Go ahead and sit down, please. Thanks for the warm welcome. It's good to be back in Florida. (Applause.) I'm looking for my little brother, but he didn't show. (Laughter.) It's okay, I love him anyway. Plus, he's doing a great job as the Governor. (Applause.)

If you're interested in serving the country, find somebody who is looking for shelter and help them find housing; love somebody who hurts; help somebody get rid of an addiction. You see, that's what -- that's how you change a society. And, Margaret, you're part of the army of compassion, and I want to thank you for your service. (Applause.)

We're headed toward peace, and that's important. (Applause.) We're still at war. I wish I could report to the nation during my State of the Nation, and here in Florida, that the war is over. It's not; there's still an enemy that cannot stand America, that still wants to inflict harm on our people, precisely because we refuse to relent in our love for freedom. But we're making good progress.

First, I want to thank the troops and their families for helping us -- (applause) -- for helping us stay on the offensive against the terrorists and the haters. Every time a terrorist is brought to justice, our children and grandchildren are safer. But, as well, every time a democracy is born in a part of the world and around the world, our children and grandchildren are safer, as well.

We've seen a remarkable, remarkable series of events when you think about it. In a very brief period of time, Afghanistan became a democracy, people were able to vote for a President of that country -- they tell me, for the first time in 5,000 years.

If you're interested in true peace in the Middle East, like I am, I fully understand that for there to be true peace, the Palestinian people must be allowed to express themselves in the ballot box, give their opinions in the public square. There must be a free press. In other words, there must be a true democracy in order for there to be peace in the Middle East. We're headed that way.

And finally, as you know, last Sunday the Iraqi citizens, in spite of threats and violence and beheadings and all kinds of horrible acts, went to the polls by millions. They defied the few acts of the terrorists. (Applause.) Every time a society becomes a free society, our children and grandchildren are better off, because free societies are peaceful societies. Democracies promote peace, and that's what we're interested.

So I'm enthusiastic and optimistic about what is taking place in the world, and I believe the United States has a duty and an obligation not only to future generations of Americans, but to people who live in tyranny, to promote democracy wherever tyranny exists. I believe every soul yearns to be free; that's what I believe. I believe everybody desires to be free. The Iraqi elections helped prove that point. The people did incredibly brave things in order to express their will. It's because people love freedom and if given the chance to be free, they accept freedom.

And for those of you who have got a loved one in the theater, or has a loved one in the theater today, you got to know that the Iraqi people appreciate our sacrifices. And I believe generations of Americans to come will appreciate the fact that this generation not only stood strong in the face of a Saddam Hussein, but stuck it out and helped the Iraqi people develop a democracy. Democracies lead to peace. And we have a duty -- we have a duty to help this world become more free so our children and grandchildren can grow up in a peaceful world. (Applause.)

We have a duty to make sure there's a retirement system for our children, too. And that's what I want to talk about. (Applause.) First of all, it's pretty interesting we're talking about Social Security, isn't it? It used to be called the third rail of American politics -- if you touched it, you would be shocked. (Laughter.) Sometimes shocked out of politics. (Laughter.) I campaigned on the issue because I thought it was important to do so. I also believe the role of a President is to confront problems -- not to pass them on to a future President, future Congress, or a future generation. (Applause.)

So the question you ask is, do we have a problem. Well, here it is. When Social Security was designed, the life expectancy was about 60 years old. In other words, you were expected to live that long. Today, life expectancy is 77 years old. In other words, people are living longer.

Thirdly, benefits are going up dramatically. So you've got a lot of people living longer, getting greater -- with greater benefits promised.

Once people recognize there's a little bit of denial in Washington -- they'll say there's not a problem. There's a fair number of people who say, it isn't a problem. If that's the prevailing view, nothing is going to happen, I fully recognize that. So step one is to say, we have a problem. And step two is to start coming up with a solution. And I have a responsibility to be involved with that, as well. It's one thing for a fellow to say, you've got a problem, you all go figure it out. That's not my style. My style is to say, we've got a problem, and we're going to figure it out. (Applause.)

