This article appeared in Saturday's Washington Post:

President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering. Jonathan Bush, who is a major fundraiser for his nephew, was appointed in 2000 to run Riggs Investment Management Co. His association with Riggs began when he headed J. Bush & Co., a New Haven, Conn., company he created in 1970 and built to offer advice on money management.

David Sirota, who has his own blog and also writes for American Progress, reports that the Riggs Bank handles a lot of Saudi money:

According to the 5/14/04 New York Times, Federal regulators fined the Riggs National Corporation, the parent company of Riggs Bank, $25 million yesterday for "failing to report suspicious activity, the largest penalty ever assessed against a domestic bank in connection with money laundering. The fine stems from Riggs's failure over at least the last two years to actively monitor suspect financial transfers through Saudi Arabian accounts held by the bank." The 5/14/04 Wall Street Journal reported that of particular concern, Riggs failed to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." According to the 4/18/04 Washington Post, Saudi Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, "may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists."

This Newsweek web exclusive has very powerful comments about the Iraq prison scandal and then more about the impulses that drive all of us, for good or bad, including those that have driven President Bush. Here's some quotes:

NEWSWEEK: What are the politics of denial?
Michael Milburn: We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like support for the death penalty, opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force. We used a notion of therapy as a general indicator of denial or lack of denial. Well, the extent to which emotion connected to childhood punishment was driving their political attitudes, when they had an opportunity to sort of reflect on that and [have a] short-term catharsis experience, that sort of energy disappears.

What we have found, really broadly, is the higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood. It’s not just going to be that they were spanked; there’s a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that. We have a whole chapter on the religious right. In our research we also found that when we gave people the statement “the amount of physical and sexual abuse in this country is greatly exaggerated by the mass media,” conservatives were significantly more likely to agree with that.

As to President Bush's formative experiences:

What does Bush’s upbringing and conservativism tell you about the way he sees the world?
Bush is really fascinating. There was a televised interview with Barbara Bush during the [2000] campaign. She was talking about her son and relating this one incident where he had come home drunk and his father was walking out to talk to him. W was saying, “OK Dad, right now, let’s do it.” Clearly there’s a tremendous amount of anger there. Not that this explains everything that’s going on, but it’s clearly, to me, a factor in his I’m-gonna-get-the-guy-who-threatened-my-dad-but-I’m-also-going-to-show-my-dad-that- I-can-do-stuff-that-he-couldn’t-do [attitude].

by TChris

President Bush doesn't read newspapers. That seemed like a good idea to Donald Rumsfeld, who announced that he doesn't read them either. Hey, why be informed? Facts, diversity of opinion, the mood of the country ... how could any of that contribute to governing?

by TChris

If you have a taste for the absurd, you might enjoy The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. The defense secretary's ramblings are set to music "in an accessible style based in classical music, with strong popular influences from cabaret to pop music." You can listen to sound clips on this page.

Thanks to Patriot Watch for this lesson today--secrecy sucks:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we
are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and
servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore
Roosevelt (1918)

Remember -- "Democracies die behind closed doors." That's a quote from 6th Circuit Judge Damon Keith in Detroit Free Press v. John Ashcroft--you can read the full opinion here. Two more quotes from the opinion:

Kos at Daily Kos says the Democratic party has become the party of appeasement:

We have become a party of appeasers, afraid to respond lest the Rove boogeyman jump out of the bushes and bite them in the rump. Dean helped kickstart a change in our party's culture, but it has temporarily receeded as the Kerry people consolidate their victory and take over the party apparatus. Kerry has rightly kept quiet as Bush digs his own grave, but where are our attack dog surrogates? Where are our Democrats being Democrats?

Atrios adds his thoughts:

....in my relatively limited contact with DC Dems his assessment of them as frightened little bunnies is spot on. Too many people in the establishment seem to be comfortable in their role as minorty party. I don't know why. So, we're going to have to fight the good fight for them.

We agree. The Dems need to seize the moment. Bush is now beyond vulnerable and has moved into the defeatable category. Let's get on it.

by TChris

Until recently, the White House did a masterful job of maintaining control of its message. The message wasn't usually accurate, but at least the main players stayed on the same page as they parroted the administration's line.

Those days are gone, says Time.

