At yesterday's gathering of world leaders in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States was represented by Vice President Cheney. The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen's hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

...[T]he vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --

THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we're in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

The Post: It was right around the election. We'll send it over.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm surprised. Maybe I did. It's amazing what happens when you're tired. Anyway, your question was? I'm sorry for interrupting.

Marshall: Do you think it's fair for Democrats or reporters or anybody else to use the word "privatization" or "private accounts" to describe the President's policy?

Luntz: I think it's fair for Democrats to do so.

Marshall: Why not the press?

Luntz: Because it's not-the press is making a pejorative statement...

Marshall: But wait, but wait. It's the phrase the president himself uses over and over again.

Others: Why would...? Hang on a minute. What makes it pejorative?

Marshall: Yeah?

Luntz: Because I-for example, I-when I listen-when someone says the word-I know some of the people on this on this discussion are Jewish. If somebody...

Marshall: Hey, buddy...

Luntz: ...Israel, I know someone is likely to be a supporter. If someone uses the phrase State of Israel, I know that they are trying to create a distance.

Marshall: Huh?

Luntz: If someone uses the phrase "private accounts," "privatization" I have an idea of where they stand on Social Security and I'm usually not wrong on that.

Marshall and others: But the President used that.

Luntz: Used that [heavy emphasis on the past tense of "used"].

Marshall: Okay, okay, so long as he stops using that, from that point on...

Others: [Laughter and crosstalk.]

Marshall: I'm serious about this. At the point at which he no longer uses the word, reporters have start using a different-verbiage-shall we say?

Luntz: It's one of the reasons why the American People don't trust the media. If the media wants to engage in a debate, let it say so. Let them come on the shows that they do on Sundays, let them state a point of view, and people know that they're not getting the journalistic report, they're getting the opinions of the left wing or the right wing because there are journalists on both sides who speak.

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York radio station apologized on Monday for repeatedly airing a joke song that ridiculed victims of the recent tsunami in South Asia and used racial slurs, saying the piece was in poor taste.

New York FM radio station WQHT, or HOT 97, ran the segment on its "Miss Jones in the Morning" show. The piece used racial slurs to describe people swept away in the disaster, made jokes about child slavery and people watching their mothers die.

President Bush and some of his advisers received worst-acting nominations for their appearances in news and archival footage in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which assails Bush for his actions surrounding the September 11 attacks.

Bush was nominated for worst actor, while Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice got a nomination for worst supporting actress and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for worst supporting actor.

[Razzies founder John] Wilson said that while "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a piece of anti-Bush propaganda, the president and his associates earned their Razzie nominations on their own.

"It wasn't Mr. Moore's editing," Wilson said. "It's the raw footage of these people just making fools of themselves."

It's a sign of the times.....red, white and blue...in the corner of the bathroom mirror, stuck up absent mindedly and now staring out like a reproach: a sticker that reads, "I Voted."

"Yeah," I think when I see it in the morning,"but I didn't vote for this."

And that's the crux of the matter in so many ways...

There has been much said about the statements made by Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard University, regarding the dearth of women in the science fields. I don't know exactly what Summers said, here was his latest apology issued Thursday:

[...]

Not knowing exactly what Summers said, I am loathe to critique it. But I do know what Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post about it, and I found that to be incredibly obtuse:

Bush's grand ambitions excited his neoconservative supporters, who see his call to put the United States in the forefront of the battle to spread democracy as noble and necessary. "It was a rare inaugural speech that will go down as a historic speech, I believe," said William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard and a leading neoconservative thinker. He predicted the speech will drive policy for the rest of Bush's presidency.

[...]

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider

Forty-nine percent of 1,007 adult Americans said in phone interviews they believe Bush is a "uniter," according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday. Another 49 percent called him a "divider," and 2 percent had no opinion.

The results nearly match those of a poll taken in October 2004, which showed 48 percent considered Bush a "uniter" and 48 percent called him a "divider," with 4 percent having no opinion.

Gov. Jeb Bush on Tuesday unveiled a proposed $61.6 billion state spending plan that would cut taxes paid by Florida's wealthiest while hitting students with higher tuition, cutting medical services to the state's neediest and providing little new money for public schools.

