September 30, 2004 - Just Tuesday the insurgents responded to US air attacks on their stronghold in Fallujah by demonstrating open defiance and their control of Samarra in a show of force in the city’s center. The Big Red One is rolling into Samarra tonight in a brigade strength offensive. Since the hand-over of Iraqi sovereignty to Ayud Allawi at the end of June the city has been one of the no-go zones, off limits to US forces under agreement reached with the Interim Iraqi Government to end last April’s crisis in the Sunni Triangle. This is the largest offensive since the President declared major combat over on May 1, 2003. CNN’s Jane Arraf, embedded with the elements of the First Division is reporting that the US military assesses the enemy strength in Samarra at 2,000 insurgents with 246 foreign jihadi fighters, followers of Abu Musa Al-Zarqawi’s terrorist network.

With just hours to go before the President and Senator Kerry engage in the first of three joint appearances before a national television audience the drive on Samarra marks the possible end of the Bush Administration’s policy of avoiding direct combat and the resulting spike in allied casualties. It comes at the end of one of the bloodiest days in Iraq. Air strikes on Fallujah and car bombs in Baghdad and elsewhere killed American soldiers and Iraqi men, women and children. It marks an escalation and an end to the dithering that has marked American occupation policy for the past five months....click here for entire article

September 30, 2004

A Gold Star hangs in the window,
A lead weight hangs from her heart,
She stands by the window just searching,
And waits for the music to start.

She sees a six year old running,
As butterflies flit through the grass,
She sees him play catch with his brother,
Her tears shining back through the glass.

A Gold Star hangs in the window,
A lead weight hangs from her heart,
She stands by the window just searching,
And waits for the music to start.

He was ten then and playing at football.
A phantom team winning that year,
A long pass and then a reception,
The home crowd beginning to cheer.

.A Gold Star hangs in the window,
A lead weight hangs from her heart,
She stands by the window just searching,
And waits for the music to start.

At twelve he delivered the paper.
Packed around town on his bike,
A Boy Scout sharply saluting,
Off on his first five mile hike.

A Gold Star hangs in the window,
A lead weight hangs from her heart,
She stands by the window just searching,
And waits for the music to start.

They brought her a flag neatly folded,
The shape of a tri-cornered hat,
They gave her the box with the medal.
The Ribbon and all, that was that.

A Gold Star hangs in the window,
A lead weight hangs from her heart,
She stands by the window just searching,
And waits for the music to start.

September 29, 2004 - From Nineveh and Salahuddin in the north to Babylon and Diyala in the country’s center and on to Basra in the south plotting the more than 2,300 insurgent attacks that have struck civilian and military targets in the last thirty days demonstrates that instead of the isolated pockets of violence described by President Bush and Ayad Allawi the United States and the Interim Iraqi Government face a comprehensive and widespread rebellion against the new regime and American occupation. Special Operations Consulting – Security Management Group, a Las Vegas based contractor operating in Iraq, has done that analysis. According to Adam Collins, the company’s chief intelligence officer in Iraq, “If you look at incident data and you put incident data on the map, it's not a few provinces.” In contrast Prime Minister Allawi with President Bush standing by his side announced to the world that of Iraq’s 18 provinces 14 to 15 were completely safe and secure.

Refer to the reality of the situation in Iraq and you draw a salvo of rhetorical mortar rounds from the Administration. When with Boston Brahmin understatement Senator Kerry described the Prime Minister’s remarks an overly optimistic attempt to put a best foot forward he drew this attack from Vice-President Cheney, “John Kerry is trying to tear down all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive to our effort in Iraq and the global war on terror. As Prime Minister Allawi said in his speech, 'When political leaders sound the siren of defeatism in the face of terrorism, it only encourages more violence.’” The New York Times quotes a senior US military officer as saying of Iraq, “We have had zero tactical losses; we have lost no battles. The insurgency has had zero tactical victories. But that is not what this is about. We are at a very critical time. The only way we can lose this battle is if the American people decide we don't want to fight anymore." ....click here for entire article

September 28, 2004 - It was not on CBS News and the anchor was not Dan Rather. It was on Fox News Sunday and the guest was US Secretary of State Colin Powell. “We have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world” since the War in Iraq began, Powell said. He described the situation in Iraq as “getting worse” and that he expected that progression to continue through the end of the year as the insurgency continues to deepen. Powell’s assessment of the conditions in Iraq contrasted sharply with those put forward by President Bush and Prime Minister Allawi at their joint appearance on Thursday.

