Documented liar John Ashcroft was confirmed by the Senate for the post of Attorney General, even though the Dems had enough votes (42) to sustain a filibuster. Senate Dem leader Tom Daschle led the fight against a filibuster, Teddy Kennedy agreed with him, and the following Dems actually voted for the Missouri liar: John Breaux (La.), Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Christopher Dodd (Conn.), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Zell Miller (Ga.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), and North Dakota's two senators, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, presumably because that's what Democrats in those states wanted. Both Kennedy and Daschle claim they have sent a message to Bush. The message appears to be, "Come up and see me, anytime." With their unwillingness to formally protest the Florida vote count in the Senate, this marks the second major cave-in by the Dems, further reinforcing Ralph Nader's campaign comment that there is no difference between the Gops and the Dems. Meanwhile, disaffected Dems in La., W.Va., Conn., Wis., Ga., Neb., and N.D. are gearing up to vote their Dem reps out of office by any means necessary, and Dems nationwide are beginning to look around for a party that better represents their interests. --Politex, 2/1/01

The Republicans so dominate the Washington power structure now that they will have their way and confirm an Attorney General who committed perjury during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because of the deal he apparently struck with Trent Lott and the White House, Tom Daschle will only allow token resistance. Thus, the Democrats will once again be enablers to a travesty of justice. It is a lamentable and pathetic strategy to argue, as Daschle is doing today, that the Democrats want to muster at least 30 votes to "show" Bush that they are a force to be reckoned with. If Bush is jamming an extreme right wing agenda down the throat of America after losing the popular vote and losing the electoral vote (with the exception of the Supreme Court placing him in office), he's not going to give a damn about a little gesture of defiance on the part of the Democrats. In fact, they will be tittering at the White House about the futility of the whole Democratic approach to Ashcroft. The Republicans know that winning is everything --and idle threats are merely the flailing gestures of an opposition in disarray. There is not a Democratic Senator, even among those who are opposing him, who will stand up and tell the truth: John Ashcroft, who postures himself as an "honest" man and a man of "integrity," perjured himself in his testimony. If this were a Democratic candidate for attorney general, Dan Burton would be holding hearings by now, Tom DeLay would be calling for an impeachment process, and Trent Lott would be demanding a Special Prosecutor. But the Democrats, for the most part, act as if it never happened.

The Republicans know that the Democrats don't have the spine to just call this tragic farce for what it is: an act of raw brazen hypocrisy. Bush and the Republicans know that they can roll the Democrats anytime they want. The Republicans don't care if 30 or even 40 Democrats vote against Ashcroft. They know that the Democrats don't have the guts to mount a filibuster. Call Bush what you will, his handlers know that winning is everything. This is a lesson that the Democrats still can't learn. The problem for the Democrats is that now they are perceived as so weak, they won't be able to draw over moderate Republicans or "centrist" Democrats. Senators, like people as a whole, gravitate toward winners. You want to be with the camp that can protect your interests and your future. That may explain why Tom Daschle himself is cozying up so close to Bush, writing weekly love notes to the President Select on his homepage. Daschle could have put up a fight, but waffled until the very end when it didn't really matter. Like all Democrats, he's sucker enough to keep his "word" to the Bush camp even after they humiliated him by revealing that he told Bush that the Democrats wouldn't block any of his nominations. He got kicked in the balls and he still thinks the political game is about honor and keeping your word.

As a result of the failure of the Democratic leadership to protect the interests and values of its core constituents, the Bush camp knows that they can have their way anytime they want. Bush has shown, from his first act of reviving the gag rule on family planning and abortion, that you need to protect your own. The Democrats, led by Daschle, don't seem to have any compunction about throwing their voters to the wolves. For that reason, the token Democratic protest that Daschle is forecasting doesn't presage some larger grand strategy to oppose right wing Supreme Court nominees. What it shows Bush is that he can nominate David Duke for the Supreme Court, if that's what he wants, and the Democrats will wring there hands and -- in the end -- lose once again. --Buzzflash, 2/1/01

You've just been named the victor in a bitterly contested national election. Your legitimacy is in doubt amongst a large percentage of the population, and nine of ten African-Americans voted for your opponent. Hispanic Americans voted in the majority for your opponent. You turn around and ignore them because you won without their support. Politics as usual from the Republican Party. Bush faces much the same situation in California. Bush "won" the election without California's hefty 54 electoral votes. He leads the United States without a mandate in the planet's sixth-largest economy. This does not seem to bother him, although it should. California has always been a Democratic stronghold, but the Democrats gained ground in the 2000 election and handed Bush a decisive 54% to 42% defeat. The situation was similar in Texas in 1992 and 1996; yet, the Clinton Administration did not ignore the Lone Star State.

