We love our soldiers, right? Maybe not. A recent expose in the Washington Post shows American soldiers from Iraq living in squaler at Walter Reed Hospital, where injured soldiers go for treatment. Here's a lengthy excerpt which has everyone up in arms:

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely - a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them - the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially - they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 - that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

. . .

"Building 18! There is a rodent infestation issue!" bellowed the commander to his troops one morning at formation. "It doesn't help when you live like a rodent! I can't believe people live like that! I was appalled by some of your rooms!"

Life in Building 18 is the bleakest homecoming for men and women whose government promised them good care in return for their sacrifices.

One case manager was so disgusted, she bought roach bombs for the rooms. Mouse traps are handed out. It doesn't help that soldiers there subsist on carry-out food because the hospital cafeteria is such a hike on cold nights. They make do with microwaves and hot plates.

Army officials say they "started an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation" last October and that the problem is now at a "manageable level." They also say they will "review all outstanding work orders" in the next 30 days.

Soldiers discharged from the psychiatric ward are often assigned to Building 18. Buses and ambulances blare all night. While injured soldiers pull guard duty in the foyer, a broken garage door allows unmonitored entry from the rear. Struggling with schizophrenia, PTSD, paranoid delusional disorder and traumatic brain injury, soldiers feel especially vulnerable in that setting, just outside the post gates, on a street where drug dealers work the corner at night.

"I've been close to mortars. I've held my own pretty good," said Spec. George Romero, 25, who came back from Iraq with a psychological disorder. "But here . . . I think it has affected my ability to get over it . . . dealing with potential threats every day."

After Spec. Jeremy Duncan, 30, got out of the hospital and was assigned to Building 18, he had to navigate across the traffic of Georgia Avenue for appointments. Even after knee surgery, he had to limp back and forth on crutches and in pain. Over time, black mold invaded his room.

But Duncan would rather suffer with the mold than move to another room and share his convalescence in tight quarters with a wounded stranger. "I have mold on the walls, a hole in the shower ceiling, but . . . I don't want someone waking me up coming in."

Wilson, the clinical social worker at Walter Reed, was part of a staff team that recognized Building 18's toll on the wounded. He mapped out a plan and, in September, was given a $30,000 grant from the Commander's Initiative Account for improvements. He ordered some equipment, including a pool table and air hockey table, which have not yet arrived. A Psychiatry Department functionary held up the rest of the money because she feared that buying a lot of recreational equipment close to Christmas would trigger an audit, Wilson said.

In January, Wilson was told that the funds were no longer available and that he would have to submit a new request. "It's absurd," he said. "Seven months of work down the drain. I have nothing to show for this project. It's a great example of what we're up against."

A pool table and two flat-screen TVs were eventually donated from elsewhere.

But Wilson had had enough. Three weeks ago he turned in his resignation. "It's too difficult to get anything done with this broken-down bureaucracy," he said.

At town hall meetings, the soldiers of Building 18 keep pushing commanders to improve conditions. But some things have gotten worse. In December, a contracting dispute held up building repairs.

"I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "

So how does the government deal with revelations that Walter Reed Hospital is a terrible place for soldiers and that the place is like a New York City subway car from the 1970's? A gag order has been imposed and people at the Hospital cannot speak with the press. Don't solve the problem, just attack the messenger.

OK, the press is too nosy and more relevations will embarass the war-makers. No surprise there. What does President Bush think of all of this? He ran for re-election on the backs of the soldiers who fulfilled his dream of being a war president. Well, Bush apparantly knew about the conditions at Walter Reed but he doesn't want to deal with it, either. Read the transcript below from a press conference with Bush's spokesman:

Q Do you think the President is going to say something about this later?

MR. SNOW: No.

Q You responded to me a moment ago that the administration was aware of this before the articles appeared in the paper.

MR. SNOW: That is my understanding. But, again, this is something that's an action item over at the Department of Defense and, in particular, the Department of the Army. I am not fully briefed on the activities or who knew what, when. And I suggest –

Q Was the President aware of it? Was the White House aware of it?

MR. SNOW: I am not certain –

Q May I follow on –

Q What is the President's –

MR. SNOW: — when we first became aware of it.* Now the President certainly has been aware of the conditions in the wards where he has visited, and visited regularly, and we also have people from Walter Reed regularly over to the White House as guests, sometimes in fairly large numbers. So as I said, the President is committed — committed to these people, committed to men and women who have served. We need to make sure that whatever problems there are get fixed. I couldn't be any stronger or plainer about it.