Early this month a fresh National Intelligence Estimate reached the President’s desk. Senior officials described the report as warning against Iraq spiraling into civil war. The contrast between that assessment and that being pressed by the President is stark and grew even starker when the President dismissed the report as just “guessing”....click here for entire article

September 27, 2004 - Yesterday I wrote, with thanks, that Ayud Allawi, President Bush’s man in Baghdad, had come to Washington and New York to help the President show America the way that proper leadership stressing faith, hope and optimism, can bring us out of the morass we stumbled into in the Iraqi Desert. Senator Kerry just doesn’t get it. He keeps judging what the Prime Minister and President say by what he sees and hears; by facts on the ground; and says that the Iraq that they describe exists only in a fantasy. Senator Kerry just doesn’t understand the beauty of faith-based leadership. All that we need to do is believe – to have faith – and all things are possible, even a peaceful and tranquil Iraq.

I was thinking that with the Prime Minister’s assurances that Iraq was safe and secure the news from Iraq just could not get any better. But then it did. The United States Military announced that it had arrested Iraqi National Guard Brig. Gen. Talib Abid Ghayib al-Lahibi, for suspicion of having associations with known insurgents. Al-Lahibi was the senior Iraqi commander in Diyala Province. The province and its capitol, Baquba have been among the hottest spots in the continuing insurgency. The arrest is the second capture of a Senior Iraqi commander in less than a month. In late August the Marines nabbed Jaadan Muhammad Alwan, the police chief in Anbar Province on similar charges...click here for entire article

Ayad Allawi was our guest last week. At great personal risk he had returned from comfortable exile to take up secure residence in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone as America’s designated Interim Iraqi Prime Minister of the interim Iraqi Government. At great personal risk he accepted the invitation of his fellow head of state, President Bush and traveled from his tranquil home in Baghdad to the more dangerous environments of New York and Washington D.C. How rude it was for Senator Kerry, in the narrow interests of partisan advantage, to suggest that the picture the Prime Minister painted for the U.S. Congress was a bit overoptimistic, given the facts on he ground! That is why the Vice-President rightly called for Kerry to apologize to the Prime Minister. After all, the Prime Minister has been able to create a peaceful, tranquil Baghdad in just 20 days. We might consider that a real miracle....click here for entire article

September 25, 2004 - Manuel Noriega, you may remember him, the President of the United States invaded Panama in December 1989 just to bring him to justice and stow him away in the safe, secure, and almost soundproof confines of a United States prison cell. It was a difficult time for the President. He had been head of the Central Intelligence Agency at a time when the Agency was cultivating its network of Central American strongmen as client-operatives. Manuel Noriega had been one of the more productive. But in the mid 1980s the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry began looking into reports that US Arms dealers were selling arms to Nicaraguan rebels in violation of US law. The probe led to Iran-Contra; President Reagan’s lapses of memory; the Vice-President’s public confession that he had been out of the loop; and exposed a shadowy network financed by a combination of laundered arms profits and drug money. Noriega ran the laundry operation cleaning the money through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Senator Kerry headed the subcommittee investigating BCCI with bulldog-like tenacity refusing to back off even when prominent leaders of his own party tried to divert him from the task. Too many prominent Democrats, Clark Clifford among them, would be brought down if Kerry kept pressing. What he was finding was too important, too vital to the nation’s security to back down. Simply put what Kerry’s investigation found was a widespread international criminal conspiracy centered in the Arab Mideast, laundering money through international commercial accounts, concealing its sources and financing Hamas, Abu Nidal, Saddam Hussein, and a newly emerging terrorist organization headed by Osama Bin Laden. One of its “legitimate” investments, funneled through a Bin Laden connected subsidiary was in a West Texas Oil company, Harken Oil headed by George W. Bush.....click here for entire article

