A good James Ridgeway Mondo Washington.

Grim News From Capital's Front Lines
It's the Economy, Stupid
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's dotty performance Sunday on Meet the Press signals just how vicious Bush can be when he puts his buddies out to dry. O'Neill's insistence that the fundamentals of the economy are great is buttressed by the administration's deliberately twisted facts, such as:

Bush projects that the stock market will rise this year, when it already has tanked. When Bush came to power, the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 10,600. Last Monday it fell below 8000. According to the Standard & Poor's Index of 500 stocks, Bush's first year and a half has been the worst ever recorded.

Bush claims that tax cuts aren't responsible for the vanishing surplus, when in fact they contributed 38 percent.

A Return to the Bad Old Days?
Smears, Slime, and Snoops

This brief story describes perfectly the smear campaign run by the FBI and its look-alikes during the '60s and '70s. It shows the slime politics played in the Supreme Court, the mendacity of the Johnson people, and, of course, business as usual for Hoover's FBI. And it reveals how military intelligence was employed to spread smears about people.

And this is precisely what Bush is in the process of recreating, so that the two-bit snoops from the Pentagon can fan out across the nation. Homeland security boils down to the FBI's acting on neighborhood snitch watches to penetrate and track supposed terrorist groups while the military dicks spread out like a plague of locusts to spread the gossip.

CIA Official Wants to Swat Journalists
Hide Your Papers!