1. From the DAILY GRILL

2. Bush officials say congress irrelevant on Iraq

The Bush administration’s assertion made on Tuesday that 2002 congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq gives it the authority to conduct combat operations in Iraq and negotiate far-reaching agreements with the current Iraqi government without consulting Congress drew an incredulous reaction from Democrats on a Joint House committee during a hearing on future U.S. commitments to Iraq. William H. McMichael 3.05.08 http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/03/military_iraqpact_030408w/

3. Democratic primary and caucus schedule

March 8 - Wyoming caucus
March 11 - Mississippi primary
April 22 - Pennsylvania primary
May 3 - Guam caucus
May 6 - Indiana primary, North Carolina primary
May 13 - West Virginia primary
May 20 - Kentucky primary, Oregon primary
June 3 - Montana primary, South Dakota primary
June 7 - Puerto Rico caucus
August 25-28: Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/primaries/primary_caucus_calendar/

4. McSame as Bush

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN10_6pyshQ&eurl=http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/05/mcsame-as-bush/

5. Late-Night Political Jokes for Dems

"I think the world of John McCain. He looks like the kind of guy who still talks real loud on a long-distance phone call? 'What time is it where you are? What? Can you hear me?' ... He looks like the guy you are waiting for to stop gabbing with the teller. ... He looks like a guy who sits at his dinner tray and watches the 'Beltway Boys.' ... He looks like the relative who you get blank e-mails from. ... He looks like the guy whose wife forced him to go on a cruise. ... He looks like the guy you have to nudge when his name is called. ... He looks like a freelance crosswalk guard." --David Letterman

"In a press conference today, President Bush announced America is not headed into a recession, especially if you own an oil company." --Jay Leno

"High gas prices leave a bad taste in people's mouths, have you noticed that? That's mostly from the siphoning, but still it's a horror. ... In fact, gas is so expensive in L.A., now when you call 9-1-1, they ask you to meet the ambulance half way." --Jay Leno

"I don't want to say McCain is old, but yesterday he got on the wrong bus, and ended up taking a gambling junket to Atlantic City." --Jay Leno

"He says things will improve once those $300 rebate checks start arriving in the mailbox. So, be sure to check that mailbox in the house you used to live in before the sheriff came and took it away." --Bill Maher

"At the press conference, they asked him about the fact gas is approaching $4. You know what Bush said? He said, 'That's interesting. I hadn't heard that.' See, Bush thinks a news conference is where reporters give him the news" --Bill Maher

"President Bush on Thursday said that the country is not heading for a recession and that the economy is actually robust. He added, 'Case in point, I'm rich!'" --Amy Poehler

"Well, this is depressing. Oil is now over $100 a barrel. Experts say gas could reach $4 a gallon, yeah. I believe the experts are named Bush and Cheney." --Jay Leno

"During a press conference today, President Bush said the following. He said it's important we make the economy stronger so -- quote -- 'families can put money on their table.' Yes, then Bush said that Americans should deposit food in their bank accounts. It was a good speech. I liked it. It's hard to top what he actually said." --Conan O'Brien

"No, Obama and Hillary argued last night over which candidate the Republicans are most afraid of. Interesting. I don't want to take sides here, but I think it's pretty obvious which candidate Republicans are most afraid of, John McCain." --Jay Leno

"And my favorite candidate, Ralph Nader, announced he's running for president! Oh, I love Ralph. You know, you can't get rid of him. Every election year he pops up. He's like the herpes of presidential candidates." --Jay Leno

"No, Nader says his reason for running is that he spent over 40 years as a consumer advocate. I think after 40 years of studying consumers' wants and needs, he'd realize consumers don't want or need him now" --Jay Leno

"Florida officials are still in a panic over yesterday's big power outage. You hear about that? A huge power outage. They were on the phone today with President Bush saying, 'We know it wasn't supposed to happen until Election Day. We don't what happened. It was premature.'" --Jay Leno

"I don't know if you have seen this. It's everywhere. They have a controversial photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban. It's been circulating on the Internet. Yeah, the turban photo should help Obama with a key group of voters, the New York taxi drivers." --Conan O'Brien

6. Wear An Orange Ribbon

Wear an orang ribbon today, tomorrow, and everyday until Guantánamo is closed - because torture is immoral, illegal, and un-American, no president should ever be given the unchecked power to call someone an enemy and lock him away
indefinitely and because Guantánamo is an international embarrassment
and is damaging our country’s reputation in the world.

