"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents." - George W. Bush, fibbing on 6/5/2003

Sometimes it seems that it would be far simpler to catalog the truths that the Bush Administration has told about Iraq;  nonetheless, Congressman Henry Waxman of California (one of my faves) has compiled Iraq On The Record, a useful list of "misleading statements" (i.e., lies) told by the Bushies in their quest to prove their collective manhoods.

I've had the idea of putting together the 52 most head-shaking moments in the Republican rule of 1994-2006, each with a photo.  These could be used for a deck of playing cards, or printed on stickers to place all over as a reminder of what dumb-f%^&s the Rethugs have been.  Thanks to the good people of DU, we're already way past 52!

In no particular order:

1. Mission Accomplished!
2. "It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. "
3. The 20(?) minutes of "My Pet Goat"
4. Foley resigns
5. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
6. Bush plays guitar while Katrina destroys NOLA
7. "Heckuva job, Bownie"
8. Cheney shoots a guy in the face while hunting captive quail, drunk
9. "Freedom's untidy"
10. Bush holding hands with Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (funders of the 9/11 attacks)
11. Tom Delay's mug shot
12. Abramoff pleads guilty.
13. Cunningham pleads guilty.
14. Ney pleads guilty.
15. Frist diagnosis Terri Schiavo from the Senate floor
16. George and Laura stand on the flag for phot op
    

When confronted with the evidence that Eisenhower was a flaming Liberal (by today's standards) a few on the Right have responded by claiming that John F. Kennedy was a Conservative - because he cut taxes.

It has been said that JFK's tax cuts were the greatest in history; that may be true, but I haven't seen an actual analysis that supports or refutes it.  But let's put JFK's tax cuts into perspective:

1. JFK cut the top tax bracket on earned income (wages) from 90% to 70%.  Today, Bush has cut this tax to half of that, or 35%.
2. JFK's tax package treated capital gains (e.g., profit from stocks, bonds, and other investments) the same as earned income - 70% tax.  Bush has reduced capital gains taxes to 15%.  Most of the income of the wealthy comes from capital gains, not wages.

All told the wealthy paid 70% of their income in taxes under JFK.  Today, the wealthy pay less than 20% (combining wages and capital gains).

I've suspected almost from the start that the "leak" published by the NY Times (and the Wall Street Journal and others) was a setup by the Bushies: The fringe-right press was just too orchestrated in its denunciation of the Times, and the "leaked" info was actually in the public domain already, and thus the "leakers" could not get in trouble. 

From the Boston Globe: 

But a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

Two very amusing song parodies, with videos:

Papa's Got A Brand New Baghdad

Folk Songs of the Far Right

I just read that there were 16,912 murders in the US in all of 2005.

Baghdad alone had 1,398 murders last month, not including soldiers or civilian victims of explosions - so that number does not include car bombs and IEDs. If we assume only (only!) 15 more deaths by bombs or of soldiers per month (and 50 people were killed in Baghdad in just one day of car bombing in February, and 5 more just today, so it's a conservative guess), that brings the total to 1413 last month - and rising monthly.
Extrapolating that to a full year, this comes to 16,956 per year. By itself, Baghdad's surpasses the entire US in murders. Not just murder rate - but number of murders. (The murder rate is 50 times higher in Baghdad vs. the entire US).

Baghdad, a city of 6 million people, now has more murders than our entire 300-million-person country. And it's getting worse by the month.

Why haven't we seen this in the media?

Apparently a Republican Congressman from Iowa, Steve King, is wandering around claiming that Iraq currently has a lower violent death rate than many US cities.  He claims a violent death rate of 25.71 for Iraq, which would put the death rate lower than New Orleans (56.0 per 100,000 in 2004), Baltimore (43.5), Detroit (42.1), Washington D.C. (35.8) and Atlanta (26.0).

If King's number was accurate, that is.

It is occasionally the case that statistics (particularly Right-wing statistics) are inaccurate, so, being a numbers guy, I decided to roll up my sleeves and dig into his number.  So I spent a few minutes going over the Iraq Index to count the number of violent deaths in Iraq last month (April). I then divided that into the population of Iraq, and I got around 40 deaths per 100,000 per year, almost twice what King claims.

We're number one - and it's not in a good way: 

"Over 9 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or having been convictedand sentenced. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.09m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in ‘administrative detention’) or Russia (0.76m).

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 714 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Belarus, Bermuda and Russia (all 532), Palau (523), U.S. Virgin Islands (490), Turkmenistan (489), Cuba (487), Suriname (437), Cayman Islands (429), Belize (420), Ukraine (417), Maldive Islands (416), St Kitts and Nevis (415), South Africa (413) and Bahamas
(410)."