Tony Blair's words, as revealed by previously secret memos plastered across British newspapers this evening, will reverberate among the British populace. But how will the U.S. press handle what seems to be a smoking gun of mass deception about the invasion of Iraq?

As The Independent (U.K.) is reporting, Blair had plenty of warning that the Iraq invasion was unjustified—in fact, he knew it was a bogus deal and went along with George W. Bush's handlers anyway. The newspaper's Raymond Whitaker, Andy McSmith, and Francis Elliott write:

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith—who took part in the meeting—warned [in July 2002] that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action". But the Prime Minister countered that "regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD."

The document [of that meeting, obtained by The Sunday Times,] ended with the admonition: "We must not ignore the legal issues," adding that "the Attorney General would consider legal advice." The Government has consistently refused to say when the Attorney General was first asked for an opinion on the legality of war.

Eight months later, Lord Goldsmith drew up his 13-page legal opinion, released by Downing Street last week, which echoed many of the doubts expressed in the earlier Foreign Office brief. The Attorney General echoes the Foreign Office paper, rejecting U.S. claims to be able to decide whether Iraq was in breach of U.N. resolutions. The Americans were alone in this position, he said, before dramatically altering his opinion 10 days later.

Michael Smith of The Sunday Times broke the story of the July document. He writes:

"If the political context were right, people would support regime change," said Blair. He added that the key issues were "whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work".

The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was "thin" as "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran".

Straw suggested they should "work up" an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would "help with the legal justification". Blair is recorded as saying that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors".

A separate secret briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to "create" conditions to justify a war.

Naturally, this is hot shit in Britain, which has an election only four days from now. Here's more from Smith's story in The Sunday Times:

The papers, the second sensitive leak close to the election, appear to be an attempt by disaffected Whitehall insiders to attack Blair's integrity. They are likely to fuel claims he misled the country on Iraq.

One reason for the secrecy is that the minutes record discussion of US plans for invasion; another is that at the time Blair had given no indication that plans were so advanced.

He had not revealed to MPs or the public that in April 2002 he had told Bush "the UK would support US military action to bring about regime change", as recorded in the Foreign Office briefing paper. Both before and after the July meeting Blair insisted in public no decision had been made.

The July meeting was later mentioned by Lord Butler in his report on the use of intelligence on WMD as a "key stage" in the road to war; but its details have never been revealed until now.

A British government memo from '02 indicates that the Bush regime got Tony Blair to go along in July of that year with a plan to invade Iraq and then build the "intelligence and facts" to justify the decision, British newspapers are reporting tonight.

The bombshell memo, leaked to The Sunday Times (U.K.), was written a few weeks after Prime Minister Tony Blair traveled to George W. Bush's Crawford ranch for what the papers described as basically a "council of war" between the dumbass POTUS and the bright Brit who should have known better.

And why should Blair have known better? The Independent (U.K.) is also reporting tonight that the Foreign Office told Blair even earlier, in March '02, that it had grave reservations about invading Iraq.

If what the papers are saying is true, we're not exactly shocked. But we're in awe of their gall.

Here's how The Independent reports both new pieces of info in "Revealed: Documents show Blair's Secret Plans for War":

Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside U.S. forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.

A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper [The Sunday Times] reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr. Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

At the same time, a document obtained by this newspaper [The Independent] reveals the Foreign Office legal advice given to Mr. Blair in March 2002, before he travelled to meet Mr. Bush at his Texas ranch. It contains many of the reservations listed nearly a year later by the Attorney General in his confidential advice to the Prime Minister, which the Government was forced to publish last week, including the warning that the U.S. government took a different view of international law from Britain or virtually any other country.

Michael Smith of The Sunday Times led his blockbuster this way:

A secret document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.

The Downing Street minutes, headed "Secret and strictly personal — UK eyes only", detail one of the most important meetings ahead of the invasion.

It was chaired by the prime minister and attended by his inner circle. The document reveals Blair backed "regime change" by force from the outset, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, that such action could be illegal.

The minutes, published by The Sunday Times today [May 1], begins with the warning: "This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. The paper should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know." It records a meeting in July 2002, attended by military and intelligence chiefs, at which Blair discussed military options having already committed himself to supporting President George Bush's plans for ousting Saddam.

There were strong suspicions anyway that the Foreign Office had advised Blair that the grounds for invading Iraq were shaky. That's because a key Whitehall official, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, pulled an Elliot Richardson on the eve of the invasion by resigning in protest.

Here's more from The Independent story:

The latest revelations could scarcely have come at a worse time for Labour, with a general election only four days away and the opposition parties lining up to attack the Prime Ministers credibility. Two polls last night showed the gap between Labour and Conservatives narrowing to 3 percent.

The minute revealed last night was of a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July 2002. Signed by the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, Matthew Rycroft. It concluded: "We should work on the assumption that the U.K. would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of U.S. planning before we could take any further decisions."

The minute records that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had warned that the case against Saddam was "thin." He suggested that the Iraqi dictator should be forced into a corner by demanding the return of the UN weapons inspectors: if he refused, or the inspectors found WMD, there would be good cause for war.

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith—who took part in the meeting—warned then that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action". But the Prime Minister countered that "regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD."

The document ended with the admonition: "We must not ignore the legal issues," adding that "the Attorney General would consider legal advice." The Government has consistently refused to say when the Attorney General was first asked for an opinion on the legality of war.

Fucking liars, Bush and his handlers, not to mention Blair. All politicians lie, but if the stories about these documents are true, this is a really big lie—the one that started the whole chain of bullshit justifications for breaking off the hunt for Osama bin Laden and sending young Americans to Iraq to die for the big oil companies and their Wall Street backers.