Order your free ribbon at https://secure.aclu.org/site/Ecommerce/1948902597?VIEW_PRODUCT=true&product_id=2581&store_id=1521

7. Chicago 10

Filmmaker Brett Morgen plunges viewers headlong into the most tumultuous years of the '60s in "Chicago 10," a documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He unleashes an audacious mash-up of animation, anachronism and archival footage to breathe bold new life into a year when America was exploding -- politically, culturally and existentially -- and, to quote one of the chants heard on the streets of Chicago that August, the whole world was watching. Ann Hornaday 3.02.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022900913.html

Watch the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9uJL7lWdFg

8. King Corn

Corn isn't just for dinner anymore. In fact, it's for just about everything but dinner.

That's what Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, former college friends and co-producers of the documentary "King Corn," discovered when they spent a year tracing what happened to the corn they planted on their own green acre in Iowa after it was harvested.

Corn — overwhelmingly genetically modified — is in just about every processed item, from hamburgers to aspirin, from soft drinks to baby formula.

Corn, according to the documentary, is why our kids are fat and our food is cheap and our life expectancy getting shorter for the first time in American history.

But the problem, the film says, isn't with corn itself, although much of what is grown, including the Cheney and Ellis seed, is so inedible it must be "processed into food" first.

"We're growing crap — the poorest quality crap the world has ever seen," Iowa farmer Don Clikeman says in the film.

The problem is what to do with the massive amounts of excess corn produced because of a government-designed and subsidized system.

The answer, according to the film: Put it in everything from vegetable oil, vegetable broth, cereal, cold cuts, ice cream, ketchup, toothpaste, disposable diapers and vitamins. Angela Woodall 3/01/08 http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_8418664

Watch the trailer http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/kingcorn/trailer/

9. Robert Greenwald: John McCain's chart-topping single "Bomb Iran" (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2kyXN4ZVQg&eurl

10. ACLU: 900,000 Names on U.S. Terror Watch Lists

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn't keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn't generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)

But if the ACLU's figure isn't accurate, it's also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice's Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month. Justin Rood 2.27.08 http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2008/02/aclu-900000-nam.html

11. Report says more than 1 in 100 Americans now behind bars, making US world incarceration leadere

More than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison — making the United States the world's incarceration leader, according to a new report tracking the surge in U.S. inmate population.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, urged U.S. states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.

"The United States imprisons more people than any country in the world," the report said. Using updated state-by-state data, it said more than 2.3 million adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — or one of every 99.1 adults out of a total population of some 230 million adults.

The numbers put the United States far ahead of more populous China, which it said has 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia, which has 890,000. The Pew report cited January statistics from the "World Prison Brief" released by the International Center for Prison Studies at London's King's College.

It also said the U.S. — with 750 inmates per 100,000 people — "is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran."

South Africa has 341 per 100,000 citizens, Iran has 222 per 100,000, and China 119, according to the World Prison Brief. 2.28.08 http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/28/america/NA-GEN-US-Prison-Population.php

12. Catholic League denounces McCain

John McCain yesterday happily received an endorsement from, and then expressed lavish gratitude towards, one of the most hateful and radical evangelical ministers in the country, Pastor John Hagee. As documented in that post, Hagee has a history of making some of the most extreme and twisted statements of any religious figure in the country towards multiple groups of Americans.

Among the many groups which McCain's new associate has targeted for hateful bigotry are Catholics. As a result, The Catholic League today issued a statement -- entitled "McCain Embraces Bigot" -- which pointed out that Hagee has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it "The Great Whore," an "apostate church," the "anti-Christ," and a "false cult system."

