car bomb exploded in front of the luxury JW Marriott Hotel here during the lunchtime bustle today, killing at least 10 people and injuring 149, according to the Indonesian Red Cross, in what officials said could have been a suicide attack.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but analysts said the attack was probably the work of the regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah, which intelligence agencies say cooperates with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. (via the Washington Post)

White House spokesman Scott McClellan announced the offer of immediate American assistance:

Mr. McClellan refused to comment on any possible role of the al-Qaeda network but said the bombing was "a reminder that we are still fighting a war on terrorism."

"We fully support President Megawati and her administration in their efforts to fight terror and we stand fully prepared in assist in any way possible to bring those responsible to justice," he added.

Meanwhile, in Liberia, Bush approved the deployment of six to ten U.S. soldiers to a country where over 1,000 civilians have been killed, people are starving and horror is commonplace.

Maybe the Liberians should stage a terrorist attack on their own country. That seems to be the only way to get the Bush administration's attention.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has been the one moderating voice in the Bush administration. He served the liberals reasonably well during the first years of Bush II (at least well enough to keep us from killing ourselves), all the way up to the decision to go to war over Iraq. Powell held the line there for a while on Iraq, but then he let those neo-cons over at the Pentagon roll all over him.

Still, even a lefty has to welcome the fact that Colin Powell has been in charge of our foreign relations (though sadly, not nearly in charge enough of our overall foreign policy).

Now comes the sobering news that Powell will retire at the end of Bush II.1.

If that's not enough to keep you from voting for anyone other than Bush, consider this:

[Condoleezza] Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration.

Picturing Wolfowitz as Secretary of State makes our stomachs turn. He's not exactly, shall we say, dimplomatic. And Condoleezza Rice is no consolation prize.

Still not ready to vote for the un-Bush? It gets worse:

Another dark horse is former House speaker Newt Gingrich. The Georgia Republican appears to be openly campaigning for the job, arguing in speeches and in a recent Foreign Policy magazine article that the State Department under Powell has failed to adequately support Bush's policies.

And that, my friends, even the mere prospect, is enough to make us hit the un-Bush campaign trail yesterday.

From today's Guardian, The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded":

US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media.

Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112.

The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

From Thursday’s press conference:

"We will not rest until Americans looking for work can find a job."

Well, maybe a little rest...

When it's not just bad form but actually deadly to be an American abroad, you know your government has gone too far.

This week the Dutch government sent 1,100 peacekeepers to Iraq to replace some of the American soldiers there.

The first item of business for these Dutch soldiers was to make it clear they are not Americans:

For extra safety, the Dutch troops are distinguishing themselves from the Americans. They have scrawled "the Netherlands" in Arabic on their vehicles, and distributed posters making sure the local people know they are Dutch. (via the New York Times)

What's a poor American soldier to do, hand out cards reading "I'm not for Bush" in Arabic?

More bad news for the environment, via Reuters:

The Bush administration on Thursday said it formed a committee to find faster ways for oil and natural gas companies to obtain drilling permits on federal lands in the Rocky Mountains.

Environmental groups have criticized the White House for being too eager to help the energy industry win access to federal lands that are now off-limits to drilling.

President George W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, made energy exploration in the western U.S. a focal-point of his plan to help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and to meet future demand for natural gas.

When will the Bush administration - or any administration - get the fact that dependence on foreign oil is not the problem? Dependence on OIL is the problem, yet very little money goes to finding an alternative.

If the world's fuel reserves were due to run out in only a decade or two, we would be hard at work on a renewable source of energy. It would be difficult, but we would heavily fund the effort and we would find a solution.

But hey, since we have all that oil just sitting around in useless places like the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and rural states like Wyoming and Montana, why bother?

Well, the Middle East without oil would be just another Africa - a place of illness and warfare and bone-crushing poverty - and you'd have to look pretty damn hard in such a place to find traces of the American government. So yes, dependence on foreign oil does matter. Hundreds of American lives have been lost because of it. But the answer does not lie in turning inward and tearing up the wildlands of Alaska or the Rocky Mountains.

A real solution is much more difficult. It will take vision, brilliance, great effort and the backbone to stand up to the energy companies. If we can build a bomb that obliterates all organic life, surely we can do this. The result would be the kind of once-in-a-century discovery that changes the world as we know it - more lasting, more ecologically sane, something for which human beings wouldn't have to die.

