W wants to vastly increase taxes on middle class

W, the KING of BAD IDEAS, now wants to raise taxes on health benefits for millions upon millions of working people who get health insurance benefits as part of their compensation at work.



Amazingly, Bush is going around talking about how his proposal will give tax deductions for health benefits up to $15,000 making the claim that this is a good deal for people. HOLD IT! How can it be a good deal when he's trying to make everyone owe taxes on the health benefits, changing policy and law that has made health benefits tax free for over 60 years.

When in the world will the media and the public realize and report this gargantuan rip off of American working families??

Yes, 5 million more people have lost health insurance since Bush took office, and THEY NEED INSURANCE, but instead of setting up new taxes for the middle class, this nation needs to progressively tax the rich to help pay for health care coverage for Americans who haven't been at the Bush trough for the last six years!

See more from the New York Times:

January 28, 2007

Experts See Peril in Bush Health Proposal

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — With his proposal to uproot a tax break that has been in place for more than 60 years, President Bush has touched off an impassioned debate over the future of the employer-based system that provides health insurance to more than half of all Americans.

“Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans,” Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address this week.

Mr. Bush said his proposal would eliminate a bias in the tax code that strongly favored insurance provided by employers over coverage bought by individuals and families outside the workplace.

Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization, said: “The president’s proposal would mean the end of employer-based benefits as we know them. It gives employers a way out of providing the benefits because their employees could get the same tax break on their own.”

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, denied that the president wanted to move people away from the employer-based system and toward the individual insurance market. “We are seriously agnostic on that,” he said.

It might take years for changes to occur. “Large corporate employers could not immediately terminate their health benefits because there is, at present, no reliable place where employees can get coverage they can afford outside the workplace,” said Frank B. McArdle, a health policy expert at Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm.

The economic rationale for Mr. Bush’s proposal is that too many people have “gold-plated, deluxe” health insurance, which encourages them to use excessive amounts of health care, driving up costs for everyone.

Many economists agree. But they doubt that Mr. Bush’s proposal would do much to hold down costs or cover more people.

“The president’s proposal addresses inequities in the tax code that provide an open-ended subsidy for premiums paid by employers,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “If your employer does not provide health insurance and you have to buy it on your own, you get no tax benefit at all. The president’s plan would eliminate that distinction.”

But Mr. Reischauer said, “A glaring problem with the president’s plan is that he did not call for any stronger regulation of the individual insurance market.” In that market as it now exists in most states, insurers can deny coverage or charge higher rates to sick people.

In their desire to achieve universal coverage, some Democrats have also begun to raise questions about the employer-based system. “We have to ask ourselves if the employer-based system of health care is still the best way for providing insurance to all Americans,” said Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, noting that workers frequently changed jobs.

The Service Employees International Union negotiates with employers to secure health benefits for its members, but the president of the union, Andrew L. Stern, said, “The current employer-based health care system is not the foundation for 21st-century health care reform.”

Mr. Bush’s proposal differs radically from President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal coverage, but experts on health benefits said they were similar in one respect: In an effort to help the uninsured — about one-sixth of the population — they would upend the system that covers most Americans.

The Clinton plan would have provided comprehensive health benefits to 39 million uninsured Americans, with more than $400 billion in new federal spending over 10 years. The White House says the tax changes proposed by Mr. Bush would provide coverage for 3 million to 5 million people at no cost to the government over 10 years.

Since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the number of people without insurance has increased by more than 5 million, to 46.6 million, according to the Census Bureau. Administration officials said they hoped to reverse that trend by helping states that offered basic private insurance policies to their residents. To pay for such help, the administration would take federal money from hospitals that serve large numbers of poor people.

Under Mr. Bush’s proposal, employee health benefits would, for the first time, be treated as income and would be subject to income and payroll taxes, just like wages. At the same time, Mr. Bush would create a tax deduction for health insurance of $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals. The same deduction would be available to everyone with coverage, regardless of the source or value of the policy.

A family with coverage worth $18,000 would have to pay taxes on the amount exceeding the $15,000 standard deduction — $3,000, in this example.

Katherine Baicker, a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the proposal would increase taxes for 30 million people with the most generous employer-provided health benefits, unless they “change their behavior” and choose less costly coverage. Ms. Baicker said the proposal would cut taxes for more than 100 million people who bought insurance on their own or had employee health benefits worth less than the standard deduction.