The Catholic League demanded that McCain repudiate Hagee and his endorsement, just as Barack Obama did earlier this week with Louis Farrakhan (despite the fact that Obama, unlike McCain with Hagee, never sought out or accepted Farrakhan's endorsement). Glenn Greenwald 2.28.08 http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/28/donohue/index.html
John Hagee preaches anticatholicism (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uViQ0hVV57Q&eurl

13. A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog. ADAM LIPTAK 3.04.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html

14. Andy Borowitz: Bush Says He Lets Red Phone Go Straight to Voicemail

President George W. Bush commented on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s controversial “red phone” campaign ads at the White House today, telling reporters, “When that red phone rings, I just let it go straight to voicemail.”

Mr. Bush rarely comments about the Democratic presidential contest, but he said that he had to speak up about Sen. Clinton’s red phone ads because he found them “so confusing.”

“If I answered the red phone every time it rang, I would never get any sleep,” Mr. Bush said. “Sometimes it starts ringing at 9 PM, and I am already tucked in by then.”

Mr. Bush said that “there’s nothing so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow, or whenever I remember to check my voicemail.”

In a rebuke of Sen. Clinton, Mr. Bush added, “If she doesn’t know about letting your calls go straight to voicemail, I don’t think she has the experience to be president.”

Campaigning in Houston, former President Bill Clinton took issue with Mr. Bush’s remarks, telling reporters, “When I get a call at 3 AM, I always pick up, if you know what I mean.”

Pressed to explain exactly what he meant, the former president said, “Three o’clock in the morning – come on! Odds are we’re talking about a booty call.”

Elsewhere, Sen. John McCain released a new series of campaign ads, showing him answering a telegraph key at 3 A.M.

Elsewhere (2), President Bush expressed support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, telling reporters, “Just because somebody didn’t get the most votes doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be president.”

Elsewhere (3), presumptive GOP nominee John McCain accepted a congratulatory call from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and then immediately changed his phone number. www.borowitzreport.com

15. Where Have I Heard That Laugh

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/02/where_have_i_he.html

16. GOPers Rebuff Dem Attempt to Extend Administration Surveillance Law

On the Senate floor Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) offered a 30-day extension to the Protect America Act, the administration's surveillance bill that expired two weeks ago.

Given that the President and Republicans have been making speeches and running ads claiming that the nation is at risk because Democrats let the law lapse, you might say it's a reasonable proposition.

But no. When Reid offered the measure as a unanimous consent measure, the Republicans objected. Paul Kiel 2.29.08 http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/gopers_rebuff_dem_attempt_to_e.php

17. D'oh! (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5LZI50dMbM

18. George Bush’s Commander-in-Chef Losing Mulligatawny Soup - Recipes for Disaster

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174900/iraq_2003_2008_two_recipes_for_disaster

19. America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline

A Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance of the same fate.

CDF’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Campaign is a national call to action to stop the funneling of tens of thousands of youth, predominantly minorities, down life paths that often lead to arrest, conviction, incarceration and, in some cases, death. Race and poverty are the major factors underpinning the Pipeline. The problems, policies and systems that feed the pipeline are a result of human choices:

• lack of access to health and mental health care
• child abuse and neglect
• lack of quality childhood education
• failing schools
• zero tolerance school discipline policies
• unsupported community institutions
• neighborhoods saturated with drugs and violence
• a culture that glorifies excessive consumption, violence and triviality
• rampant racial and economic disparities in child and youth serving systems
• tougher sentencing guidelines
• too few positive alternatives to the streets after school and in the summer months
• too few positive role models and mentors in the home, community, social and cultural life

We created the Pipeline and we have the power, knowledge and will to dismantle it. The need is urgent. http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=c2pp

20. Hillary Live On Saturday Night (video)

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/03/hillary_live_on.html

21. The Sunday Funnies (video)

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/03/the_sunday_funn_14.html

22. Ahmadinejad welcomed heartily in Iraq

It's a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can't.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran's great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry.

Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq's U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington's No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band. MARK MACKINNON 3.02.08 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080302.wiraqi03/BNStory/International/

23. 452

Number of days President Bush has spent at his ranch in Crawford, TX. His stay there this past weekend with the the Danish prime minister marked Bush’s 70th visit as president. President Ronald Reagan, one of the modern presidency’s most “famous vacationer[s],” spent just 335 days at his ranch in Santa Barbara, CA. http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/03/452/

24. Why Mommy is a Democrat

Why Mommy is a Democrat is a sweet children's tale that reminds us why we are all Democrats. I loved it!" -- Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show http://littledemocrats.net/aboutthebook.html

25. Rocketboom: God and Politics in Lynchburg Tennessee (video)

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/rb_08_feb_05

26. Bill Moyer’s Journal: Rick Karr On Government Secrecy

Just recently, the Senate voted to grant the telecom companies that helped the Administration secretly listened in on phone calls immunity from the lawsuits — to let them off the hook — while the reporter who'd exposed them (James Risen) fought to stay out of jail. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02292008/watch4.html

27. Vermont towns approve Bush "indictment"

Voters in two Vermont towns approved measures Tuesday calling for the indictment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for what they consider violations of the Constitution.

More symbolic than anything, the items sought to have police arrest Bush and Cheney if they ever visit Brattleboro or nearby Marlboro or to extradite them for prosecution elsewhere — if they're not impeached first. 3.04.08 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23472875

28. Vets Break Silence on War Crimes

U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to descend on Washington from Mar. 13-16 to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in those countries.

"The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it," said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. "That's left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like."

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by "a few bad apples", as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of "an increasingly bloody occupation." Aaron Glantz 2.28.08 http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41398

29. Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore

CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. Farah Stockman 3.06.08 http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/03/06/top_iraq_contractor_skirts_us_taxes_offshore/?page=1

On February 4, President Bush announced a baseline military budget of $515.4 billion for the next fiscal year, not including funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the largest one-year Pentagon request in real, uninflated dollars since World War II. This Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 figure represents a 7.5% increase over the 2008 appropriation of $479.5 billion and is expected to be the first of many rising requests supposedly needed to replace equipment lost and damaged in Iraq and to gear up for the security threats to come. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen explained last October, “we’re just going to have to devote more resources to national security in the world we’re living in right now.”

At first glance, all these additional funds will be used to sustain the Global War on Terror (GWOT, in Pentagon shorthand) and replace equipment destroyed or rendered inoperable in the wars now under way. “The Fiscal Year 2009 Defense budget request sustains the President’s commitment to growing U.S. ground forces that are needed to prevail in the current conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan,” a Pentagon press release notes. Additional funds are allocated for “Operations, Readiness, and Support” – troop training, replacement parts and equipment, combat supplies, and so on.

But a close examination of the FY 2009 request indicates that the principal sources of future budget growth are not the GWOT or other such low-intensity contingencies but rather preparation for all-out combat with a future superpower. Probe a little deeper into Pentagon thinking, and only one potential superpower emerges to justify all this vast spending: The People’s Republic of China. 3.05.08 http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5041

3. Mary Mapes: A Season of Change in Texas

For ages now, Texas Democrats have been living in a political drought of Darfurian proportions. Few candidates, feeble causes, little help, no hope.

From the governor's office to city planning commissions, from members of Congress to county clerks, district judges to dogcatchers, the state has seemed packed to the rafters with Republicans.

To the rest of the country, it was a given: Texas bled red. Democrats had the blues. In fact in much of the state, putting a "D" next to your name on the ballot might as well have meant "deceased."

Then came the transformational presidency of George W. Bush.

Like a modern-day Moses, Bush has unintentionally led Lone Star liberals out of the wilderness into what looks increasingly like a political promised land. 2.29.08 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/mapes

4. White House E-Mail Gone Missing

Historians eager to search through the daily minutiae of the Bush administration can expect scandalously little help from the White House’s shoddy and suspiciously gap-ridden e-mail archives. Estimates of the number of missing e-mail messages range into

The gaps coincide with critical periods like the run-up to the Iraq war — and the rollout of specious intelligence — as well as the period when the White House was leaking the identity of the former C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Also missing are communications from Karl Rove, the president’s former political guru, and 50 other White House staffers who used e-mail accounts at the Republican National Committee.