[...]

"I believe this is a common-sense budget based on sound conservative principles," Bush said.
[...]

Local advocates, meanwhile, blasted the governor's call to reduce $398 million in spending on the Medically Needy program, which provides medical services and prescription drugs for nearly 36,000 sick Floridians who can't get insurance coverage.

"I can't understand why they want to keep throwing away lives to give somebody a tax break," said Bill Rettinger of Hollywood, a severe asthmatic and bone transplant patient who has been in the Medically Needy program since 1999. "I can't understand that mind-set, where 36,000 are expendable but a $136 million ... tax break isn't."

"I have achieved a lot of my dreams in life and I want to see that young Texans achieve some of theirs,' Friedman said in a telephone interview. He added, "I want to be governor because I need the closet space."

Friedman said the main priorities in his campaign will be reforming the Texas education system, adding safeguards in the judicial process where Texas ranks as the nation's leader in capital punishment and establishing a peace corps for the state.

Plus, he wants "to fight the wussification of Texas."

"I am determined to get back to a time when the cowboys all sang and their horses were smart," Friedman said.

[...]

Friedman has said he expects his campaign to be unconventional, irreverent and star-studded. He knows it will be tough to win in the heavily Republican state, but he thinks he can win votes from people fed up with bland politicians.

"We hope the people of Texas are going to reject the choice of paper or plastic," he said.

Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday the Bush administration made some bad decisions in Iraq and was unprepared for stabilizing the country in a rare acknowledgment of mistakes.

But Democrats complained the Republican President Bush's administration was unwilling to learn from its mistakes to change policies in Iraq, be candid about the cost of continued deployment and develop a better exit strategy.

"We have made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been good, some of them have not been good, some of them have been bad decisions, I am sure," Rice told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity, to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind," she said on the second day of hearings on her confirmation...

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

Bush acknowledged that "some of the decisions I've made up to now have affected our standing in parts of the world," but predicted that most Muslims will eventually see America as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

"There's no question we've got to continue to do a better job of explaining what America is all about," he said.

I like this timewaster. Open your iTunes (or other, inferior, music player), hit shuffle, and tell us the first ten songs that come up. I've added a twist: if the song has an exclamation mark next to it, it's a favorite.

• War
  
• Quicksilver Messenger Service
  
• Django Rheinhart
  
• Pink Floyd
  
• Albert King
  
• Rassan Roland Kirk
  
• Steely Dan
  
• David Grisman
  
• Yes
  
• Eric Satie

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the removal of stickers placed in high school biology textbooks that call evolution "a theory, not a fact," saying they were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

Biology teachers at a high school in Dover have rejected the instructions of local officials to read a statement in class today questioning the theory of evolution.

Crosses will be banned from this month's inaugural parade in Washington, D.C.

The Jan. 20 presidential inauguration is causing controversy—and religion is at the heart of the strife.

Not only is the phrase "under God" in the president's oath under attack from an atheist who has filed suit to stop any prayers from being said during the ceremony, now crosses have been banned from the inaugural parade.

Critics are calling it religious discrimination and censorship.

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney and the Christian Defense Coalition were granted a permit to hold a prayer vigil and demonstration during the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day. In that permit the list of prohibited "structures" includes crosses—along with bicycles, crates, coffins, cages and statues.

Mahoney is outraged.

Official: U.S. ends search for WMD in Iraq

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN.

The search ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and may have hidden weapons stockpiles.

Members of the Iraq Survey Group were continuing to examine hundreds of documents and would investigate any new leads, the official said.

Charles A. Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group's search for WMD in Iraq, has returned to Iraq and is working on his final report, the official said.

Everybody wants to know: Who else Armstronged themselves for the administration? It's a rare suspicion that sets off both David Corn and Jonah Goldberg, so there's certainly an interest out there in airing any dirty secrets -- but somehow, I don't trust the White House or the many federal agencies to pursue this with particular vigor. (Imagine the administration's search for the Valerie Plame leaker, only lazier.)

