] The court refused to endorse a central claim of the White
] House since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: that
] the government has authority to seize and detain terror
] suspects or their protectors and indefinitely deny access
] to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.

Good. For a country purportedly fighting for "the rule of law" we've been doing a pretty crappy job about even bothering to follow our own.

Yahoo! News - Enemy Combatants Win Right to U.S. Courts

That's when Cheney unloaded with the "F-bomb,"

Way to go, dick.

"a 2002 order signed by Bush says the president reserves the right to suspend the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war at any time."

So is Bush the second coming of Franz von Papen, a "leader" so inept that his underlings could get him to authorize anything or is he managing to rank right up there with Saddam Hussein, the guy we needed to "regime change?"

El Presidente Shrub Says 'Geneva Bad! Torture Good!'

] The Bush administration is spending $18 million on a new
] round of taxpayer-funded television advertising to
] promote the Medicare discount drug card, the Medicare
] administrator said Tuesday.

So id this an $18 million dollar ad to try to get people to vote for the shrubbery or is it $18 million dollars that could be spent on something practical, like maybe a medicare system that doesn't suck?

And oh yeah... this is the benefit plan that it was said would "only" cost $400 billion, whenthey hid numbers saying $500+ billion, and it is only covering about 7 million out of 41 million people eligible?

Wait... does that mean if everyone signs up it costs $3 trillion???

Yahoo! News - White House Spends $18M on Medicare Ad

On May 1st of last year our fearless leader declared we had seen the end of major hostilities in Iraq. I guess the Mission Accomplished referred to in the background of the photo here was to get us suckered into a guerilla campaign that would cause us to lose all credibility everywhere in the world.

"Hey! We'll send in troops!"
"Yeah, and we'll kick your asses just like the Iraqi's."
(World gives US the finger)

Just a reminder...

It's nice to see that it's not just now that the government is lying to cover itself.

] Brown felt shocked by the role of the government
] attorneys back then, particularly the solicitor general.
] Brown couldn't believe that this man would stand
] flat-footed before the Supreme Court and say the
] documents contained national security secrets. The
] solicitor general had only his integrity. How could he
] relinquish that?

Yahoo! News - A Daughter Discovers What Really Happened

] President Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf
] people" during Cabinet meetings, his former Treasury
] secretary, Paul O'Neill, told CBS News' "60 Minutes" in
] what the network said was his first interview about his
] work for the administration.

Lets start confirming some of Nick's worst fears!

] Describing his first such meeting with Bush, O'Neill said,
] "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I
] thought, to engage [him] on. ... I was surprised it turned
] out me talking and the president just listening. ... It was
] mostly a monologue."

He was thinking. I wonder what's for dinner? The economy.. Yummy. The economy is good for my teeth. Chomp Chomp..

] White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dismissed
] the characterization of Bush's style. "It's well known the
] way the president approaches governing and setting
] priorities," he told reporters. "The president is someone
] that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities,
] and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Its well known? We don't know shit about this administration that they have not wanted us to know, aside from when someone comes out and says "he is really an idiot." That remains very scary and occurs regularly.

It's all part of his strategery!

CNN.com - O'Neill: Bush 'like a blind man' - Jan. 9, 2004

Once upon a time, the government created the Labor Department because there seemed to be an issue with employers taking advantage of their workers (see notes on the Pullman riots, or read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for a little idea on how this used to work). So the Labor Department came into being to make sure that some pretty basic guidelines were followed. You know, little things like, no 12 year olds working 14 hours a day in sweatshops. The kind of thing we hear about Nike doing in Asia and moan about until we go buy the latest version of AirJordans, although I guess they're LeBron's now, sort of like LeCars except not French.

Now if you've ever looked at things I write, it's pretty obvious I don't think much of the current shrub that lost the last election but ended up running the country anyway, but if you look at the last few links on my list, you'll see, the Labor Deapartment putting out a list of ways to SHAFT labor, and a note about changes to the immigration policy.

Now either this is a really unfortunate piece of timing, or the Shrub Administration just explained HOW TO BUILD A THIRD WORLD SWEATSHOP IN THE US FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Hence the title of this. Let's take a job that pays nothing, and has extremely long hours and is already designed with overtime costs built in for the employees to work like dogs and not have anything at the end of the day. How do we do that? Immigrant labor of course.

The highlight of America is that we have gotten ahead not because we had any built in advantage, it was because we worked harder and better and more creatively than the next guy. Collectively we did that better than the next country too.

Now we've decided that smarter isn't good enough, we have to copy how they do things in the worst parts of the world. We grew out of that 100 years ago.

There was a big joke in the 2000 Presidential campaign about "building a bridge to the future." Instead the joke is on us because this President wants to drag the 19th century back into daily life. Life in the middle ages was nasty brutish and short. It was better but still bad in the 19th, and call me an elitist snob, but I like running water.

Way to celebrate WWII guys. Let's wave the swastika on Rosh Hashana. Am I the only one not surprised that this is the state that elected the shrub as governor?

Yahoo! News - School Apologizes for Nazi Display by Band

] "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas,
] announced in January to the Republican leadership that
] war was going to take place and was going to be good
] politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.

I think Ted is a little pissed off. Being right doesn't hurt. Go Ted!

Yahoo! News - Kennedy Says Case for Iraq War Was Fraud