The threat to the nation’s historical record is severe. In the last four years, the administration has received repeated warnings from the National Archives about missing e-mail records protected by federal law.

One of the administration’s former computer experts, Steven McDevitt, has admitted to Congress that the e-mail preservation system is “primitive” and that “the risk that data would be lost was high.” Mr. McDevitt uncovered 12 work days with no e-mails at all for President Bush’s immediate office and 16 blank days for Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. At a closed hearing last year, still other administration witnesses admitted that e-mails from hundreds of days were missing, according to lawmakers at the session. The White House also conceded at that time that there were “numerous days with few or no e-mails” for some offices in a system the administration installed after taking office.

Lately, though, the White House has been shifting its story, insisting that there is “no evidence” of missing e-mails. Call it electronic malfeasance or colossal ineptitude. What has become of all these missing policy and political communications the law says belongs to history and the taxpayers? 3.01.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01sat3.html

5. Horrifying and Unnecessary

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

• Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.
• Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.
• Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.
• Waterboarding.
• Using military working dogs.
• Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.
• Conducting mock executions.
• Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.” 3.02.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/opinion/02sun1.html

6. Gun Crazy

The Valentine’s Day massacre at Northern Illinois University, like the killings at places such as Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, has evoked expressions of horror and sympathy and familiar questions about the killer’s motives and mental health. Atrocities like these make Americans feel angry and perhaps helpless.

Our political leaders are not helpless. They could match public shock with prompt, concerted and effective action to make mass shootings a less frequent fact of American life. But neither party’s leaders have shown any sign of stepping up their responsibilities. The latest campus carnage barely caused a ripple in presidential politics, where conventional wisdom dictates against actively advocating more stringent gun control laws.

No single measure or combination of measures can ensure that deranged individuals are prevented in every instance from shooting up a crowded classroom or shopping mall. But neither the absence of a perfect solution nor opposition from the powerful gun lobby is an excuse to do nothing — not when some 30 people are killed with guns every day in America. The rampage at the Northern Illinois campus was at least the sixth multiple murder in this country in just the first two weeks of February.

In a rare outbreak of reason on the subject of guns at the end of last year, Congress approved a measure worked out with the National Rifle Association to provide financial incentives for states and localities to share pertinent mental health records with the national database used to screen prospective gun buyers. But there are other practical steps the nation can take that would make it more difficult for dangerous people to obtain deadly firepower.

To his credit, John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, starred in television ads supporting state ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado to close the gun show loophole. Lately, though, he signed onto a Congressional brief urging the Supreme Court to use a case it is hearing this month to set a legal standard that could foreclose other needed gun restrictions that pose no real threat to the right to bear arms.

The Democrats should not be afraid to challenge Mr. McCain — or gun zealots’ wacky idea that the solution to campus mayhem is to arm teachers and students. 3.01.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01sat1.html

7. Paul Craig Roberts: Going to Jail for Being a Democrat: How Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman Got Roved

Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama, a Republican state, was framed in a crooked trial, convicted on June 29, 2006, and sent to Federal prison by the corrupt and immoral Bush administration.

The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration's use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who "they could not beat fair and square," according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona and co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee. Woods says that he has never seen a case with so "many red flags pointing to injustice." 3.03.08 http://www.alternet.org/rights/78407/

8. Dan Hull: One of us

The 43rd president certainly personifies many of the "American" traits that Alexis de Tocqueville observed 170 years ago in his book "Democracy in America." A Texan's Texan, Bush is a hardworking, action-oriented, driven and headstrong man who, despite his Ivy League education, has shown little interest in ideas generally.

He plainly believes, however, in the primacy and superiority of American ideas and institutions. Although his presidency has been consumed by foreign affairs, Bush is no internationalist.