No, this is the sort of task that can only be solved by one method: process of elimination. I'll start it off:

I swear that I have never taken money -- neither directly nor indirectly -- from any political campaign or government agency -- whether federal, state, or local -- in exchange for any service performed in my job as a journalist (or commentator, or blogger, or whatever you think I should be called).

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract "a very questionable use of taxpayers' money" that is "probably illegal." He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in requesting an investigation.

[...]

The contract may be illegal "because Congress has prohibited propaganda," or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "And it's propaganda."

[...]

Williams' contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced "video news releases" designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office [GAO], which called them an illegal use of taxpayers' dollars.

An investigation by the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that the VNR had violated a ban on government funded "publicity and propaganda." According to The Hill, a newspaper based in Washington, D.C., "VNRs are standard practice in the public-relations industry and local news reports often rely on them. ... However, the GAO said in its decision, 'our analysis of the proper use of appropriated funds is not based upon the norms in the public relations and media industry.'"

Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel criticized for calling parts of the Geneva Conventions on prisoner treatment "obsolete," will promise to live by anti-torture treaties if he is confirmed as attorney general, according to a statement obtained on Wednesday.

Gonzales said he was "deeply committed to the rule of law," in a statement for delivery at Senate confirmation hearings on Thursday.

As a leading architect of Bush's ends-justifies-means war on terror, Gonzales pushed to justify torturing terror suspects in violation of international law, promoted military tribunals that echo Stalin's show trials, helped write the Patriot Act (which, among other powers, gives government agents vast new snooping authority) and excused the limitless imprisonment of American citizens whom the president merely suspects of terror activity.

Three years into that war, much of Gonzales' handiwork has been rejected by courts, damned by the world community and disavowed by the administration -- as in the Justice Department memo quietly released last week declaring that "torture is abhorrent to both American law and values and to international norms."

Gonzales' defenders argue that, as White House counsel, he was simply a passionate advocate for his client.

[M]any Democrats think the best they can do is wound Gonzales enough with questions about his notorious torture memos to disqualify him for any future Supreme Court seat. In the end, however, they will feel pressure to support him or face retaliation from Republicans.

What do you get out of failing to oppose Gonzales' nomination? Is it that you're afraid that Rush Limbaugh is going to say bad things about you if you oppose him? Are you worried about how the media will portray you, maybe say you are "obstructionist?" Are you afraid that you'll be portrayed as "anti-Hispanic?"

Here's what I think YOU don't get: THIS IS ALL GOING TO HAPPEN ANYWAY, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! Rush Limbaugh IS going to say bad things about you. The Right-wing echo-chamber WILL portray you as obstructionist. They WILL portray you as anti-Hispanic. THEY WILL DO AND SAY THESE THINGS NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! And, the irony is, these past several years have shown that the more you cozy up to their side, the more they will do this to you, because it shows them that you think you are vulnerable and afraid of your constituents.

Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Gonzales's role in seeking a legal opinion on the definition of torture and the legal limits on the force that could be used on terrorist suspects in captivity is expected to be a central issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings scheduled to begin on Thursday on Mr. Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general.

The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

Until now, administration officials have been unwilling to provide details about the role Mr. Gonzales had in the production of the memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Gonzales has spoken of the memorandum as a response to questions, without saying that most of the questions were his.

[...]

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Tuesday that while Mr. Gonzales personally requested the August opinion, he was only seeking "objective legal advice and did not ask the Office of Legal Counsel to reach any specific conclusion."

Advocates of Social Security privatization continually crow about Chile’s high returns under individual accounts. In concentrating on returns, however, they miss crucial parts of the story. They ignore the fact that Chile has cut social spending, raised taxes, and cut benefits in order to pay transition costs—transition costs that the government will continue to pay until 2050. They ignore exorbitant management fees that have, over a number of periods, cut these much-vaunted returns to nearly zero. Advocates also fail to mention that these individual accounts have increased economic inequality and left workers vulnerable to market downturns. Moreover, privatized systems must either require retirees to convert a substantial portion of their account into an annuity – which means that the account can't be passed on to heirs other than the spouse – or accept a high percentage of the very elderly outliving their account and falling into dire poverty. Once these factors are taken into account, the case for privatization becomes much shakier.