February 2005 Archives

As Atrios points out, Paul Begala today on CNN sent a much-needed message to any Democrat who thinks he or she should throw the Republicans a lifeline with a compromise to President George W. Bush's irresponsible Social Security plan:

And yet rumors abound that Democrats, perhaps even former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, will find a compromise that allows Mr. Bush to succeed in privatizing part of Social Security. Look, any Democrat who rescue Mr. Bush's assault on Social Security ought to be defeated in a primary and allowed to begin their own retirement early. 'Nuff said.

Julie Saltman points us to a story that reveals much about Republicans' misplaced priorities. Rolling Stone's David Swanson writes:

A review of fines levied by other federal agencies suggests that the government may be taking swear words a bit too seriously. If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying "fucking brilliant" on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. And for the price of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors. (Actually, you might be able to afford four "nuke malfunctions": The biggest fine levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year was only $60,000.)

One need look no further than this story to understand how Democrats have consigned themselves to the political wilderness: we keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Are we threatening to do so again?

This has not been a good week for Congressional Republicans when it comes to Social Security privatization. Many of their town hall meetings have not gone well. Now some GOPers are desperate to cut a deal to get bipartisan cover for the president's irresponsible proposal.

Some Democrats, regrettably, may be willing to provide Republicans with a last-minute escape hatch. As the Washington Times' John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei explain:

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid has declared that Senate Democrats are united in their opposition to personal accounts carved out of Social Security. That is a deal-killer if true, since as a practical matter the most controversial ideas typically need a supermajority of 60 votes to end filibusters and allow a vote. Despite Reid's assertion, however, several moderate Democrats have not ruled out backing a more modest version of the president's plan.

Despite Reid's assertion, however, several moderate Democrats have not ruled out backing a more modest version of the president's plan.

Some of these centrists, such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), have been meeting with Republican colleagues to discuss whether there is a middle ground.

Or not.

As Josh Marshall points out:

The real bottom line in this article, however, is the crew of Dems eager to toss a life-line to the president just as the American people are turning hard against phase-out. Take Rep. Shaw's possible compromise deal, as described in the Post: Republicans give Dems some of their add-on accounts and in return the president agrees to phase-out less of Social Security than he initially wanted -- 2 percent of payroll rather than 4 percent.

Such a deal! Republicans at their town halls are getting treated like off-pitch singers on the Gong Show and the Democrats should cut a phase-out deal that gives the president what until a couple months ago was supposed to be all that he wanted (i.e., 2 percent of payroll)?

Whoever these Fainthearted Dems might be, please pass a law barring them from negotiating the price of their next automobile, right? I mean, maybe they think Enron stock is undervalued too and primed for a comeback.

Nathan Newman explains how Wal-Mart successfully defeated a unionization vote:

Essentially, Wal-Mart says that since they'll continue to violate labor law after the vote and fire people who try to strike, resistance is futile. Wal-Mart uses its own reputation for intimidation and retaliation as an electioneering tool.

Newman uses Labor Blog to do an excellent job of highlighting labor issues around the country. If you don't visit already, I suggest you make it a regular stop.

Could someone please explain to our Ambassador to Canada that our neighbor to the north has not given up its sovereignty just because they will not do as our government says?

Slate's Timothy Noah is not buying into Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.'s spin that Wal-Mart is a good employer -- and good for the economy.

The apparent purpose of the speech was to counter political resistance to the building of Wal-Mart "supercenters" in California. But if Scott saw much danger that Wall Street might believe his rosy picture of labor relations, he wouldn't paint it, because that would create an investor stampede away from Wal-Mart stock. What we have, then, is a unique rhetorical form: Nonsense recited by someone who is relying on most of his listeners to understand that he is spouting nonsense. Wal-Mart took the trouble to send this speech out to writers "who are in a position to influence a lot of others," according to a cover e-mail I received from Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for corporate communications. I took Williams' email as a plea to expose the dishonesty in Scott's remarks (Stop us before we kill again!) disguised as a plea to give Scott's remarks a fair hearing. I will try to oblige.