Treasury officials said that under the Bush proposal, an uninsured family of four with an annual income of $60,000 would save $4,545 if it bought coverage in the individual market. By contrast, they said, a family that earns $80,000 and has employer-provided coverage worth $20,000 could see a tax increase of about $1,500.

Joel D. Kaplan, deputy chief of staff at the White House, acknowledged that the proposal could accelerate the trend of employers’ dropping health benefits for employees. But he said more people “would be able to buy insurance in the individual market,” so there would be “a net increase in the number of insured.”

Politicians and health care providers are skeptical.

Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said, “The president’s proposal would do little to help the uninsured, but would undermine the employer-based system through which 160 million people get coverage.”

Richard J. Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, agreed. “The tax proposal would have the effect of driving people to the small-group insurance market — a market that has proved unstable,” Mr. Umbdenstock said. “For many people, even with a tax break, coverage would remain unaffordable.”

Historically, employers have used benefits as a tool to recruit workers and keep them healthy and productive.

R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, praised the general direction of the president’s proposal but said his members had serious concerns.

First, Mr. Josten said, the $15,000 cap on tax-free insurance takes no account of wide geographic variation in the cost of health care and insurance. The same package of benefits typically costs more in Boston than in Minneapolis, for example.

Moreover, Mr. Josten said, a health plan may be expensive because it covers older workers with major medical problems, not because it is “gold-plated.” A single mother, working as a low-paid secretary at a law firm, could be pushed into a higher tax bracket because she participates in an $18,000 health plan covering older men who have had heart attacks and expensive surgery, Mr. Josten said.

Treasury officials acknowledged that some people with costly, comprehensive benefits had modest incomes.

But deluxe health plans are vanishing fast. In recent years, many workers have found themselves paying more for less comprehensive benefits. From 2000 to 2006, premiums for employer-sponsored coverage rose 87 percent, about four times as fast as workers’ earnings, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The GOP's Class War

George W. Bush’s alliance with the rich and big business makes his politics entirely predictable. Following the GOP’s form of class warfare, Bush always protects his favored class, whether giving huge tax cuts for the country club class or massive economic incentives for corporations that pay CEOs hundreds of millions.

His proposal for health insurance is nothing but a huge tax increase for taxpayers that will once again hit the middle class the hardest. The plan will surely lead to reductions in care by employer organized health plans and increased numbers of individuals scrambling to obtain decent coverage on their own.

With the Bush health insurance tax increase, working people lose big again, while the rich will find a negligble relative cost. I’m afraid this is a chance for Bush to do for healthcare what he’s done for peace in Iraq!

The FAILED PRESIDENCY of W

How much lower can Ws poll numbers go? Its taken so long for the American people to figure it out, I wonder if it is true! Bush To Face Skeptical Congress
Iraq Overshadows Domestic Outreach

By Peter Baker and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 23, 2007; A01

President Bush plans to reach out to the opposition in his State of the Union address tonight with new and recycled proposals on health care, energy, immigration and education, but the uproar over his decision to send more U.S. troops to Iraq has eclipsed potential consensus on domestic policy.

As he addresses a Congress controlled entirely by Democrats for the first time since he took office, Bush faces deep skepticism inside the chamber, even within the House Republican leadership, which yesterday made proposals intended "to hold the Bush administration . . . accountable" for the progress of his latest Iraq plan.

The doubt on Capitol Hill reflects the continuing erosion of Bush's public support across the country. His approval rating is at the lowest level of his presidency, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, and only twice in the past six decades has a president delivered his annual speech to the nation in a weaker condition in the polls -- Harry S. Truman in the midst of the Korean War in 1952 and Richard M. Nixon in the throes of Watergate in 1974.

For the first time, majorities of Americans say Bush cannot be trusted in a crisis, has not made the country safer and should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq to avoid further casualties rather than leave them until civil order is restored. And, in a sign of intensifying opposition, a majority (51 percent) for the first time expressed strong disapproval of Bush's performance, compared with 17 percent who strongly approved.

