from buzzflash ….. 

Stephen Colbert doesn't owe
anyone an apology for telling the truth through the use of poised, barbed wit. 

No, George W. Bush owes the
nation an apology for lying, failure, arrogance, intolerance and greed. 

The Washington press corps still
thinks that they are working for Pravda under Soviet Rule or are Royal Court
transcribers. 

‘President Bush has quietly
claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took
office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by
Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. 

Among the laws Bush said he can
ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions,
requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems,
''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and
safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.’

‘In a replay of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
charade, neo-conservative supporters of George W. Bush are pushing the U.S.
intelligence community to take a more alarmist view about Iran’s nuclear
program - only this time, the nation’s top spy John Negroponte is resisting the
pressure unlike former CIA chief George Tenet. 

Tenet joined in Bush’s hyping of the WMD evidence about Iraq - famously
telling the President that the case was a “slam dunk.”  

‘May 1st, 2006, is the third
anniversary of the end of "major combat" in Iraq. It was a glorious
day when George Bush flew onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was
hailed by the rapturous throngs of toadie "news" persons like Chris
Matthews ("And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you
know, a high-flying jet star." 

"Hardball," May 1,
2003) and Bob Schieffer ("As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the
great pictures of all time.

 
‘George W. Bush
has been more emphatic about spreading democracy than any president since
Woodrow Wilson.  

Yet Bush’s
policies have subverted elected governments, corrupted foreign elections, and
tainted democracy itself. For most of the American media, however, Bush’s
pretensions on democracy remain sacrosanct.  

‘Yet we now live in a nation in
which the president has the omnipotent power to ignore all constitutional
restraints on his power. That might not be the way the president and his legal
advisors put it, but that is the practical effect of what they are saying to
justify his powers. They effectively claim that the Constitution vests the
president – as military commander in chief during the “war on terrorism” – with
such extraordinary powers that he is able to ignore restraints on his powers
imposed both by the Constitution and by Congress.  

Exxon Mobil Profit
Rises on Soaring Prices

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, on Thursday
reported that quarterly profit surged, driven by rising oil prices. Anger over
gas prices is gaining traction in many midterm races around the nation as
Democrats attack Republicans for being too close to oil companies. 

Exxon
Mobil Profit Rises On Soaring Prices 

 
‘Mr. President,

Do you ever wake up in the middle
of the night? Do you? Do you ever wake up sleepless in the middle of the night?
What have you done in Iraq? Do you ever realize, in the middle of the night,
what you've done? Do you?’ 

A Wake-Up Call For President Bush

 
‘Twelve hours: one circuit of the sun from horizon to
horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural
measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval
between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass
annihilation halfway around the world. 

Twelve hours is the maximum time
necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack
– a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the
Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global
strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was
approved months ago, and is now in operation. The planes are already on
continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the
Iranian border, as Sy Hersh
reports in the New Yorker, and waiting only for the signal from
President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear
weapons on some 400 targets spread throughout the condemned land. 

‘You ask about the motivations, and that is one of the
patterns that comes through when you look at these things all together. 

There’s really a three-stage
motivation that I can see when I watch so many of the developments of these
coups. The first thing that happens is that the regime in question starts
bothering some American company. They start demanding that the company pay
taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that
company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its
assets. So the first thing that happens is that an American or a foreign
corporation is active in another country, and the government of that country
starts to restrict it in some way or give it some trouble, restrict its ability
to operate freely. 

‘Usually watching CNN with one
eye as we blog from our undisclosed location doesn’t give us much new fodder,
except for the occasional "stuck landing gear" crisis. But
this week we were aghast at the coverage of Chinese President Hu Jintao at the
White House. 

At an outdoor ceremony, Bush told Hu: 

 
As our great holy men of faith
leapt about the landscape this past week, loudly protesting the cruel &
inhuman treatment visited on refugees from West Papua by our evil neighbours,
the Indonesians, the rest of the world, including Great Britain, was busy
complaining about the inhuman treatment being meted-out by our great friend
& ally, the US, on the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (Guantanamo
Detainee List Draws Wave Of Complaints).

‘How extraordinary. Something is
happening here that has never happened in America's history. A consensus is
sweeping the nation. Not that the war in Iraq is wrong, or that oil companies
are screwing us blue, or that the climate is going to hell, or that good-paying
jobs are being replaced by low-paying jobs, or that our national health care
system is a disgrace, or that that the rich are getting a lot richer while the
middle class gets poorer. 

 
‘Last but not least, before deciding to bomb Iran's
nuclear installations the Bush administration must seriously question whether
the intelligence on which its decision is based is reliable. Those of us who
have followed reports on the development of Iran's nuclear program know that
the warnings from American and other intelligence agencies about Tehran
building a bomb in three and five years have been made again and again — for
more than 15 years.