September 24, 2004 - It was on May 1, 2003 that the President of The United States flew to the deck of the Abraham Lincoln to theatrically declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and an end to what he called major combat operations. On September 8, 2004 the President of the United States vowed to “Complete the Mission” to honor the more than 1000 Americans who had given their lives in Iraq. Yesterday both the President of the United States and the US designated Interim Prime Minister of Iraq renewed the pledge to complete the mission. Is this the same mission that was accomplished 17 months ago? If it is not what mission is it that we are to complete?

First the mission was to disarm Saddam Hussein; to eliminate his access to stores of weapons of mass destruction that he might use against his neighbors or, in a worst case scenario, against the United States. It turns out that mission had been accomplished long before the first decapitation attack was launched on March 19, 2003.

Then the mission was to effect regime change in Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were dragged down. The dictator no longer dwelled in his palaces while the rubble was being combed for traces of his DNA even as the countryside was being combed for traces of his WMD. With and American Viceroy installed in Baghdad that mission had been accomplished.....click here for entire article

September 23, 2004 - 10 days after CBS broadcast its story based upon questioned documents the President finally questioned the authenticity of the memoranda. “There are a lot of questions about the documents and they need to be answered," he told the Manchester News –Leader. "I think what needs to happen is people need to take a look at the documents, how they were created, and let the truth come out." For 10 days the White House was saying that it had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the memoranda presented by a respected news organization. That delayed reaction tells us volumes about the underlying facts of Lt. George W. Bush and his 1972 service with the Texas Air National Guard.

One would think that the minute the memoranda surfaced, especially the one that purported to order Lt. George W. Bush to report for a flight physical. The President of the United States would have denounced it as a fabrication. After all he is in a unique position to know the facts. He knows whether he received a direct order from his squadron commander to submit to that flight physical in the summer of 1972. If he did not receive such an order we would have expected an immediate denial. That it was not forthcoming is strong evidence that the order was given and was not obeyed. The President has still not denied that Lt. George W. Bush defied a direct order to report for a flight physical in the summer of 1972....click here for entire article

September 20, 2004 - April, they say, is the cruelest month. April 2004 proved the point. For three weeks US Marines tightened the noose around Fallujah preparing the battlefield for a final push to wrest the city away from Sunni insurgents. As the fighting intensified the casualty count went up. At the last minute the order came from Washington to stand down and to turn control of the city over to the insurgents. The calculus was political. The kind of house to house urban warfare would increase the Marine casualty count ten-fold. Collateral damage would be more extensive than any yet seen in the Second Iraqi War. The second factor imperiled the Bush timetable for creating a specious sovereignty shifting political responsibility to hand-picked Iraqis. The first factor was the more important in Washington’s calculation. The War President simply could not politically sustain the level of Marine casualties necessary to reduce Fallujah. In August the same cycle played itself out in Najaf. The battlefield was prepared; the noose tightened; Marines dies; and the order came to stand down.

Six months after the Siege of Fallujah was lifted US commanders in the field acknowledge that the Sunni Triangle and the Shi`ite strongholds in Sadr City and south of Baghdad are “no-go” zones for American troops. US commanders in the field tell us that there will be a major push to regain control of the countryside in November and December timed to prepare for Iraqi elections in January. Coincidentally launching the push to reduce the insurgents’ control of the countryside will defer the inevitable American casualties until after our own elections on November 2nd....click here for entire article

September 19, 2004 - New Jersey Republican Assemblyman Bill Baroni said that the arrest of Sue Niederer outside a Hamilton firehouse where Laura Bush was speaking was justified. Niederer was being “disruptive” he said. Well I guess that she was. She shouted a question at Mrs. Bush. “When are the sons and daughters of Congressmen and Senators going to fight in Iraq?’ Niederer, who wore a T-shirt with a photo of her dead son and the legend, “President Bush, you killed my son!”, had a ticket to attend the rally. When she shouted her question Mrs. Niederer was hustled from the hall by Hamilton Police and Secret Service Agents. She was not arrested at that time.

