Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

Astute reades will have noticed that we went on vacation without mentioning it. Our bad.

Anyway, we're back and can't help wondering how anyone could ever have thought we be able to invade and control Iraq when we can't even do that at home.

Christopher Hitchens thinks that Cindy Sheehan is

"...an hysterical paranoid ideologist, or at least being manipulated by people who...turned this into camp fruitbag and nutbag..."

Cindy Sheehan has more nutbag than Christopher Hitchens ever did. She went to Crawford and took on Dorian Gray Jr. in person while craven armchair hawks like Hitchens sit around and defend their disastrous war policy -- even as the death toll passes 1,800 servicemen, and Iraq careens towards civil war.

201k would rather have Cindy Sheehan with us in a fight than the pathetic Hitchens any day.

Any day.

Joan Walsh is one of Salon's best writers, and she does a great job in her latest cover article. But she misses one point for lack of cynicism--which just so happens to be the specialty of the house around here.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but it felt to me as if with Bush's latest remarks about Sheehan over the weekend, the clownish lightweight his critics know and despise was beginning to shine through for all to see. If you haven't already, take a moment to ponder what he told Cox News about why he could find time for a bike ride on Saturday but not to meet with Sheehan:

"I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say. But I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life ... I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy. And part of my being is to be outside exercising. So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so."

You don't have to be Cindy Sheehan to think that yammering on about "staying healthy" and living a "balanced life" while so many are suffering and dying in Iraq is unthinkably cruel, as well as unbelievably politically tone deaf. When I read Bush's quote -- I read it over and over -- I found myself wondering not just about his character but about his fundamental emotional health. It's as if he's confessing he couldn't stay "balanced" if he had to confront Sheehan's grief, and even worse, her questions about why her son died.

Perhaps Walsh didn't attend prep school, which would explain her failure to recognize rich-kid obnoxiousness when she sees it. Bush wasn't being tone-deaf, he was being an a-hole. He was speaking not to the nation or to Cindy Sheehan, but directly to his buddies, saying, "Yeah, I'd like to meet with her but I have to go ride my bike."

The key to understanding a man like George Bush--and what he meant by his seemingly impolitic remarks--is to realize that he doesn't give a s*** about Cindy Sheehan, her dead son, anyone else's dead kid, or, in fact, any U.S. soldier anywhere. He really doesn't.

If he did, he wouldn't have sent them to Iraq.

The reason his remark seemed odd to Walsh is that he wasn't trying to make sense--he wasn't even speaking to her. He was making a joke for the likes of Scooter and Rummy.

Just wanted to mention that we read this article and didn't get ONE reference. Not one.

We read every word and had no freaking idea what the hell she was talking about. It was like another language.

Paul Krugman is now flat-out calling George Bush a liar.

Paul Krugman is pretty much always right, in case you hadn't noticed. Lately he's started hinting strongly that the housing bubble is doomed. So keep your head up.

Robert Pear of the Times reports that Judge Rosemary M. Collyer decided on Saturday that the delusional corporate ideologues of the Bush Administration can't use the "War on Terror" as a pretext for eliminating labor rights they've been scheming to get rid of since they were nasty Young Republicans during the Nixon Administration.

Judge Collyer, who was appointed by President Bush, [said] the Bush administration exceeded even the "broad authority" granted by Congress.

Under the personnel rules, Judge Collyer said, "the Department of Homeland Security may be required to bargain in good faith," but "there is no effective way to hold it to that bargain." Under such circumstances, she said, "a deal is not a deal, a contract is not a contract, and the process of collective bargaining is a nullity."

In other words, Judge Collyer said, "collective bargaining would be on quicksand" because the department could unilaterally "absolve itself of contract obligations" while employees and their unions would be bound by those agreements.

"The Department of Homeland Security has reserved for itself the right to declare any part of any collective bargaining agreement null and void" by issuing directives or taking "whatever other actions may be necessary to carry out the department's mission," she said.

Judge Collyer also criticized procedures adopted by the Bush administration to dismiss, demote and discipline employees of the Department of Homeland Security.

These rules, she said, do not provide "fair treatment" or "due process" for employees who appeal disciplinary actions.

Judge Collyer has experience in labor law. President Ronald Reagan appointed her general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, a position she held from 1984 to 1989. The procedures at the Homeland Security Department, she said, do not meet any definition of collective bargaining.

"Collective bargaining," she said, "has at least one irreducible minimum that is missing" at the department: a binding contract.

"A system of 'collective bargaining' that permits the unilateral repudiation of agreements by one party is not collective bargaining at all," she said.