Invading Iraq to liberate Halliburton from its financial woes. You just can't make it up.

OK, you can go back to the runaway bride story now.

George W. Bush told the masses last night at his press conference exactly what his strategy on Social Security was—rather, his strategy on selling his plan to dismantle Social Security by privatizing it so his pals on Wall Street can profit. He may just get away with it.

After almost four months of pounding the lie into the populace, through a series of "town hall" meetings, that Social Security is "broken," Bush revealed that his plan is to cut benefits. Here's the line in his press conference that gets me:

See, once the American people realize there's a problem, then they're going to start asking members of Congress from both parties, why aren't you doing something to fix it?

Yes, that's exactly what the regime has done: stir up fear by lying about how the Social Security program is broke and broken. Once that sinks in, you tell people that benefits will be cut.

As I pointed out on January 19 in "Going for Brokers," this is just another drumbeat for war. But this time the war is against us, not Iraq. Take a look at what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been saying. I wrote back then:

As Bob Greenstein of the CBPP points out, the predicted Social Security shortfall for the next several decades could be made up almost entirely if we simply did not make permanent the Bush regime's tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

But those truths are drowned out by the enormous propaganda campaign of the past four months. Re-read what Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post wrote on December 31:

President Bush's allies are raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to promote private Social Security accounts, as Democrats and Republicans prepare for what they predict will be the most expensive and extensive public policy debate since the 1993 fight over the Clinton administration's failed health care plan.

Nearly four months later, we can finally say that there now is a Social Security "crisis": the administration's well-financed assault against it.

The millions of dollars have come from the wealthiest Americans. Who do you think contributes the bulk of any political-campaign money? I wrote last September:

Keep a couple of things in mind: As NYU professor Ed Wolff has pointed out, the richest 1 percent of American households own 38 percent of all wealth. And as the Center for Responsive Politics notes, fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all campaign contributions over $200 for the 2002 midterm congressional elections.

When are people going to wake up to the fact that the current administration is not conservative but in fact revolutionary and radical? Maybe when you're spending your retirement years begging for jobs at Wal-Mart while they're relaxing in the Hamptons.

Those scrambled yeggs at Halliburton are once again getting over on us with the help of their friends at the Fox News Channel.

The estimable watchdog Halliburton Watch notes Fox reporter Gregg Kelly's "Bon Appetit" puff piece yesterday about the Dick Cheney company's great job feeding the soldiers in Iraq. Kelly toured a dining room in Taji, Iraq, and told viewers:

The company has been rocked by accusations of overcharging the Pentagon. Here, however, there's no controversy about the food's quality. In fact, some worry that all the eats might make them fat when they're at war. It all stifles that ancient military pastime—complaining about the chow.

You report, we deride. We're the ones who are complaining, pal. Halliburton's international house of profits, protected by a Bush regime that prides itself as being "conservative," continues to play hide-the-sausage with U.S. taxpayers.

As Halliburton Watch growled last June, the company's subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) charged us millions of dollars for meals that never existed. The Defense Department's own audit agency found last June that Halliburton overcharged the government for meals by $136 million.

The vultures at Cheney's company make much of their money simply by acting as middlemen. The press has picked up on this—the print side, at least. As Halliburton Watch noted in a June 15, 2004 story about the DOD audit:

In a related development, the Los Angeles Times reported that "the Army recently renegotiated a contract that Halliburton had with a Kuwaiti company to provide meals. By contracting directly with the Kuwaiti company instead of going through Halliburton, the Army knocked 40 percent off the cost of the contract." Once the Pentagon dealt directly with the Kuwaiti-owned company, known as Timimi Co., the cost per-meal dropped from about $5 to about $3, according to GAO Comptroller David Walker.

It's a friggin' feast for Cheney's company. CorpWatch's Pratap Chaterjee, who often gives us food for thought about the company that still pays our vice president a salary, wrote last June about whistleblowers' allegations:

In testimony submitted to members of Congress, one truck driver explained in detail how taxpayers were billed for empty trucks driven up and down Iraq and how $85,000 vehicles were abandoned for lack of spare tires. A labor foreman said dozens of workers were told to "look busy" while doing virtually no work for salaries of $80,000 a year. An auditor related how the company was spending an average of $100 for every single bag of laundry and $10,000 a month for company employees to stay in five-star hotels.

Hungry for more details? Former Army captain Marie deYoung, who worked for Halliburton in a contracts office, blew the whistle loud and long about the company's "Tiger Team," which was supposed to straighten out criticized and scandalous subcontracts. Chaterjee wrote:

De Young says that Halliburton paid the Kuwaiti subcontractor La Nouvelle $100 per bag for laundry services—four times more than they were paying elsewhere. That added up to more than $1 million per month. Another time, the company ordered 37,200 cases of soda at $1.50 a case, but was delivered only 37,200 cans, resulting in charges that were five times the normal wholesale cost for the drinks.

Halliburton housed the Tiger Team at the five-star Kempinski Hotel for $10,000 per employee per month. At the same time, soldiers were required to live in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The military requested that Halliburton employees move into the tents, but they refused, De Young said.

Chaterjee would have had little to write about if not for the work of California congressman Henry Waxman, whose Government Reform Minority Office is the best investigative body that no one ever heard of. Waxman laid it out in a cluster of documents last year.

The House Democrats, stymied by the GOP's refusal to conduct full hearings, tries to wake up the public by hauling out charts and posters (see an example above). Those moments don't make TV news. So let's go back to Fox's Gregg Kelly for a taste of Halliburton's meals that actually were served. Again from yesterday's Halliburton Watch piece:

In the Fox report, Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Gunter is seen eating a meal. He eagerly proclaims, "KBR does an extremely good job." The food is so good, he says, that "we've been trying to hide it from our wives." "I was talking to my wife the other day," he said. "I was like, 'Baby, it's pretty rough over here.' I said they only have nine flavors of Baskin Robbins (laughs)."