All ideas are on the table except running up the payroll tax. And I don't care whether it's a Democrat idea, Republican idea, independent idea, I'm interested in ideas. And so I'm going to say, like I have been saying before to the United States Congress, bring them up. Let's see what you think we ought to do to solve the problem, and I'll work with you.

The way the system works is that you write a check -- you don't write a check -- they take it out of your check, a payroll tax, and it immediately goes to pay somebody's benefit. That's the way it works.

And why that is important is because with a conservative mix of stocks and bonds, you will be able to get -- your money will be able to get a better rate of return than the money inside the Social Security trust. And by getting a better rate of return inside the Social Security trust, your nest egg will grow big enough to help you when it comes time to retire. Not fully take care of all your retirement obligations, because you'll still have money in the Social Security trust, which you'll be able to receive at the appropriate time, but it will help complement the money. And that's important. And that's an important aspect of making sure that the promises made to the younger workers are more likely, or more closely to be delivered.

Secondly, I like the idea of promoting an ownership society. I think it makes sense to have people feel a stake in the future by owning something. I like the concept of people getting a quarterly statement about how their stocks and bonds are doing in their own personal account.

Now, there's some rules, and it's important for you to know the rules. One, you can't take your money that you set aside in the personal account and go to the race track. (Applause.) Or take it to the lottery. You can't do that. There will be a prescribed mix of conservative stocks and bonds into which you can invest, similar to the employee thrift plan at the federal government level. See, this already exists, by the way. I haven't invented this. Federal employees now get to do that. They get to take a portion of their money and put it in a conservative mix of stocks and bonds, five different programs they get to choose from, so they get a better rate and more money.

Thirdly, there are ways to make sure that you can invest in very safe certificates as you head into retirement. People are going to say, well, what happens if the stock market goes down the year I'm going to retire? Well, first of all, you've had your money in the market over an extended period of time. But if you're worried about that, there are ways to invest the money prior to retirement to help kind of shield from a cyclical market. What I'm telling you is these investment vehicles will be safe. There's all kinds of rhetoric about, well, you're not going to let people gamble their money. Well, if things are done in a conservative fashion, you will be able to achieve the objective of getting a better rate of return on your money and have more money available for you on retirement than if it had sat in the Social Security trust. In other words, that money will grow better.

This is -- what we're talking about here is, we're talking about a plan for everybody. This isn't just a management plan, this is an everybody plan. This is an idea that we've all got to come together. Whether you're union or management, Republican or Democrat, people from all walks of life must put their minds together to get something done, so our youngsters are not strapped with a system that's going to make it hard for this country's economy to continue to remain the best in the world, where people are going to be able to realize their dreams. That's what we're talking about.

By the way, people say, can you afford to do this? Well, first of all, I don't think you can afford not to do it. But we have got a plan; our idea is that we phase in these accounts slowly so that the transition cost is manageable in the budget process. In other words, these things just don't start all at once. You can start by putting $1,000 aside, or up to 4 percent, which is ever [sic] less, and over time that grows $100 a year, so eventually, you get to the 4 percent cap -- 4 percent of your income. So if you're making $90,000, you can have an account of $3,600 a year. But it's going to be phased in so that the transition cost is manageable.

Q -- really understand how is it the new plan is going to fix that problem?

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it. (Laughter.)

...physician-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a new member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was at last week's meeting on a bill restricting class-action suits. "You know," he said, "I immediately thought about silicone breast implants and the legal wrangling and the class-action suits off that.

"And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. . . . In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier."

"I got into this race five weeks ago to talk about the devastating loss we experienced in November," Roemer said in an interview. "It was not about 60,000 votes in Ohio. It was about losing 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country. If that's a trend in business or politics you're in trouble."

Republicans are in the strongest position they've been in since the early 20th century, Roemer said.

Roemer, who said top Democrats in Congress encouraged him to enter the chairman's race, said he wants to strengthen Democrats' position on national security.