"The world changed significantly on Election Day, and the only people who were surprised were them," GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio said of Bush and his aides. Now, he added, "they've backed themselves into a tough corner, and the problem is his continued insistence for the troop increase, which flies in the face of what 70 percent of Americans want, makes him look . . . like [he's saying], 'I'll listen to you, but I'll do what I want anyway.' "

The poll indicates that Bush has made no headway in selling his decision to bolster troop levels in Iraq by 21,500, with 65 percent now opposing it compared with 61 percent the night of his Jan. 10 nationally televised address. Three in five Americans trust congressional Democrats more than Bush to deal with Iraq, and the same proportion want Congress to try to block his troop-increase plan.

Bush's overall approval rating of 33 percent matches the lowest it has been in Post-ABC polls since becoming president, and 71 percent say the country is seriously off track, the highest such expression of national pessimism in more than a decade. By contrast, newly installed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is enjoying a honeymoon, with 54 percent approving her handling of the job.

While Bush will devote about half of tonight's 40-minute-plus speech to Iraq, the broader battle with Islamic radicals and other foreign policy matters, advisers said they understand that only sustained and visible progress on the ground in Iraq might change American minds about the war. The best Bush can hope for tonight, they said, is to prevent a wholesale defection by Republicans and buy enough time for his plan to work.

"He knows there's great skepticism," said a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the speech before its delivery. "But in spite of that, he believes there's much to be done if we can work together."

Aides said Bush will not directly engage in a debate over congressional efforts to block the troop increase. But in private briefings for administration allies yesterday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said Bush will challenge Congress to put up its own plan if it does not like his "new way forward," according to people who were briefed.

Past presidents who found themselves facing an opposition Congress tried to tack to the middle after suffering midterm retreats. "This president, based on his speech last week, is taking the opposite approach," said Michael Waldman, a Clinton speechwriter who heads New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "The 2006 election was as close to a referendum on a president and issue as you get in our constitutional system. So for the president to move to escalate, it's very dramatic."

While recognizing differences over Iraq, Bush does aim to make progress with Democrats on domestic policy. The four main issues he will emphasize -- health care, immigration, energy and education -- are closer to Democratic priorities than some past State of the Union addresses. And Bush tried to send a signal on the eve of the speech by accepting an invitation to address the House Democratic retreat in Williamsburg on Feb. 3.

"They're going to focus on issues and themes where they think they can get bipartisan cooperation," said Cesar Conda, former domestic policy adviser to Vice President Cheney. "It's a big difference from before, when he had a Republican Congress and the big issues would have been making the tax cuts permanent and reforming the tax code. It's a change in tone and focus. He's got to deal with the reality of a Democratic Congress."

Some of Bush's domestic discussion will sound familiar. He plans to repeat his call to overhaul immigration laws and allow illegal immigrants to become guest workers, an idea that may find more favor among Democrats than it did with Republicans last year. He plans to call for extension of his No Child Left Behind education program with modifications to make it more flexible but will not ask Congress to expand it to high school as he did in the past.

The White House has previewed two new health-care proposals that will be in the speech. The first would make employer-provided health-care benefits taxable income after a deduction of $15,000 for families and $7,500 for singles. Officials said the plan would increase taxes for 30 million families whose benefits are worth more than the deduction but would provide a tax break to the vast majority of families with employer coverage as well as to 17 million people who purchase insurance on their own. The program would begin in 2009 and cost the government during its first years of operation but pay for itself by 2018, they said.

Bush also wants to redirect spending from Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs toward new grants to help states ensure that everyone has access to affordable basic health insurance, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said yesterday. Leavitt did not specify a cost but said the new program would spur efforts already underway in states such as Massachusetts and California to provide coverage to people without health insurance.

The main uncertainty is what Bush will say about energy and the environment. Amid much talk about climate change and energy security, the president and his aides have promised unspecified "bold" ideas. Officials have ruled out binding caps on emissions of greenhouse gases, despite support among Democrats and some corporate executives who came to Washington yesterday. But they told allies that he will advance ideas for greatly expanding ethanol as an alternative to oil, and some insiders expect changes in fuel efficiency standards for vehicles.

Staff writers Dan Balz, Chris Cillizza, Christopher Lee and Lori Montgomery contributed to this report.

Surge and Purge

We have to watch w and Rovie all the time. They're way ahead of the game, always shifting things in a way most would think illegal. Here Krugman shows how they're getting set for upcoming investigations and possible criminal trials....