Yesterday President Bush bestowed upon the American public and the White House press corps the honor of a press conference - his first in nearly five months.

Among other eyebrow-raising items, Bush announced that his administration is working on codifying the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Though to be fair, he tried to say it in an inclusive way:

"I am mindful that we're all sinners," the president said, and borrowing from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, added:

"And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of their neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own."

Oh yes, he really said that. Then he said this:

"On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on issues such as marriage. And that's really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I believe we ought to codify that one way or the other and we have lawyers looking at the best way to do that." (New York Times)

These statements are wrong on any number of levels, but, for the sake of argument, let's just take three:

1. What ever happened to the whole separation of church and state thing?

2. Queers are here to stay, Mr. Bush. They're going to get married in Canada, come back and raise families, move in next door and infiltrate the Pentagon (sneaky queers being what they are). And they deserve more than to be merely tolerated.

3. A U.S. law to define marriage ALREADY EXISTS. It's called the Defense of Marriage Act, and Clinton, god help him, signed it.* (This fact helpfully pointed out by William Eskridge Jr., professor at Yale Law School, as interviewed by the intrepid New York Times.)

#3 is a probably a good example of why Bush has only held nine news conferences in his two and a half years as President. If it isn't scripted, it's a total embarrassment.

*To his credit, this was before Will & Grace.

Paul Wolfowitz: A Man of Murky Intelligence

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is a rabid right winger. On Sunday he told anyone who would listen that the America must go on the offensive to prevent terror, even when the intelligence is “murky”.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, defending the Bush administration's justification of the Iraq war, said today that intelligence on terrorism is by its nature "murky," and that the United States may have little choice in the future but to "act on the basis of murky intelligence" if terror attacks are to be prevented. (New York Times)

Once again, this seems like a very bad plan. We’re supposed to trust the Bush White House – or any White House – to differentiate between credible but murky intelligence and murky intelligence that is just too murky to be believed? How easy would it be to believe what murky intelligence sounds and good discount what doesn’t fit in the plan?

A little too easy for comfort. What we’d have is a White House able to act without proof. And that, Bush or no Bush, is a very scary White House indeed.

From today’s Washington Post, "Mideast 'Futures' System Set - Pentagon Project Would Use Market to Seek Information":

The Pentagon is setting up a commodity-market style trading system in which investors would be able to bet on political and economic events in the Middle East -- including the likelihood of assassinations and terrorist attacks.

This is another nasty piece of work brought to us by Bush appointee John Poindexter and his Information Awareness Office in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here’s how they describe the program, called FutureMAP on their website:

The DARPA FutureMAP program will identify the types of market-based mechanisms that are most suitable to aggregate information in the defense context, will develop information systems to manage the markets, and will measure the effectiveness of markets for several tasks. Open issues that will drive the types of market include information security and participant incentives. A market that addresses defense-related events may potentially aggregate information from both classified and unclassified sources. This poses the problem of extracting useful data from markets without compromising national security. Markets must also offer compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties. The markets must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation.

(Markets sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation? Hell, if they can pull that off, let’s move the SEC to the DOD. Maybe a little more fire power will get all those corrupt CEOs and investment banks / brokerage firms in line.)

Net Exchange, the company responsible for the design, development, and operation of the trading system (called PAM - the Policy Analysis Market) describes the concept in more detail on their website, noting in their example of PAM futures and derivatives contracts that the traders "can make a handsome profit".

Oh, well, when they put it like that, it hardly sounds disgusting and reprehensible at all.

From today's AP wire via The Arizona Republic, "Bush still shunning NAACP meeting":

Since the days of Warren G. Harding, presidents have met at the White House with leaders of the NAACP. Not President Bush, at least not yet.

More than halfway through his presidency, Bush has yet to receive the nation's oldest civil rights group or the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights, an umbrella organization.

The president met with the Congressional Black Caucus for just an hour or so during his first month in office but has not responded to a half-dozen subsequent requests to meet again.

While Bush, who got only 9 percent of the Black vote in 2000, has shunned meeting with established Black groups, he has reached out to carefully chosen minority audiences and to civil rights advocates less critical of his policies. One example is the National Urban League, whose annual conference Bush is to address in Pittsburgh today.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said he requested meetings with Bush in 2001 and 2002, and "was told politely, in writing, that he'd love to meet but his schedule just didn't allow it."