Her disruptive behavior occurred outside of the hall on the public sidewalk. It was caught by the television cameras and broadcast Friday. Mrs. Niederer is shown standing there, surrounded by reporters and calmly answering their questions. Suddenly uniformed policemen and others in street clothes walk up behind her, grab and handcuff her and take her away. The first reports were that she was to be charged with “defiant trespass.” The Mercer County prosecutor has announced that no charges will be filed...click here for entire article

September 18, 2004 - The page is blank and I am searching for characters with which to fill it. I need to find characters conjoined into words; words combined into phrases; phrases strung into sentences; and sentences aligned in paragraphs. Somehow the thoughts the race through my mind won’t organize themselves into coherent sentences. I have written before of Raymond Clark and of his elegant encounter with the completion of his journey through life. It was a journey of both painful and of joyous steps taken one by one. The last was Wednesday surrounded with his five daughters and two of his sons-in law singing Amazing Grace at his bedside. He smiled and then went to greet his final visitor in private.

Coming just a week after Ming crossed the Rainbow Bridge our emotions have become all jumbled and confused. A sound, a memory, a random thought will open that empty place within our selves and commence to fill it up with tears. We knew and both of them knew that our time together was drawing to a close. They knew and we knew that the time for them to depart from us had come and both left us quietly and without fanfare. They both took pieces of our hearts with them when they went.

As we drove east toward the growing glow of morning the sun burst over the trees perfectly aligned with the road way. That bold orb of pulsating life clouded all sight. Automobiles traveling east before us were rendered mere shadows. Signs directing us to our exit became invisible as we were guided on our way to the funeral chapel. I heard these words, "This is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it!"

This morning we gathered with his family; with the members of the Church that he served as Assistant Pastor; and with his friends to celebrate his life and to comfort each other. The sadness that we feel is for ourselves; that life has deprived us of his company, his counsel and his caring. But we feel joy as well, that we were privileged to have shared part of our journey with him. For that favor we give thanks.

Ray, may the Good Lord bless and keep you, may he make His face to shine upon you and grant you peace.

Amen.

September 17, 2004 - Do you remember the $87 Billion supplemental appropriations bill that passed last November? It included $18.4 Billion to reconstruct Iraq. Well, the Administration has come back to Congress looking for authority to spend $3.46 Billion on security in Iraq. Now George W. Bush is not looking for more money in this move. He just wants to spend part of the $18.4 Billion on security. There is plenty of money left in the reconstruction fund. He has only spent $1.14 Billion in the 11 months since the bill passed according to the State Department’s figures reported to the .Senate Foreign Relations Committee today.

Some of the Senators did not like what they were hearing. One, a Marine combat veteran, said that the request "does not add up in my opinion to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble. … It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing, it's now in the zone of dangerous." Another Senator, a recognized foreign affairs expert often touted as a future Secretary of State said, "Although we recognize these funds must not be spent unwisely, the slow pace of reconstruction spending means that we are failing to fully take advantage of one of our most potent tools to influence the direction of Iraq."....click here for entire article..

September 15, 2004- Dan Rather, who has been a notorious Democratic operative since his biased account of the Kennedy Assassination was broadcast on November 22, 1963, has been definitively exposed as a fraud and a cheat – at least the Republican machine says so on the talk shows, on the right wing blogs and websites, and on the Internet’s political forums.

According to the messages pounded out loudly, Rather was at best a dupe and at worst a willing participant in a fraud presumably originating in the Kerry Campaign. Citing the opinions of “typeface experts” and others the claim is that the documents shown to illustrate the 60 Minutes story could not have been produced in 1972 and were therefore forgeries. The banging of the drums drowns out the unanswered real questions raised by the CBS story and diverts attention to accusations of forgery.

The voracious talk show wolves refer to the documents as forgeries as though that was proven even though there is a paucity of evidence to prove their claims. A fair and balanced examination of the facts starts with the proposition that no one, not even representatives of CBS News have seen the original documents. CBS had only copies and every other so-called expert has seen only degraded images in copies of the CBS copies. No questioned document examiner worthy of being called as a witness would express an unqualified opinion as to the authenticity or lack thereof based solely on an examination of a copy....click here for entire article.