More on Bush's reaction to the story here. Somehow in our political culture it's still the antiwar people who are deemed hostile to the troops. Sending them into harm's way for no good reason is not anti-soldier, and sending them to a hell-hole at Walter Reed is not anti-soldier, either. The right wing loves to remind people that Vietnam war protesters spit on returning soldiers, an allegation which is heavily disputed. But the point is that you don't spit on soldiers. So how do we sum up conditions at Walter Reed?

Who's more important: Anna Nicole or Walter Reed? To me, it's Walter Reed, as in Walter Reed Hospital, where army vets are living in squalor. This is the news of the day, as the soldiers were sent off to war and suffered serious injuries which landed them in the Hospital which is not fit for rabid animals.

News editors love scandals, which write themselves. This scandal certainly would, since the vermin-invested Hospital was known to Bush administration officials for quite some time until the Washington Post recently told the rest of us.

Fox News, the conservative news channel which bills itself as "fair and balanced" prefers Anna. She's much prettier than Walter Reed, and stories about her death also wrote themselves. So Anna it was. According to a recent media analysis, Fox News, which attacks war critics as unpatriotic, couldn't control itself. According to ThinkProgress.org:

Our national media embarrassment was again on full display on Friday. Both MSNBC and Fox News devoted more coverage to Anna Nicole Smith — three weeks after her death on Feb. 8 — than they did to the multiple developments involving the neglect and deplorable conditions at Walter Reed military hospital.

The most lop-sided coverage by far was aired by Fox News, which featured only 10 references to Walter Reed compared to 121 of Anna Nicole — roughly 12 times the coverage. MSNBC featured 84 references to Walter Reed and 96 to Anna Nicole.

Wouldn't an editor want to run with a story like the one below?

Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups and members of Congress for more than three years.

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."

"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer.

A recent Washington Post series detailed conditions at Walter Reed, including those at Building 18, a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches.

I guess not, at least not at America's most popular news channel. Media critics complain that we have a "media monopoly" in which only a few corporations control most of the news we watch and read. The news channels hold licenses in the public trust, but these licenses are being squandered. And the people at Fox News admit it. One of its hosts cheerfully proclaims that news about Anna Nicole is worthwhile because that's what the people want, and news about the soldiers is not exciting enough. What a disgrace.

Let's cut through the crap here. Scooter Libby may have been found guilty in Federal court for lying to investigators about circumstances surrounding the outing of a CIA operative who was married to a high-profile war critic, but you know that the rot and stench lies at the top of the mountain: Bush and Cheney.

What Libby did was serious. When Joe Wilson, a former U.S. Ambassador, investigated claims that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction, he discovered that it was false. He wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post claiming that the reasons for war in Iraq were bogus. The Bush White House panicked and decided to retaliate against Wilson by exposing the identity of his wife, who worked undercover for the CIA. That is illegal, thanks to a law passed in the 1970's when leftists were trying to fight U.S. imperialism by outing CIA operatives. When investigators asked Libby under oath when he learned about Wilson's CIA wife, he lied repeatedly. The guilty verdict means that Scooter Libby will spend time in the big house.

Uncle Dick will continue managing affairs at the Bush White House. He will escape prosecution because Presidents and Vice Presidents don't get charged with crimes these days. But the way I see it, when Cheney's chief of staff is convicted for lying to investigators, that reflects on the whole enterprise. The most powerful advisor to the de facto President will go to jail for participating in a cover-up.

Libby's crimes were not the worst offenses of the Bush White House, but it's good enough to destroy Bush's credibility once and for all. Those of us who dispaired in November 2004 when Bush was re-elected never thought we'd see George W's popularity ratings sink ito the 20 percents, but it's been shooting down ever since Hurricane Katrina, as television images of stranded and poor New Orleans residents living in squalor at the Superdome and Bush's emergency apparatus failed everyone were on display for all to see.

Impeachment is probably not necessary. Better to let the Bush White House die a slow death. Cheney is regarded as total scum, a liar and ruthless operative who will do anything -- and deny anything -- to advance his nefarious agenda. Bush is seen as a clown who never really got his bearings after six years at daddy's desk in the Oval Office. People yearn for the days of Clinton, when the worst offense in the public mind was lying about oral sex. Now the President is caught lying about war.

A weakened Bush will weaken the Republican Party, clearly the worst of two evils in our two-party system. When Bush was re-elected, I wondered if the Republicans would over-reach and do the kinds of things that would destroy the Party. Things like that happen after resounding victories which create unbridled arrogance. It happened in 1964, when LBJ won a landslide and abandoned his re-election campaign a few years later, when the public soured on the Vietnam War. It happened in 1972, when Nixon won a landslide and resigned in disgrace two years later, his hands caught in the cookie jar of Watergate. It's happening right now. Bush is a lame duck with no credibility and no smarts to wiggle out of this. Only capturing bin Ladin would save him, and six years after 9/11, he's nowhere to be found. I speak for many when I say that its a good thing that the the lame duck is limping and destroying the party, hopefully for the foreseeable future. If Dick Cheney had a gun and took George W. duck hunting, he'd probably shoot him. He would if he could.