"If there's one reason Senator Kerry lost the presidential race, it was because he failed to make the American people feel safer," Roemer said, adding that he also wanted to encourage talk within the party about developing a stronger position on values.

Roemer said he hoped to make the party more inclusive, especially on the issue of abortion. He opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother.

President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday.

The proposals, they said, are in the $2.5 trillion budget that Mr. Bush plans to unveil on Monday. White House officials said the budget advanced his goal of cutting the deficit, which hit a record last year.

"We are being tight," Vice President Dick Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday." "This is the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here."

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed -- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.

Jonah Goldberg attacked yours truly in a column recently.

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Jonah Goldberg was a cheerleader for the unprovoked, unilateral US attack on Iraq. The reason he repeatedly gave was that Iraq was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Extremist rightwing hawks like Jonah Goldberg used their privileged position as pundits to terrify the US public that Iraq was a threat to the US. He repeatedly said in the buildup to the war that Iraq was a menace to the US, and he repeatedly brought up North Korea's nuclear weapons as a reason for a preemptive attack on Iraq.

Iraq never has had nuclear weapons. Iraq never has been as close as two decades from having nuclear weapons. Iraq dismantled all vestiges of its rudimentary and exploratory nuclear weapons research in 1991. Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 1992, 1993 and all the way until 2002, when Jonah Goldberg assured us Americans that we absolutely had to invade Iraq to stop it from imminently becoming a nuclear power just like North Korea.

By the way, I am in print in January 2003 saying that I did not believe Iraq posed a danger to the United States. It did not.

If Jonah Goldberg had asserted that he could fly to Mars in his pyjamas and come back in a single day, it would not have been a more fantastic allegation than the one he made about Iraq being a danger to the United States because of the nuclear issue. He made that allegation over and over again to millions of viewers on national television programs, to viewers who trusted his judgment because CNN and others purveyed him to them.

Jonah Goldberg is a fearmonger, a warmonger, and a demagogue. And besides, he was just plain wrong about one of the more important foreign policy issues to face the United States in the past half-century. It is shameful that he dares show his face in public, much less continuing to pontificate about his profound knowledge of just what Iraq is like and what needs to be done about Iraq and the significance of events in Iraq.

Goldberg criticizes me for saying that the 1997 presidential election in Iran was more democratic than the Jan. 30, 2005 election in Iraq. His complaint is that the four candidates for president were vetted and approved by Iran's Guardianship Council.

It is certainly the case that although Iran has elections, they are flawed because many candidates are excluded on ideological grounds. To say that, however, is not to say that the popular will can never unexpectedly make itself known in Iran. In the 1997 election the vetting was lax, and a relative liberal, Muhammad Khatami, was allowed to run. He had earlier been fired as minister of culture for being too liberal. He wrote about Habermas and civil society and democratization in Iran (he had lived in Germany several years and read Habermas in German).

The four presidential candidates in Iran were all known by name, unlike the candidates for Iraq's parliament, most of whom remained anonymous to voters in the weeks leading up to the election. I'd say that is a sign of greater transparency in Iran. The Iranian participants were not in danger if they campaigned or ran, one of the criteria of a successful democratic election according to international watchdog groups. In this respect, too, Iran in that year was superior to Iraq in 2005.

Khatami's victory in 1997 was a big surprise. He was put in by the youth vote and the women's vote, against the wishes of the hardline clerics. If a candidate wins who wasn't expected to, that is a sign of lack of manipulation of the results.

Khatami was elected by 69% of the Iranian electorate, and 76 percent of eligible voters voted. The latter number is higher than will be true for Iraq.

In every way, from the transparency of candidates and platforms, to safe conditions for voters, to unexpected results, to the percentage of eligible voters who voted and the percentage of the electorate that directly chose Mr. Khatami, his election was more democratic than the elections just held in Iraq.

