My in-laws are moving in with us, we found out they left on Sunday instead of Monday so they will be here tomorrow... we worked hard to get the house ready but we have a ways to go... and I will be taking kids to the dentist tomorrow... Christy is really tired, she tried to help but it was taking too much out of her... the kids are useless... I am not a happy camper...

We went to Colville for the kid's dental work. I tried to find some hardwood doors or at least hard-core doorsThey only sell hollow core doors, solid core are special order...

Grandpa made a wrong turn by staying on Hwy 20 and went to Colville... 38 miles one way. In other words, he got about 9 miles from here and mad a left turn and went due West instead of North. He had to turn around and come back.

Gary and Blaine came up with no trouble, I had Cindy's friend Jeff come over and he, Christian and I emptied the truck in under 15 minutes. So we have Gary, Suzie, Blaine, Grandma and Grandpa here for a couple days... little hectic...

This morning at two minutes and three seconds after one o'clock it was 01:02:03 04/05/06... nothing to get excited about because it happens every 100 years but it's an interesting bit of irrelevance.

We had a nice breakfast at Cathy's Cafe with everyone... We took Blaine and Gary& Suzie around to look at houses... that was fun. I beat Gary at pool, he's pretty good even with a bad back, emphysema, and Diabetes so bad he can hardly write his name... he really is a good pool player... the first challenge I have had on my table...

We tried to get a rental care for the Blaine & the Petersen's to drive home last night but it was too late, we got one for tomorrow. Today was Christy's day to go to Spokane to get blood work and talk with Angela. We took Grandma, Suzie, Gary and Blaine we took the Penske Truck back and paid the bill. The visit with the Dr went well and her results came back good so we don't have to mess around with being Neutropenic. We went to Costco and came home... Gary and I played some more pool...

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the gratefully and appreciating heart.

I took the Suzie & the Boys to Spokane and they took off for Las Vegas and Riverside at about 10:00 this morning... I couldn't sleep last night because my brain seemed to be on amphetamines or something. I couldn't stop it and I couldn't make sense of it... I had to take the kids [Calie & Christian] to the Baptist Church because they were taking about 20 kids to the Mariner's game in Seattle, they won't be back till Saturday night... I had to drop them off before 0800 and I had to have the Sister and Brother's-in-laws to the airport to pick up a car before 10:00... we did it with about 20 minutes to spare... I have put on a lot of miles in the past few days...

I bought a tool to reach down 4.5 feet to turn on the water down by the shop today... cool.

I wonder if the kids up here realize the amount of effort their parents put into keeping them entertained and educated... it's incredible...

I heard that my Uncle Bob [Reverend Robert Bradford Daggett] died today. I liked him a lot, wicked sense of humor... he and Cecil came to my father's funeral... I don't remember what the congregation sang but I heard my father's voice coming out of Uncle Bob... it was beautiful... I fell apart.

I worked out back with cables, chains and pulleys. there were several huge cables and some big chunks of metal weighing about 300 pounds. I used the truck and chains to pull them out of the thicket they were in and then used the pulley and Cables to pull them up on a hillside... I worked alone and it felt good to get so much done. I took Cindy to church earlier and we are waiting for her to come home

Autumn fell and scraped some bark off the top of her foot... looks very painful but she never let out even a whimper... She called me into the room and she said "Daddy Ow." and I saw the scrape and I am really amazed she didn't cry. Autumn doesn't feel pain like we do... what pain she does feel is delayed

Be grateful for luck, pay the thunder no mind, listen to the birds, and don't hate nobody.

I finally got the closet cleaned out, something I haven't managed to complete since we moved in here, I've been close but I always stopped for one reason or another.

I moved most of Grandma and Grandpa's stuff into the house and out of the way so I can get the car & truck in.

I hope this arrangement works out... whether it does or not will depend on me I guess. Whatever the outcome you won't read about it here, I find I have folks reading this who amuse themselves by provoking and instigating tensions unnecessarily... that takes a little of the therapeutic benefit away... I hate having to censor this page but I guess that's the nature of the world...

Christy seemed to feel OK today, tired as usual and she has a very sore rib from coughing... she has a nasty dry cough

This is an Associated Press article... I have made no secret of how little respect I have for President Bush. I have disliked him since I heard his comments from the Governors Office in Texas immediately following the Columbine High School tragedy. He was already using fear-mongering tactics and pandering to his fundamentalist support-base's agenda.