George W. Bush has escaped to Latin America where they've probably never heard of Scooter Libby and haven't checked up on Bush's pathetic public opinion ratings. It's ironic that Bush is visiting Latin America these days, light of the recent death of the only survivor of one of the worst massacres in recent Latin American history. (The obituary of this woman is the end of this piece). Bush is probably too stupid to know that his own father got his hands dirty in the massacre at El Mozote, and that people in that part of the world probably haven't forgiven us for that terrible day.

El Mozote is shorthand for all that went wrong in El Salvador during the 1980's. Much has been written about American foreign policy in this region during that time, all of it horrifying, as President Reagan took office in 1981 basically looking for the neighborhood weakling. Once Reagan found that Third World sickly kid hiding in the corner, he kicked the shit out of him and didn't stop until he left office eight years later.

If you want to know more about U.S. foreign policy in El Salvador in the 1980's, just Google "Reagan" and "El Salvador." A good start is here. This guy is pretty reliable on these matters as well.

Briefly, Reagan decided that the Cold War was not exciting enough and that our government would step up its policy of supporting any military regime that claimed to fight communists, whether they were communists or not. Under the Cold War's twisted logic, any movement or rebel army that advocated anything resembling social justice, land distribution or a break in the rigid concentration of power and wealth in the Third World was the enemy. El Salvador, a tiny country in Central America, became one of the Ground Zero's in this regard. Particularly after the El Mozote Massacre.

The El Mozote Massacre took place in the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when Salvadoran armed forces killed an estimated 900 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history.

The massacre was both a low point and a turning point in the civil war that ravaged this Central American country between the late 1970s and early 1990s. As news of the massacre slowly emerged, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda because it seriously undermined efforts by the U.S. government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid

That's right, Reagan and Co. blamed the leftist rebels for the massacre at El Mozote. They also attacked critics of the Reagan adminstration as communist sympathizers. After American newspaper reported on the massacre, the Reagan administration attacked the messengers.

Seeing the conflict as critical in its determination to prevent communist encroachment in Central America, the Reagan administration was determined to give the Salvadoran government military assistance in defeating the FMLN insurgency. This was seriously complicated by the reports from El Mozote, which appeared just as a new round of debate over the huge flow of money and arms being sent to El Salvador's armed forces was getting underway. Correspondingly, the reports drew immediate fire from Reagan administration officials and others on the American political right. Salvadoran army and government leaders said no such massacre had taken place and officials of the Reagan administration dismissed the reports "as gross exaggerations".

Eventually, it was confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that Reagan's critics were right and that the Reagan administration lied about this incident. The best summary of the episode is here, where Mark Danner wrote a long article for the New Yorker about it.

George W. Bush's father was Reagan's Vice President when Reagan was terrorizing Latin America, El Salvador in particular. Daddy was Reagan's foreign policy expert, having served as CIA chief in the 1970's. People in Latin America probably know that George W.'s father was involved in the dirty civil war in El Salvador, but George W. probably can't find El Salvador on a map. Today, America's dumbest is romping through Latin America, telling jokes, slapping people on the back and talking about democracy and freedom. But the people of Latin America know better.

Here's the obituary:

March 9, 2007 Rufina Amaya, 64, Dies; Salvador Survivor By DOUGLAS MARTIN New York Times

Rufina Amaya, who in 1981 saw Salvadoran troops slaughter her family and many others in her village, then, as the only witness, dedicated her life to telling about it, died Tuesday in San Miguel, El Salvador. She was 64.

The cause was a stroke, said her daughter Marta.

Mrs. Amaya escaped government soldiers on the morning of Dec. 11, 1981, as they killed all the men, women and children in her village, El Mozote. There and in the surrounding area, the Catholic Office of Human Rights in El Salvador said, 809 victims have now been identified, many found in mass graves.

After Rufina Amaya returned to El Salvador from a Honduran refugee camp in 1990, moving to a nearby village, she worked as a lay pastor for the local Roman Catholic church and led what she called “reflection groups.” She received a ceaseless stream of visitors from around the world.

Again and again, she told of seeing her husband being beheaded and hearing her daughter’s mortal scream, after she miraculously found a hiding place.

“God saved me because he needed someone to tell the story of what happened,” she said in 1996 in an interview with The New York Times.

Her most significant influence came less than a month after the massacre. Both the Salvadoran and American governments were denying the atrocity, despite protests from church groups and others.