September 14, 2004 - You saw it on tape. A burning Bradley Fighting Vehicle on Haifa Street in Baghdad surrounded by a crowd of Iraqi men and boys. No weapons were visible. The insurgent fighters who attacked the US unit are long gone. A television reporter was doing a stand-up with the already destroyed US vehicle as a background. Suddenly there is an explosion, the TV man falls toward the camera as he is speaking. He is dying. You see his death. It doesn’t have the impact that it would have were he a familiar face speaking English. He is a familiar face to those who watch Al Arabiya Television and the language that he spoke and they understand is Arabic. A rocket from a US helicopter gunship killed him and some 30 others. Their bodies litter Haifa Street. The rocket attack was necessary, US officials said, to destroy sensitive equipment and weapons aboard the Bradley. It also destroyed the lives of men and boys and a television newsman with the camera running – collateral damage.

It is just one scene in a series of scenes in the drama of the US campaign to tamp down the Iraqi insurgency in time for the election – theirs nest January and ours this November. The dead lying in Haifa Street join the women and children killed from the air in strikes at what are described as “safe houses” in the streets of Fallujah. Death from the air is indiscriminate. Like the rain it falls on the guilty and the innocent alike. Each child killed had a family; a mother and a father; brothers and sisters; grandparents; cousins and aunts and uncles. Who won their hearts and minds this week?....click here for entire article.

Enlistment in the active duty armed services obligated you to an active duty tour that varied in duration depending on the service branch followed by inactive reserve duty. My younger brother Bill, lost in his freshman year at the U of I, enlisted in the Air Force. He spent four years stationed at Biloxi, Mississippi and Blytheville, Arkansas. He was discharged after his reserve obligation was satisfied in 1966. Our younger brother John enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam at the same time as John Kerry and came home with a Bronze Star with the V device....click here for entire article.

September 12, 2004 - To mark the third anniversary of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington that claimed the lives of 2,700 people from 80 countries the President of the United States attacked Senator Kerry of having more positions on the Iraq war than the 99 other United States Senators. President Bush used the occasion to claim that if John Kerry had his way Saddam Hussein would still be in power. That may be so. Had it been John Kerry conducting the War on Terror a contained Saddam Hussein may well have still been sitting in Baghdad dreaming his grandiose dreams; 40 Million ordinary Iraqis might not have been free to dodge from house to house in an endless crossfire of occupation; resistance and civil war; and most importantly the international alliance that Bin Laden ushered into existence on that fateful day might have brought Bin Laden to justice, either before an American court or the throne of God.

Had John Kerry had his way the French and German troops who soldier on today beside 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan might have had the support and resources necessary to bring that eternal war to a successful end, not just routing the Taliban but rooting it out. Had John Kerry had his way the international alliance that proclaimed, “We are all Americans” three years ago today might still be intact, strong and effective in its effort to rein in the pale horse of radical Islamic terrorism instead of having been fractured and its force dissipated in a war to find illusory weapons of mass destruction in Iraq....click here for entire article..

September 11, 2004

The sun and dust are welded into a crusty sheet.
That sticks upon your body in the vicious August heat,
And your joints are sore and shaken on the long road to Tikrit.

A Humvee heads the column, another guards the back,
The middle, three trucks rolling down this God forsaken track,
Its just another hundred miles ‘til he could hit the sack.

A load of bottled water and ammo for the guns,
And MREs on pallets and bullets weighed in tons,
It’s got to get to Tikrit to feed our hungry sons.

His eyes were red and burning, his nose was caked with dust,
He did not think about this war or whether it was just,
He only hoped he’d make it through and wondered who to trust.

The light was dim and fading, his sight no longer keen,
He did not hear the bomb go off, the shooter was unseen,
And then he wasn’t nothing, just another dead Marine.