As near as I can tell this president has failed at everything he has ever tried to accomplish... he has cost the lives of untold thousands of people through bungling the war and bungling the victory. His administration had demonized the victims of natural disasters to cover up the failures. He has thrown his own people to the wolves to shift the blame from the fact they were his appointees or appointees of people he put into power.

Leak-Hating President As Leaker-In-Chief?

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer 32 minutes ago

WASHINGTON -

President Bush insists a president "better mean what he says." Those words could return to haunt him.

After long denouncing leaks of all kinds, Bush is confronted with a statement — unchallenged by his aides — that he authorized a leak of classified material to undermine an

Iraq war critic.

The allegation in the

CIA leak case threatens the credibility of a president already falling in the polls, and it gives Democrats fresh material to accuse him of hypocrisy.

"In politics, what gets bad gets worse," said GOP strategist Ed Rogers. "And we've been on a bad roll for quite some time. We're in an environment now where every mistake is a metaphor."

Critics were quick to portray the Bush-leak report as a fresh sign of a failed Iraq policy, manipulated intelligence and a lack of presidential veracity. Honesty was once seen by Americans as one of Bush's strongest character traits, but polls show that perception has waned in Bush's second term.

Causing the furor is a court filing that revealed that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President

Dick Cheney's former top aide, told a federal grand jury that Bush authorized him to leak classified information on Iraq to reporters in mid-2003.

Libby is charged with lying and obstructing an investigation into whether the administration intentionally revealed the identity of a CIA operative,

Valerie Plame, to undermine her husband's public criticism of the Iraq war.

As president, Bush has wide latitude to declassify material. And there was nothing in the legal papers filed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to suggest Bush or Cheney did anything illegal, or had specifically authorized Libby to identify Plame.

Still, the report put Bush and Cheney at the center of the alleged administration effort to leak classified material to bolster its case for invading Iraq and to discredit war critics.

Bush often has denounced leaks and pledged to punish the leakers. He has expressed pride in a disciplined White House where leaks are infrequent.

"It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war," he told a news conference last Dec. 19, speaking of the leaking of the National Security Agency's warrant-less surveillance program.

The latest flap comes as things seemed as if they could hardly get worse for the president and his Republican allies: Iraq, continued fallout over the botched Katrina response, the Dubai ports debacle, shortcomings in the new Medicare prescription drug program, the resignation of former House Majority Leader

Tom DeLay and the collapse of a proposed immigration overhaul.

A new AP-Ipsos poll showed just 36 percent of the public approve of Bush's job performance, a low-water mark for his presidency.

Another AP-Ipsos poll showed that, while 53 percent of those surveyed said they considered Bush to be "honest" in October 2004, that number had dropped to just 44 percent last month.

The disclosure that Bush might be the White House leaker-in-chief isn't going to help matters.

"He's suffering enough now and this is certainly more fuel for the fire," said Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis.

Fields said Bush has a record of "making blanket statements, sometimes self-righteous ones" that can later be turned against him when "replayed and quoted over and over."

Just Thursday, Bush emphasized the importance of straight talk. "When the president says something, he better mean what he says," he told a North Carolina audience. "In order to be effective, in order to maintain credibility, words have got to mean something. You just can't say things in the job I'm in and not mean what you say."

In September 2003, Bush said he was distressed by the CIA leak case. "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action," he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said at the time: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it (the CIA leak), they would no longer be in this administration."

Democrats mocked those earlier statements in light of the new allegations.

"The president all the time was looking for himself," Sen.

John Kerry, Bush's vanquished 2004 presidential challenger, said on the "Imus in the Morning" radio and television show.

Republican consultant Rich Galen said the controversy was "just another in a list of issues that have come up, emotional issues, that the White House has had a hard time getting in front of."

The White House scrambled to assert the president's right to selectively declassify information, with McClellan insisting there's a difference between leaks that can compromise national security and a president's decision to declassify information "when it is in the public interest."

Democrats who fail to recognize that distinction are "engaging in crass politics," he suggested.

To which House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi responded, "The president owes the American people the truth about his manipulation of sensitive intelligence for political purposes."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, including five presidencies.

From Bill & Margaret

America’s Blinders

By Howard Zinn

April 2006 Issue

http://progressive.org/mag_zinn0406

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heart-stricken over Iraq’s taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slave-owner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

What Could Bring Bush Down or Drive Him Out?

by Tom White
by Tom White

The latest out of Washington as reported on the Net April 6 in a lot of places (Drudge, Antiwar.com, etc.), is that Bush okayed Libby’s release of Valerie Plame Wilson’s name to the media. This now makes it plain as the proverbial pikestaff that we have a rascal and rogue for president, a man who would do anything at all to retain the luscious power and perks he has been given.