Bush also is perceived to not think things through (i.e., the details of the Iraq occupation), yet apparently considers himself pragmatic. He is not shy about bringing "God" into the national discourse. He is happy in cowboy garb and with a folksy manner of speech.

Bush is even informal enough to address Paul O'Neill -- his former secretary of the Treasury and ex-Alcoa chief - by the nickname of "Pablo," if those accounts are correct.

Notwithstanding his patrician background, the president is an amalgam of what Tocqueville saw in Americans -- and he wears it on his sleeve.

Is Bush really us? Yes. Approve of him or not, he is arguably the most "American" president we have ever had. However, based on his steady decline with the American public since 2002, there is no reason now to think that Americans -- or historians -- will give the president much better marks in years to come. And that would make George W. Bush a historical anomaly.

The prescient Tocqueville would have argued that Americans would be much kinder to him in decades and centuries to come. And Tocqueville would have been fascinated with George Bernard Shaw's famous quip that democracy is "a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

If the American experiment was likely to produce leaders a bit rough around the edges, driven, informal, anti-intellectual and "un-European," he couldn't have dreamed up a more representative specimen than Bush 43. 2.03.08 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_550421.html

9. Thomas Moore: The lies of war

The deceptions and failures of the Bush-Cheney administration have placed young Americans in a war where lives are cut short and bodies maimed by IEDs, snipers and the myriad other dangers in a war zone. Our continued presence in Iraq perpetuates this havoc. The planning for the invasion was grossly inadequate in part because the administration showed disdain for the history of the Middle East. This, combined with revelations such as the Abu Ghraib humiliations and tortures, and more recently the cowboy tactics of the Blackwater mercenaries who are apparently subject to no rules at all, indicate a broad disregard for human life and human dignity. Those who have been humiliated seek revenge. They join terrorist groups.

The Islamic Middle East was my home for seven years. I taught Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians, Baha’is, Jews and Azerbaijanis. I traveled through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. I know these peoples a bit. They are like us. They want warm houses, good schools, jobs, hospitals — you can complete the list because it is your list as well — and they want peace.

They hate the condescension and arrogance of the Bush-Cheney administration’s foreign policy — the invasion, the bombings, the torturing, the surge, the mercenaries — but most do not hate Americans. They discern the difference between political arrogance and the wishes and needs of average citizens. All of us — Iraqis, Turks, Iranians and Americans — want to be able to live out our lives, to make our marks. Of course we "support our troops" as the ubiquitous ribbon counsels, but that does not mean we must support a broken government and the lies, old or new, that place our soldiers in harm’s way. 3.03.08 http://bangornews.com/news/t/viewpoints.aspx?articleid=161037&zoneid=35

10. Bob Herbert: The $2 Trillion Nightmare

We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.” 3.04.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html

11. Paul Waldman: The Contours of the Campaign to Come

The fight for the Democratic nomination isn't over yet, but the direction the other side thinks things are going can be gleaned from the salvos being lobbed at the Democrats. Go to the Web site of the Republican National Committee, or any of the more virulent conservative blogs, and you'll see that most of the attacks are being aimed at Barack Obama. The contours of the coming campaign are taking shape, and as usual, it's not pretty.

Consider the smears of Obama that have slithered around the Internet and over the airwaves in recent months: He's a secret Muslim. He attended a fundamentalist madrassah as a child in Indonesia. He's tight with Louis Farrakhan. He takes advice from a cabal of Israel-hating anti-Semites. He doesn't put his hand over his heart when he says the Pledge of Allegiance. He took his oath of office on the Koran, not the Bible. He doesn't wear an American-flag pin. (The last is the only one of these that is actually true, ridiculous though it may be.)

And most of all, his middle name is Hussein, two syllables of menace revealing him, conservatives hope voters will conclude, as everything those voters are not—not white, not Christian, not a foe of terrorism, not American. So the shameless crew who has built its careers on stoking hatred and resentment, the Coulters and Limbaughs and Hannitys, will say again and again: Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Add it to the lies about who he is, where he's been, and where he places his hand, and you get strands entwining together to form a complete picture. It's one that strikes into the primitive corners of voters' brains, where the roots of tribal attachment lie and fear and hate govern action.

