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Volume CCXXXIII, Number 29   January, 2003    Worcester, Massachusetts    Since 1770

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By Henry Cabot Lodge
Diplomatic Correspondent

George Bush's first effort to stiff the requests of the widows and victims of September 11 terrorism went down in flames. It sounded like the best idea since the invasion of Iraq: to investigate the government bungling and its cover-up, pick the most celebrated bungler and prevaricator of the second half of the last century: Henry Kissinger. Well, next to Henry's old boss, Dick Nixon.

This old correspondent remembers Henry's desperate effort to ingratiate himself with the last bunch of reactionary nuts camped out at the White House (actually, it was pretty much the same bunch of reactionary nuts), by whitewashing Reagan's covert war to overthrow the democratically elected government in Nicaragua, while propping up the bloodthirsty oligarchs in neighboring El Salvador. OK by Henry, but perhaps the only good thing you can say about the Reagan Administration is that they still found him loathsome.

Henry, like any good Republican, didn't hesitate to place money before country. His replacement, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, rates the highest accolade one can give to any Bush appointee: it could have been worse.

Maybe Kean was the safe choice, but the Spy had nominated an unquestioned moral leader with no partisan axe to grind and with plenty of free time. Who wouldn't trust an investigation headed by that prince of God, Bernard Cardinal Law?

Henry Kissinger's contribution to the investigation of the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffatt

By James Watt
Environment Editor

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On a Friday night when no one was looking, Bush's Environmental Protection Administration slipped in about 100 pages of new rules to make sure that polluting power plants would never have to clean up their act.

The technical name for this is "New Source Review," which had been a long-standing loophole in the Clean Air Act. Want to build a new power plant? You can't befoul the atmosphere. What if you've got a filthy old furnace already belching toxic clouds? Thanks to George and Chrissie Whitman, you can rebuild it from the inside out and, as long as the original walls remain standing, it can belch until the last dog dies (of emphysema, no doubt).

You might have thought that the Environmental Protection Administration would approach this issue from the perspective of – environmental protection. Who are you, Al Gore? Wake up! The EPA itself admitted, in an astonishingly defensive and cringing press release, that cleaning up these toxic dinosaurs wasn't really part of its job:

It is important to understand that the NSR program was never designed to require facilities to reduce existing levels of pollution – that is not its purpose. . . .  The best way to require reductions in emissions is through legislative action such as the President’s Clear Skies proposal.
http://www.epa.gov/nsr/

If you're waiting for Bush's Clear Skies press release to become a serious legislative proposal, all we can say is: don't hold your breath

By Dr. Richard Sharpe
Medical Correspondent and
Scott V. Sandiford
Legal Correspondent

America has been breathing easy since the enactment of the "Homeland Security" bill. What terrorist would dare strike now that the Coast Guard has been moved from the Transportation Department and U.S. Customs from Treasury? As for the incompetent FBI and CIA bureaucracies, well, we'll worry about them some other time.

It takes a lot of ink to move several dozen government bureaucracies around the old organization chart, and you can bet that lurking in that bill there's room for some, uh, extraneous material.

At the 24th hour, the White House, eager to please their patron and former employer, Eli Lilly, snuck in a provision stripping autistic children of their rights to sue Lilly for alleged defects in Lilly's vaccines. This medical professional hasn't yet been persuaded that common childhood vaccines cause autism or other grievous injuries (with apologies to Private Eye), but isn't that what courts do: determine facts in dispute?

Not anymore. Thanks to a last-minute amendment (Sections 1714-1716) to the Homeland Security bill, these seriously afflicted children will no longer have the right to seek redress for the harm allegedly caused by Eli Lilly. Lame duck Texas sleazebags Phil Pockets and Dick Arsehole took "responsibility" for this larceny. In truth, nothing happened on this pointless exercise in paper-shuffling without the consent of George Bush and his handlers.

So if you're the parent of an autistic child depressed over being screwed by meretricious Republicans, here's some free advice courtesy of the Bush Administration and its investors: have a Prozac. It's got to be good; it's made by Lilly.

By Dan Quayle
Education Editor

Much was made, mostly by apologists for George Bush, of his supposed leadership in passing the education bill. This legislation, we were told, would usher in a new era of accountability and federal support for education so that no child would be left behind.

If you believed that, we're moving you to the slow learners group. The November regulations issued by Bush's Education Department make clear that the Republican agenda has not deviated one degree from its traditional goal: destroying the public schools.

The regulations command local school districts (without providing the money to pay for it) to allow students to transfer from "failing" schools to schools with higher test scores. Those who don't transfer presumably can safely be left behind.

If there's no room at the better schools, too bad. If the school district is under a court order conflicting with Bush's unfunded mandate, the conflict is for the victim to solve.

The transparent purpose behind these vindictive regulations is to compel school districts to pay for kids to attend private (or "charter" schools) if there's no possibility of cramming any more of the little monsters into the districts' supposedly better schools.

Maybe providing sufficient federal funding to improve education for all children, with a focus on low-scoring (that is, low-income) schools would in fact remedy the problem of kids rotting in lousy schools. Maybe, but solve this extra-credit math problem first: What do you get when you subtract $300 billion in tax cuts for the rich from $22.5 billion in federal aid to education?