The Bush administration’s dithering over whether to send troops to Liberia stands in stark contrast with the zealousness with which it sent American forces into Iraq. The U.N., other African governments and Liberian citizens themselves are begging the United States to help stop the bloodshed.

After weeks of indecision, Bush finally sent 4,500 troops steaming towards the Liberian coast, although there are no plans as yet to send them ashore.

The Pentagon brass have argued that the U.S. has no national interest in Liberia, dredging up memories of America’s failed peacekeeping mission in Somalia. Secretary of State Colin Powell says we need to help, but we must have a clear mission and, of course, a definitive exit strategy.

Bush says that the Africans need to take the lead on this one.

In other words, when it matters to us, we’ll defy the world and invade whatever country we deem necessary. But when we don’t really care, when the killings are only killings and not tied to some worldwide terrorist network, we want others to clean up the mess.

Bush can’t have it both ways. He claims that America is the protector of freedom and democracy, but he refuses to act when human rights are grossly violated, when nations are begging for American help, when Liberians are placing the dead bodies of their loved ones at the gates of the American embassy.

The U.S. may be acting according to its strategic interests, but Bush’s rhetoric suggests that the mighty, benevolent America does otherwise.

There’s something wrong with a world that can’t protect human beings from mass carnage. America may not be able to solve the problem, but as the self-proclaimed leader of the “free world”, but it is our duty to take the leadership to try.

Regardless of whether the Bush administration made the right decision in releasing photos of what it says are the dead bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein, the fact remains that Americans can be no more sure of the veracity of these claims than the Iraqis and other Arabs they were meant to impress.

We simply cannot take our government’s word for it.

No doubt there are some reasons for a government to lie to its own people. Selected matters of national security, perhaps, but these instances should be carefully selected indeed. If a government starts believing too much in its own self-righteousness, it can justify more and more things being withheld from the public for its own good. Dictators and totalitarian regimes lie regularly to their people. Democratically-elected officials should not.

You’d think this could all go unsaid, but Bush has shown that his government is willing to lie to protect its vision of what must be done in Iraq, regardless of what the evidence has shown.

Other presidents have lied, to be sure. Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger lied regularly about international affairs, and Clinton will be remembered for the half-truths and untruths he told about his romantic entanglements. But this does not excuse Bush’s behavior.

Bush’s lies about Iraq have destroyed what limited credibility remained abroad. And they have left Americans distrustful of our own government, more cynical about what we are told and suspicious of what is being left unsaid.

As much as we hate to say it, we wouldn’t put it beneath Donald Rumsfeld and the White House to manufacture the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. Improbable? Yes. Impossible? Sadly, no.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Standing in front of thousands of tax-refund checks that soon will be in mailboxes across the country, President Bush defended his economic policies Thursday and declared that "better days are ahead" for Americans.

In the first of a series of events intended to shore up confidence in the economy and his stewardship of it, Bush visited a Philadelphia facility that has been working overtime to produce the tax-cut checks that Congress approved earlier this year. On Friday, the first wave of about $12 billion worth of refunds will be mailed to 25 million families who qualify for the new $1,000-per-child tax credit, which Bush and Congress expanded in May from $600 per child.

Watching Bush blow $12 billion doesn’t exactly shore up our confidence in the economy, and it certainly doesn’t do anything positive for our thoughts on his stewardship of it.

The budget deficit forecast for the current fiscal year is a staggering $455 billion, which means that the federal government is spending nearly half a trillion dollars more than it expects to make in one year alone. The $455 billion is 50% more than what the White House projected it would be last February.

Nevertheless, new White House budget director Joshua Bolten says not to worry: “The U.S. economy is poised to return to healthy, sustained growth….There is a substantial stimulative effect to the tax cuts that have been introduced.”

Well. The only stimulative effects from the tax cuts introduced thus far by the Bush administration have been to his poll numbers, which are stimulating downward, and to the lavish efforts made to produce picture perfect photo opportunities. Bush’s $400 checks may make voters happy because they can pay off some debts or buy a new fridge, but they aren’t going to get the behemoth that is the U.S. economy moving again.

And as we stagger under the weight of even more debt, listening to Bush tell us that everything will be fine, we have the sneaking suspicion that “better days” are simply not what’s ahead for America.