While listening to today's Diane Rehm Show on NPR, Julie Saltman rightly gives the overwhelming edge to the callers.

Sometimes all one can do is sigh. From ThinkProgress, we learn the disturbing results of a new Harris poll:

– 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).

– 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).

– 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November).

Over on TAPPED, Matthew Yglesias has some wise words for any Democrat who may be considering an attempt to cut a Social Security deal with the White House:

Democrats are winning this fight, and should accept nothing less than surrender. Once the GOP has given up on phasing out the plan, we can either start a serious conversation about finding a balanced approach to Social Security reform, or else move on to addressing more pressing fiscal issues. Until then, trying to compromise with a party that knows no procedural or ethical restraints on its conduct and that's led by a president who's apparently hell-bent on destroying Social Security is a losing deal.

You can think you are cutting a deal -- but history shows that this White House will only use you for political cover before striking the things important to Democrats from the final legislation.

Insanity, as Albert Einstein once explained, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

After four years of trying to compromise, it is time for the Democratic Party to oppose.

In today's New York Times, we learned that former advisers to the Swift Boat Veterans for TruthLies have now been hired to go after the AARP because it dares oppose President George W. Bush's irresponsible Social Security privatization scheme.

Perhaps that means we are going to be subjected to more ads like this one, currently running on The American Spectator's web page.

Yes, this is a real ad. It's running right now on the right hand column of the Spectator's web site. Clicking on the ad on the Spectator's web site takes you to the web site of the company that hired the consultants named in the New York Times story.

Josh Marshall has more on this upcoming battle.

Perhaps the Bush Administration will understand the clear meaning of this new warning from Comptroller General David Walker. The Washington Post's Christopher Lee writes:

The Government Accountability Office warned federal departments last week against using a popular public relations tool that already has landed two agencies in hot water for breaking federal anti-propaganda laws.

In a Feb. 17 memo, Comptroller General David M. Walker reminded department and agency heads that prepackaged news stories that do not identify the government as their source violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you institute de facto drafts, extend the length of troop deployments, mistakenly withhold pay and benefits from our injured soldiers, cut Veterans benefits, and force our injured soldiers to pay for their meals while getting treatment. The Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson reports:

The active-duty Army is in danger of failing to meet its recruiting goals, and is beginning to suffer from manpower strains like those that have dropped the National Guard and Reserves below full strength, according to Army figures and interviews with senior officers.

None of this, of course, is the fault of President George W. Bush, or his decision to make iresponsible tax cuts for the affluent a higher priority than these needs.

As Kevin Drum explains, conservative activists like Grover Norquist are not interested in making government more efficient.

They just want to destroy it.

It must be the reasoned arguments like this one that led Time magazine to name Powerline the blog of the year.

(Hat tip: Atrios)

Thank goodness President George W. Bush is there to slay another straw man, forcefully rejecting another view that no one argues.

Such rhetorical courage is a wonder to behold.

Frank Rich analyzes the Bush Administration's tactic of hiring people to act as fake journalists.

By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

Ah, the joys of government propaganda.

MediaCitizen's Timothy Karr is quite unimpressed with the latest examples of PBS' continuing cave-in to conservative media intimidation.

Well, now that there is no hope for an NHL season, now that we know the hopes some of us placed in today's last-ditch negotiation meeting were misplaced, it is time for me to weigh in on this travesty.

My message to all involved: go to hell, you pathetic bastards.

Yes. I am referring to you, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. And you, NHLPA Executive Director Bob Goodenow. And to you, all the owners and players who would rather see the 2004-05 NHL season cancelled than to make a deal to divvy up over $2 billion in revenues provided by fans like me.

So, you've made your choice. A choice that has consequences. I hope you enjoy the drastic drop in revenues your inexplicable failure to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement will cause.

I hope you revel in the aftermath of your incredibly selfish decision to kill this season rather than make the serious effort necessary to make a deal to save the professional version of this sport in North America.