Surging and Purging

By Paul Krugman

Published Friday Jan. 9, 2007 in New York Times

There’s something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors.

Last month, Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney (federal prosecutor) for the Eastern District of Arkansas, received a call on his cellphone while hiking in the woods with his son. He was informed that he had just been replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a Republican political operative who has spent the last few years working as an opposition researcher for Karl Rove.

Mr. Cummins’s case isn’t unique. Since the middle of last month, the Bush administration has pushed out at least four U.S. attorneys, and possibly as many as seven, without explanation. The list includes Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego, who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman, on major corruption charges. The top F.B.I. official in San Diego told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Lam’s dismissal would undermine multiple continuing investigations.

In Senate testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to say how many other attorneys have been asked to resign, calling it a “personnel matter.”

In case you’re wondering, such a wholesale firing of prosecutors midway through an administration isn’t normal. U.S. attorneys, The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, “typically are appointed at the beginning of a new president’s term, and serve throughout that term.” Why, then, are prosecutors that the Bush administration itself appointed suddenly being pushed out?

The likely answer is that for the first time the administration is really worried about where corruption investigations might lead.

Since the day it took power this administration has shown nothing but contempt for the normal principles of good government. For six years ethical problems and conflicts of interest have been the rule, not the exception.

For a long time the administration nonetheless seemed untouchable, protected both by Republican control of Congress and by its ability to justify anything and everything as necessary for the war on terror. Now, however, the investigations are closing in on the Oval Office. The latest news is that J. Steven Griles, the former deputy secretary of the Interior Department and the poster child for the administration’s systematic policy of putting foxes in charge of henhouses, is finally facing possible indictment.

And the purge of U.S. attorneys looks like a pre-emptive strike against the gathering forces of justice.

Won’t the administration have trouble getting its new appointees confirmed by the Senate? Well, it turns out that it won’t have to.

Arlen Specter, the Republican senator who headed the Judiciary Committee until Congress changed hands, made sure of that last year. Previously, new U.S. attorneys needed Senate confirmation within 120 days or federal district courts would name replacements. But as part of a conference committee reconciling House and Senate versions of the revised Patriot Act, Mr. Specter slipped in a clause eliminating that rule.

As Paul Kiel of TPMmuckraker.com — which has done yeoman investigative reporting on this story — put it, this clause in effect allows the administration “to handpick replacements and keep them there in perpetuity without the ordeal of Senate confirmation.” How convenient.

Mr. Gonzales says that there’s nothing political about the firings. And according to The Associated Press, he said that district court judges shouldn’t appoint U.S. attorneys because they “tend to appoint friends and others not properly qualified to be prosecutors.” Words fail me.

Mr. Gonzales also says that the administration intends to get Senate confirmation for every replacement. Sorry, but that’s not at all credible, even if we ignore the administration’s track record. Mr. Griffin, the political-operative-turned-prosecutor, would be savaged in a confirmation hearing. By appointing him, the administration showed that it has no intention of following the usual rules.

The broader context is this: defeat in the midterm elections hasn’t led the Bush administration to scale back its imperial view of presidential power.

On the contrary, now that President Bush can no longer count on Congress to do his bidding, he’s more determined than ever to claim essentially unlimited authority — whether it’s the authority to send more troops into Iraq or the authority to stonewall investigations into his own administration’s conduct.

The next two years, in other words, are going to be a rolling constitutional crisis.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

W's Surge to Lose

What is with the US media the way they accept W's calling the escalation in troops to Iraq a "surge" and their suggesting that it is only temporary. What a pile of bull!

Did anyone anywhere ever think that Bush would do anything other than increase the number of troops in Iraq. Not a chance. I would've bet the farm.

Did you see the Houston Chronicle today? It was great, congressmen and a female US senator were all shifting around trying to say something of substance without out offending the American public. Several Ds were working hard to appear to support the war, while nearly all Rs suggested that they supported the president but were worried about the war going wrong.

Raise Minimum Wage; but no deals for big business

The Democrats need to rais the minimum wage without any additional deals for big business. The six years of the Bush administration have been nothing but benefit and deal after deal for big business. The only true way to know where Bush stands on any issue is to judge if it is a giveaway to private industry; if it helps industry, Bush is pushing it. If it throws money and tax breaks at big business, then W will be fighting for it.



