Charles M. Smith, the Pentagon official in charge of the Halliburton Iraq contract, uncovered a billion dollars of unjustified spending by the Texas company. As James Risen reported in the NYT, he was fired for his pains. And so he should have been. The story recalls the time when Pentagon auditors called Halliburton’s charge of $27 million for fuel that cost the company $82,000 "illogical." As if we needed more evidence that auditors are mere bean counters.  Unimaginative drones, they lack the vision, imagination, and talent essential in the world of modern business.

On Wednesday 5/11/05, three years and eight months to the day after 9/11/01, the capital was on red alert, under threat by an unidentified aircraft minutes from the White House.  The House and Senate were evacuated.  White House staff, including the Vice President and the First Lady, were hustled to secure bunkers.  F16s were scrambled, a Blackhawk helicopter intercept went aloft, the National Guard was called out, and Washington, DC was in full panic mode.

There are few more important contemporary documents than the agenda of the President of the United States.  History turns on what the President does, whom he sees, and when.  The White House Chief of Staff generally controls the President’s schedule, but only when the chief executive is actually on the job.  In the case of Mr. Bush, a President who has spent much of his time in office on vacation, an obscure government agency handles most of the responsibility for the President’s daily doings.

The Bureau of Land Management has decided to freeze all solar energy projects on government land pending environmental impact studies. That means no more big solar initiatives for two years or so. With oil at $140 a barrel, the decision might seem counterintuitive. There is after all enough sunshine in the 1.6 million acres of the Mojave National Preserve to power the entire nation. Furthermore, at the same time the government is worried about the environmental impact of solar panels in national parks, Mr. Bush is demanding that we drill for oil in national parks. But there is no paradox here and critics of the B.L.M. are unjust and wrong-headed. As usual, the administration knows exactly what it’s doing.

I quite dislike that John McCain
For reasons easy to explain
It’s not at all his death’s head grin,
Nor his oratory made of tin
Not so much his corrupt cronies
Nor his morals, so very phony.

The problem I’ve with John McCain
Has more to do with his refrain
In which he does us all entreat
To fear the prospect of defeat
Of the Republican nominee
Who just happens to be he.

This is cause for trepidation
Rather than for celebration
Because, says McCain himself,
If we return him to the shelf
And elect that other guy
Without a doubt we all will die.

In London the other day President Bush remarked that he intended to write his memoirs. He promises to include all the highlights of his life to date. His mischievous youth torturing small animals and insects in Texas. His glorious cheerleading days at Andover. The fun he had going AWOL in the national guard. The heroic struggle to get through Yale and Harvard with passing grades. The heavy drinking, the failed businesses, Jesus, redemption, the highest office in the land, surviving a deadly pretzel. The self-reported highlight of his tenure in office: catching a large fish in the Crawford estate lake. This is the stuff of epic, a certain bestseller and instant classic.

American Conservatism:  An Encyclopedia is in bookstores everywhere, more or less. I haven’t noticed a copy in my local store, but then San Francisco may not be its best market. With nine-hundred and ninety-seven pages of red blooded, red state ideas, the volume is a must have for right thinking Americans.  According to a reviewin the New York Times, the work is rich in universal truths, such as that Bill Clinton was "corrupt," whereas Ronald Reagan was "vigorous and principled."  The "courtesy and dignity" of segregationist senator Strom Thurmond and the virtues of segregationist governor George Wallace are duly lauded, while the encyclopedists are ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.

George W. Bush often says he’s a hopeful person. In yesterday’s radio address he hoped to blame Congress for high oil prices. Congress according to Bush prevents oil drilling off the coasts, oil drilling in national parks, turning shale into oil, and the building of new refineries. All of which would allow us to fully exploit our estimated 3% of world oil reserves. That would be in about ten years time and even then the effect on oil prices will be negligible. That’s because producing all 3% of our estimated world reserves would do nothing to cut our consumption of 25% of world oil production. It’s a good thing Bush is a hopeful person because he’s not very good at math.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once promised the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution an "aggressive prosecution of the purveyors of obscenity."  His successor Michael Mukasey told Orrin Hatch during his confirmation hearings that he’d devote more FBI resources to "mainstream obscenity prosecutions." Some might consider this a peculiar priority in a world plagued by disease, violence, ignorance, and injustice.  Do exposed flesh and improper language really pose the same kind of threat as bloodthirsty terrorists?  Is smut truly as urgent a problem for the Justice Department as our enormous and growing prison population, now the highest per capita in the world?

