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In recent days, China, Russia, and several smaller central Asian countries have come out formally and said that it is time for America to abandon the military bases it has erected around the Caspian and Black seas, and throughout the middle east. Uzbekistan was more direct, simply ordering the Americans out in six months.

If he’s a hack, like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, than the United States is going to become a much grimmer and greyer place to live for the 99% of the population who aren’t the beneficiaries of the Scalia brand of Christian fascism.

The next few months, now THAT is what everyone is going to remember.

With approval ratings for recent GOP miscues such as Social Security, ending the filibuster, and Terri Schiavo all in the 30s, and his own down around the mid 40s (the lowest ever for a President just four months after reelection), Putsch’s handlers clearly felt that the risk of Putsch saying something really stupid was outweighed by the need to stop the slide.

The only things they don’t have control over are the Senate, wthere the filibuster means 60 votes are needed on key issues and they only have 55 seats, and the Judiciary, where a majority of judges are those picked by Presidents other than members of the Bush clan.

Putsch reportedly said, "It's a budget that focuses on results. The taxpayers of America don't want us spending our money into something that's not achieving results." Money for disabled vets and Amtrak doesn’t produce any worthwhile results, but giving money to people who don’t need it does. Republinomics, don’t you know. Give all of America’s money to the super rich, and they will take good care of us.

They don’t usually make him look like a complete fool by setting him up to quote someone who says utter absurdities like, "We were occupied for 35 years by Saddam Hussein. That was the real occupation." He repeated that with a somewhat straight face (he never entirely lost the perpetual smirk) while the woman who originally uttered the phrase, one Safia Taleb al-Suhail, sat right next to Pickles. I have to say that she didn’t look like someone who had been occupied by Saddam Hussein for thirty five years. Plump, healthy-looking and well-groomed, she didn’t look like she had spent much time being ruthlessly ground under the heel of the occupiers. Maybe she was ground under the occupiers in some other way.

Voting in America is dysfunctional. It’s a sick process with unreliable and often ludicrous results. It’s an embarrassment to America, a nation that once, fairly recently, prided itself on fairness and honesty in its elections.

California in general was free of the sorts of problems seen in places like Florida and Ohio. While there were 3,200 incidents reported, most were of the "registered in wrong county" variety. One notable one read, "Caller indicated he was a registered voter in Los Angeles County but relocated to San Diego county approximately six months ago. Caller requested information on where he should go to vote. Caller stated he had not re-registered in San Diego County at any time. I explained the October 18, 2004 deadline for re-registration in San Diego County and informed him it was likely he would not be permitted to vote in the election. Caller stated he would contact the Los Angeles County office to speak with it tomorrow to see if it could find a way to permit him to vote." What made it remarkable was that the incident report transpired in Santa Barbara County, 100 miles from Los Angeles and 180 miles from San Diego.

We don’t need phony and alarmist stories. Gawd knows there’s enough real material to work with.

I’ve maintained for years that there’s two types of Republicans: rich, or stupid. The rich vote Republican out of their own self interest. The stupid support Republicans because they are easy to distract with phony appeals to patriotism and genuine appeals to bigotry.

Why, indeed, hadn’t they warned us? Why, those cads! They were holding out on us!

It’s hard to sulk properly when kismet turns life into a big-budget Ed Wood movie.

The Iraq Survey Group's final report has leaked in Washington. The Group was engaged in a 15-month hunt in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which folks will remember was Putsch’s primary rationale for attacking Iraq in the first place. The group concluded that Iraq’s weapons program consisted pretty much of whatever poisons Saddam might have had in his medicine cabinet for political opponents, and that was about it. Oh, he THOUGHT about WMDs, just as most leaders do these days, faced with a rogue United States.

"America’s Ownership Society" sounds like it might have been the legal principle behind the Dred Scott decision. And on the lips of a plutocrat like Putsch, it might as well be.

We may never know if he ordered torture or not, but when he claimed that he never even considered torture, we have proof that he was lying through his teeth.

A right winger piped up, asking me if the numbers 4.2 trillion and 5.7 trillion meant anything. They were, as you must have guessed just from context, the numbers of the national debt on the day Clinton took office and the day he left, respectively.

Hell, if that’s all it takes, I’m going to ask Dick Cheney if I can be the next king of England. Dick, I promise that if you attack England, Londoners will be cheering and throwing flowers at American troops, and those peaches and cream-complected British girls will be spreading their legs for them. England hasn’t been invaded in nine hundred and thirty eight years, so obviously, they are overdue. Oh, and I promise to let Halliburton oversee rebuilding London after it’s been reduced to rubble.

I finally did watch the videotape of the decapitation of Nicholas Berg. It didn’t start out real high on my list of fun things to do in my spare time, but as the questions mounted about the exact circumstances under which the events portrayed in that videotape occurred, I finally decided I just had to see for myself.

Turns out I was wrong. He was.

The Republican Rapture Right has created a nation that is suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and they couldn’t be happier.

Recent events have been so prominent that they need only passing mention here: the riots sparked by Moqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City (no relation) which killed five Americans and injured hundreds of people. As this was going on, NBC, a former news source, reported that the Americans were going to march right in on Fallujah and teach those wogs a lesson they would never forget. OK, NBC didn’t say "wogs." But there was nothing in their news cast to indicate that there was the slightest possibility that it would be anything other than a quick and successful operation: at which point, I thought, "Oh, oh. If this is what the house organ is saying, than clearly the Putsch junta hasn’t learned a thing."