After The Times and The Washington Post reported the killings on Jan. 27, 1982, both extensively quoting Mrs. Amaya as well as citing their own observations of human remains, the debate grew sharper. The United States and Salvadoran governments insisted that any dead were probably armed rebels.

In 1992 the exhumation of bodies, first those of many children, began. The atrocity could no longer be denied.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, leftist rebels battled the American-supported Salvadoran government. The Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army had been trained by United States military advisers and was fighting guerrillas in northeastern El Salvador.

Accounts vary on leftist activity in El Mozote, a village of 20 houses facing a square. Mrs. Amaya recalled that unarmed guerrillas in ragged civilian clothes had once tried to get townspeople to assemble in a church, but few went.

“I remember people saying: ‘Don’t get involved. Let’s just live and work and not get involved,’ ” she said in 1993 in an interview with The New Yorker.

But on Dec. 10, 1981, soldiers arrived in El Mozote, demanding that residents turn over their weapons. When they said they had none, the soldiers killed some people.

Mass murder began the next morning. People were pulled from their beds before sunrise and divided into three groups. Men were beheaded; some women were raped. The first child killed was tossed in the air and bayoneted.

Mrs. Amaya said at the time in an interview with The Times that she heard her son scream: “Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me.”

She escaped when she realized nobody was directly watching her. She quickly huddled among pine and crabapple trees behind her house.

Her husband, Domingo Claros, a 29-year-old woodcutter, was killed; so were her son Cristino, 9, and her daughters María Dolores, 5; María Lilian, 3, and María Isabel, 8 months.

In 1990, Pedro Chicas Romero of La Joya, a nearby hamlet, who had hidden in a cave as soldiers killed his relatives and neighbors, filed a criminal complaint against the Atlacatl Battalion, demanding that its members be punished. Mrs. Amaya was the first to testify.

In January 1992, a pact ending the 12-year civil war explicitly exempted the army from human rights prosecutions. Mrs. Amaya complained bitterly about this.

“They have never even come to ask our pardon,” she said in 1996 in an interview with The Times.

She married José Natividad in 1985 while living in a refugee camp in Honduras. They were divorced two years later.

Besides their daughter Marta, she is survived by another daughter, Fidelia Márquez, who was not in El Mozote at the time of the massacre, and by her adopted son, Walter Amaya.

Jorge Ávalos, a Salvadoran journalist, remembered visiting El Mozote with Mrs. Amaya in 1992. Amid the ruins and roaming deer, she indicated where bodies would be found.

“Here, next to this tree, the young girls were gathered,” she said.

She did not cry. She said she long ago had cried herself dry.

I really don't know how much more of Bush's nonsense we can put up with. His diehard supporters would probably defend Bush even if he's caught in a whorehouse with his pants around his ankles. For the rest of us (about 70 percent of the population), well, we just have to wait out the remainder of his second term. If you want to place blame, blame the people who re-elected him.

It's no longer a shock when the scandal de jour bobs to the surface each week. This time it's news that the FBI violated the Patriot Act in surveilling American citizens.

The FBI repeatedly failed to follow the strict guidelines of the Patriot Act when its agents took advantage of a new provision allowing the FBI to obtain phone and financial records without a court order, according to a report to be made public Friday by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

The report, in classified and unclassified versions, remains closely held, but Washington officials who have seen it tell ABC News it documents "numerous lapses" and describe it as "scathing" and "not a pretty picture for the FBI."

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to brief Congress on the report at noon.

The officials say the inspector general found the FBI underreported by at least 20 percent the use of the controversial provision, known as National Security Letters, NSLs, in required disclosures to Congress.

The Patriot Act gave FBI agents the ability to demand telephone, bank, credit card and library records by issuing an administrative letter, bypassing the need to seek a warrant from a federal judge.

Civil liberties groups have long opposed the provision, saying the lack of oversight could lead to the kinds of problems apparently uncovered by the inspector general.

In a report last year, the Justice Department said there were 9,254 NSL requests on 3,501 persons in the calendar year 2005.

Some officials say the actual number is substantially higher.

The inspector general's report reportedly found "systemic" failures in the issuance, tracking and accountability of the controversial NSLs, although a Justice Department official said there was no finding of "willful or criminal misconduct."

This is ugly. Some good commentary here. Here's the choice, folks. We can reign in civil liberties until they are lost forever and we become an authoritarian state where it is against the law to criticize the government. Or we hit back at the President, and we hit him hard. It's easy to say that these abuses resulted from rogue operators and that they did not reflect official policy. But we know better. This is the consequence of a civil liberties clampdown. I have said it before and I will say it again. I have no doubt that the government is closely monitoring war dissenters and other "radicals." I know this because it happens every time the government goes to war. Google "cointelpro" for the evidence.