Mr Ming
June 20, 1988 – September 7, 2004

I want to tell you about Ming. Oh, I know, he was just a dog, a little animal not more than 10 inches high when he strutted along patrolling the neighborhood with his head held high. I was just a kid of 50 on that day in August of 1988 when we went to the breeder to look at the litter. The breeder kept touting his bigger and better conformed brother as the one we should choose. I was tempted to choose the better, bigger pup but there was something about the little guy. His pink tongue stuck out, he did not walk but rather pranced as he bounded across the play pen she kept the litter in and there was this intense look in his eye, as if he was deciding whether these humans were the kind he wanted to be associated with.

We went away to think about what the breeder had said and we decided to take the pup that she had said was the “better dog”. The next day we returned to complete the transaction. We gave her the check, she completed the paperwork so that we could register the pup with the AKC and we went out to the pen to get the new member of the family. When I reached out to pick up the puppy we had chosen he shied away from my outstretched hand. The little one ran over to be picked up and looked up at me. He knew and in that moment he explained to me that I had been chosen.

We had to choose a unique official kennel club name for the AKC. He was christened Shanghai’s Mister Wu. At home he was simply Mister Ming. The first night at home he romped and explored and scampered over from time to time to be petted. After a while he disappeared. The door had not been opened and he could not have escaped outside. After several minutes we found him, fast asleep and curled up in a souvenir sailor’s hat resting on the bottom shelf of a cart in the kitchen. Ming had found himself a bed.

That was the beginning of sixteen years of friendship in which it was quite unclear which of us was the caregiver and which was being cared for. He was almost a year old when I noticed his intent interest in the television news programs. I already knew that he understood and followed our conversations. Always after a highly interesting story he would look up to me with a look that asked for my opinion. I found myself trying to figure out what he was thinking. He would vocalize in a questioning tone and I would respond with a comment. I began thinking of him as my little man in a dog suit.

One day after breakfast I announced wearily that it was time to go to work. I put on my jacket, collected my brief case and went to the door. Mr. Ming stepped in front of me carrying his leash in his mouth. That is how it became routine that he would come to the office with me. He pitched right in soothing clients during our meetings concerning the most difficult emotional passages of life. He was my partner as well as my dearest friend. He became a fixture around the courthouse. Everybody knew him and everybody was his friend as he stopped to receive a pat and a smile.

In the last few weeks he had become frail. Walking had become a chore. He could no longer patrol the neighborhood with his daughter by his side. By last weekend he could no longer stand without losing his balance. On Monday evening that gallant tiny man in a dog suit found the strength for one last tour, marching with unsteady steps to the corner of the block and back with his head held up high and alert to everything around him.

On Tuesday morning that gallant heart gave out. He was held in the arms of his human mother. He looked at her then closed his eyes and went into that final sleep, He rests now on the farm, in the hickory grove just across the fence from the cemetery where my mother and father lie. I had no idea what a big hole such tiny dog could leave in a human heart. But then he was not a tiny dog. He was my friend when I believed that I had no other. He was the biggest dog in God’s creation. He was Mister Ming,

September 8, 2004 - On March 13th 2002, a year and a week before he launched the Second Iraqi War the President of the United States said that he had learned the lessons of Vietnam. “[T]he politics ought to stay out of fighting a war. There was too much politics during the Vietnam War", he said. On September 7th 2004, just two weeks short of eighteen months after the President launched the “decapitation attack”, the one thousandth American was killed in Iraq. The Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff marked the occasion with a press briefing. They conceded that Sunni insurgents control Ramadi, Fallujah, Baquba and Samarra. They also conceded that there was to be no military attempt to reduce insurgent control of those areas of the Sunni triangle or to end the Mehdi Army’s uprising in Sadr City and the Shi`ite south until after the November elections. The delay, they said, was to give time to train and equip the Iraqi Army so that local troops could carry the burden of defeating the insurgents and to permit the Allawi government to negotiate a peaceful solution to the pacification of Iraq. Domestic politics and the political cost of mounting American casualties have nothing to do with it, they said.