Real wages have declined for five years, even for the 90th percentile of earners.  But for the top 1%, these are boom times.  Corporate profits are also at record levels.  The rich are getting a lot richer, and everybody else, the low and middle wager earner alike, is getting steadily poorer.  Big media, including the New York Times, usually retails the party line on this phenomenon, blaming workers’ lack of bargaining power.  Also the high cost of medical benefits, which absorb an ever larger share of pay packages.  Henry M. Paulson Jr., our Secretary of the Treasury, had the last word, neatly summarizing the Fox News view of the growing impoverishment of  nine tenths of American households.  "It is neither fair nor useful to blame any particular political party" he admonished back in ‘06.

In New York John McCain said he’s very angry with the oil companies for their obscene profits. In Houston McCain announced he wants to give our coastlines to the oil companies so they can make more profits. A pattern? Indeed. In a variant of P.T. Barnum’s "there’s one born every minute," McCain calls it leadership we can believe in.

Now that John McCain has done a double-back flip on warrantless wiretaps, reversing his clear stand of 2006 when he said that the Bush eavesdropping program was illegal, it's more important than ever to understand what's really involved. Will Bush-McCain domestic wiretapping affect our daily lives? Let's go behind the scenes of the program and find out.

George W. Bush didn’t study underwater basket weaving in college. The White House web site baldly states that W. was a history major at Yale. He even graduated, which means he must have learned something. Doesn’t it? If you graduate don’t you have to pass most of your courses, even in New Haven? Apparently actual experts in the field of history, Bush’s Yale professors, judged him sufficiently knowledgeable about the facts of times past to earn his degree. The question is, just what were they teaching in the Yale history department forty years ago?

John McCain
PO Box 7802
Merrifield, VA 22116

Dear John McCain,

Thank you for yours of May 12th. You write that you "are in the most important fight of your life" for the "core principals of individual freedom, small government, and unflagging dedication to defending our nation" and ask for my financial support. Before I send a check, I ask that you clarify a few points about your policies and beliefs. Forgive me for relying on Michael Tomasky’s excellent piece in the New York Review of Books, Who is John McCain, but you appear to have changed your mind so many times about so many things that I needed Tomasky’s help to keep it all straight.

"We’ve got Cheneys on both sides of the family – and we’re not even from West Virginia!" Thus did Dick Cheney launch his post vice presidential career as a stand-up comic. He’s been working on his material, and we found him hard at it in his West Wing office, scribbling, talking to himself, trying his jokes out loud, laughing heartily. Some require a little more work, even if the vice president thinks they are all without exception absolute screamers:

The most influential official in the Bush administration is also the least known.  Wolf J. Flywheel is White House Logician in Chief.  Operating from a small West Wing office equipped with nothing but a telephone, pads of paper, and boxes of number two pencils, Mr. Flywheel works out the logic behind every administration policy.  The difficulties inherent in this task are evidenced by Mr. Flywheel’s appearance.  A nondescript bureaucrat when he took up his position, over time his thickening eyebrows, thinning hair, slouching walk, and ever-present cigar have made him the spitting image of Groucho Marx.  After toiling in complete obscurity for seven years, and now that he has agreed to serve a McCain administration at the express wish of the candidate himself, Mr. Flywheel agreed to his first interview:

John McCain's base? That's what Chris Matthews calls the press. What seemed an egregious example of the phenomenon caught my eye in the NYT yesterday and I wrote to their Talk to the Newsroom feature. Below is my letter and NYT News Editor Paul Winfield's response. Did he address my point? You be the judge.

John McCain is promising his base a smooth continuation of GOP governance. But what have the last seven years of the Bush administration truly wrought? "If the American people really want to know what George W. Bush is up to, the best place to look is the candor of Grover Norquist," once said Ralph G. Neas, the President of People for the American Way. We caught up with the globe-trotting Mr. Norquist as he strolled through a devastated village in Burma.  He was carrying a large bundle of tee shirts, each emblazoned with the logo of his Leave-Us-Alone Coalition.  The logo is a composite picture of the White House and dome of the Senate, enclosed by a red circle with a diagonal red slash across its diameter.  The fat, bearded man was sweating heavily in the sultry South Asian heat.