Lenin said it way back and most impressively (I quote from memory): "Once you have given them these privileges they will stop at nothing – not even murder – to retain them." V.I. was referring to the Russian bourgeoisie I think, but it was equally true of his gang, and actually appears to be the universal Machiavellian mode, adopted by all Mammonites since the beginning of human tribal government and intertribal warfare.

Get them before they get you.

Bush wanted to be reelected in 2004 more than anything. Thus the word went out, "Anything goes." And if your power means anything at all, anything at all, you’ll get away with it.

I have been watching, quite patiently for me, to see if that will hold true for GB, as it has held true for FDR for nearly 60 years since the death of that charming scalawag, who preceded Bush into the office the latter now holds. It’s been known to careful students of the affairs of the realm for the better part of those 60 years that FDR ought to have been tried for some variety of war crime because of his lies and manipulations in getting the Japanese to attack us and his merciless betrayal of our military people in Pearl Harbor when he succeeded.

Then he solemnly promised to keep "our boys" out of WW II, all the while he was working hard to get a lot of them killed pulling England’s chestnuts out of the fire. He was a thoroughly bad lot, but people still look up to him as a "great leadah" despite all the recent histories of his years of misrule that make plain he was a great liah and warmongah.

Nobody yet knows for sure how or why JFK was killed (or even Lincoln!), nobody yet knows the full story of Oklahoma City, nobody yet knows the entire story of Waco, and for sure, nobody yet knows the real story of 9/11. We live in the era of unchallengeable government; asked a few reasonable questions or for a few films or documents, they simply stonewall and look blank.

Nixon had to leave because the real rulers of the land got tired of him. You’ll recall the "meedja" led the charge in his case. Where are they now that we need them? Will they ever get tired of W? There are signs of it, but there isn’t much action. No big braying as in Watergate days. No flashy reporters playing the heroes of the disclosure drama.

The only way Bush can be retired is if "they" – our real rulers that is – push him out with some "spontaneous" media opposition that generates a popular outcry, which the media can then amplify. Or will they decide to let him run his course and keep his bully little war going, which is so good for so many in so many different ways?

I’m betting they’ll stick with him. We can fulminate all we want out here in the broad fields of the Republic, but it don’t mean a thing, ’cause we ain’t got that swing. Not to put to fine a point upon it, we obscure folk out here in the boonies simply don’t have any clout in D.C. Bleat as we may, it is inaudible in the chancelleries, History happens to us; we don’t make it. As has been said. And it’s true. That’s what galls so much.

In the long swing of the ages, however, we faceless peons prevail; if anything survives the wreckage that the great ones bring on us, it is we, said faceless P’s. They come and go; we go on. The great ones, of course, enter the history books (if any there will be in the years ahead) where, after some time, they receive their ultimate fame, which Dr. Johnson so well described in his "The Vanity of Human Wishes": they leave "a name at which the world grew pale, to point a moral or adorn a tale."

Meanwhile, I, a nobody, a man of no fortune and no fame, am watching along with – how many? – a couple of hundred million of us nobodies, and I admit I continue to hope against hope that I will be disappointed in my pessimism about the power of people to change their ostensible rulers or even influence their policies.

April 8, 2006

Tom White [send him mail] writes from Odessa, Texas. He is the author of Bill W., A Different Kind of Hero: The Story of Alcoholics Anonymous(2003), and the newly-published Lost in the Texas Desert.

Molly Ivins: Don't panic, just get busy

On the premise that spring is too beautiful for a depressing topic like Iraq, I thought I'd take up a fun subject – global warming.

Time magazine warns us to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." On the other hand, my sister is on the Global Warming Committee of the Unitarian Church in Albuquerque, N.M. They go around replacing old light bulbs with more energy-efficient models. My money's on my sis.

It's a good thing the phrase "the tipping point" became a cliché just in time to help us describe global warming. Just a few years ago, we were more or less cruising along on global warming, with maybe 50 years or so to Do Something about it. Suddenly, the only question is how soon to push the panic button, and 10 minutes ago appears to be the right answer.

People in journalism are the worst criers of "Wolf!" imaginable. We are always setting off alarms about Ebola, or avian flu, or the impending water shortage, or the Social Security crisis, or killer bees, or the pine bark beetle, or anorexia among teenagers (surpassed only by obesity among teenagers). Boy, if we can't sell you a scare with a few headlines and some mashed facts, no one can.