The reason Mr. Goldberg is alarmed that I pointed this obvious fact out is that he wants to kill thousands of Iranians and thousands of US troops in a war of aggression on Iran. If the American public knows that there is a lively struggle between hardliners and conservatives in Iran, and that an American intervention there would be a huge disaster and would forestall the natural evolution of Iran away from Khomeinism, then they might not support Mr. Goldberg's monstrous warmongering.

That is why he attacked me.

So let me propose to him that we debate Middle East issues, anywhere, any time, he and I.

Otherwise he should please shut up and go back to selling Linda Tripp tapes on Ebay.

Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”

I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.

But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”

[snip]

To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany’s foreign minister, [Fritz] Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as “the instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” This “pseudo–religious transfiguration of politics … largely ensured his success.” The Times’ Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood—drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. “There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences.”

Everyone, of course, is thrilled that so many Iraqis turned out to vote, in the face of threats and intimidation, on Sunday. But in hailing, and at times gushing, over the turnout, has the American media (as it did two years ago in the hyping of Saddam's WMDs) forgotten core journalistic principles in regard to fact-checking and weighing partisan assertions?

It appears so. For days, the press repeated, as gospel, assertions offered by an election official that 8 million Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, an impressive 57% turnout rate. I questioned those figures as early as last Sunday, and offered the detailed analysis below on Wednesday. Finally, on Thursday night, John F. Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times reported that Iraqi election officials have quietly "backtracked, saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country and that the figure could change."

Then, in Friday's paper, Burns and Filkins noted that one election commision official was "evasive about the turnout, implying it might end up significantly lower than the initial estimate." They quoted this official, Safwat Radhid, exclaiming: "Only God Almighty knows the final turnout now." They revealed that the announcement of a turnout number, expected to be released this weekend, has been put off for a week, due to the "complex" tabulation system.

I'll be delighted if that figure, when it is officially announced, exceeds the dubious numbers already enshrined by much of the media. But don't be surprised if it falls a bit short. The point is: Nobody knows, and reporters and pundits should have never acted like they did know when they stated, flatly, that 8 million Iraqis voted and that this represents a turnout rate of about 57%

[snip]

And one thing we now know for sure: the early media blather about a "strong" Sunni turnout has proven false. Adding a dose of reality, The Associated Press on Wednesday cited a Western diplomat who declared that turnout appeared to have been "quite low" in Iraq's vast Anbar province. Meanwhile, Carlos Valenzuela, the chief United Nations elections expert in Iraq, cautioned that forecasts for the Sunni areas were so low to begin with that even a higher-than-expected turnout would remain low.

In a rare reference to an actual vote tabulation, The New York Times on Thursday reports that in the "diverse" city of Mosul, with 60% of the count completed, the overall turnout seems slightly above 10%, or "somewhat more than 50,000 of Mosul's 500,000 estimated eligible voters."

This, of course, is no minor matter: Iraq's leading Sunni Muslim clerics said Wednesday that the country's election lacked legitimacy because large numbers of Sunnis did not participate in the balloting. Sure, many of them are simply sore losers (they lost an entire country) but that doesn't make their reaction any less troublesome for Iraq's future, especially with the cleric-backed Shiite alliance apparently headed for a landslide win.

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

The survey of First Amendment rights was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted last spring by the University of Connecticut. It also questioned 327 principals and 7,889 teachers.

The findings aren't surprising to Jack Dvorak, director of the High School Journalism Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington. "Even professional journalists are often unaware of a lot of the freedoms that might be associated with the First Amendment," he says.

The survey "confirms what a lot of people who are interested in this area have known for a long time," he says: Kids aren't learning enough about the First Amendment in history, civics or English classes. It also tracks closely with recent findings of adults' attitudes.

"It's part of our Constitution, so this should be part of a formal education," says Dvorak, who has worked with student journalists since 1968.

Although a large majority of students surveyed say musicians and others should be allowed to express "unpopular opinions," 74% say people shouldn't be able to burn or deface an American flag as a political statement; 75% mistakenly believe it is illegal.

President George W. Bush met with the Congressional Black Caucus Wednesday for the first time as a group in nearly four years, but what CBC members said stood out the most was the president's declaration that he was "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in the history of the United States.