The number was also the number of billions the projected deficit for the fiscal year now stands at. Unfortunately, like the first number, it’s already grown since it came out, since it’s come to light that it doesn’t count costs incurred in Iraq, and doesn’t assume that Putsch’s tax cuts will remain permanent. The real number for the next year could actually be $700 billion, which would be more than double the worst year in history prior to now.

But then 9/11 happened, and Canada, like the US, ran to the imagined security of the police state to deal with it.

But after watching "60 Minutes" last night, I would say the man pretty well redeemed himself. In Ron Suskind’s book, "The Price of Loyalty," O’Neill is the only one of several top admin members to go on the record with opinions and facts about the closed, secretive regime in the White House.

Of course, if that bond measure doesn’t pass, he’s finished, and California is in deep trouble. His ONLY option if it fails is a big tax increase. I’ve no doubt he would propose such if forced by the vote to do so, and that could lead to one of the biggest and gaudiest political battles this state has ever seen.

That hope comes from the thin black line that protects the Constitution against avaricious politicians and scheming demagogues. The judiciary is making a stand, and recently dealt several major blows to the schemes of this illegal and dangerous administration.

But for the administration, which often works at cross-purposes, not only with the public but within itself, these same points are sources of concern, and well as hope.

Putsch and Phoney Blair are getting together this week for a state affair in London (and to give you some idea of the warm welcome they expect, the Secret Service asked for diplomatic immunity so they could shoot and kill protesters that got too scary looking for the boy president. The Brits, not interested in seeing London become another Fallujah, turned them down), and while they’ll put a brave face on it, the fact is they are conceding defeat in Iraq. They plan to turn administrative control over in Iraq by July 1^st, 2004, and have the military out by 2006. Mind you, just a few weeks ago, they were talking five years on administrative control, and decades on removing the military.

The ability of the elitist class warriors of the GOP to capture the Bubba vote is something that is going to puzzle historians for many years. Here is a party of social Darwinist plutocrats who are devoted, body and something, to comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, and they are able to win the unwavering support of Bubba, who is making $20K a year, slightly less than he made in 1980, and who no longer has anything resembling decent medical coverage, and have him declare that liberalism – the core of what makes America America – is a socialist intellectual plot.

That sounds pretty loony, doesn’t it?

Given that, why is the US so concerned about Iran developing nukes, and for that matter, why did they take the posture that Iraq needed to be invaded because they MIGHT develop nukes?

But in late August, word went around that the revelation of Plame’s career had resulted in the "liquidation of seventy of her assets," a statement I take to mean that 70 of her sources were killed.

The decision, a unanimous one, was pretty straightforward. Punch cards are demonstrably less accurate – by a margin of 2 ½ times worse than the second least reliable method – at tabulating votes accurately. There is an error margin of between 3 and 4 percent with punch cards.

What created the huge flap is that Daeubler-Gmelin was quoted as saying, "That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that." The American media promptly started howling that she was comparing the sainted President to Adolf Hitler.

So that leaves just 134 little Injuns in the race.

OK, my research staff is on vacation this week (he’s at the vet’s, getting his flea shots), so maybe that isn’t EXACTLY how Arnie bowed out of the California governor’s race. I’m glad he did, personally. I’ve always liked Arnie’s movies, and while I think he might have what it takes to hold office, I would like to see him work his way up. We have enough unqualified buffoons who use money and family name to take high office as it is. Arnie could do better, I think.

The claims even contain some truth, which is a departure from most GOP propaganda of late. In terms of the percentage of GDP, Reagan’s vast debts were actually bigger -- if only slightly -- than what the White House claims America faces today. Of course, the spin machine forgets to mention that government spending has already been cut to the bone this time, and there is an existing mountain of debt far larger in both the private and public sector than last time. Even so, Reagan’s advisors quickly realized that "trickle down" was an unalloyed disaster and raised taxes – shifting the burden downward, of course.

I’m not kidding. He really said that. With his bare face hanging out.

The only problem is that it is sheer puffery.

Remember back to April, when after weeks of administration propaganda, over half the American public believed that some or all of the hijackers on 9/11 were Iraqis? Granted, some of that was because el Presidente and his henchmen are a bunch of sleazy, morally bankrupt two-bit con men who, while never actually claiming that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, mentioned it in conjunction with Iraq whenever they could (Putsch, in that strange parody of a news conference in the days prior to the rape of Iraq, mentioned 9/11 six times, apropos of nothing), and made broad, if unverified statements like "Saddam supports terrorists."

He’s one of the main reasons why America is rapidly losing the leadership role it had in the arts and sciences. He doubtlessly did some good, and trimmed some waste. But he also destroyed quite a few worthwhile and even vital government projects in his never ending search for the amusing quip and political points.

When it comes to wild and weird, Sacramento didn’t stand a chance. Texas once again stands alone, which makes life much easier for Molly Ivins. She covers state politics in Texas, and never has to wonder what to write about next.

Most papers agree on this much. There was a crowd. There were US troops. The troops fired, and at least seven died and dozens more were injured.

By itself, it was pretty pathetic. Even the Germans didn’t try to stage cheering crowds for propaganda purposes. But this administration is used to having the most outrageous and silly lies swallowed whole by a docile press and public, and is merely maintaining the same tradition that they’ve used right along.