Success of 100 hours hinges on few uncertain Senate votes The Hill By Elana Schor and Jeffrey Young

Two planks of the House Democrats’ “100 Hours” agenda are headed for swift passage this week but risk delay in the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats must navigate intra-party disputes over how to raise the minimum wage and amend the Medicare drug benefit.

Unlike their party colleagues in the House, Senate Democratic leaders are sending high-priority bills through regular order, a move that underscores their promise of bipartisanship. But this could deny them the political benefit of demonstrable progress when there are fractious conference negotiations with the House over different approaches to the minimum wage and Medicare.

“I’m becoming aware of the difficulties of the U.S. Senate in trying to pass a bill dealing with one issue,” freshman Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said yesterday, urging the Senate to follow the lead of his former House colleagues and approve a clean minimum wage increase.

Republicans, however, are seeking tax and regulatory sweeteners for businesses to ease the impact of a phased wage hike to $7.25 per hour. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has indicated that he will back the business breaks, remarking last week that a filibuster-proof margin for a stand-alone minimum wage increase may be achievable, but, “I’m not sure I want to do that.”

The Senate Finance Committee today will examine options for tax breaks that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee can successfully pair with the wage hike. But HELP Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and ranking Republican Mike Enzi (Wyo.) are already dissenting from party leaders’ positions on the minimum wage.

Kennedy will push for a Senate wage hike without business tax breaks at an event today with House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, and freshman Reps. Betty Sutton (D-Ohio) and Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.).

At least two members of Kennedy’s panel, freshman Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), backed his approach.

“We need to do serious business tax breaks … [but] don’t link them to the minimum wage,” Brown said. Sanders also called for a clean bill, saying via e-mail: “After 10 years of inexcusable inaction, I believe that the time is long overdue for Congress to pass a clean minimum wage bill.”

Enzi, meanwhile, spent yesterday’s GOP policy lunch tamping down enthusiasm among Republicans for adding small-business health plan provisions to the minimum-wage hike. Enzi’s small-business health plan bill fell short on the floor last year, and he continues to work carefully on a compromise with Democrats that he hopes to pursue as a stand-alone issue, spokesman Craig Orfield said.

Senate Republicans also endorse other business benefits as add-ons to the wage bill, but support for including small-business health plans is being stoked in the House. There, senior Republicans gathered yesterday to tout Reid’s support for a business-friendly wage bill and promote their alternative – which includes small-business health plans.

“Small business health plans would be my choice,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said in an interview late last week, adding that a wage increase coupled with health insurance incentives would ensure businesses are “able to give their employees a better life.”

The Medicare prescription drug bill slated for House approval on Friday, which would require the Bush administration to negotiate with drug companies on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries, poses considerable challenges of its own for Senate Democrats.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has been granted first dibs on drafting a bill to fulfill the Democratic campaign promise for federal negotiation of Medicare drug prices. He will hold a hearing on the issue one day before the House considers its Medicare bill, strongly opposed by the White House.

But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a Finance Committee member, got 54 votes last year for a bill he and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) authored that would allow federal negotiation of Medicare drug prices. Wyden and Snowe will release an updated version of their measure today, mandating negotiation in the case of single-source drugs, drugs created with substantial taxpayer funding, or in cases where private insurers request help.

Wyden said yesterday that he and Snowe count 58 votes in the new Congress for their plan, if freshman Democrats were added and Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), who is ailing, subtracted. Still, even if the pair can reach the crucial 60-vote threshold, Baucus could credibly claim to provide the Democratic leadership with a bigger margin, starting with his own vote.

“I’m going to work very closely with chairman Baucus,” Wyden said when asked whether he would consider using his head count for leverage in discussions with Baucus, who voted against two Medicare negotiation bills last year. “I’m pleased with the discussions we’ve had.”

Baucus is under pressure from Democratic leaders, who have vowed to approve negotiation by spring, to get a bill through the Finance Committee. Though Baucus has criticized the Bush administration’s handling of the drug benefit, he was one of only two Democrats who participated in the drafting of the law creating the program.

“I suspect there [are] going to be serious questions about it in the Senate,” Republican Whip Trent Lott (Miss.) said yesterday of the Medicare negotiation concept. “I’m not sure how or when Reid plans to call it up. I think Democrats have serious questions about it too.”

