Being Poor

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

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There's more.  Please go read it.  (Then email it to the next person who blames Katrina's victims for not leaving.)

Coincidentally enough, many of those things make the Bush Administration look bad.

I'll give the condensed version after the jump, but American Progress has a good report here.

In her Salon article "I invaded the White House press corps", Wilson gives a day-by-day account of the Press Corps' "minor mutiny" ...

On July 11, the story of Karl Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame case broke, and the hounds got loose in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House and whomped on the press secretary. It was the Great McClellan Mauling of '05: Thirty-five questions about Karl Rove by a suddenly unified and frothy White House press corps that had quickened into a minor mutiny.

July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I'd spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora's box opened -- just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule ...

War Mom vs. Peace Mom

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

Stung by the ability of one grieving mother to inspire a growing antiwar movement, the White House has found a mom to call its own.

An obviously delighted President Bush introduced her to a boisterous invitation-only audience mostly made up of military families in Idaho yesterday -- then sent her out to talk to the press.

(Emphasis added.)

I'm not sure this is what the Bush League had in mind when they said -- again -- that we were "turning the corner" in Iraq.

BAGHDAD - Finding a way to head off civil war is at the heart of all the major initiatives - including the talks over a new constitution - in Iraq. But by most common political-science definitions of the term, "civil war" is already here.

"It's not a threat. It's not a potential. Civil war is a fact of life there now," says Pavel Baev, head of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway.

But the truly important issue remains the one few have focused upon: Bolton's role in making sure that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," as British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove told Tony Blair at a July 2002 meeting of the British Cabinet. Contrary to the mainstream narrative, Bolton's was no private war with U.S. intelligence. Rather, his actions were crucial in creating the highly charged atmosphere in which the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies bit the bullet, ignored the gaps in their data and told Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the warhawks what they wanted to hear.

To a considerable extent, Bolton was one of Bush's primary fixers.

[Emphasis added.]

More juicy bits below ...