The Senior Senator—At the age of 87, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is reported to be preparing for election to his ninth six-year term in what its members like to call the “upper body.” Byrd began his Congressional career in 1952 with four years in the “lower body” and moved from the House of Representatives to […]

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Not many, if any, news reports have focused on the unpublicized connections of this Bush administration’s family members with politically—and financially—sensitive operations. Business Week recently noted that “dads and sons and other relatives reign so widely in this administration that there have never been so many family combos in an administration at the same time.” And the […]

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Social Insecurity—President Bush keeps pushing his Social Security privatization plan, but with a declining chance of passage. Democratic opponents call it “Bushonomics” and a “piratization scheme” that fits what George W.’s father once called “voodoo economics.” The debate has spurred a new vocabulary among Democrats—”chicanery,” “deception,” “subterfuge” and “trickery” that they say is designed to […]

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Days after the president’s second term acceptance speech, which was full of optimism for the blessed success of democracy and freedom in Iraq, the Middle East and the world, the White House revealed that, on top of the $25 billion in “emergency spending” in Iraq already approved for this year, it will ask Congress for […]

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We were not alone in finding that the extravagant, massively policed, $40-million presidential inauguration parade and the chief executive’s wimpy acceptance speech, followed by the 10 expensive ballroom galas, were bad news. A headline in the New York Times Week in Review section called the Bush oration “A Speech About Nothing, Something, Everything.” In his 21-minute inaugural […]

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