Naturally, having listened to the media set off endless alarms, the public is inclined to discount them, not to mention that global climate catastrophe is not an inviting topic. We're somewhere between "Don't Panic Yet" and "Panic Now!" – and edging toward "Now!"

What is happening is not just what climatologists told us would happen, but global warming turns out to reinforce itself by a number of feedback mechanisms. For example, when the polar icecaps start melting, there's less blinding bright ice to reflect heat back into the atmosphere – over 90 percent of sunlight simply bounces off ice and back into space. Whereas the dark water left behind by melted ice does the opposite, pulling in more warmth and accelerating the process.

The political fight over global warming is over, except for the Bush administration, which has some weird problem with science in general. I'm still not sure what's behind that: I recall Rush Limbaugh and the radio right taking great glee in pooh-poohing the Kyoto treaty and the whole idea of global warming. Maybe they associated global warming with Canadians or something equally awful.

You might think some premise like, "The whole world is getting hotter, and disastrous consequences will ensue," would be more persuasive than, "I don't like Canadians, they're wusses," but I suspect part of the fun of being Rush Limbaugh is never having to say the word "responsible."

The shame for journalism is that it has always been so easy to expose those few "scientific" voices claiming there is nothing to global warming. When the money for "scientific research" on such a subject comes from oil companies, skepticism is required.

Instead, many journalists let the bullies on the right cow us with the "liberal media" nonsense and reported there was "a debate" over global warming. There was no debate. The only question is how fast it's happening. And the answer that keeps coming up is faster than we thought. And still faster.

Time magazine, in its warm and fuzzy way, proposes that capitalism can solve much of the problem of global warming. Henry Luce would be so proud. Can't you see it now? Boy, I'll bet those titans can hardly wait to cut into next quarter's profits.

The insurance industry, for obvious reasons of its own, has long taken global warming seriously. By simply refusing to insure housing or enterprises near low shores, insurance can make quite a difference.

It's true the United States could make a good thing out of specializing in green energy and green technology, but we are still living with an administration that subsidizes the oil industry. The question is where the political leadership is going to come from before we reach the Panic Point, before Miami Beach sinks underwater, before Wall Street needs a seawall.

Al Gore is all we've got, and the right wing is still prepared to dismiss him with contempt and ridicule, not because he's wrong but because they'd rather talk about the time he was supposedly advised to wear earth tones.

As the Earth drifts toward crisis, our president does not yet seem capable of grasping even the First Rule of Holes. We're in one, and it is time to quit digging.

As Canadian casualties mount in Afghanistan, it’s important to correct three major falsehoods being promoted by the ill-informed, flag-waving media.

1. “Taliban are terrorists.” In 1989, at the end of Soviet occupation, Afghanistan fell into anarchy, civil war, and crime. Rape was endemic. A village prayer leader, Mullah Omar, armed a group of religious students (talibs). He set about fighting banditry, rape and drug dealing, imposing order based on traditional tribal and religious law.

Taliban were not 9/11-style terrorists, but a religious, anti-Communist movement drawn from the Pushtun tribe.

Most of the Taliban’s energies went to fighting Afghan Communists. Iran, India and Russia openly backed the Communists — rechristened, Northern Alliance.

Most of the so-called “terrorist camps” in Afghanistan were in fact bases used by Muslim volunteers who had come to fight Communists there and in Central Asia.

The Taliban shut down production of opium and heroin. But its backwards leaders proved themselves to be harsh and incompetent. Female education was temporarily banned because Communists had infiltrated the nation in the 1970’s through the school system. The Taliban oppressed minority Hazaras, and blew up Buddhist idols.

But Washington gave millions in aid to the Taliban until four months before 9/11. The U.S. once considered using them and Osama bin Laden’s 300 al-Qaida followers to stir revolt in China’s western Muslim regions, and in Russian-dominated Central Asia. The U.S. cut off aid after the Taliban refused to give a key strategic pipeline deal to a U.S. oil firm.

The Taliban’s leaders knew nothing of 9/11, a plot actually hatched in Germany. When the U.S. demanded bin Laden be handed over, the Taliban refused: He was a guest and national hero, wounded six times in the anti-Soviet struggle. The Taliban offered to send bin Laden to an international tribunal once the U.S. presented evidence of his involvement. Washington refused and invaded, blaming the Taliban for 9/11.