Whether the President and his advisors misunderestimated the difficulty of the task of reducing Iraq when they started the war is beside the point. They got us into it. They did not underestimate the easy conventional campaign that started the war. That part went according to plan and resulted in only 138 American deaths. It was the aftermath of that easy conventional victory that they missed. The policy that President Bush has adopted to deal with the aftermath is familiar. It was tried before. While denying the obvious parallels to the ten year war in Vietnam the Bush Administration is intent upon following the same Nixonian policies that failed in Vietnam. Having started the Second Iraqi War President Bush and his Administration simply haven’t the stomach to finish the job...click here for entire article.

September 7, 2004 - President Bush was still holding press conferences in March of 2002. He held one on March 13th. In the aftermath of 9-11 he had taken advantage of the waive of international support for America and for an international response to the worst single terrorist attack in history to create a genuine coalition to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban that harbored it. The Taliban had been driven from power but not destroyed. Its leaders escaped into the Afghani mountains. Al Qaeda had been driven from its network of training bases but like the Taliban its leadership escaped to plot further depredations. Asked about Bin Laden and the Taliban the President had this to say:

“"We haven't heard from him in a long time. I truly am not that concerned about him. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban," Bush said. But now, "we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore."
I’m not sure that President Putin and the parents, teachers and children of Beslin’s School #1 would agree. Our invasion of Afghanistan has hardly slowed the pace of Al Qaeda campaign of international terrorism. Bali, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Spain have all felt the scorpion’s sting. Now Russia is added to the list of victims. The Taliban is still active in a guerilla insurrection just as it was when it swept to power ignored by the United States after the demise of the Soviet Union...click here for entire article.

September 6, 2004 - George Bush wants to simplify the tax code. At least that is what he says. “"In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify and make fair the federal tax code." He has already floated one idea, replacing the graduated income tax with a national sales tax. He floated it and when it did not soar claimed that people were putting words in his mouth. His aides are touting a flat tax proposal. They would replace the graduated income tax with a tax in which every one would pay the same rate without deductions or credits. His aides say both suggestions “deserve consideration”. The White House says that the President will issue an executive order creating a special commission to report to the Secretary of the Treasury some time in 2005. The panel will be directed to come up with a revenue neutral plan; that is one that will not produce any more money than the present tax system – one that will not close the deficit gap from the revenue side.

Investment income, interest, rental income, dividends and capital gains would not be included in the definition of income under the flat tax plans the Republicans are touting. The Republican idea would tax only that income received by individuals as wages or salaries – a flat tax on paychecks to produce the same dollars as the present system. Under their proposals Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would pay the same flat rate on their paychecks as you and I. The bulk of the magnates’ income would come to them tax free...click here for entire article.

September 5, 2004 - I am troubled by President Bush’s record with the Texas Air National Guard. It is not that he was able to avoid being drafted by joining the guard. It isn’t even that he used family influence to get into the guard. My cousins, Jeff and Craig, satisfied their military obligation by joining the Illinois National Guard in 1968; taking six months of training and then showing up for drills every second weekend for the next 7 ½ years. They spent two weeks each summer in beautiful Camp Ripley, Wisconsin making meals for Wisconsin mosquitoes. Their service with the guard was not without risk. Their unit was not mobilized for Vietnam. The closest they came to combat was when they were called out for riot duty at the University of Illinois in 1970. Unlike their counterparts in Ohio, they were not ordered to “lock and load”. They completed their service obligation and were discharged in 1976. Jeff, who is now practicing law in Champaign, was discharged as a Sergeant. So was my brother but he earned his stripes in Vietnam – and yes in Cambodia as one of the troops that President Nixon denied were there.

My problem with the President is not that he avoided Vietnam by joining the guard. It is not even that he was jumped over 500 other applicants because of his family influence. My uncle got his son’s billets secured using the contacts he built up after he left the Army Air Corps as a Colonel in 1948. What troubles me is that he did not finish what he started when he joined up. I take him at his word that he joined TANG because he wanted to be a pilot like his old man. He got the training. He learned to fly, but then when it came to the follow up he couldn’t stay the course....click here for entire article.

September 4, 2004 - It was just fifteen years ago that the Secretary of Defense came to Capitol Hill to complain to the House Armed Services Committee, ”The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward. AH-64 . . . forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out.”