What makes the latest episode so unusual is that the Bush administration admits that the FBI broke the law. "The nation's top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions."

We should have seen this coming. According to legal analysis Glenn Greenwald, in signing the Patriot Act, Bush announced that the government did not really have to comply with the requirements that the FBI violated:

That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here -- and it is quite significant -- has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I've seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore.

The Bush adminstration has no regard for the law, no regard for civil liberties and nothing but contempt for the American people who foolishly placed their trust in Bush and the other authoritarians who have been running roughshod over the Constitution since the day he took office. The question lingering from last week's scandal -- the felony conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's former right hand man -- is whether Bush will pardon Libby. A better question is who should pardon Bush.

One of the better bloggers out there is a low-budget operation. The Power of Narrative blog consists of regular postings reflecting moral outrage about the war in Iraq and possible war in Iran, with invective launched against both political parties, including the spineless Democrats who are not taking steps to end the Iraq War.

His latest entry takes no prisoners:

With only a few exceptions, most liberal-progressive blogs are "war managers," just as Pelosi and Reid are. Just like the Washington Democrats whose triumph in November they heralded as the second coming and whom they will not now seriously challenge, so in thrall to power are they, these bloggers have revealed themselves not to be opposed to our criminal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq in any fundamental way: they are opposed only to the Bush administration's "incompetence" and "bad management." If only our war of conquest had been executed efficiently, all would be well with the Democrats' Empire.

And they are doing nothing to oppose the drive to war with Iran, which the Democrats want at least as much as the Republicans.

All such people, including most of the prominent liberal bloggers, are murdering imperialists, with American hegemony as the ultimate goal that animates them. The rest is for show, and to consolidate and expand their grasp on power domestically, just as the United States acts in an identical way abroad.

There are very few Tom Paines out there who will tell it like it is. Bookmark the blog and read it regularly. He also wants you to sign a petition demanding that Congress filibuster and end to the Iraq War. Do what he says. I did.

I would imagine that when the President gets elected, his staff goes to some kind of orientation where they undergo training in how to work for the government and what rules and regulations to follow. Probably the first rule is that you can't engage in any political campaigning from the office or use government resources for personal use. You also can't download pornography from the government's computers or reveal government secrets without permission. Another rule that must be passed along to new government employees is that you can't reveal the identity of any CIA employees.

The CIA remains a super-secret organization. You are not allowed to know who works for the CIA or what they are doing. Sort of like the mafia. That analogy is not totally off-base. Both organizations are known for unsavory and illegal acts, as any good book on these entities will attest. In the 1970's, a leftist magazine, Counterspy, made the identity of CIA operatives our business. Counterspy quite understandably objected to much of what the CIA was doing, as our intelligence operatives were doing more than just gathering information about foreign countries and spying on international threats and political organizations. The CIA was also overthrowing and destablizing governments that did not cater to the political and economic needs of American politicians. These covert operations killed thousands of people and made the U.S. government an international pariah.

Congress eventually passed a law making it illegal to "out" a CIA operative. George H.W. Bush, a former CIA chief who became President in 1989, declared those who out CIA operatives to be traitors. His son runs an administration that outed a covert CIA official in order to retaliate against her husband, who declared shenanigans on Bush Jr.'s war in Iraq. This is what we have come to: a bootlicker like Bush Sr. who presided over the Reagan adminstration's murderous foreign policy comes off like the voice of reason in comparison to his offspring who wanted war so bad that he would throw anybody under the bus just so that he could parade in front of the soldiers with a "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him.

One of the many scandals eroding the credibility of the Bush administration is the outing of Valarie Plame, whose husband's dissent sparked retaliatory impulse in the Bush White House. Her career was destroyed, and her testimony before Congress today shows that she was victimized by the wild-west mentality of the rogues who've hijacked the Executive Branch of American government. There was a day when Republicans embraced the CIA as the tool of American values around the world. Today the Republican Party's contemptuous misuse of the CIA's covert identity rules shows beyond any doubt that some people will do anything to advance a political goal.

Bush's public standing is breaking apart like the glaciers at the North Pole. This is a good thing. An emasculated presidency through January 2009 can only help the country. If you let the first graders run the school, then the school turns into a playground. If you let reactionary zealots take over the presidency, then the presidency becomes an ethical hell-hole where anything goes, even by the very standards of the American presidency. I doubt the American people deserve any forgiveness in reelecting Bush. I'm not sure they deserve a medal for waking up. It wasn't that hard to do.

I was in criminal court once in a small town, sitting in the judge's chambers with other lawyers going through the cases, when the judge was reading out loud some criminal charges against a teenager. The case had to do with marijuana, and the old judge looked at me (although it wasn't my case) and said, "What the hell is a bong?"