Complicating matters for Baucus is that a majority of his committee voted for the Wyden-Snowe amendment on the floor. Baucus was the only Democrat on the panel who voted against it, while Snowe captured the support of fellow Finance member Gordon Smith (R-Ore.).

Snowe said yesterday that she and Wyden would discuss their new bill at tomorrow’s Finance hearing and she hoped “some of the changes will broaden the support [for negotiation].”

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) was one of two members missing the vote on Wyden-Snowe. Despite Democrats’ emphasis on negotiation during their electoral triumph last year, Coleman said yesterday he would continue to oppose government involvement in Medicare drug prices.

“We’ve got a system now that’s working,” Coleman said, acknowledging that he would risk political attacks during his reelection run in 2008 but charging that negotiation would “add another layer of bureaucracy.”

The pressure coming from outside interest groups is considerable. Two of Washington’s biggest powerhouses, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the AARP, are facing off and are ready to bring the full weight of their influence to bear.

UN Calls to Stop Next Two Executions

Iraq Should Refrain From Executing Two Hussein Aides, UN Says

By Bill Varner and Paul Tighe

Much like international human rights groups tried before Saddam's hanging, the UN has now called for a delay to allow review of process and appeals...

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Iraq should refrain from carrying out the execution today of two associates of former leader Saddam Hussein, who was hanged Dec. 30, said Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Hussein's half-brother, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, are scheduled to be executed at dawn today in Baghdad, Al Arabiya television reported yesterday, citing unidentified Iraqi government officials.

``The concerns that I expressed just days ago with respect to the fairness and impartiality of Saddam Hussein's trial apply also to these two defendants,'' Arbour said yesterday in a statement, adding she appealed to Iraq's President Jalal Talabani to prevent the death sentences being carried out.

Bush Can't Run from the Hussein Death Spectacle

It is amazing that the Bush administration is now trying to distance itself from the outrageous execution of Saddam Hussein. You know the US was an accessory to the execution; more likely the moving force with the current Iraq puppet government.



Sadly for the US's global reputation, the execution video is very much like the typical terrorist killing with menacing hooded figures (unwilling to expose their identities) slitting necks, or in this case putting a noose around the victim. Again, like the terrorist assasinations, the killers here (somewhat sanctioned by some type of totally biased government) verbally accompanied the death with threats and vulgarities.

Oddly, perhaps not surprisingly, the parallels between W and Saddam are ironic. Saddam kills those opponents in Iraq who tried to assassinate him, and W uses the propped up Iraq system to kill Saddam who tried to assassinate his father. Apparently these acts of retribution are ok as long as you're in power...

It is up to US to stop him...

A Sentinel in Time
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Thursday 28 December 2006

The calendar pages of our collective history are dotted with a gloomy constellation of days marked in blood, in woe, and in regret. The assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy; that last, hurried helicopter flight from that last rooftop on that last day of our time in Vietnam; the day four lifeless little bodies were pulled from the rubble of a bombed church in Birmingham; the December morning when Pearl Harbor was transformed into a graveyard etched in infamy, the September morning when we all watched those proud Towers in Manhattan crumble and fall - these moments, and the others of like kind too vast in number to name, defined us and transformed us even as they left their scars.

Sometimes, when such a grim milestone passes, we can say to ourselves, yes, it was this terrible day that revealed and released the strength, courage and perseverance which came, in time, to define that moment. We can, with deserved pride, glory in the memory of our passage through those crucibles, confident in the hard-won knowledge that we all have the capacity to overcome any trial, and that surpassing good can be forged in the fires of sorrow and pain.

Too often, however, we come to remember a day of darkness as bereft, with empty hands and hollowed hearts, deprived of the chance or ability to do more than bow our heads and wish it could have been, somehow, different. It requires a long passage of time, in most instances, to allow the cold realities of such days to sink in, and to absorb the brutal totality of consequences we have been burdened to endure in the aftermath. Some moments linger, haunting us, seemingly beyond redemption or solace.

Worst of all, such days breed more days to match or surpass them. The wretched offspring of one malignant moment are birthed into our future, where they wait like deep chasms in a darkened road. Like Booth's bullet, they cut a swath through time itself, and no matter our efforts or exertions, we never seem quite able to reach a place where we are free from their damned and damnable power to do us harm.