I don't want to hear how sorry you are. How much you supposedly care about the fans. How much you regret the season's cancellation.

Because that's all a bunch of public relations crap. So, spare us the false concern.

If you cared, you would have found a negotiated solution. If you cared, we would not have seen a three-month gap between negotiating sessions. If you cared, this dispute would have been settled long ago.

Instead, both sides drew their lines in the sand and got ready for their little war.

Great. Have fun with it.

Just don't expect all of us to come back to spend huge amounts of money when you come to your senses and realize just how stupid you have been.

(And yes, it does feel better to have that off my chest.)

You know, a media that had a liberal slant -- or was just nonpartisan -- might take an interest in with which groups some Republican leaders hang out, and what they say when addressing them. Salon's Michelle Goldberg was willing to see for herself:

It's a good thing I went to the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Otherwise I never would have known that, despite the findings of the authoritative David Kay report and every reputable media outlet on earth, the United States actually discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, vindicating all of George W. Bush's pre-war predictions. The revelation came not from some crank at Free Republic or hustler from Talon News, but from a congressman surrounded by men from the highest echelons of American government. No wonder the attendees all seemed to believe him.

The crowd at CPAC's Thursday night banquet, held at D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Building, was full of right-wing stars. Among those seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson. Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

Unless, of course, such claims were never intended for mainstream consumption. After all, when the facts are a problem, it is so much easier just make up a whole new set of them when one is alone with the true believers.

Paul Krugman makes an essential observation today, noting that when it comes to tax cuts and Social Security, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is not an impartial fountain of information.

When it comes to these subjects, Greenspan is just another political hack. And Democrats should start pointing that out.

Greenspan made President George W. Bush's irresponsible tax cuts possible. Now, he seeks to provide cover on Social Security. Democrats should stop allowing Greenspan to get away with shilling for the White House.

ThinkProgress reports that the GOP's war against science continues, with a committee of the Indiana legislature deciding to ignore science and legislate when all fetuses are viable.

On Wednesday, the Public Policy and Veterans Affairs Committee of the Indiana legislature approved a bill that states “a human fetus can survive outside the womb after 20 weeks of gestation.” Nevermind that it’s totally untrue. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at UPenn, said “no medical experts suggest a baby born as early as 20 weeks as viable.”

Joe Conason may have figured out, at least in part, how Jeff Gannon James Dale Guckert was able to get access into the White House press room despite his past and lack of journalism experience.

Guckert's efforts were very helpful in the successful GOP campaign to defeat former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Conason writes:

Daschle's defeat is old news by now, of course. Yet to understand who "Gannon" really was -- and why he obtained such special treatment from Karl Rove's White House communications operation -- one useful exercise may be what intelligence analysts call "walking back the cat." In essence, this means running the movie in reverse slow-motion to see where the suspect came from and what he did along the way.

Looking back at the special role played by Talon and Gannon in the South Dakota Senate campaign may provide clues in the mystery of the male-escort-cum-journalist's extraordinary access to the Bush White House.

David Corn explains (once again) why we should be concerned that President George W. Bush has tapped John Negroponte for a top post: this time, Director of National Intelligence.

His previous exploits, though, warrant more attention than ever. He has been credibly accused of rigging a human rights report that was politically inconvenient. This is a bad omen. The fundamental mission of the intelligence community is to provide policymakers with unvarnished and valuable information-even if it causes the policymakers headaches. But there's reason to believe that Negroponte did the opposite in tough circumstances. If that is the case, he would not be the right man to oversee an intelligence community that needs solid leaders who are committed to truth-finding.

What a quaint idea. Of course, we know that this is not the Bush Administration's top priority. After all, this is an administration where telling the truth gets you fired and lying gets you promoted.

It's all about the values.

Ah, I sure love to see these supposedly small government favoring conservatives in action. From Think Progress:

Conservatives in the Ohio State Senate are considering a bill that would prohibit public and private college professors from introducing “controversial matter” into the classroom and shift oversight of college course content to state governments and courts.