Above all, the message will be: He's not one of us. He's one of them. He worships a strange god, his name comes from an alien tongue, and he harbors a secret agenda of doom. Should he become president, they will say, the gates will be breached and the foreign horde will swarm over us. Elect him, they will say, and all will be lost. 3.04.08 http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_contours_of_the_campaign_to_come

12. Tom Engelhardt: The Almost $3 Trillion Miscalculation

How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that larger figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations. 03/04/2008 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/?pid=294127

13. Nicole Whittington-Evans: Unique region should not be held hostage to greed

Alaskans, especially residents of communities in and near the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, have good reason to oppose the proposed land swap between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Doyon Ltd.

This land exchange will dramatically alter the livelihoods of local residents. Many are Doyon shareholders who oppose the exchange and who have been unfairly deprived of a voice in the deal through a rushed public comment process.

Doyon, the largest private landholder in Alaska, wants to acquire the lands with the highest potential for producing oil and gas, even if it adversely affects Native residents and recreational visitors. Without these lands there is little chance Doyon will attract industry partners. Also, if the land exchange is approved and infrastructure is built here, it will be easier for Doyon to expand its operations into other parts of the refuge. Perhaps this is why the corporation is willing to go against the wishes of its shareholders to gain approval for this project.

The Exxon Valdez case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court reminds us of how an oil company can operate. Like Exxon, Doyon has a poor track record when it comes to pollution violations. Doyon pleaded guilty to 15 violations of the Oil Pollution Act for dumping hazardous wastes down wells, and one of its drilling rigs violated air quality permits at the Alpine oil field. It seems clear that Doyon is the only winner in this land exchange. The people who depend on the rich resources of the refuge, and the wildlife that call this land home, will be the big losers. 3.03.08 http://www.adn.com/opinion/story/334102.html

14. Bill Berry: Real patriots don't waste the nation's resources

Americans didn't become the world's biggest energy hogs on purpose. Our behaviors today result from cheap oil and economic growth fueled by unsustainable consumption of cheap goods. But we're capable of changing our behaviors. So in response to the bleak winter numbers of last week, here's a short list of things we could accomplish with little pain:

• Face the facts: An economy that relies on rapacious consumption will eventually devour itself. We need a new design that thrives on community health and stability rather than boatloads of junk from China.

• Go on a diet: Obviously, there's a lot of fat in the U.S. economy. A diet wouldn't hurt, literally and figuratively. A diet that relies more on plants requires much less energy than one rich in red meat. As Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute notes, shifting to a plant-based diet cuts greenhouse gas as much as driving a Prius does.

• Protect our land and water resources: The first step is to make sure they aren't lost to sprawl and other dumb uses. We also need to ensure that these resources are protected for future generations. If mandates or incentives are needed to preserve soil and protect the public's water, then we can't be timid.

• Take personal responsibility: If Americans embraced one or two sustainable practices, the impact would be immense. We could park the car for one day a week, alter a diet and retrofit our homes and businesses for energy conservation. These are small steps that can make a big difference. Our major institutions -- churches, businesses, governments -- need to lead by example and preach the truth.

• Elect responsible leaders: Choose local leaders who embrace sustainable community policies, state leaders who are willing to reward them and national leaders who have the guts to say that new realities require simple but determined efforts to change.

Getting people to equate patriotism with responsible consumption and conservation of resources would be a big step in the right direction. Rewarding that behavior would be even bigger. http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/275416

15. Joe Conason: McCain’s Very Own Farrakhan

Whatever their true private beliefs, presidential candidates in America are constantly required to provide proofs of faith, often through their connections with various religious figures. Benedictions from the pulpit bestow an aura of righteousness—except, of course, when the pastor or minister is a disreputable kook whose endorsement should be an embarrassment.