An unidentified and non-uniformed woman is heard describing the food as "pretty unbelievable."

The Fox reporter added to the glory of KBR's food, saying, "You know, some of this looks like a brunch, you know, at a Marriott hotel or something like that. It's pretty elaborate."

Kelly went on to praise the camp's "Chef Denzel from India" as "probably one of the few pastry chefs ever deployed to a combat zone." As Halliburton Watch adds:

But there was no information on one of Chef Denzel's Indian compatriots who said working in KBR's dining facilities is "hell." An Indian newspaper described the facilities as "slave camps." KBR reportedly pays Indian workers $200 per month for cooking food and cleaning toilets, a puny wage that helped double Halliburton's stock price since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Senator Dick Lugar's arms-control work makes him a peacenik in the eyes of the neocons. No wonder John Bolton's nomination is in trouble before Lugar's Foreign Relations Committee.

I guess I'm kinda slow about this. But the blogger Stygius isn't. Read his dense, but interesting, April 4 analysis of how the neocons in general (and Bolton in particular) still lobby against the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which led to the dismantling and destruction of huge amounts of weapons in the former Soviet Union.

Lugar and former senator Sam Nunn collaborated on this legislation, which calls for us to pay to dismantle weapons overseas. But the neocons have always insisted that we're merely subsidizing the evil foreigners by allowing them to spend their own money building better and bigger weapons to be used against us.

Bolton has carried that water before, as Stygius notes. The putative U.N. ambassador has had nothing but contempt for arms control.

Lugar, on the other hand, is gloriously proud of his arms-control work. No wonder Desmond Tutu picked him for the Hands That Shape Humanity project—describing Lugar, by the way, as an "activist."

Now if Lugar will just dismantle Bolton . . .

Whether or not John Bolton is confirmed as U.N. ambassador, we may never know the true story of all the cloakroom maneuverings surrounding this neocon nabob's nomination until Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Dick Lugar writes his memoirs.

Go back to the committee's underreported February 1 hearing on Iraq. The very first discussion of the Iraq debacle in this Congressional session, it took place right after the lockdown election in Iraq, amid all the hyperbolic hoorays.

Too bad the hearing got little notice in the press, because it was a devastating critique of the Bush regime, specifically designed by Lugar to revolve around a rousing analysis by veteran Iraq scholar and on-the-ground military/arms expert Anthony Cordesman (left). Typically blunt, especially in print, Cordesman blasted the regime for putting "ideologues" in place in Iraq. Without naming Medal of Freedom winner L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, Cordesman acerbically referred to our "proconsul" in Iraq. As always, he offered suggestions.

Unfortunately for the neocons and their religious zealot pals who defend Israel's right-wing government, Cordesman's suggestions for stabilizing the Middle East start with placating the Arabs by wading into the Israeli-Palestinian death dance.

It's one of the finest summations I've read about the Iraq debacle.

Lugar's February hearing came before the Bush regime decided to install one of its most abrasive ideologues in the U.N. Bolton didn't get the kowtowing that Senate Judiciary chair Arlen Specter gave to Alberto Gonzales in January, and now the Bolton nomination has been held up in Lugar's committee until next month.

Yes, it was GOP senator George Voinovich who appeared to throw a monkey wrench into the works by asking Lugar for more time, prompting the chairman to postpone the vote on Bolton until May 12—a vote that won't happen if Bolton withdraws his name under the building pressure of critics.

Lugar is under increasing pressure from the White House and other Bolton supporters to cooperate by whisking along the vote as soon as May 12 rolls around. Among those devilish voices whispering in his ear is David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, who wrote yesterday:

Bolton supporters are wondering how the chairman could be so clueless. He may or may not be Bolton's biggest fan, but Lugar's performance makes one wonder whether he's conniving with Democrats to sink Bolton or simply in over his head. In any event, if he wants to redeem his professional reputation he can do so only by regaining control of his committee and solidifying Bolton's support from his GOP colleagues before the panel reconvenes three weeks from now.

Of course Lugar wants to sink Bolton. He can't come out and say so—he's no Elliot Richardson. (Although it does seem remarkable that Lugar, a quiet and conservative Republican from Indiana, is part of Bishop Desmond Tutu's celebrity-imbued Hands That Shape Humanity. Lugar conscientiously got his hands dirty in this peace project/artwork.)

We used to think of Republicans like Lugar as hidebound. That was until the neocons and religious nuts took over the GOP. Lugar may not be a rebel, but he has ways of making known his displeasure with the neocon wing of his party.

Building a hearing around the work of Cordesman, an outspoken foe of the neocons and a familiar face on Capitol Hill, was the somewhat reserved Lugar's way of sticking it to the neocons. Unfortunately, the hearing got very little play in the press.

You may have heard of Cordesman. As I noted last September, Paul Krugman of the New York Times quoted an earlier Cordesman analysis as saying that U.S. officials are "guilty of a gross military, administrative, and moral failure" in Iraq. Read `Inexcusable Failure yourself.

I called it "an antidote to the neocon job that's been foisted upon the American people."

That was last fall. Subsequently, the prolific Cordesman produced another epic from his D.C. aerie, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). It's called Playing the Course:A Strategy for Reshaping United States Policy in Iraq and the Middle East

When Lugar reconvened his committee after the holiday break and scheduled the first session for a discussion of Iraq, he didn't put on a dog-and-pony show for his fellow Republicans who control the White House and Congress. No, he invited a panel of three, all of them with strong establishment, even pro-war, credentials, but all of them also critics of the Bush regime's disastrous handling of Iraq. Besides Cordesman, there were retired General Gregory Newbold, former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Peter Khalil, an Australian who served as director of national security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority from August 2003 to May 2004.

