Politics: What a World

First day home with my beautiful little boy in tow and here's what we wake up to after a largely-sleepless evening:

More U.S. soldiers die in Iraq, and a grim but sadly rewarding turn towards reality by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admits that this "new kind of war" is going to require a whole lot of our old kind of money. If only we didn't have the largest federal deficit in the history of the American experiment...hmmm.

Meanwhile, jobless claims rose by another 5,000 tax-cut victims last week. Many economists has anticipated a better situation, but of course, they have their heads up their asses. Actually, they thought that the marginally good news from the stock market this past quarter was going to lead to some businesses deciding they could invest in new labor. But the reality is that it's going to take a lot more than a dodgy but rising stock market to get people working again. I am continually amazed at this type of thinking, which matches the Bush administration's "more money in the paycheck" philosophy of tax cutting. The stock market doesn't hire anybody, or represent anything like the employers for whom most Americans work. That the healthcare sector had a great quarter -- or whatever -- doesn't mean a thing if they did so by cutting costs and often cutting the workforce. Investors, who may have represented America in 1998 but have now returned to their old definition of rich bastards, reward companies who cut costs and maximize profits. But that enterprise almost always leads to the jobless numbers we see today.

And what most of the world would call "lying" from their child or friends, but what the press hasn't even approached calling "deception" got another interesting linguistic turn today: "Skirting."

As in, "Bush Skirts Queries on Iraq Nuclear Allegation":

The White House acknowledged Monday that the intelligence underlying the president's assertion was incorrect and should not have been in his State of the Union speech. Leading Democrats have seized on the admission as justification for a congressional inquiry into the administration's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told reporters that the White House learned only after the speech that documents that were the basis for his claim had been forged. "After the speech, information was learned about the forged documents," he said. "With the advantage of hindsight, it's known now what was not known by the White House prior to the speech. This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech."

It has emerged in recent weeks, however, that the CIA dispatched a former senior diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson, to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims, and that Wilson concluded the allegations were false. Administration officials have said the information had not been conveyed to the White House at the time of the speech.

A month before the speech, the CIA and State Department had stopped referring to the Niger issue in public statements and documents because they were questioning the reliability of the intelligence, senior officials said.

Liars, anyone?