The kicker to this story is that the legislation is based on the advocacy of extreme right-wing activist David Horowitz. As Think Progress notes:

Horowitz, who is the driving force behind the movement for “academic freedom” in Ohio and other states, has a distinguished history of intellectual defamation, historical inaccuracy and political bullying.

...pitchers and catchers report. Go Cubs!

Over on TAPPED, Matthew Yglesias catches a townhall.com writer comparing Social Security privatization's transition costs with the transition costs of ending slavery.

Really. She does. Star Parker writes:

Am I pushing the envelope too far to suggest that there is common ground between the politics of slavery and the politics of Social Security?

Yglesias does a good job of examining how Social Security privatization and slavery are just a bit different. Just how desperate must privatizers be if they are running talking points like this one up the flagpole?

The Boston Globe may have thought that Eric Alterman was going to accept something less than a retraction and an apology for printing columnist Cathy Young's ugly charge that Alterman is a "self-hating Jew."

Think again.

Do you want to mix your chocolate with some child slavery? If not, you may want to read this important commentary by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.):

On Valentine's Day, there will be no chocolate gifts for young Aly Diabate. "I don't know what chocolate is," said Aly, who was forced into slavery at age 11 to harvest cocoa beans in Ivory Coast. Aly's ignorance of chocolate is forgivable. Like tens of thousands of other child slaves on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast, he subsists on a diet of corn paste and bananas.

Less forgivable is the fact that chocolate lovers in the West have been kept in the dark about these harsh realities. Few realize that most of the cocoa beans that go into Nestle, Mars and Hershey candy bars come from Ivory Coast, where thousands of enslaved boys — some as young as 9 — work in the most squalid, brutal conditions imaginable.

According to one report, the child slaves of Ivory Coast "are whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children in Europe and the United States."

That's a nice Valentine's Day message, doncha think?

An even better one from we consumers is to refrain from buying their candy until these companies get the message that child slavery is not an acceptable labor practice.

Mark Hertsgaard sends us all a troubling (but likely true message): it is already too late to prevent climate change. So, we must take steps to mitigate its likely impacts on our planet and humanity.

Honest federal budget observers have for several years now raised alarms about the Bush Administration's use five-year budget projections (rather than the traditional 10-year budget horizon).

While officials will not admit it, the reason the White House has changed the forecast procedure is to hide the balooning costs of their policies in the "out" years just beyond their forecasts.

Belatedly, some observers inside the beltway are catching on to the Bush Administration's irresponsible and fiscally dangerous path. As the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker write:

For President Bush, the budget sent to Congress last week outlines a painful path to meeting his promise to bring down the federal budget deficit by the time he leaves office in 2009. But for the senators and governors already jockeying to succeed him, the numbers released in recent days add up to a budgetary landmine that could blow up just as the next president moves into the Oval Office.

Congress and the White House have become adept at passing legislation with hidden long-term price tags, but those huge costs began coming into view in Bush's latest spending plan. Even if Bush succeeds in slashing the deficit in half in four years, as he has pledged, his major policy prescriptions would leave his successor with massive financial commitments that begin rising dramatically the year he relinquishes the White House, according to an analysis of new budget figures.

Why does President George W. Bush want to burden future generations with so much new national debt? Why do the citizens of this nation accept this irresponsible debt build-up with barely a wimper?

Don't we care about our legacy? Don't we care about the type of nation we are leaving to future generations to come?

I won't be expecting many answers to those questions.

Mathew Gross rightly urges us to stand with the United Food and Commerical Workers in their fight against a Wal*Mart decision to close a Jonquiere, Quebec, store -- one where the workers dared to vote to unionize.

Click here to sign a petition to Wal*Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott, urging him to reconsider this attack on working families.

Given that the Bush Administration released a list of proposed program cuts on a late Friday afternoon, they are really, really hoping the American people do not notice what it is willing to do in order to protect its irresponsible tax cuts for the rich.