Lugar introduced the three and praised Cordesman's Playing the Course as an "exceptional paper . . . to provide a framework for our discussion of policy issues in Iraq."

You can bet no neocon would praise Cordesman's views on Iraq as "exceptional," because he said:

[T]he odds of success in Iraq are at best even —if one accepts the fact that in the real world the only definition of success we can actually hope to achieve means some form of pluralistic Iraqi government that can work its way through years of political and economic difficulty without direct American military support.

And that's the good news. Known for his blunt talk, Cordesman ticked off—and I mean ticked off—"nine major mistakes" by the Bush regime:

• We went to war on the basis of the wrong intelligence and with a rationale we could not defend to the world or the Iraqis.

• We bypassed the interagency process. We ignored warning after warning by U.S. intelligence experts, State Department officials, military officers with experience in the region, and outside experts that we would not be greeted as liberators fighting a just war, but by a highly nationalistic and divided people who did not want outsiders and occupiers to determine their destiny.

• We planned and fought the war to remove Saddam from power without any meaningful plan for stability operations and nation building. We allowed political and economic chaos to take place as we advanced and in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's fall.

• We did not prepare our military forces for civil-military missions, to deal with terrorism and insurgency, to play the role of occupier in a nation with an alien religion, language and culture, or have the mix of HUMINT and weapons they needed for the "war after the war." As a result, we forced our military to slowly adapt under pressure and in the face of a growing enemy.

• For a year, we assumed that a proconsul in the form of the CPA could govern Iraq and plan its future, rather than Iraqis. We staffed much of the CPA with inexperienced political appointees and ideologues that spent virtually all of their time in a secure enclave and only served for brief three to six month tours.

• For a year, we developed idealized plans for political reform that did not survive engagement with reality. We focused far too much on national elections and drafting a constitution without having a similar focus on effective governance at the national, regional, and local levels.

• For a year, we had military leadership in Iraq that would not work closely with the leadership of the CPA, and which lived in a state of denial about the level of popular hostility we faced and a steadily growing insurgency.

• For a year, we made no serious attempt to create Iraqi military, security, and police forces that could stand on their own in dealing with a growing insurgency, terrorism, and lawlessness. Instead, we saw such Iraq forces largely as a potential threat to our idealized democracy and felt our forces could easily defeat an insurgency of 5,000-6,000 former regime loyalists.

• For a year, we tried to deal with an Iraqi economy that was a command kleptocracy as if it could be quickly and easily converted to a modern market-driven economy. We sent in CPA advisors with no real experience and no continuity. We created a ridiculous long-term aid plan without a meaningful understanding or survey of the economic problems Iraq faced, an understanding of Iraqi needs and expectations, and the talent in either the U.S. government or the contract community to implement such a plan or develop the kind of plans and programs focused on short- and medium-term requirements that Iraq actually needed.

Cordesman's criticism is shrugged off by the Bush regime and gets little play, and unfortunately his suggestions don't get publicized either. Like this passage:

In any case, even under the best conditions, we must leave in the next two to three years, and as soon as Iraqi forces can replace us. This is not a choice. Being an advisor and a friend is both possible and desirable. However, no policy in Iraq, this region, or the world can succeed where the U.S. seeks to keep bases or remains an “occupier.” We need to prepare for this contingency now, and the key to that preparation is two-fold:

First, it is to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that can ease the anger against us in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and ultimately give Israel true security.

Second, it is to rebuild and strengthen our relations with the Southern Gulf states and our other allies in the Arab world.

And Cordesman, the kind of pragmatic thinker missing in the current regime, noted:

We may well have to leave Iraq without achieving the limited definition of success I gave at the beginning of this testimony. If an elected Iraqi government asks us to leave, we must do so as quickly and with as much integrity as possible. The same is true if we are asked to compromise our military effectiveness or the integrity of our aid process.

Failure is an option, and will scarcely be the only time the U.S. has faced defeat. Abandonment, however, is not an option. If we are forced to leave Iraq, we should not do so in bitterness or in anger. We should be prepared to offer aid and assistance. We should make it clear that we will do what we can regardless of the circumstances. As Vietnam and China have shown, history endures long beyond anger and frustration, and so do our vital strategic interests.

The latest statistics on the nation's economic "recovery" since the burst of the dot-com bubble are enough to make ordinary Americans' blood vessels burst. As you listen to the incessant Godtalk from the Bush regime about "moral" this and "sin" that, corporations and their execs are taking immorally high profits out of our economy while you're going deeper into debt.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained in a report released yesterday:

A smaller share of the growth in national income during this recovery has gone to workers’ wages and salaries than in any other recovery since World War II.

Oh, and one other thing:

By contrast, the share of national income growth going to corporate profits has been higher than in any post-World War II recovery.

The center's report, based on the government's own stats, points out one other thing:

After-tax corporate profits have climbed to their highest levels as a share of national income since 1929.

Ah, that was a good year for Wall Street's blutocrats, wasn't it?

Here are some facts and figures from the center's new report: During the previous post–World War II recoveries, 49 percent of the "real income growth" went to wages and salaries and 18 percent to corporate profits. During this one, 23 percent has gone to wages and salaries and 44 percent to corporate profits.

You don't have to be a friggin' Marxist to complain about this.

Greed will always be a part of our existence, but shouldn't people be demanding that the government at least try to keep it from being excessive? Instead of stoking it, which is what the Bush regime does?