On the twentieth day of this coming new year, we will mark the sixth anniversary of the moment George W. Bush stood before Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, raised his right hand into a bitter wind, and swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

This, in the fullness of time, may well stand as such a day. Everything we have endured these last six years - the death, the horror, the fear, the anger - was born that afternoon in Washington, DC. We have already suffered myriad consequences because of it - the shame of Abu Ghraib; the lingering fear of blue skies and airplanes; the ebb tide of freedom as rights become privileges too easily withheld, the bottomless sorrow stitched into nearly three thousand folded American flags while taps played to the wind - and it is a bleak certainty that further suffering born on that day lies in wait.

Consider some other anniversaries we will mark in this new year.

February 5th will be the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations, in which he stated without equivocation that Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that could easily be delivered to terrorists for use against us. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all the bloody calamities to follow, became an inevitability on this day. It was not so much the presentation itself that sealed the deal - much of which was and remains laughably transparent - but Powell himself. Wreathed in the fawning adulation of the media establishment, the myth of his rectitude carried the day, thus damning untold thousands to death, suffering, and pain.

March 19th will likewise be the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, of "Shock and Awe," and of the moment a match was put to the fuse. Beyond the blood already spilled because of this day - blood like an ocean - is the carnage yet to come. Before much of this new year is gone, the only people still talking about "winning" in Iraq will be that small cadre of wretches who created this anniversary in the first place, whose monochromatic ideologies exploded an inescapable quagmire that will be generational in its impact upon us all.

May 1st will be the fourth anniversary of the day President Bush stood before an assembled gathering of servicemen and women on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to gleefully declare, under a bright banner reading "Mission Accomplished," that victory in Iraq had been achieved. Little needs to be said here, because the obvious grossness of some moments requires no further elaboration, except this: Of the nearly three thousand soldiers killed in Iraq, and the nearly 47,000 soldiers wounded in Iraq, only the barest fraction fell before the first of May 2003. All the rest have come in the long days, weeks, months, and years since that bright banner was unfurled.

December 17th will be the second anniversary of Bush's public confirmation that he had indeed authorized the National Security Agency to tap the telephones of countless American citizens - said taps having been undertaken without warrants. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a law requiring these warrants to protect citizens against undue governmental intrusion, was discarded out of hand through these actions. Despite the fact that almost no requests for FISA warrants have ever been denied, and that the parameters for obtaining these warrants are so broad that they can be obtained even after the surveillance is underway, Bush and his people deemed the FISA requirements too restrictive. On this anniversary, we mark the moment when a president placed himself above the law by fiat and suffered no consequences - the moment when each and every one of us stepped deeper into the doomed, imprisoned shadow of Winston Smith.

These are but a small sampling of the moments, days, decisions, and consequences unleashed on January 20, 2001. Freighted with deadly potential, each of these was born that day, and each has itself become a singularity, a creator of mayhem and strife in its own right. As that first moment poisoned the potential of so many tomorrows, so now do these. The bomb that kills a child in Baghdad creates the father whose revenge will be gained by another's senseless death. The official lie that goes unchallenged clears a path for the deadlier lies to follow. A deliberate chip in the walls defending our rights is the perfect spot to lay in the pry bar, until the chip becomes a hole through which tyranny may pass with stunning ease.

Thus, the anniversaries of woe are compounded; consequences spawned by consequences, and a future once defined by hope is transformed into a territory of dread.

Yet, in spite of all the horrors arrayed before us, even as our uncertain future whispers its omens of grief from an unfathomable darkness, there is a simple and unassailable truth standing sentinel against despair. We are that truth - all of us, every one. We are a defiant counterweight that can tip the scales of history. The wellspring of limitless possibility and potential that is humanity's astonishing birthright bestows upon each of us the means to be the alchemists of our own fate.

You are the bulwark, as this new year approaches: a defining line between the possible and the inevitable. The terrible moments of our past reach out to define our future, to create new anniversaries of mourning from the old. Only your will can keep this beast at bay. If you choose to, if you summon the courage and strength and perseverance that have served us well so many times before, the momentum of that cold January day and all the days that followed will be checked.

You are stronger than history, if you choose to be so. The future is yours to create, if you choose to do so. The moments to come are yours. Let nothing and no one steal them from you. Guard them with your life, because that is exactly what they are.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.