Unable to withstand U.S. power, Mullah Omar ordered his men to blend back into the Pushtun population and wage low-grade guerrilla war against the invaders. Other movements, like Hizbi-Islami, joined in battling foreign occupation. Canada unwisely chose to pick a fight with fierce tribesmen whose only desire is to end foreign occupation and be left alone.

2. “Canada is defending ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan.” This is pure propaganda. The U.S. installed the puppet Karzai regime in Kabul, then held an election even more rigged than the ones run by the Soviets. The U.S. spends hundreds of millions to bribe Afghan warlords, most of whom are up to their turbans in drug dealing. Since the Taliban’s overthrow, opium production is up 90%. The U.S.-NATO ruled narco-state Afghanistan now produces most of the world’s heroin. Karazi’s regime would collapse the moment foreign troops leave.

Besides drug lords, the U.S., Canada and NATO are also in league with resurgent Communists — who, with the Soviets, killed 1.5 million Afghans and tortured tens of thousands. The Uzbeks — now U.S. and Canadian allies — are more vicious and brutal than Taliban, and deeply involved in drug trading.

3. “Canada is defending women’s rights.” Laughable nonsense. The Taliban, demonized by western propaganda, mistreated its females no worse than other Afghans. Women are mistreated across South Asia. In India, brides are burned and people hanged for marrying below their caste. An estimated 10 million female fetuses were aborted in India since 1985, according to the leading medical journal Lancet.

Canadian troops are not social workers and won’t change local customs. Only naive fools think they could. American and Canadian journalists who rushed to Afghanistan see none of this because they stay safely “embedded” with occupation forces. They get the usual cook’s tour and cheery assessments, and are fed PR handouts. Cheerleading for war and flag-waving may sell papers, but it is not responsible journalism.

AUSTIN, Texas — In general, I’m against kicking ’em when they’re down ... unless really awful people are involved. I figured Tom DeLay is so awful, plenty of people would gang up on him and I could pass.

Imagine my surprise when the toughest question one famous TV tough guy could come up with was, “Do you think you invested too much in the Republican Party?” Another inquired whether DeLay could think of any mistakes he’d made. I waited with bated breath for the immortal, “I wish I could learn not to work so hard,” but no, he couldn’t think of a single one.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay first came to power promising to restore democracy to the U.S. House of Representatives, supposedly suffering from then-Speaker Jim Wright’s tyrannical regime. Even after the R’s drove Wright from office, however, bipartisanship was out of the question for DeLay. In the budget fight and government shutdown of 1995, for instance, DeLay rejected compromise and famously said, “It’s time for all-out war.”

I never minded DeLay being a tough guy — it was his syrupy claims to carry the banner for Christianity that I found offensive, as he frog-marched the House toward being a cash-operated special-interest machine. The idea of putting pressure on lobbyists to give only to Republicans, pressuring lobbying firms into hiring only Republicans and then letting lobbyists sit at the table during committee meetings where legislation was written — it was just screaming overt corruption.

Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich turned “the people’s House” into a pay-for-play machine for corporations. Put in enough money, get your special tax exemption, get your earmarked government contract, get your trade legislation and your environmental exemption, get rid of safety regulation.

I’d like to address the idea that what DeLay did was only “payback” for the alleged sins of Wright and then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, that it’s “our turn” at the trough, so why not act like Dan Rostenkowski? It’s a great way to rationalize misbehavior, even if the misbehavior is as disproportionate as Wright’s ethical peccadillo compared to the open corruption of DeLay’s “K Street Project,” selling Congress to the lobby.

I’ve watched enough switches of political power and use of the “payback” excuse to realize that what the new Ins call “payback” has little to do with whatever the new Outs used to do. It is, instead, a direct reflection — “projection,” the shrinks call it — of the ethical values of the Ins onto the Outs. Every time you hear a misdeed justified by, “Well, they used to do it,” you can generally mark off a 50 percent to 75 percent exaggeration.

To get a real sense of DeLay’s cynicism and recklessness, forget the stuff the press loves, like the “free golfing trip” to St. Andrew’s. Instead, take note of the following example.

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods “Made in the USA”) in the Pacific being used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere and paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum-wage bill (mandating a level higher than the island’s standard $3.05 per hour) from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay’s office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas’ largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book “The Hammer” by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.

Evidently, DeLay didn’t have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan’s holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff “one of my closest and dearest friends.” He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

“Stand firm,” he added. “Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.” He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay’s professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.