In 1998, FEMA approved federal aid to help fight fires in Presidio County, Texas. This money comes from the President's Disaster Relief Fund. Later the same year, Bush requested FEMA's help again when he declared 20 counties disaster areas due to flooding and damage from tornados. Bush blasted Clinton's poverty tour and obliquely praised FEMA again when he said, "Perhaps he ought to come to farm country if he wants to find people who are hurting" during a campaign stop in Iowa in 1999. (Source: Des Moines Register, 7/16/1999) He sounds like a compassionate fellow, doesn't he? Fast forward to 2001 [with Bush's right-hand man Joe Albaugh as the newly-appointed head of FEMA]. The state of California is in the throes of the state's worst power crisis ever, resulting from the state legislature's 1996 deregulation of the electricity industry, signed into law by former Republican governor Pete Wilson. The industry based future demand for electricity from figures from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when California was in a recession. Demand for electricity quickly outpaced the supply during the booming mid and late 1990s, and as a result, California's electricity industry found itself struggling to keep up. California's current governor, Gray Davis, has repeatedly asked the federal government for help. In the waning days of Clinton's administration, Clinton required distributors to continue to sell power to the state to avert a statewide (and possibly nationwide) crisis. Alan Greenspan has warned of a ripple effect that could undermine the decade-long period of prosperity that this country has been enjoying. (As daily rolling blackouts darken parts of Northern California, power wholesalers are making out like bandits, charging up to $600 per megawatt-hour of electricity. The sky-high prices threaten to bankrupt California's electricity industry.) The city of San Diego was the first victim of deregulation in California. San Diego Gas & Electric was the first utility to deregulate in 1999. By 2000, SDG&E customers' bills tripled. San Francisco was the next city to fall prey to the crisis, suffering rolling blackouts in June 2000. Relief came for SDG&E customers that September in the form of a three-year price cap, but in the twilight of Clinton's presidency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission quickly put a stop to it by allowing only a flexible cap rate, meaning that the utilities could charge customers more if it was "warranted." This gave utilities enough wiggle room to raise rates, and the stage was set for disaster and socialization of losses only days after Bush was selected as the President-Elect. (The new head of the FERC, Curt Herbert, Jr., is opposed to price-fixing and to any federal intervention in the power crisis.) Two weeks before Bush's inauguration, Californians were slapped with a 7 to 15% rate increase by utilities who whined about going bankrupt and laying off employees, something they obviously should have thought about when their lobbyists pushed deregulation legislation through the State Legislature in 1996. A few days later, SoCal Edison announced that it could not pay the $596 million it owed to energy wholesalers. Of course, this half a billion dollars will be paid by some of the most heavily taxed people in the United States: Californians.

Why has Bush refused to help California as the crisis worsens, day-by-day. The most populous state in the nation, risking economic disaster for not only the state, but also the entire country? The answer is simple. Money. California cannot produce enough electricity to satisfy the demands of customers. This is a well-known fact. The state of California only produces 16% of the natural gas, 53% of the oil, and 75% of the electricity that it consumes. It imports natural gas from Canada, the Southwest, and the Rockies. It imports oil from Alaska and overseas. It imports electricity from the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest, and more recently, Canada. However, as populations increase the demand on utilities in these regions, they are less able to sell to California, and Canada has threatened to cut California off completely. California has to buy power from somewhere or the lights will go out. Enter Enron. Enron is the nation's single largest purveyor of natural gas in the country. Bush's ties to Enron are well known, Enron being one of the single largest contributors to his 2000 campaign and to the Republican Party. Enron's CEO, Kenneth Lay, was a member of Bush's energy transition team and has a lot of influence. Enron is one company that stands to profit enormously from the continuation of the energy crisis in California, and Bush only stands to benefit from his largesse to Enron in refusing to help the citizens of California. One hand washes the other, and the people of California are left…literally…in the dark. The Republican Party, responsible (at least the California faction) for the crisis, will socialize the losses while energy interests, traditionally fond of Republican candidates, will make out like bandits and appreciatively line Republican pockets in time for the 2002 election.