It was just twelve years ago that the Secretary of Defense complained to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements . . . You've directed me to buy more M-1s, F-14s, and F-16s — all great systems . . . but we have enough of them.”....click here for entire article.

September 3, 2004 - On September 17, 2001, just six days after the Twin Towers fell the Federal Bureau of Investigation scooped up Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi in a Detroit suburb. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department announced that the raid broke up what it called a terrorist sleeper cell. The pair had videos, photographs, drawings and other documents that the Justice Department claimed were surveillance of sites for future terrorist attacks in Las Vegas on a NATO base in Turkey. When the pair was convicted of terrorism charges Attorney General Ashcroft took himself out to the Blue Drapes to announce the outstand victory in the nation’s War on Terrorism. It was the first of many similar raids and triumphs that followed in enclaves of Moslem immigrants and converts across the country.

Except it was nothing of the kind. When after trial some of the concealed materials emerged Judge Rosen, who had been appointed to the Federal Bench by President George H. W. Bush, ordered the Justice Department to conduct a review of the case. When the review produced evidence that convinced the Justice Department lawyer who took over the case not just that his predecessor had concealed evidence but that the defendants were innocent of terrorism charges. He took the unusual step of asking the court to void the convictions, dismiss those charges and grant a new trial a fraud count that was unrelated to terrorism. In throwing out the convictions and dismissing the terrorism charges against the Moroccan immigrants Judge Rosen said that the prosecutors “ignored or avoided any evidence or information which contradicted or undermined” their preconceived view of the case....click here for entire article.

September 2, 2004 - IAEA inspectors will report that Pakistan’s pardoned nuclear black-marketer furnished Iran with the expertise, parts and materials to build 70 sophisticated centrifuges used to produce weapons grade highly enriched uranium. The machines have been assembled and reports are circulating in Washington that Iran has already produced sufficient HEU to build 4 or 5 bombs. Now this is not a shipment of aluminum tubes or forged documents indicating failed attempts to buy Nigerien Yellow Cake. This is solid information assembled by the IAEA inspections team, they aren’t just suspicious that the centrifuges exist; they have seen them. Iran does not deny that they are pressing forward with the production of HEU. The Iranians claim that the weapons grade material is only intended for peaceful purposes.

The President says that we will press Iran diplomatically. He says that Iran’s situation is different than that which caused him to invade Iraq. “Diplomacy failed for 11 years in Iraq, and this new diplomatic effort is barely a year ago.'', he told the New York Times last week. I was puzzled by that reported remark. You would have thought that eleven years of diplomatic failure would have resulted in an active and productive Iraqi nuclear weapons program. If diplomacy – and eleven years of sanctions – had failed to restrain the Ba`athist regime’s nuclear ambitions their program would be farther along than that of Iran – or that of North Korea for that matter. That being the case you would think that 160,000 or so allied troops occupying Iraq would have discovered a gram or two of HEU in more than a year, even after our spectacular catastrophic success. You would have thought that the fact that they have not shows that the diplomatic isolation and severe sanctions imposed for 11 years had effectively dismantled the Iraqi nuclear program. We have it on the President’s authority that diplomacy failed and that was reason enough for war....click here for entire article.

September 1, 2004 - The winning score for George W. Bush was a 9.9 point double back flip with a twist. August 30, 2004: When Mr. Lauer asked him about the war on terrorism, Mr. Bush replied, "I don't think you can win it." The president went on to say, "I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." August 31, 2004: "In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table," Mr. Bush told the American Legion delegates. "But make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win."

I guess last week was an experiment. They sent the President out to do unscripted on-camera interviews with NBC News and the Today show then let him sit down with Time magazine. The sent the President but Dubya showed up. In the space of just a few days he praised John Kerry’s war record and belittled his own; called his centerpiece Iraqi war a “catastrophic success; and let slip the admission that his War on Terror could not be won. In those three exchanges we got a fleeting glimpse of what our George W. Bush really thinks. With the speech to the American Legion Dubya stayed home and the President returned to the script.....click here for entire article.