The Supreme Court certainly knows what a bong is. Yesterday, the Court heard argument in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, where a high school kid was disciplined for unfurling a 14 foot banner off-campus during a field trip. The banner -- which read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" -- caused a stir, and the school punished the smart-ass for conveying a drug message during a school event.

The Bong Hits case is attracting a lot of attention because the Supreme Court does not hear many student speech cases, and this case does not fall neatly within the precedents governing the right of public schools to censor students. In 1969, the Supreme Court said that students could wear anti-war armbands at school and engage in other political speech so long as it does not disrupt the educational mission. This was a lenient approach to student speech, but the Supreme Court reigned in that standard in the 1980's, ruling that schools could censor obscene and offensive speech and also freely edit school-sponsored student newspapers.

The question for the Court in the Bong Hits case is where does that case fit within the precedents? Commentators are wary and think the Court will use this case to further reign in student speech and give school administrators more authority to censor provocative students. The Bong Hits reference does not help, as the Court gives the benefit of the doubt to school administrators in searching students for drugs. But the fact that this banner was unfurled off campus is a point in the student's favor.

One Court watcher interpreted the oral argument yesterday as follows:

The Supreme Court on Monday toyed with the notion that public school officials should have added discretion to censor student speech that they may interpret as advocating use of illegal drugs. But this was only a flirtation, not a warm embrace. During the argument in Morse v. Frederick, a clear majority of the Justices showed significant skepticism about creating a wide exception to the curb on suppression of student speech that the Court spelled out in 1969 in Tinker v. Des Moines School District

On the other hand, according to another Court watcher, only the most conservative Justices on the Court seemed focused on reigning in student speech:

The only Justices who appeared to be sympathetic to the top-side theory I blogged about this morning -- that a school district can suppress any student speech "inconsistent with the school’s basic educational mission" -- were the Chief Justice and Justice Scalia, although Justice Scalia appeared to be partial to a somewhat narrower theory that the school can penalize any student speech advocating unlawful action (as opposed to, e.g., speech advocating a change in the law). (It's possible Justice Thomas might also be inclined to a theory along these lines, but he did not ask any questions.) Justice Alito commented with respect to the broader top-side argument: "I find that a very, a very disturbing argument, because schools have and they can defined their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech that's inconsistent with educational missions."

Reading the oral argument transcript last night, I was struck at how you can dance on the head of a pin for one hour and lose sight of the big picture: the high school kid had this large banner with a satirical message off-campus which was plainly visible to his classmates during a field trip celebrating the passing of the Olympic Torch. Yes, the message had a drug-reference, but nothing was disrupted and it was satire. No one during the argument said anything about satire, but the Supreme Court over the years has actually been favorable to extending First Amendment rights for satire, even offensive satire, like Hustler Magazine's parody of Rev. Jerry Falwell, depicting him as an incestuous drunk who had sex with his mother in an outhouse. That was a real case, Hustler v. Falwell (1988), and the Supreme Court held that Falwell could not sue Hustler for defamation because everyone knew the parody wasn't real.

If the Supreme Court says that schools can reign in off-campus student satire, then we are in big trouble. A ruling like this can stop underground newspapers and other creative student speech at the whim of a stuffy school principal which can shoot first and ask questions later. Your instinct in reviewing this case might be that the student with the Bong Hits banner is just a smart-ass who need a good whippin'. But his case will affect everyone, grades 1 through 12. What a lessen in power and authority these students will learn if the Supreme Court rules against the smart-ass.

In a nutshell, Congress wants to get to the bottom of the U.S. Attorney scandal. On paper, this may be the most boring scandal in U.S. history: United States Attorneys fired for political reasons by the President and his advisors. Except that it's serious, and as commentators have suggested, it is almost unprecedented for the President to single out a few U.S. Attorneys for political retribution.

It's hard to get people excited about this, and most people couldn't care less about a few grieved attorneys. One of the criticisms of the left over the years was that it had no sense of humor, and that it was conservatives -- led by blowhard Rush Limbaugh -- who captured the public imagination with "witty" commentary. This is changing.

Thank George W. Bush and his endless stream of incompetent and corrupt leadership.
I think its fair to say that Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert is a comic genius. Like a standup comic who changes his routine, no one else can hit the nail on the head this way. Watch this segment. Same goes for Jon Stewart. These guys are taking a mundane story -- separation of powers, Congressional investigations and Presidential perogative -- and making it understandable. Not an easy thing to do. It's a sad state of affairs when a comedy channel offers the most biting political commentary these days. Maybe these segments should be played every morning in the country's high schools.