At the conclusion of yesterday's 40-minute meeting, Bush - who attended along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - was asked by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd) whether he would support the re-authorization of a portion of the Voting Rights Act that must be approved every 25 years (It will come up for consideration next year).

"I don't know anything about the 1965 Voting Rights Act," Jackson recalled the president saying in an interview with the Chicago Defender.

He said that a hurried Bush went on to say that "when the legislation comes before me, I'll take a look at it, but I don't know about it to comment any more than that, but we will look at it when it comes to us."

Tonight we've heard a State of the Union speech that puts a little meat on the bones of President Bush's second term agenda--but not much. I expected more specific proposals than we heard. Much of the rhetoric was familiar from the campaign and the president's public statements since his reelection.

Curiously, he again avoided spelling out how he would create private, personal accounts to augment Social Security--how he would pay for them, what effect they would have on traditional Social Security benefits, and more.

Even more curiously, a "senior administration official" who briefed reporters on the Social Security proposal earlier today disclosed details of the White House plan that I don't think will play well in Peoria. Most significantly, this official revealed that most or all of the earnings from new "personal" or privatized accounts will be paid not to the holder of the account, but to the government. The senior official called this a "benefit offset." It's one way to finance the creation of these private accounts, but it's going to cause quite a political stir, I think.

Under the White House Social Security plan, workers who opt to divert some of their payroll taxes into individual accounts would ultimately get to keep only the investment returns that exceed the rate of return that the money would have accrued in the traditional system.

The mechanism, detailed by a senior administration official before President Bush's State of the Union address, would hold down the cost of Bush's plan to introduce personal accounts to the Social Security system. But it could come as a surprise to lawmakers and voters who have thought of these accounts as akin to an individual retirement account or a 401(k) that they could use fully upon retirement.

"You'll be able to pass along the money that accumulates in your personal account, if you wish, to your children . . . or grandchildren," Bush said last night. "And best of all, the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away."

The plan is more complicated. Under the proposal, workers could invest as much as 4 percent of their wages subject to Social Security taxation in a limited assortment of stock, bond and mixed-investment funds. But the government would keep and administer that money. Upon retirement, workers would then be given any money that exceeded inflation-adjusted gains over 3 percent.

That money would augment a guaranteed Social Security benefit that would be reduced by a still-undetermined amount from the currently promised benefit.

In effect, the accounts would work more like a loan from the government, to be paid back upon retirement at an inflation-adjusted 3 percent interest rate -- the interest the money would have earned if it had been invested in Treasury bonds, said Peter R. Orszag, a Social Security analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton White House economist.

Here are the basics of the proposal, as described in greater detail by a senior administration official than by Mr. Bush, who called it "a better deal" for younger workers, echoing President Franklin D Roosevelt:

¶Beginning in 2009, workers could invest up to 4 percent of their wages in individual investment accounts up to $1,000 a year initially. The maximum contribution would rise by at least $100 a year afterward.

¶The program would be phased in. In 2009, this option would be available to workers born between 1950 and 1965; in 2010, workers born as late as 1978 could participate; and beginning in 2011, all those born after 1949 would be eligible.

¶Account holders would have to choose from a small menu of diversified stock and bond funds with varying degrees of risk, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal government workers.

[Note from me: So much for the freedom to invest as you see fit, eh?]

¶The personal accounts would be administered by the government; private companies would manage the investment funds under contract with the government.

[Note from me: Administered by the government, eh? Hardly what our "It's My Money" friends on the right had in mind.]

¶No withdrawals would be permitted before retirement.

¶When workers retired, most would be required to use at least part of their accounts to buy from the government lifetime annuities, financial instruments that provide a guaranteed monthly payment for life but that expire at death. Despite Mr. Bush's declaration that money in the accounts could be passed on to children and grandchildren, the principal of an annuity cannot be inherited.