The center's report, co-authored by David Kamin and Isaac Shapiro, delves smartly into the side details of this current trend:

Because a relatively small part of the recent growth in national income has gone to wages and salaries, their share of the total national income has shrunk, from 55.0 percent in 2001 to 51.9 percent in 2004—the lowest level ever recorded, with annual data available back to 1929.

Even when employer contributions for workers’ insurance and pensions are added in, total labor compensation makes up a declining share of total national income.

And for a bunch of economists, they're pretty good at looking at the implications:

In addition, corporate taxes have declined over time. As a result of these two factors—rising corporate profits and declining corporate taxes—after-tax corporate profits have climbed to their highest levels as a share of national income since 1929.

The only people likely to jump out of windows in New York City these days are those who don't work on Wall Street.

Get ready for a real religious war. Ultra-conservative Pope Benedict XVI's close allies in the U.S. reach high into the Bush regime and other conservative institutions.

Financed by people like former Domino's Pizza mogul Tom Monaghan (a huge contributor of campaign cash to Bush boys Dubya and Jeb), they'll be delivering an unprecedented crusade against Muslims, abortion, gays, and anything all you godless atheists out there hold sacred.

You'll just have to live with the news announced by the Vatican:

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam:

Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger qui sibi nomen imposuit Benedictum XVI.

In other words: We've got a winner! Joe Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI!

So if you have anything to confess to the new pope, e-mail it now.

This is not a conspiracy theory that's unfolding. It's real. Admirers of Bush, Monaghan, and the new pope might say to me, "Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris." To which I can only say, "Absit invidia."

To continue: One of Pope Benny's prominent former students is Father Joe Fessio, the head of Monaghan's chain of Ave Maria colleges, which now include a law school and college in Michigan and a huge new campus and university town near Naples, Florida. Antonin Scalia has already been a "Justice in Residence" at the law school and makes frequent speeches sponsored by Ave Maria. He has also "consulted" with Monaghan on the start-up phase of the new Florida campus. Clarence Thomas gave the school's first law lecture in 1999 and the school's commencement address in 2003. John Ashcroft (an evangelical Protestant) sent a special videotaped greeting during that 2003 ceremony.

Other Catholic fundamentalists are making inroads in the corridors of power. The Reverend John McCloskey, whom Garry Wills described in the National Catholic Reporter in 2002 as the spokesman for the secretive far-right Catholic big-cigar group Opus Dei, shocked D.C. by converting right-wing congressman Sam Brownback to Catholicism in July 2002. Slate's Chris Suellentrop dubbed McCloskey the church's "K Street lobbyist" and added:

McCloskey is a native Washingtonian, an Ivy Leaguer who graduated from Columbia and a former Wall Streeter who worked at Citibank and Merrill Lynch. As a result, he travels comfortably in elite circles, and his ministry is focused on them: on young priests and seminarians (the intellectual elite in many Catholic communities), on college students at elite universities and "strong countercultural" Catholic institutions, and on "opinion-makers and people of influence." The self-described supply-sider has a top-down strategy to transform the culture, too. He wants to turn Blue America into Red.

McCloskey has also converted Bob Novak (of Plamegate fame) and other celebrities.

I know. You might say, "It's just another pope. And so he's conservative. And so he has friends, allies, and disciples way high up in the U.S. government and power structure. So what? Stercus accidit."

But this is deep stercus for all of us—more warfare, more religious warfare, more fanatically religious warfare on battlefields and in courtrooms and classrooms.

For the first time in centuries, right-wing Catholics and right-wing Protestants (like Ashcroft and the Bushes) are openly, publicly joining hands in their march to political power.

If you're a demon, or you engage in any demon-like behavior, you'll get a lot of exorcise—you'll be running away quickly from the coming "moral" crusade.

For all the smoke about morality, this surge of fundamentalist Catholicism is about power. And when it comes to its battle with Islam, that's a war of numbers. During Pope John Paul II's long reign, Catholics fell to No. 2, behind Islam, in adherents.

Only yesterday—even before this new ill papa was picked—three reporters at the Wall Street Journal teamed up to write a riveting preview of the battle between Islam and Catholicism—a battle that also threatens those of us who aren't Muslims or Catholics.

For now, what's fascinating are the new alliances between right-wing Catholics and right-wing Protestants. The Schiavo circus was just the latest to bring these former enemies under the same big tent.

Monaghan sold Domino's for a huge fortune and now devotes practically all of his money to political endeavors, like building his chain of right-wing Catholic colleges. They're not cheesy, either (see photo below).

But shiny new buildings in southwest Florida aren't Monaghan's point. Enforcing a rigid form of Catholicism is. Burton Bollag explored Monaghan's startling burst of philanthropy to that end in "Who is Catholic?," an April 2004 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

After a quarter century in which no new Catholic colleges were established, most of those being founded now are led by traditionalists who feel the majority of America's 230 Catholic colleges have strayed from the truth of the Catholic faith.

The Rev. Joseph D. Fessio, a Jesuit and Ave Maria's chancellor, shares that view. He is bitterly critical of the University of San Francisco, the Jesuit institution where he taught for almost two decades, for such decisions as hiring a gay former priest as head of marriage-and-family counseling, and allowing students to stage the play The Vagina Monologues. In a fund-raising appeal for Ave Maria he wrote, "Many Catholic institutions ... have ceased to be places where the fullness of Catholic truth is joyfully and vigorously taught, defended and proclaimed."

And who was Fessio's mentor? The former Joe Ratzinger. Bollag wrote:

As a young theology teacher at the University of San Francisco in the mid-1970s, [Fessio] founded the St. Ignatius Institute to promote a great-books education, in response to a liberalizing of the university's curriculum. Two years later he founded Ignatius Press to publish conservative Catholic thinkers, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog and Father Fessio's mentor since the time he did his doctoral studies at the University of Regensburg, in Germany.