Many people are outraged that the Attorney General of the United States has been caught in a lie about his involvement in the politically-motivated firings of the eight United States Attorneys. I am not one of them. I am looking at the bright side.

To recap:

On March 12, Gonzales denied any involvement in the prosecutor purge: "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on … That’s basically what I knew as attorney general."

New documents released tonight, “including Gonzales’s appointment calendar, show that the attorney general and his deputy, Paul McNulty, participated in an hour-long meeting about the firings on Nov. 27. Seven of the eight prosecutors were let go on Dec. 7.” The meeting occurred during the 18-day gap in documents the Justice Department had previously released.

When the media confronts an obvious contradiction like this, it does not come out and call the public official a liar. Instead, the media will say that the documents appear to contradict prior statements. That's how the New York Times handled it this morning:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.

The previously undisclosed meeting appeared to contradict Mr. Gonzales’s previous statements about his knowledge of the dismissals. He said at a news conference on March 13 that he had not participated in any discussions about the removals, but knew in general that his aides were working on personnel changes involving United States attorneys.

I am delighted that Gonzalez was caught with his pants around his ankles. I am looking at the bright side. This episode only sheds more light on the rotting corpse that is the Bush presidency, exposed for all to see as a corrupt enterprise that would be prosecuted under the RICO laws were it a private organization. Only the diehards continue to support the King and his minions, who are destroying everything they touch. A corrupt Attorney General is a bellweather, like an innocent cough that signals emphysema. Will this accelerate the end of the Bush administration? Bush won't be impeached, but he can crawl to the finish line and return to Crawford, Texas, where he can take up volleyball and learn how to read.

No lawyer can get away with lying to the court. Gonzales will not get away with lying to the country. He will not be around much longer. He should be sentenced to serve as a public defender in night court in a sleepy Texas town, handling DWI and burglary cases. Let's face it: Gonzalez was a good flunky, but Alberto, you suck at being Attorney General.

The newspaper this morning reports another scandalous act of cowardice. In Connecticut, some high school kids actually wrote the script for a war-related play that the principal quashed.

Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”

It's easy to get mad at the principal for his cowardly act of censorship. The principal should be re-assigned to work at the strip mall convenience store selling beer and cigarettes to the locals. The students who wrote the play from scratch should be appointed Ministers of Culture in the State of Connecticut. It's not so rare for a pathetic authority figure like the school principal to trigger the clampdown on independent and free thought. But screw him for a moment. Focus instead on the rare student who cares enough about current events that would go out of his way to design a cultural event like this. Look at the bright side.

The road to authoritarianism has a pit-stop in New York City, where the police department embarked on a comprehensive effort to monitor activists nationwide who intended to protest the Republican National Convention in 2004. The problem, according to the New York Times, is that the police were not just surveilling protesters who might cause violence but also peaceful protesters who wouldn't harm a fly. The story is below.

Political conventions in a presidential election year are a waste of time because the nominee is already selected. The conventions are nothing more than pep rallies for the faithful to get drunk and call their political opponents names. The conventions do attract political protesters, though, who want to get under the skin of their political enemies and rally the faithful.

The 2004 Republican convention in New York City was particularly odious because it was timed to coincide with September 11. Few conventions are held in late summer, but this one allowed the Republicans to exploit September 11 and brand the Democrats as weak on terrorism. There was nothing more despicable than the Republican Party gaining mileage out of September 11. But it's how Bush got re-elected.

The political surveillance of political activists nationwide is disgraceful, but that goes without saying. How much money did this cost? Who trained the police to infiltrate political organizations? What do their logs and records say about what they observed? Was the Bush re-election campaign involved in the planning? We may never know. The police don't want these records released.

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say that the documents could be “misinterpreted” because they were not intended for the public.

“The documents were not written for consumption by the general public,” wrote Peter Farrell, senior counsel in the city’s Law Department. “The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information.”

Because the materials have not yet been used to decide or argue any issues in the civil lawsuits, Mr. Farrell said, “there is no right of public access.”

The rash of Bush scandals in recent months has dwarfed the surveillance issue. That's a shame. The history of political surveillance in this country is an outrage, and it never stops. Someone's head should roll for this.

March 25, 2007 City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention (New York Times) By JIM DWYER

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

. . .

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

. . .

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

. . .

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a report on July 22, 2004.

“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s “Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.”

The Bush administration wants to gut the Endangered Species Act, which is credited with saving various animals from extinction. According to Salon.com, the plan is under wraps and employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service (which is part of the Executive Branch which George W. Bush heads) think the plan is crap-ola. The story from Salon is below. More on this story here.