In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have suffered exactly this kind of indignity, under very different circumstances. And their contrasting responses revealed not only aspects of their own characters, but also the enduring prejudices of the national media covering this year’s campaign.

Well aware of Farrakhan’s record, since both of them reside in Chicago, Obama forthrightly rejected the support of the unsavory minister. Unfortunately, his own Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has chosen to associate himself with the Nation of Islam, which may well create problems for Obama—but at least he has clearly separated himself from the poisonous Farrakhan philosophy.

By contrast, McCain went out of his way last week to accept the endorsement of a Christian pastor with a deeply disturbing record of bigotry and extremism. That would be John Hagee, a Texas televangelist whose career is chronicled in “God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters,” a new book by investigative reporter Sarah Posner. As Posner reveals, Hagee is the kind of evangelical minister who has anticipated the end of the world for decades now, even as he promises untold riches to those who tithe to his ministry. He is an ardent warmonger who, like Farrakhan, seems to imagine a Middle East cleansed by blood—except that in his fantasies, the Christians will be saved while everyone else burns. (The saved won’t include members of the Catholic Church, however, an institution he despises and denounces as venomously as Farrakhan does.) 3.05.08 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080305_mccains_very_own_farrakhan/

16. Irma Montoya: The Least Among Us

What will be our measure of women’s progress on International Women’s Day, 2008?

Is it Hillary Clinton, the first viable female presidential candidate in U.S. history?

Is it the average working woman, who now finally earns more than four-fifths of the average man’s wages?

Is it the female students who now outnumber males at colleges?

Or should our measure be the women in the lowest paying jobs, those who sew our clothes, care for our elderly and our children, pick and prepare our food? Across the United States, women are much more likely as men to earn minimum wage and to be uninsured. When we think about how far women have come, do we think of these least among us, or only of the pioneers breaking glass ceilings?

Contrasts in the status of women are especially dramatic in Texas. The third richest woman in the world lives here: Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heir. Her $16 billion fortune was boosted by global trade rule changes, such as North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which benefited many multinational corporations. But Texas is also home to some of the poorest women in the US, in the border region that was devastated by NAFTA. Many of them, ironically, shop at Wal-Mart for its low prices. When the Democratic candidates sparred over NAFTA recently, neither of them mentioned the majority of single mothers in Texas who live under 125% of the federal poverty line — too little to support a family.

These are not the kinds of records we want to set: Texas had the highest percentage of uninsured people in 2006, according to the Census Bureau; two-thirds of uninsured Texas parents are female. Texas has the second largest gap between the top and bottom fifth, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Here in El Paso county, more than two-thirds of single mothers with children under 5 live in poverty. My organization, Mujer Obrera, helps low-income immigrant women, many of them displaced from the garment industry, rebuild their lives and start businesses. 3.06.08 http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/06/7519/

17. Libby Copeland: A Long Campaign Gives Democracy A Good Workout

Yes, it will. The Democratic primary will go on forever and ever. Isn't it grand ?

Voters, buck up. Superdelegates, gather your strength. Let the campaign strategists argue over delegate math and let countless talking heads argue over the definition of "going negative." Because the next seven weeks (or more!) may be exhausting, but they might ultimately be good for democracy. And they could be good for the Democratic Party, as well.

All those states that have complained in past election cycles that they don't matter, so much so that this time they moved their primaries up? Looks like they needn't have bothered. Looks like Pennsylvania, with its April 22 primary, will have a crack at the action. Which means more voters weighing in on the Democratic race, which means more power to the people.

So bring it on! Bring on the candidates' newfound love for the Steelers. Bring on the mandatory cheese-steak-eating photo ops. (Tip from John Kerry: Do not ask for Swiss cheese.) Let the most historic primary race in history continue. We see Barack Obama shooting hoops in West Philly with Will Smith. We see Hillary Clinton in an Amish buggy with a guy named Jebediah. We see more people arguing about the issues this race can't help but be about -- race and gender, establishment versus youth, the choice (a false choice, really) between judgment and experience. Those arguments aren't bad things, not if folks can find some substance amid the theatrics. 3.06.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030503189.html