The administration official acknowledged Wednesday that the accounts, alone, would not resolve Social Security's solvency issues. But while the President delivered a rousing appeal to step up to the challenge of Social Security, he largely avoided the painful questions of cuts and costs. Instead, he presented his private accounts as a historic new benefit for Americans.

The proposal would amount to one of the biggest changes in government social policy in history. But just as remarkable is what was not addressed.

The president did not say what benefit reductions he favored. The official who briefed reporters spoke only of unspecified "benefit offsets" and did not say what the cuts would entail or how large they would be.

The president did not address the cost to the government of paying full benefits to retirees for decades while tax money was being diverted into private accounts. Nor did he say how much this would increase the annual budget deficit.

There was no mention of what would happen to workers who become disabled, currently 16 percent of Social Security beneficiaries, or the minor children of workers who die, now 7 percent of beneficiaries. People who stop working or die young would obviously have much less in their retirement accounts than those who worked until retirement age. Nor was there discussion of whether spouses would have access to the private accounts or what would happen in the case of divorce.

No one in the administration mentioned how workers who retired when the market was in a slump would be protected financially.

There was no discussion of exceptions to no-withdrawal rule - for someone with large medical expenses associated with a terminal illness, for example.

All these difficult questions, some of them possibly deal breakers, were left for negotiations with Congress.

Excuse me for spewing a bit of vitriol at the Democrats for a moment here, but I have to take issue with this. Now you're going to hold him accountable? When exactly are we going to be seeing BushCo held "accountable" for the MIA WMD's? For the mushroom cloud on the horizon? For the lack of any substantive connection between Saddam and bin Laden and 9/11? For more than 1,400 American dead who were lost proving those claims false and God only knows how many more "spreading freedom" across those desert sands? Is that on the back burner? Somewhere further down the agenda?

I know there are some of you saying, "But Jazz... there's nothing they can do! They are the minority... the GOP is calling all the shots." Excuse me, but... boo fucking hoo. This tyrant "won" the last election by a smaller margin than any incumbent in history. Truman beat Dewey by a bigger share. We lost that election by putting up a man who essentially beat himself. If you'd nominated my dog Kenya she'd probably have taken Ohio and Florida against this walking, misunderestimated disaster of a "president."

And it wasn't just the presidential race. The message was garbled and lost on a pack of frightened red state sheep who bought into Karl Rove's visions of darkness and Armageddon. Even giving Bush four more years, he could have been brought in check if the GOP had been forced to surrender the Senate. Hell, for that matter, just getting up to a tie would have done it since that would have given some cojones to Snowe, Chaffee, and some other moderate Republicans.

Democrats won’t try to filibuster Alberto Gonzales’ nomination to be attorney general but will hold extensive debates in the Senate over his role in developing the Bush administration’s policies on treating foreign detainees, the Senate’s top Democrat said Tuesday.

There will be an up-or-down vote,” Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada told reporters after the Democrats huddled together for their weekly planning session.

A filibuster, a parliamentary tactic for delaying Senate action, would require Republicans, who hold a 55-44 majority in the Senate, to win over at least five Democrats — or four Democrats plus Vermont Sen. James Jeffords, an independent — to put Gonzales in office.

Democrats were surprisingly united in opposing Gonzales in the Senate Judiciary Committee, something that was not achieved when they voted on current Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Ashcroft was confirmed by a 58-42 Senate vote, the narrowest margin ever for an attorney general.

Democrats’ opposition to Gonzales derives “from the nominee’s involvement in the formulation of a number of policies that have tarnished our country’s moral leadership in the world and put American soldiers and American citizens at greater risk,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said during Senate debate Tuesday.

Gonzales, who served as White House counsel during Bush’s first term, would replace Ashcroft if confirmed. He would be the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general.

A vote by the Senate on Gonzales’ confirmation will not occur until at least Thursday, after Bush’s State of the Union speech Wednesday night, GOP senators said. They said Democrats don’t want to give Bush a success to talk about in his first State of the Union speech of his second term.

“They want the bully pulpit all the way up to and after that to try to taint this nominee with the perceived sins of the Bush administration,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.