Top Bush officials griped about what one called Rumsfeld's "destructive arrogance." Says the adviser: "You have no idea what it's like to deal with the United States of Rumsfeld." Colin Powell's closest aides, like chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, were quoted in GQ magazine, saying that Powell was weary of fighting ideological "utopians" in the Administration and being forced to do "damage control" and "apologizing around the world." Powell's foes, perhaps in retaliation, blamed him for being slow to decide to travel to the Middle East to help quell the furor over the abuse scandal. Says a senior Bush official of the open warfare: "It is not very conducive to a healthy working environment."

The White House will surely try to regroup, but Bush and those who surround him are natural finger-pointers. Keeping on message will grow increasingly difficult as the administration struggles to find a positive message to spread.

by TChris

If your mother likes to read and has an interest in politics, you might want to give her Amy Goodman's new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them.

So what's the connection to Mother's Day?

Goodman says that one of her goals is to go where the silence is and fill it, to give a voice to the voiceless. In many respects, she's a motherly figure. She empowers citizens, tells those untold stories out of an honest caring for the struggle of the voiceless and is critical of injustice, inequality and war. This compassion embodies the true spirit of Mother's Day as represented by its founders who wanted much more than flowers.

The first proposition for Mother's Day in the United States came in the late 1850's by Appalachian homemaker Anna Jarvis. She organized "Mother's Work Day" to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community. Then in the 1870's Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist and author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace, since she believed they bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else.

Mother's Day became an officially recognized national holiday in 1914 after Jarvis' daughter, also named Anna successfully lobbied the Wilson administration.

Another disturbing sign of the times....the U.S. is losing its scientic edge.

The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals. Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.

What does it mean?

Even analysts worried by the trend concede that an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate the fight against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with knotty environmental problems. But profits from the breakthroughs are likely to stay overseas, and this country will face competition for things like hiring scientific talent and getting space to showcase its work in top journals.

"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly going to be dominated by countries other than the United States," Denis Simon, dean of management and technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently said at a scientific meeting in Washington.

Maybe if we weren't spending billions of dollars on an unnecessary war being fought for no good reason we'd have more money to fund scientific research and our scientists. The Democrats think so and are attacking Bush on the subject:

The Center for American Progress today formally launched a massive searchable database, Claim v. Fact, "that charts conservatives' distortions, lies and dishonesty, and refutes them with well-documented facts.The Center is soliciting the public to help grow the database, asking citizens to submit entries that are not yet documented in the system." Submit your entry here.

We've thought for a long time that Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein is a conservative in sheep's clothing. For example, she is the prime mover of the ill-advised Victim's Rights Amendment making its way through Congress. Yesterday, she showed her true conservatism again by calling for the death penalty in a case involving the murder of a police officer in San Francisco--after the DA decided not to charge the case as a death case. She used the dead officer's funeral service as her vechicle to make her charge--causing further division and dissension in the community. Feinstein went even further, and said that had she known the DA opposed the death penalty, she probably wouldn't have endorsed her for the position.

DA Kamala Harris has promised to put the cop's killer in prison for life. San Francisco and Alameda County do not have great success with death cases:

The D.A. in Alameda County has sought the death penalty in no fewer than four police killings over the past two decades. The prosecution's batting average: zero. District Attorney Tom Orloff, who personally prosecuted one of the cop killers back in 1986, says there appears to be a common thread -- namely, jurors' reluctance to deal out the death penalty without clear proof that the defendant woke up that day with the idea of killing a cop...."Our juries are just like San Francisco's,'' he said. "(Imposing the death penalty) is not something they jump at the opportunity to do.''

From time to time people mention Sen. Feinstein as a vice-presidential candidate. Not in our book. Not by a long shot.

by TChris

High school students gathered on the White House lawn yesterday to stage a mock graduation ceremony. The students -- children of immigrants who haven't been legally admitted to the United States -- hoped to call attention to the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a proposed law that would allow such students to become permanent citizens after two years of college, trade school or military service.

"Under current law, these young people generally derive their immigration status solely from their parents," the National Immigration Law Center said in a statement, "and if their parents are undocumented or in immigration limbo, most have no mechanism to obtain legal residency even if they have lived most of their lives [in the U.S.]. The DREAM Act provides such a mechanism for those who are able to meet certain conditions."

The story of Marie Gonzales illustrates the need for this legislation.