Many at San Francisco viewed Father Fessio and the small group around him as doctrinaire elitists who opposed the university's attempts to engage with modern society.

The rebellious Fessio was fired and demoted by the Jesuits to hospital chaplain, but his conservative friends in Rome interceded:

Mr. Monaghan and Ave Maria University's president, Nicholas J. Healy Jr., appealed to the Superior General of the Jesuits, in Rome, who agreed to allow Father Fessio to join the new university as its chancellor.

Fessio, backed by all that pizza money, is delivering a rigid education:

The new orthodox colleges are often seen as attempts to recreate the more structured and insular Catholic higher education of the 1950s, with its clear answers and great certainties. [Patrick J.] Reilly, [president of the conservative] Cardinal Newman Society, says that's not the case. "There is an understanding that free academic interchange is a central part of academic education," he says. But within limits. Students at the new institutions will be allowed to debate controversial issues like abortion and gay rights in class, he says, but professors will be expected to uphold the church's orthodoxy. "Faculty members," he says, "would not debate."

Indeed, for many of those involved with the new colleges, the Vatican's doctrine represents the truth, period. "I love the church," says Ave Maria's Father Fessio. "It means everything to me. I don't understand people who want to change things."

Yeah, right. Change is in the air, and the fundamentalist Catholics like Fessio and the new pope are eager to "change things"—not to mention people and their behavior.

The Wall Street Journal story I mentioned briefly above, "Islam's Global Gains Pressure Catholics to Rethink Strategy," noted that the Roman Catholic Church had extended an olive branch to Islam for the past 40 years, trying to "lay to rest its 1,400-year history of conflict with Islam." But that has "backfired," according to the story, written by Gabriel Kahn, Keith Johnson, and Andrés Cala. (If you have access to the Journal, click here.) They wrote:

While some Muslims have embraced the call for dialogue, many Catholics now fret that the conciliatory approach has tied the church's hands, preventing it from keeping up with Islam's rapid growth, particularly in parts of the world once dominated by Catholicism.

The Journal pointed out that in 1970, there were 666 million Roman Catholics (I know, it's a weird number, right?) and 553 million Muslims. By 2000, the number of Catholics had risen nearly 60 percent, to 1.1 billion—but the number of Muslims had risen 115 percent, to 1.2 billion. Being overtaken by another conservative institution is intolerable to the Vatican, so forget about that ecumenical bullshit emanating from the Catholic Church to Islam. As the Journal story noted:

The concerns underscore how Islam is looming as one of the defining issues for Catholicism in the 21st century, in much the same way that communism was in the last century. Islam offers a new type of challenge, one to which the church is still struggling to find a way to respond.

The former Soviet empire was easier to paint as an enemy, with its armies spread across Eastern Europe, repressive political system, and atheist ideology. Islam's rise is more difficult to counter because it is a religious faith with many things in common with Christianity, including shared roots that both religions, along with Judaism, trace back to the prophet Abraham in the ancient Middle East.

Now more conservative than under John Paul II, the church will likely strengthen its recent alliances with conservative Protestants—like America's evangelical Christians, who grew up hating the Catholic Church—to battle the Muslims.

Catholics like Garry Wills have written reams about how the Roman Catholic Church was already growing more conservative under John Paul II and how the powerful Ratzinger was plumb reactionary. The danger is when conservative religious figures are more reactionary than religious and when they venture further and further into non-religious matters to prove how hidebound they are. Wills wrote in the 2002 National Catholic Reporter essay:

Some people, not all of them Catholic, think that the supreme task and glory of the Catholic church is to oppose the world, to throw up a bulwark of changelessness against the giddy whirl of modernity.

That is what Malcolm Muggeridge liked about the church—its secular usefulness to conservatism.

Some take this instrumental approach to all things Catholic. They do not stress the natural law arguments for opposing contraception (a good thing, too, given the weakness of those arguments) but the fact that it goes against hedonistic culture of sexual permissiveness—as if it did not trivialize that opposition by saying one need not have intellectual integrity so long as you are critical of lust.

Father Richard John Neuhaus has said that any arguments for a married priesthood cannot be considered on their own merits at the moment, because this would be seen as giving in to the modern mood.

That kind of fear and fanaticism against "the world" was the Pius IX position, and what John XXIII tried to free us from in his opening and updating.

A mindless opposition to the new has crippled the church in the past, as when it did not see the merits of printing, literacy and the vernacular during the Reformation.

Concerning Ratzinger himself, Wills wrote in 2002:

Cardinal Ratzinger has opposed the . . . term "the people of God" as a "catchword" hiding "a Marxist myth." He has opposed liturgical reforms, urging that the eucharistic meal not be called a meal, that the altar be turned around and the priest faced away from the people, that the Marxist myth be fought in such prayers as "Look not on our sins"—it should be individualistic "Look not on my sins." That means that Ratzinger must condemn the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us." In fact the prayer is communal in ways that must strike Ratzinger's fine sniffing apparatus for incipient Marxism: "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

I admire how Wills always tries to parse his own Catholicism. There are plenty of religious people out there who aren't wild-eyed radicals seeking to convert others or trying to legislate people's behavior. These days, the problem is that some religious nuts have weapons and others control governments, which have even more weapons.

The last epoch formally called the Crusades may seem like a thousand years ago. But considering that religious warfare seems to be on the increase these days, we have reason to be frightened about Ratzinger's ascension.

As the old saying goes, "Abyssus abyssum invocat."

Especially with all these self-righteous politicians pandering to people's superstitions and fears—you know, ad captandum vulgus.

Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. *

* Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.

Will the Senate Judiciary Committee vote yea or nay on John Bolton today? If it's yea, then the full Senate will definitely confirm, so today's expected action will say it all.

Actually, what says it all about Bolton is that he's a career obstructionist, first on behalf of the Reaganites and now for Bush Jr. He has hopped around in government "service" and inexplicably gained power and clout. Well, maybe not inexplicably. He has often fought Congress and the public to try to keep his bosses' dealings secret. Following is just a brief glimpse of part of his work during the Reagan Administration:

March 1986: Newsday's Rita Ciolli writes that the personal financial documents of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, a big pal of the Reagans who fled the U.S., "reveal a blueprint of his corrupt regime and how the billions of dollars in ill-gotten wealth were hidden in bank accounts and shielded in real estate worldwide."

Just like any number of tinpot dictators the current neocon regime cuddles up to, like Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.

The 2,100 pages of Marcos documents, full of juicy info about alleged kickbacks and other chicanery involving U.S. firms and politicians, had been seized by U.S. Customs officials when the royal couple fled the Philippines for Hawaii. Naturally the White House wanted to stop their release. And who was given that task? From the Newsday story:

In a letter to [Marcos critic congressman Stephen] Solarz, Assistant Attorney General John Bolton said immediate release of the papers could hurt "both existing federal criminal investigations and any future investigations which may develop from information contained in the documents."

Sources said Justice officials could have sought a court order to stop the release, but did not want to appear to be protecting the Marcoses.

July 1986: The Senate Judiciary Committee, considering Reagan's nomination of Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States, tiptoes around the topic of Rehnquist's past health problems. The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Wermiel wrote:

Mr. Rehnquist attempted to keep his hospitalization secret in 1982 and has refused to discuss it since then, taking the position that his health isn't a matter of public interest.

Bolton makes an appearance in another unhealthy aspect of the Rehnquist matter. Typically, Bolton brought his stonewalling equipment with him. The Houston Chronicle explained:

The confirmation hearing on William Rehnquist's nomination as chief justice of the Supreme Court took an unusual twist when President Reagan invoked executive privilege to prevent Democratic senators from reviewing memos the nominee wrote while working at the Justice Department during the Nixon administration.

The documents dealt with issues including civil rights, civil liberties, wiretapping and surveillance of radical groups.

Reagan's decision to claim executive privilege was disclosed in testimony by Assistant Attorney General John Bolton, after Judiciary Committee Democrats objected to the Justice Department's refusal to provide access to the documents.

Start of digression: Bolton has always been a stonewaller— with a heart to match, judging by the number of people his abrasive manner has pissed off. (See my colleague Jason Vest's April 14 piece, "Wanted: Complete Asshole for U.N. Ambassador.")

It's not hard to fathom why today's Democrats have had such a tough time mustering up the goods to stop Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. It probably has to do with the fact that he spent his so much of his early career as a sleazy government lawyer trying to stonewall the press and public. He was just doing his job. Well, that's fine; someone has to do it. But that career choice doesn't qualify him for the important diplomatic post of U.N. ambassador. In fact, it disqualifies him. End of digression.

Let's go back to '86, when the Democrats were pissed at Bolton's stonewalling on behalf of Rehnquist. The Chronicle explained:

Bolton stressed that the claim covered only highly confidential internal memorandums by Rehnquist at a time when he was acting virtually as President Nixon's lawyer.

From 1969-71, Rehnquist was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice on critical issues to the attorney general and to the president. At the time, John N. Mitchell was attorney general.

Ted Kennedy, according to the Chronicle, called the Bolton argument "hogwash":

Kennedy said the memos were critical because they were written "on the eve of Watergate" and could reveal Rehnquist's thoughts on key civil rights questions.

Yeah, good luck on finding that out. It's the same charade today as it was back then. Orrin Hatch, at the time a feisty, fairly young senator from Utah, was quoted by the Chronicle as calling the opponents' quest for documents "a fishing expedition":

The reason they're so excited about fishing is they really don't have anything to stop the nominee.

October 1986: The Justice Department, headed by Edwin Meese, decides not to prosecute John McKean, chairman of the Postal Service Board of Governors, who was accused of violating conflict-of-interest laws. John Bolton, variously referred to throughout the year as either a regular assistant A.G. or as the Justice Department's legislative lobbyist (same difference) explained it away, as this Wall Street Journal excerpt noted:

In a letter to the committee on the decision, Assistant Attorney General John Bolton said the department won't take action because of the "absence of any evidence of venality" and because "administrative action" is available. Rep. William Ford (D., Mich.), the committee's chairman, said he will ask the department to explain those references.

No chance of that happening. But you're saying: This seems like a minor deal, right? Wrong. The Journal story noted that McKean's only comment on the decision was that he "has confidence in the Justice Department process." The story continued:

Mr. McKean also figured in a controversy surrounding Attorney General Edwin Meese. Mr. McKean, a San Francisco accountant, arranged a $40,000 loan for Mr. Meese, who later supported him for the Postal Service appointment. Mr. McKean also arranged a $60,000 loan to the wife of former White House aide Michael Deaver.

In 1983, the GAO and the Office of Government Ethics investigated those loans and Mr. McKean's relationship to Messrs. Meese and Deaver. As a result of that probe, Mr. Meese corrected what were termed technical problems with his financial disclosure statement.

When the Justice Department reviewed the GAO report, it said there weren't any criminal violations and further investigation wasn't warranted.

Bolton was doing the smart thing: trying to stonewall so that no one would have to testify. The Reagan gang often got into deep legal trouble when they had to testify. Deaver, for instance, later got a prison sentence (suspended) for lying to Congress.

