Compare and contrast President Bush’s use of the word freedom in State of the Union Addresses (immediately before we invaded Iraq versus last night):
2003: 4 times (not counting “USA Freedom Corps”)
2005: 21 times
Interesting. The cynically-minded might call that a post-war rationale shift.

Some fine print from Bush’s Social Security piratization privatization plan:

The plan is more complicated. Under the proposal, workers could invest as much as 4 percent of their wages subject to Social Security taxation in a limited assortment of stock, bond and mixed-investment funds. But the government would keep and administer that money. Upon retirement, workers would then be given any money that exceeded inflation-adjusted gains over 3 percent.
. . .
In effect, the accounts would work more like a loan from the government, to be paid back upon retirement at an inflation-adjusted 3 percent interest rate — the interest the money would have earned if it had been invested in Treasury bonds, said Peter R. Orszag, a Social Security analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton White House economist.
. . .
Critics of the Bush plan said the proposed “claw back” renders the whole idea of “personal retirement accounts” virtually meaningless. Indeed, the system would ultimately look something like a proposal made by President Bill Clinton, in which the government would have invested Social Security taxes in the stock market.
That idea was criticized by conservatives because the federal government could end up choosing winners and losers in the financial markets. But under the Bush system, the government is still choosing the stocks and bonds to be bought with Social Security money, said Jason Furman, a former Clinton administration economist. Individuals would get a limited choice, and the government would still keep most of the returns.

Conventional wisdom is that the president’s plan is already dead on arrival with 90% of the Democrats and a few Republicans. I doubt this is will go over well with a number of the remaining Republicans. If I understand this correctly, it means that in exchange for assuming market risk, individuals can realistically expect only a 0-3% return from these private accounts–the rest will go back to the government.
So our retirement insurance program gets dismantled and seniors get only a minimal return in exchange for assuming market risk. Hmm, who’s the big winner here? Those earning commissions from managing all the accounts?
Which candidate was it that Wall Street contributed heavily to last year?

More tax dollars at work:

A Florida State University center has used more than a half-million in education tax dollars to put a positive spin on President Bush’s key school policies, including hiring a public relations firm to teach charter schools to be more media-savvy.
Despite conflicting studies on the success of charter schools and other alternative education programs, the School Choice Center at FSU touts them as ways to “increase student achievement, increase parental involvement, promote school improvement through constructive competition, and accomplish racial and ethnic diversity.”
. . .
Since 2003, taxpayers have given the center $627,567 as part of a 5-year, $1.2 million federal grant made available through the No Child Left Behind Act, which promotes school choice as a fix for failing public schools.
The center’s mission is to make parents aware of all choice programs, including traditional magnet schools, expand the number of choice schools in the state, and help them “work the media” � as was written in one of the PR firm’s pamphlets.
But links on the center’s Web site are almost entirely to studies and articles from conservative groups and strong school-choice proponents such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Education Reform and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

These days I think that’s called “fair and balanced” reporting.

“McCreary fire department loses building, 4 trucks in blaze.”
Who does the fire department call for help when its building is ablaze?

Hey, can I obtain White House media credentials? Because I, too, have virtually no journalistic background, but have launched a website “committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage” to readers.
Where do I apply?
Incidentally, Mr. “Gannon” can already stake claim to one of the most ironic moments of 2005, for asking President Bush about Senate Democrats who are “divorced from reality.”