All the more reason to focus upon the story. As the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Christopher Lee explain:

President Bush's budget plan calls for elimination or drastic reduction 68 federal programs that he has never targeted before, including vocational-education grants, emergency medical services for children and assistance to local law enforcement agencies, according to a list the White House released yesterday.

Oh, and this new list sure adds weight to Paul Krugman's excellent column from yesterday:

It may sound shrill to describe President Bush as someone who takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends. Yet his latest budget proposal is top-down class warfare in action. And it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they're willing to take it.

When she was the National Security Advisor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave the following testimony to the 9-11 Commission:

And I said, at one point, that this was a historical memo, that it was -- it was not based on new threat information. And I said, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile." (emphasis added)

In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.

But aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security," and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures," the commission report concluded.

The headline says it all:

A Dangerous Loophole in Airport Security
If Slate could discover it, the terrorists will too.

This loophole, allows a potential terrorist to bypass the no-fly list by utilizing internet check-in, a program like Microsoft Publisher, and a printer to create a duplicate boarding pass. Read Andy Bowers' story to learn all of the details.

As Bowers explains, closing this loophole would require:

at least one document check station that simultaneously compares all three elements: the boarding pass, a government-issued ID, and the No-Fly List in the airline's computer.

The real question is whether we serious about airline security. The lack of reaction to Bowers' story provides a troubling answer.

President George W. Bush once again shows that despite the rhetoric, his support of our Veterans is exaggerated. The New York Times' Robert Pear and Carl Hulse report:

President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday.

Perhaps, as the new American Progress Action Fund's Think Progress blog pointed out, this is why President Bush failed to mention the word "Veteran" even once during his State of the Union address.

Remember how President George W. Bush promised that we could afford his irresponsible tax cuts?

Guess not. Unless adding nearly two billion dollars a day to the national debt is your idea of affordable. The New York Times' Edmund L. Andrews puts our national revenue problem in context:

The other side of Mr. Bush's equation - higher tax revenues that result from faster growth - is unlikely to fill the gap. Despite strong economic growth and soaring corporate profits last year, federal tax revenues amounted to only 16.3 percent of the total economy, comparable with levels in the 1950's and far below the level of 21 percent reached during the stock market bubble in 2000.

"What's unrealistic is that they are trying to fund a government with today's demands on a 1950's stream of revenue," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a research group that advocates fiscal discipline by the government.

After all, many Republicans admit that their actual goal is to destroy the federal government by starving it of the resources it needs to do the job the American people expect it to do.

Isn't that right, Mr. Norquist?

Is there any limit to the amount of red ink the Bush-Cheney Administration will run up in the pursuit of their ideological goals?

Josh Marshall catches the Vice President in a candor moment: admitting, at least in part, to the huge amount of debt that our nation would need to accumulate in order to fund President George W. Bush's fiscally irresponsible Social Security phase-out plan. As Marshall writes:

As we've noted repeatedly here, the biggest threat to Social Security is our accumulated national debt -- actually, even more our accumulating national debt. If we only had the debt load we have now and weren't adding hundreds of billions of dollars every year because of the president's policies, we could probably grow our way out of it.

In any case, indebtedness is our problem. And Cheney's solution is to borrow many trillions more dollars over the next two or three decades, in addition to our existing structural budget deficits which are likely themselves unsustainable. And he and the White House now admit this will do nothing to improve the financial condition of Social Security.

Following any reasonable calculation the entire debate should end right there -- though I concede that rational calculation ain't what it used to be. (emphasis in original)

I read Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog almost every day because he provides some of the best analysis available about the situation in Iraq and the Middle East.

Today he did us all an additional service. He took the time to expose conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg for the fraud that he is. This is a top-notch smackdown -- from the computer keyboard of a distinguished professor:

Jonah Goldberg attacked yours truly in a column recently.

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Cole has an award-winning blog because he has rare knowledge about the region and knows how to write coherent analysis about events happening there. Jonah made a mistake taking him on.

MSNBC enhanced its position in the so-called liberal media by hiring conservative Tucker Carlson to host a 9 p.m. show.