Unless you’re a regular reader of New Delhi’s Business Standard, you may have missed this from a January 31, 2003 article "Bush’s party to raise funds via Noida, Gurgaon":

HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing arm of the Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies, has bagged a project to undertake a fund-raising campaign for the US Republican Party over the telephone.

This is the first time such a project has been handed out to a company outside the US. The market research and public relations companies engaged by the party usually undertake such projects.

HCL eServe has put in place a team of 75 people to work on the project out of its call centres in Noida and Gurgaon. According to industry sources, the number of seats could be ramped up depending on the success of the campaign. These operators are required to call up people in the US seeking their support for President George W Bush and a donation for the Republican cause....

The Republican contract comes on the heels of a successful anti-abortion campaign run by HCL eServe for a US politician.

The President’s post-September 11 foreign policy diktat – “You’re either with us or you’re against us” – hasn’t done the country much good. In fact, this type of statement accompanied by the administration’s constant bullying have so alienated our traditional allies that the foundation of the post-WWII western alliance may not survive intact.

Bush may think he doesn’t need America’s traditional allies in NATO, that he can get all the support he needs from the former Communist nations, but he is dead wrong. The newest members of NATO are helpful because they desperately need American aid and they want the economic shot in the arm from relocated American military bases. What they don’t have – and what the U.S. needs very badly – is the cash to rebuild the places Bush has chosen to bomb to the ground, places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Western Europe has the money, but they resent Bush's unilateral approach and aren't about to hand him a free pass without some serious conditions.

Psst. Here’s a tip from Rhonda and Jane, Mr. Bush: if you stand before the United Nations and say “we don’t need you; we’ll do whatever we want,” then you can’t say later that those very same member nations have an obligation to help you. Europe doesn’t owe you a thing, particularly when you said yourself it was irrelevant.

Americans, on the other hand, will be paying with their lives and their wallets for years to come. At the very least, Mr. Bush, you should pay with your job a year from November.

John Ashcroft: Slayer of Civil Liberties

John Ashcroft is a rabid right-winger. His steadfast faith in the USA Patriot Act has imprisoned innocent people, done away with due process and sent legal, law-abiding immigrants high-tailing it for Canada. All in the name of national security and a self-righteous belief that conservative Christianity is (or should be) the law of the land.

Now the inspector general at Ashcroft’s own Justice Department has released a report identifying dozens of cases where the Department’s personnel have violated the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants swept up in the terrorism investigations allowed by the Patriot Act.

As reported by the New York Times, employees from the Bureau of Prisons, the FBI, the DEA and the INS are accused of beating suspects, verbally taunting them and, in one case, “ordering a Muslim inmate to remove his shirt so [an] officer could use it to shine his shoes."

The report is the second in recent weeks from the inspector general to focus on the way the Justice Department is carrying out the broad new surveillance and detention powers it gained under the Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress a month after the 9/11 attacks.

In the first report, which was made public on June 2, [the inspector general] found that hundreds of illegal immigrants had been mistreated after they were detained following the attacks.

That report found that many inmates languished in unduly harsh conditions for months, and that the department had made little effort to distinguish legitimate terrorist suspects from others picked up in roundups of illegal immigrants.

The first report brought widespread, bipartisan criticism of the Justice Department, which defended its conduct at the time, saying that it "made no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further attacks."

No doubt Ashcroft will say that the Justice Department does not condone these types of abuses. But it is Ashcroft himself who sets the tone for the agency, and the actions of these abusive employees are clear manifestations of the Attorney General’s own attitudes toward immigrants, civil rights and legal due process.

Using the no-fly zone as an excuse, the Bush administration started its campaign in Iraq in mid-2002.

So last March when it looked like he would just go ahead and do as he damn well pleased, he was, in fact, already doing as he damn well pleased.

Here we have an Associated Press report from last week regarding several large companies mistakenly tagged as small businesses in the government's contractor database.

The mistaken designations, contained in records obtained by The Associated Press, mean the government has overstated the contract dollars that are going to small business at a time when the Bush administration has been pressing to give smaller firms as much federal work as possible.

"The numbers are inflated, we just don't know the extent," said David Drabkin, senior procurement officer for the General Services Administration....