March 1987: Playing Post Office is one thing, but Iran-Contra was a grown-up scandal, requiring more sophisticated stonewalling. The Washington Post reported:

House and Senate investigators have been blocked by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh from obtaining Justice Department records on the delay last fall of an FBI inquiry into arms shipments to Nicaraguan contras.

The holdup of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe is one of four cases over which Walsh had assumed jurisdiction by late last week. The Justice Department has referred at least 52 investigations, most involving arms transactions, to Walsh's office for review since he was appointed by a special three-judge federal court.

Oh, what a sticky mess Iran-Contra was. Bolton was right in the middle of the stonewalling effort, of course. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post story back then by George Lardner Jr. and Dan Morgan:

[O]n Feb. 25, Assistant Attorney General John R. Bolton informed the House select committee in a six-page letter of the Justice Department's inability to supply a wide range of requested records.

One category that Bolton cited as under Walsh's control concerned "records relating to the delay of ongoing investigations relating to the contras, and any assistance provided to them, in particular the Southern Air investigations."

The FBI began an inquiry into Southern Air's role in ferrying weapons to Iran and to U.S.-backed rebel forces in Nicaragua last Oct. 6, the day after an unmarked C-123 cargo plane financed and serviced by Southern Air was shot down in Nicaragua. The Justice Department asked the FBI on Oct. 30 to delay the inquiry, ostensibly on the grounds that Southern Air was then involved in a "sensitive mission" in the Middle East. The delay continued until Nov. 26.

Walsh declined comment on his stance yesterday, but it has been drawing expressions of dissatisfaction from Capitol Hill, along with growing calls for grants of immunity to key figures in the probe such as former National Security Council aide Oliver L. North.

Check out the Wikipedia page on Iran-Contra for more info and links.

May 1987: By this time, the shit's hittin' the fan in Iran-Contra. As the Boston Globe's Steve Kurkjian reported:

President Reagan can order the independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, to provide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North with immunity in his investigation of the Iran-contra affair and can fire Walsh if he refuses to do so, a Justice Department official told Congress in a letter . . . .

And who was that Justice Department official? Here's more from the Globe story:

In answering a hypothetical question, Assistant Attorney General John R. Bolton stated that by refusing to follow Reagan's directions on providing full immunity to North, Walsh could be liable for dismissal under the independent counsel law, which calls for such removals for "good cause."

Also, Bolton said, Reagan could, in effect, provide such immunity to North on his own by granting to his former National Security Council aide a pardon under Reagan's constitutional powers.

June 1987: Bolton the attack dog. That's a style we've heard about during his confirmation hearings in 2005. It's not a deal breaker, to my mind. His sleazy actions then and now are. According to a 1987 story by the Washington Post's Mary McGrory, Bolton "complained bitterly about Lawrence Walsh's "lifestyle," referring to his fancy offices on the public dime.

March 1988: Bolton gets a new job at Justice: head of the Civil Division. He had been the assistant A.G. in charge of congressional liaison.

What's laughable about that, in light of Bolton's current battle through Senate confirmation, is that in '88 Bolton got to escape a confirmation hearing—see, he not only helped stonewall documents and testimony by others and all that, but he also didn't want to go through the public process himself.

Here's how the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wryly reported it back then:

Question: When does a nominee to a position requiring Senate confirmation not have to submit to the confirmation process?

Answer: When the nominee has already been confirmed by the Senate.

That bit of confirmation trivia comes courtesy of Attorney General Edwin Meese III's recent decision to appoint John R. Bolton, now the assistant attorney general in charge of congressional liaison, as head of the Justice Department's Civil Division. Because Bolton is simply trading one assistant attorney generalship for another, he does not have to go through the confirmation process again.

Marcus added this context:

While there is some precedent for leap-frogging the confirmation process, Senate sources said some committee members—particularly ranking Republican Strom Thurmond (S.C.)—were miffed to have learned of the planned appointment in the press rather than receiving a courtesy call from the Justice Department to clear the move.

Thurmond was miffed? Maybe Bolton really is the right choice for the U.N. job.

Spc. Ismail Turay Jr./Defense Dept.

Hope you didn't miss that important April 13 deadline. I'm talking about the date when applications closed for the World Bank job of Manager of External Affairs and Outreach for the Middle East and North Africa.

The "acting manager," of course is Shaha Ali Riza, gal pal of incoming World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. It's an important job, extremely high profile. It's safe to say she'll probably get the post permanently.

And this is a tough job, being the Bank's chief spokesperson in the Middle East, according to the official description sent to me by faithful mole W.B. Staffer One. The job description notes:

The Bank's reputation remains at risk due to the continued conflict, the importance of the region in oil resources and geopolitical interests.

But it's made for a neocon like Riza. According to the job description, this is the task of the "Adviser":

Working across the matrix with country and sector management, the Adviser will develop a strong and cohesive team of communications and partnership staff . . .

And the Adviser must have:

Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in a matrix environment, both as team leader and team member . . .

Yes, Wolfowitz's girlfriend qualifies to be part of the matrix. How about your sons and daughters? Do they qualify?

The U.S. military is desperately looking for a few hundred thousand soldiers. Sharpen your killing skills with America's Army, the Pentagon's official military video game. The home page for it notes that "America's Army is Rated 'T' for Teen."

Sweet.

You can check out another MATRIX here. It's the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, which is "a pilot effort to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies." Thank God that New York has dropped out of it. (If you really want to find out about this scary thing, read the Electronic Privacy Information Center's analysis of it.)

The military and the Justice Department aren't the only ones running factory farms that are "all around you." Check out the brilliant video on the Meatrix. You'll be in hog heaven.