Yes, that would be the same Tucker Carlson who mocked an incident where an eight-year-old was disemboweled by a faulty wading pool drain as a "jacuzzi case" in order to take a cheap political jab at former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards.

So, you can expect high rhetoric at 9 p.m. on MSNBC this spring.

And, as Media Matters for America observed:

The February 2 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, which devoted the entire hour to discussing President Bush's State of the Union address, featured six Republican officials and pundits and one Democratic pundit.

Or not.

This needs to become the most-used phrase in politics: "benefit offset." That's the phrase Bush Administration officials used to describe a little secret in their Social Security partial privatization scheme.

Under the White House Social Security plan, workers who opt to divert some of their payroll taxes into individual accounts would ultimately get to keep only the investment returns that exceed the rate of return that the money would have accrued in the traditional system.

The mechanism, detailed by a senior administration official before President Bush's State of the Union address, would hold down the cost of Bush's plan to introduce personal accounts to the Social Security system. But it could come as a surprise to lawmakers and voters who have thought of these accounts as akin to an individual retirement account or a 401(k) that they could use fully upon retirement.

If a worker sets aside $1,000 a year for 40 years, and earns 4 percent annually on investments, the account would grow to $99,800 in today's dollars, but the government would keep $78,700 -- or about 80 percent of the account. The remainder, $21,100, would be the worker's.

This writer is in favor of adding private accounts to Social Security -- or finding other mechanisms to increase national savings. But he could never support the fiscally irresponsible shell game being proposed by the Bush Administration.

Early during the State of the Union address, President George W. Bush said:

Members of Congress, the choices we make together will answer that question. Over the next several months, on issue after issue, let us do what Americans have always done, and build a better world for our children and grandchildren.

John Podesta and the American Progress Action Fund team have been live blogging and fact-checking the State of the Union address on their new Think Progress blog.

A wealth of rapid response information awaits you there.

I am sure that our Republican political leaders who dyed their fingers for display at tonight's State of the Union Address are quite impressed with their commitment to cheap political theater.

Frankly, I have rarely witnessed a scene so pathetic.

Dear Republicans, you did not risk your life to vote. You do not risk your life by having your finger dyed for a few days after tonight's speech.

Attemping to exploit the courage of the Iraqis who did risk their lives to vote is just outrageous.

All of those pathetic enough to dye their finger tonight really would do well to take to heart the wise words written by Charles Pierce the other day:

You do not own their courage.

The people who stood in line Sunday did not stand in line to make Americans feel good about themselves.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify lies about Saddam and al-Qaeda, so you don't own their courage, Stephen Hayes. They did not stand in line to justify lies about weapons of mass destruction, or to justify the artful dodginess of Ahmad Chalabi, so you don't own their courage, Judith Miller. They did not stand in line to provide pretty pictures for vapid suits to fawn over, so you don't own their courage, Howard Fineman, and neither do you, Chris Matthews.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line in order to justify the dereliction of a kept press. They did not stand in line to make right the wrongs born out of laziness, cowardice, and the easy acceptance of casual lying. They did not stand in line for anyone's grand designs. They did not stand in line to play pawns in anyone's great game, so you don't own their courage, you guys in the PNAC gallery.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to provide American dilettantes with easy rhetorical weapons, so you don't own their courage, Glenn Reynolds, with your cornpone McCarran act out of the bowels of a great university that deserves a helluva lot better than your sorry hide. They did not stand in line to be the instruments of tawdry vilification and triumphal hooting from bloghound commandos. They did not stand in line to become useful cudgels for cheap American political thuggery, so you don't own their courage, Freeper Nation.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify a thousand mistakes that have led to more than a thousand American bodies. They did not stand in line for the purpose of being a national hypnotic for a nation not even their own. They did not stand in line for being the last casus belli standing. They did not stand in line on behalf of people's book deals, TV spots, honorarium checks, or tinpot celebrity. They did not stand in line to be anyone's talking points.

You do not own their courage.

We all should remember that.