This crisis is no more an average Californian's fault than a major earthquake or flood. They had no control over the deregulation of the utilities. Disguised as a money-saving measure, AB 1890 sailed through the House and Senate in California. AB 1890 was actually a stranded cost bailout, adding $27 billion in debt to the California economy. It averages to $844 per capita, or $3400 per family. Only the Congressional bailout of the S&Ls ($120 billion) can compare in its sheer enormity. It's outrageous. Had there been an earthquake or flood in California, Governor Davis could request aid from FEMA and would receive it. However, powerless (literally) Californians, victims of an overzealous, industry-favoring legislature, will be forced to bear the burden of this astronomical blunder themselves, thanks to President Bush, who only stands to gain financially from the crisis. I cannot remember a President who was so openly corrupt….or hypocritical. --Stacey Moberly, 1/28/01

With a new president comes new office decor for the White House. But the peaches and cream scheme doesn't fool Jonathan Glancey.

"George Bush made his supporters laugh by promising to give the Oval Office in the White House "one hell of a scrubbing" when he moved in to the famous presidential office this week. So this week, after a thorough wash-down, workers removed just about every last bit of Clinton's legacy they could - except the desk that Queen Victoria presented to President Rutherford B Hayes in 1880. Out went big Bill's bold royal blue presidential rug, his eye-catching golden damask drapes and his plush red and cream silk-covered sofas. In came Ronald Reagan's ivory, beige and terracotta rug (though one commentator described this as "ivory ringed in melon and sage". Tasty, eh?) and a "peaches and cream" colour scheme set off with cream brocade....

"Medallions and busts of Democrat presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry S Truman have been ousted, but the following artworks have been retained: Rembrandt Peel's portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army outfit; Fred Remington's sculpture, The Bronco Buster; Thomas Moran's epic landscape, The Three Tetons; and a Norman Rockwell oil depicting the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. Bush has added a painting of a small boy fishing from a bridge, and another of a man on horseback. Oh, and there are bowls of peach roses on the coffee table. Nice. Not much change here then, really, is there? This depends on whether you think office decor tells a story or not. It does, of course. Bush is not, nor has he ever been, Mr Nice Guy, yet the peach and cream colours, the saccharine-sweet picture of a boy fishing, the outdatedly macho picture of a rider, the peach roses and ivory carpet suggest a president who wants to appear as warm and comfortable as a family hotel in Dallas. Bush's taste in office decor is respectable middle America. Staff and visitors will no longer be able to enter the peaches and cream Oval Office in jeans, and certainly not in T-shirts. Instead the UPS (universal politician's suit, usually grey or blue and utterly banal) for manly men and, presumably, the pleated A-line skirt for matronly women, will be the new dress code. Taken together, the couture and decor imply respectable, white, middle-aged, middle-class values. No perverts or radicals here. Not sure about dogs.

"As an exercise in re-imaging Bush as a caring, compassionate politician, will this soft, sexless, pastel-shaded, post-Clinton interior take anyone in? The new-look Oval Office is rather like an electric chair covered in plush or a death-row cell in Texas being given the once-over.... For a man who has tried hard to prove how macho he is, the peaches-and-cream trick is particularly unconvincing. If he was true to himself, Bush should really have gone for a hi-tech office, all stainless steel, chromed bolts, stressed wire and gridded metal floors with piranha fish, perhaps, swimming below them. A reproduction of Francisco de Goya's depiction of a firing squad would surely have been a more suitable choice of painting than that of a little boy fishing. And maybe some guns sent in by good ol' Republican boys might have decorated walls lined with razor blades rather than silk-finish paint. In the good old bad days, when rightwing politicians were true to their self-image, you could expect Adolf Hitler to plan, say, the invasion of Poland from the depths of a titanic neo-classical office designed by Albert Speer in an attempt to outbid Versailles. Such offices were clearly the haunts of fanatics and megalomaniacs. At least you knew who was out to repress you or to extend the boundaries of your empire by the whole of western Europe and a chunk of the Balkans and Russia to jackboot.

"The banal near-genius of politicians like Bush, with his peaches, cream and ivory and respectable suits, is to make rightwing regimes seem almost decent. How can I mean any harm, the new look Oval Office appears to say, when I like the same kind of beige - and pastel-shaded, silk-finish decor that most of middle America does? There is something ultimately far more chilling in having a president who likes executions garbed in a natty corporate executive's suit and sitting in an office that would appeal to the mumsiest members of the Mothers of America than having him reveal his true colours. Hannah Arendt coined the immortal phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the culture of fascists and Nazis in power; now we are faced with the banality of decor with which to hide democratically elected rightwing regimes. Somehow, after George Bush's "one hell of a scrubbing", peaches and cream will never seem quite so innocent again." --The Guardian, 1/24/01

by Jerry Politex

I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Chez Zee.

Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.

...click here to continue the novel.

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