The Bush administration has set a goal of providing small business with 23 percent of all federal contracts, but has fallen about 3 percentage points short after awarding $53 billion to small companies.

Officials now acknowledge that the percentage was inflated by the erroneous database entries and that the true amount of federal business that went to small firms was smaller.

Think that’s bad enough? Check this out:

Among the contractors designated as small businesses in the records obtained by the AP were:

• Verizon, the largest local phone company in the nation, and Verizon Wireless, the company's joint venture that is the largest U.S. wireless provider.
  
• Barnes & Noble, the top U.S. bookseller, with superstores in 49 states and the District of Columbia, plus mall stores under different names.
  
• AT&T Wireless, the cellular phone spinoff from AT&T.
  Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which includes Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin hotels.
  
• Dole Food Co. Inc., the world's largest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables.
  
• Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade, one of the top U.S. transportation engineering firms with projects around the world.
  
• KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root. KBR is one of the world's largest providers of oil field services and part of the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before taking office in 2001.

But let’s not worry our pretty little heads over that last one.

From the New York Times via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Under a system that was deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.

Completing a message to the president also requires choosing a subject from the provided list, then entering a full name, organization, address and e-mail address. Once the message is sent, the writer must wait for an automated response to the e-mail address listed, asking whether the addressee intended to send the message. The message is delivered to the White House only after the person using that e-mail address confirms it.

The White House says the new system, at www.whitehouse.gov/webmail, is an effort to be more responsive to the public and offer the administration "real-time" access to citizen comments.

Via the New York Times: Critics Say E.P.A. Won’t Analyze Clean Air Proposals Conflicting With President’s Policies

In the last several months, the Environmental Protection Agency has delayed or refused to do analysis on proposals that conflict with the president's air pollution agenda, say members of Congress, their aides, environmental advocates and agency employees.

Agency employees say they have been told either not to analyze or not to release information about mercury, carbon dioxide and other air pollutants.

It seems EPA Administrators have to check with the White House before they allow certain results to be published.

"Whether or not analysis is released is based on at least two factors," said William D. Ruckelshaus, who was the first agency administrator under Nixon. "Is the analysis flawed? That is a legitimate reason for not releasing it. But if you don't like the outcome that might result from the analysis, that is not a legitimate reason."

Of course, all this contradicts the EPA’s stated purpose:

EPA's mission is to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment — air, water, and land — upon which life depends.

It seems protecting that upon which life depends is not as important as political gain.

Which is yet another reason to distrust the information that comes out of Bush’s White House. And question seriously what doesn’t.

From Sunday's Dayton Daily News, "Bush still knocking Head Start":

Of all the things the federal government needs to fix, President George W. Bush's obsession with Head Start is perplexing.

As important as Head Start is to the almost 1 million children who are served by the early childhood education program, it's not a huge federal initiative. Head Start is slated to get $6.9 billion next year under legislation pending in the House. Meanwhile, right now the the country is spending an average of $3.9 billion per month in Iraq.

From today's San Francisco Chronicle, "Federal deficit to hit record this year - dramatic increase in White House's estimate of shortfall":

The White House Office of Management and Budget projected that this year's deficit would reach $455 billion, $151 billion more than previously estimated. In 2004, the White House said, the budget gap will rise to $475 billion, $168 billion more than expected, before starting to shrink again as the pace of economic growth picks up.

Makes you wonder what else he's underestimating.

Everyone knows that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. So why does the White House keep changing its story on Saddam Hussein’s phantom uranium cake?

First the White House admitted the statement was wrong.

Then it blamed the CIA.

Now it says that the uranium claim was technically correct when Bush announced it to the nation, even though the CIA had discredited the information several months before and CIA Director George Tenet said last Friday that the 16-word statement should have never been written into the speech. Here’s what Bush had to say yesterday (via Reuters):

"When I gave the speech, the line was relevant ... Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts," he said.

Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld went a step further. Suddenly, not only was the line relevant, it was accurate - and it remains accurate today (via the New York Times):

Senior Bush administration officials today adjusted their defense of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union Address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, insisting that the phrasing was accurate even if some of the underlying evidence was unsubstantiated.

Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in separate appearances on Sunday television talk programs that the disputed sentence in Mr. Bush's January speech was carefully hedged, enough that it could still be considered accurate today.

Sounds like we’re arguing over the meaning of “is” again.