Also surfacing is more evidence that the Bush administration is screwing around with its official reports on global warming. According to ThinkProgress.org, "A new report documents “hundreds of instances” in which Bush administration officials throughout the government “engaged in White House-directed efforts to stifle, delay or dampen the release of climate change research that casts the White House or its policies in a bad light, says a new report that purports to be the most comprehensive assessment to date of the subject.”

ABC News tells us that "Researchers for the non-profit watchdog Government Accountability Project reviewed thousands of e-mails, memos and other documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and from government whistle-blowers and conducted dozens of interviews with public affairs staff, scientists, reporters and others. The group says it has identified hundreds of instances where White House-appointed officials interfered with government scientists' efforts to convey their research findings to the public, at the behest of top administration officials."

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The environment is a commodity. Weakened environmental regulations and watered down animal protection laws equal more money for corporations. Ideologicaly, these measures mesh with the fanatical cravings of the Bush administration and its supporters to weaken any governmental program that gets in the way of making money. This is a legacy of both political parties, but I reckon to say that the Republicans are worse. They campaign on these efforts to roll back advances in science and wildlife protection, but with a war going on, who's listening?

Here's the story about the Endangered Species Act:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

Maybe some people don't give a damn that the First Amendment is being wiped away piece by piece in any number of ways during the "war on terror." War is good for many things, like the economy, nationalism, patriotism and the undertaker. It's also a good cover for the powers that be to get away with the erosion of civil liberties that they've been so thirsty for. With war, the government gets what it wants.

Schoolchildren should undergo some kind of training in civil liberties. What exactly does the First Amendment say? What is Due Process under the Constitution? And the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable police searches and seizures: what can I say to the police when the ask me questions on the street? Is it legal to criticize the government in times of war? Few people know the answers to these questions, mostly lawyers. What is sad is that our rights fade away slowly and many of our countrymen are not even aware of it, if they even knew we had these rights to begin with.

The Patriot Act gives the government power to do things that it could not do before. This law was enacted right after September 11, when the President could have gotten Congress to vote that a ham sandwich is actually a fish tank. The Patriot Act is loaded with highly significant measures governing the detection of terrorists as well as rules making easier for the government monitor political activity. All of this passed with no debate.

It comes as no surprise that this power to monitor political activity has been repeatedly abused by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. I wrote a few days ago about front page revelations in the New York Times that the New York Police Department -- the same entity that everyone loves in the aftermath of September 11 -- embarked on a nationwide effort to monitor political organizations that wanted to protest the Republican National Convention in 2004, held in New York City, where President Bush and other Republican warmongers and fearmongers could drive home their message of fear and loathing before a national audience. The NYPD, according to records obtained by the ACLU and the Times, wasn't just monitoring and infiltrating potentially disruptive organizations but peaceful organizations that never had any intent to disrupt anything. This monitoring is as un-American as burning the flag, except that it's 100 times worse.

That story on the front page of the Times a few days ago has now receded into the woodwork along with the other cockroaches of the Bush administration. There are just too many scandals to keep track of anymore. In some ways, that's good. Throwing light on the Bush administration from every angle can only hasten the demise of the shameless and deplorable administration that has bungled and lied and killed and squandered for six years. But it's actually quite bad that a First Amendment scandal is being ignored. That's because, for many Americans, scandal means sex, not the violation and trampling of our civil liberties, the very liberties that separate us from North Korea. I would bet if you Google "First Amendment scandal" nothing would come up. But Googling "sex scandal" would overload the computer.

The latest First Amendment scandal was reported in the Washington Post. This story, too, is being swept under the carpet. Under the headline, "FBI Provided Inaccurate Data for Surveillance Warrants," the Post on March 27 reported that "FBI agents repeatedly provided inaccurate information to win secret court approval of surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, prompting officials to tighten controls on the way the bureau uses that powerful anti-terrorism tool, according to Justice Department and FBI officials."

The story goes on to say that "The errors were pervasive enough that the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, wrote the Justice Department in December 2005 to complain. She raised the possibility of requiring counterterrorism agents to swear in her courtroom that the information they were providing was accurate, a procedure that could have slowed such investigations drastically."

Astute news watchers know that this story rings a bell. It should. According to the Washington Post, "The department's acknowledgment of the problems with the FISA court applications comes nearly two weeks after a blistering inspector general's report revealed widespread violations of the use of "national security" and "exigent circumstances" letters, which allow FBI agents to collect phone, e-mail and Internet records from telecommunications companies without review by a judge. The problems included failing to document relevant evidence, claiming emergencies that did not exist and failing to show that phone records requests were connected to authorized investigations."

So there you have it. Repeated violations of the freedom of association and freedom of speech. Without these freedoms, we ain't got nothing, brother. Where is the outrage?