Bush speaks -- Now what? -- "President Bush's second inaugural speech has been praised as a promise by his supporters and criticised as a threat by his opponents - and it has left the world wondering what it will mean in practice." [BBC]

Bush's Words On Liberty Don't Mesh With Policies -- "President Bush's soaring rhetoric yesterday that the United States will promote the growth of democratic movements and institutions worldwide is at odds with the administration's increasingly close relations with repressive governments in every corner of the world." [Washington Post]

Gary Leupp: Madness in High Places -

"Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go," wrote Shakespeare. One might add, especially when "there is a method in it" as there surely is in the painstaking war preparations, reflecting what the warmongers have learned about "politically" rationalizing their military agenda. A "document of madness" as nuts as Ophelia's ravings remains the game plan for the great ones' Greater Middle East transformation project. One must monitor these lunatics, examine and expose their methods and documents, countering them politically with the weapons of the sane.

And when they are finally on trial for their crimes, and plead insanity, we should take our cue from the Texas courts and say, "That's no excuse."

Watch What We Say, Not What We Do -- Are "aliens overseas" to be pledged the humane treatment spoken of in Bush's inaugural address? [billmon]

Byron Williams: The Accountability Moment - Was Election 2004 Our Last Chance to Hold Bush in Check?

Not drunk, brain-injured [BBC]

discoverychannel.com: Study: Warming Caused Mass Extinction -- "Global warming, not an asteroid impact, was to blame for the mass extinction of species 250 million years ago, an international team of researchers reports in the latest issue of Science magazine."

Paul Krugman: The Free Lunch Bunch -- "President Bush is like a financial adviser who tells you that at the rate you're going, you won't be able to afford retirement - but that you shouldn't do anything mundane like trying to save more. Instead, you should take out a huge loan, put the money in a mutual fund run by his friends (with management fees to be determined later) and place your faith in capital gains." (NY Times, free registration required)

David Ignatius: Worrisome Hubris -- "A Republican who has served in three GOP administrations remarked that the mood in Washington this inauguration week reminded him a bit of the second Nixon administration. There is a smugness and insularity among senior officials -- a feeling that because the president has won reelection, his aides don't have to explain themselves or their policies to the nation."

Roger Lowenstein: A Question of Numbers -- A great overview of Social Security   (NY Times, free registration required)

Independent [UK:] Canada here they come -- "At their home in a comfortable, quiet Seattle suburb, Mike Teller and his partner Bob Vesely will not be cheering today. Indeed, while the celebratory thousands line the streets for the presidential inauguration 3,000 miles away in Washington DC, Teller and Vesely will think of their future and the greener pastures they believe await them. They'll be thinking of escape."

Common Dreams: Ohio's GOP Attorney-General Launches Revenge Attack on Election Protection Legal Team

CNN: Rice confirmation vote delayed

Truthout: New Doubts on Plan for Social Security

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) predicted yesterday that partisan warfare over Social Security will quickly render President Bush's plan "a dead horse" and called on Congress to undertake a broader review of the problems of an aging nation. ... Bush's plan for allowing younger Americans to divert a third or more of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts to enhance their long-term benefits has drawn fire from Democrats, who say it is a risky step toward partial privatization of Social Security. Many Republicans have expressed reservations about the political wisdom of Bush's vision for restructuring the nearly 70-year-old retirement and income security program, and Thomas's comments will fuel the controversy.

Condi Rice characterizes Asian tsunami as "wonderful oppportunity" for U.S.

CounterPunch -- Federal Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva Conventions

Robert Scheer: Pomp and Improper Circumstance -- "On Thursday, an estimated $40 million worth of inaugural pomp and circumstance will only temporarily triumph over an incalculable record of deceit and error."

Paul Krugman: That Magic Moment -- "Last week President Bush declared that the election was the "accountability moment" for the war in Iraq - the voters saw it his way, and that's that. But Mr. Bush didn't level with the voters during the campaign and doesn't deserve anyone's future trust. I won't belabor the W.M.D. issue, except to point out that the Bush administration, without exactly lying, managed to keep most voters confused. According to a Pew poll, on the eve of the election the great majority of voters, of both parties, believed that the Bush administration had asserted that it found either W.M.D. or an active W.M.D. program in Iraq."

TomDispatch: Thoughts on Fiction-based Reality --

We already know that the particular fictions of the Bush administration -- those mushroom clouds rising over American cities thanks to Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear program, the evanescent al-Qaeda/Saddam ties, and the fantasy biological and chemical production and delivery systems that were to send poisons spewing over our East coast via nonexistent Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles -- were among the numerous fictions successfully imposed on a majority of the American people. Some of them (though no longer the WMD ones) are still being repeated by administration officials and being believed, according to polls, by surprising numbers of Americans. In other words, the Bush administration has insisted with remarkable success that a vision of the world concocted more or less out of whole cloth inside a bubble of a world is the world itself. It seems, right now, that we're in a race between Bush's fiction-based reality becoming our reality (at least in this country) and an administration implosion in the months or years ahead as certain dangerous facts in Iraq and elsewhere insist on being attended to.

Molly Ivins: "Let's try this again, slowly, for those who, like the president, seem to be having difficulty with reality. Social Security will not be bankrupt, will not be flat bust in 2042 or 2052 or even, as the president has also claimed, by 2018. According to the deliberately alarmist projections of the fund's trustees, it will have exhausted the trust fund in 2042. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Social Security will be able to rely on the trust fund until 2052 and after that will still be able to pay 81 percent of scheduled benefits."

David W. Orr: The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party -- "Following the election of 2004, much has been made of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party, even its possible end. But it has escaped the notice of our blow-dry television pundits and political observers alike that the Republican Party, in the full blush of triumph in control of all the branches of government and large sections of the media, stands on the edge of certain extinction."

Seymour Hersh: The Coming Wars -- "'This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,' the former high-level intelligence official told me. 'Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.'"

A man-made tsunami -- "Why are there no fundraisers for the Iraqi dead?"

Jason Vest: Repeating Errors of History -- Bush considering the "option" of death squads to kill Iraqi insurgents.

Robert Scheer: Is Al Qaeda just a Bush Bogeymen? -- "'The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear,' a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism 'is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media.'"

Guardian: City of Ghosts -- "What really happened in the siege of Falluja? In a joint investigation for the Guardian and Channel 4 News, Iraqi doctor Ali Fadhil compiled the first independent reports from the devastated city, where he found scores of unburied corpses, rabid dogs - and a dangerously embittered population."

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