Wow, she's clearly a looney. Another nutty activist judge putting the law above GOP talking points. Can't wait to see what the right-wing smear machine does to her.

America is on your side.

A somewhat disturbing preoccupation with his soul--or maybe, his career--but perhaps the best guitar work yet from Richard Thompson--and that's saying something.

...is back.


Yay!

Mom of Slain GI Holds Vigil in Crawford

By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer

August 07,2005 | CRAWFORD, Texas -- The mother of a fallen U.S. soldier who is holding a roadside peace vigil near President Bush's ranch shares the same grief as relatives mourning the deaths of Ohio Marines, yet their views about the war differ.

"I'm angry. I want the troops home," Cindy Sheehan, 48, of Vacaville, Calif., who staged a protest that she vowed on Sunday to continue until she can personally ask Bush: "Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?"

Sheehan was among grieving military families who met with Bush in June 2004 at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, Wash. That was just two months after her son, Casey, was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004.

Since then, she said, various government and independent commission reports have disputed the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had mass-killing chemical and biological weapons -- a main justification for the March 2003 invasion.

"I was still in shock then," Sheehan said in a telephone interview.

"All of those reports prove my son died needlessly," said Sheehan. "This proved that every reason George Bush gave us for going to war was wrong."

Sheehan, who formed a group called Gold Star Families For Peace and has spoken out against the war across the nation, talked for about 45 minutes on Saturday with Steve Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, and Joe Hagin, deputy White House chief of staff, who went out to hear her concerns.

Appreciative of their attention, yet undaunted, Sheehan said she planned to continue her protest along the road during Bush's stay through the end of the month.

"If he doesn't come out and talk to me in Crawford, I'll follow him to D.C.," she said. "I'll camp on his lawn in D.C. until he has the courtesy and the integrity and the compassion to talk to somebody whose life he has ruined."

He doesn't understand, ma'am, because George W. Bush has never paid any price for anything he's ever done in his life -- ever.

So much for that.

August 4, 2005
President Makes It Clear Phrase Is 'War on Terror'

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
GRAPEVINE, Tex., Aug. 3 - President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

In a speech here, Mr. Bush used the phrase "war on terror" no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the "global struggle against violent extremism," the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.

In recent public appearances, Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers have avoided formulations using the word "war," and some of Mr. Bush's top advisers have suggested that the administration wanted to jettison what had been its semiofficial wording of choice, "the global war on terror."

In an interview last week about the new wording, Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said that the conflict was "more than just a military war on terror" and that the United States needed to counter "the gloomy vision" of the extremists and "offer a positive alternative."

But administration officials became concerned when some news reports linked the change in language to signals of a shift in policy. At the same time, Mr. Bush, by some accounts, told aides that he was not happy with the new phrasing, a change of tone from the wording he had consistently used since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It is not clear whether the new language embraced by other administration officials was adopted without Mr. Bush's approval or whether he reversed himself after the change was made. Either way, he planted himself on Wednesday firmly on the side of framing the conflict primarily in military terms and appeared intent on emphasizing that there had been no change in American policy.

Ok, so here's what we think happened: Karen Huges returned to the team and came up with "the global conflict against violent extremism" and everyone--except Karl Rove--agreed. GWB went along because he'll do whatever anyone tells him, and because Rove held his tongue (for once).

A week later, newspapers in hand, Rove convinced him it had been a bad idea all along, and GWB agreed. So now everyone on the team is in retreat, trying to have it both ways.

Rejoice, patriotic Americans--the wheels are falling off the totalitarian bus that is the Bush White House.

Turns out it isn't the liberal culture of Massachusetts that enabled priests to be sexual predators for decades.

It was the Ohio police.

What a surprise.

August 1, 2005
Bush Appoints Bolton as U.N. Envoy, Bypassing Senate

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
President Bush bypassed the Senate confirmation process today and appointed John R. Bolton as the new United States ambassador to the United Nations.

The appointment, while Congress is in recess, ends a months-long standoff between the White House and Senate Democrats who deem Mr. Bolton unfit for the job and have been holding up his confirmation.

Bolton is the one who lied on his confirmation application, saying he has not been interviewed in any current investigation when he in fact has. He's also the one who has resisted attempts to examine his role in the promoting of faulty "intelligence" on WMD in the Middle East.

He's the one about whom a parade of career State Department officials have complained. And he's the one who chased a female American consultant down a hotel hallway, screaming, threatening, and throwing things at her, because she was going to report the truth about a matter to her superiors (which was her job), instead of what he wanted her to report.

But none of that matters. The boss's son has the power to recess appoint him without Senate confirmation, and that's what he did.

All together now:

"Zieg Heil!"