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Let's riot and throw bricks through bank windows

Posted By: like London is doing! Could B Fun on 2009-04-01
In Reply to: Another 750,000 jobs lost in March. Wait, I exaggerate. It was 742,000. - HomeAlone




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"Heterosexual henchmen?" Now that is a riot.

You must go through a LOT of windows in
NM
Of course I don't have any proof. I'm not peeping in his windows..sm
trying to see if he's going to drink or not. You have no proof that he doesn't drink. This is all speculation.

This is a bunch of bunk. If you think discussing the wrong doing of one person holds no water because other people are doing or have done it too, then I'll just have to agree to disagree. That's like saying, it's OK because the Clinton's and Kennedy's did it. Again, whatever gets you through.

I think the discussion we need to be having is that the media needs to get out of these people's personal lives.


board up all windows and doors

set radios at full volume in each room to various right wing talk shows - Savage, Hannity, O'Reilly, Malkin.  Cower in basement.  Just do what any reasonable True Believer would do, silly.


 


If you like this, it's easy using Windows Photo Story 3.
Projects like these basically take a few simple steps:

1. Find the photos.

2. Find a no-royalty music sample.

3. Stick 'em into Windows Photo Story3 and use the tools to add captions, select transitions between photos, zoom and pan effects to the photos themselves, and add audio.

You could also use Windows Movie Maker if you want to do some of this with movie clips instead of still photos.

The last step, if you want to post to YouTube, etc., is to convert the "WMV" (Windows Media) format that this will create to another format like MPEG or FLV (Flash). There are some free converters out there, as well as companies like A-One Software that have just about any converter you'd want.

Basically, a converter is a very simple piece of software that lets you import a file of one type and save it as another type.
You think people smashing store windows and setting fires is good?
if you codone that then you have serious issues.
Don't you remember the gas/toxic warfare scare and we were told to duct tape our windows? SM
So, with the bird flu plan, what kind of silly advice do you think we'll get to keep us safe? 
what exactly is a bank run?
x
Check your bank.........
A financial advisor on the Today Show this morning warned all Americans who have more than $100,000 in the bank, to shift their money to other banks that are FDIC insured. The FDIC only insures up to $100,000 per person. That does not mean different accounts within the same bank or different branches of the same bank. DIFFERENT insured banks. I, myself, do not have to worry about this as I don't even have a fraction of that, but I find the fact that this advisor felt the need to come on the air and spell it out very telling. She also said your bank will tell you that you just need to create more than one account within the same bank - NOT TRUE. She also said to watch the stocks of your bank - if stock prices continue to fall - get the he11 out!  BTW, greed is a sin, eh?
And our bank accounts are

in such wonderful shape today, right?


We now live in a fascist society where the Bush government is buying the banks.


Socialism would be a giant step forward.


Bank of Obama

 Because everyone deserves a bailout!


http://www.bankofobama.org/


This is what happens when you throw a
Different strokes for different folks. This is what democracy looks like. Deal with it. Not taking the abortion bait. Take that argument back to the church where it belongs.
They did everything but throw

cabbages and rotten eggs at the guy.  Where do you get the 'nads to stand up there and keep sellin' when the customers just ain't buyin'?  And whether he's one of the 'good ones' or not, he sounds just like every other politician, doesn't he?  'I've devoted my life to service.....You're mad.  I hear you and Washington hears you.'   Riiight!  I hope we don't lose our fury and momentum before next year.  A good out with the old/in with the new dustup in 2010 would have them shaking in their shoes for 2012. 


Bank of America to cut 35,000 jobs.......sm
over the next 3 years.  Weren't they the ones who put money in your savings account every time you made a purchase? 

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4BA6ZD20081211?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
The feds should use the bank & Wall St.
Then put a lien on, and sell, their fancy mansions in upstate NY, their yachts, their Mercedes, etc.  Let their kids to go public school instead of fancy private ones.   They're the greedy ones who got us into this mess, let THEM pay for it, not us.
If it's a felony to incite a bank run, then
shouldn't these people on Wall Street be prosecuted?  After all, if they hadn't done what they did to the economy, then we wouldn't have to withdraw our money.
Yeah! Could I rob and bank and claim to be
nm
What is the bank bail-out if not socialism? s/m
Maybe you'd have better luck with your employees if you gave them a raise.  If you have a profit margin that allows you to give them a 25% bonus, surely a 10% raise wouldn't cause you to suffer too much.
Bank executives will be getting bonuses
and we are fighting over crumbs and religion.
"Central international bank" = sm
One-world currency. Interesting.
Who benefited from the bank bailout?

Wall Street, Citigroup, AIG, Fannie May/Freddie Mac, the car companies.


I don't want a check either but wouldn't be nice if they would give us the money instead of coming up with all these carppy bogged down packages?


What would you do if they would give us $30K or more?  That would probably cost less than what they are proposing and you know darn well, that money would go into the economy faster than their plan.


 


I was speaking about bank bailouts
not the stimulus. Two different things.

Since the banks are crying that they are losing money because of people not paying mortgages, etc., would it not make sense to boost them back up by providing the money THEY ARE GOING TO GET ANYWAYS to the homeowners first and therefore killing two birds with one stone?

Or no, lets just throw more money at them with no stipulations and no rules and bend over and continue to take it while they go on another vacation and laugh all the way to the bank. That definitely makes more sense.

Since people who rent aren't involved with the mortgage/bank crisis, no they would be left out of this one. But like Zville posted, they could be covered under the stimulus side of this "economic relief" that's being proposed.

How does it not tick you off that all the businesses are getting a bailout and "infusion" of cash but the average citizen is still going to suffer for the next two or three years?


Wanda on the bank bailout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADr2KG5aso
throw him to the wolves
Hey, I have an idea, lets gnaw off the foot of the fool who got us into this mess into the first place.  Took a country with a surplus, a happy time for all, respect throughout the world and got us into a situation we will not get out of for years to come, if ever..Better yet, lets throw him to the people and lets tar, feather and string him up.
false. Throw something

else against the wall, may be it will stick.


 


brb -going to go throw up my lunch now.
nm
Then you'll throw a fit about having
to pay this woman's medical bills, support her subsidized housing, feeding and clothing the kid........make up your MINDS. It's a shame she didn't have the money to abort this fetus safely.
Say one more word and I will throw up! nm
.
After we throw the bums out

Maybe we should acknowlege that whoever volunteers for the job has ulterior motives. 


What if we then select our candidates at random, like we do jurors for jury duty.  We select a slate of candidates that are average people with average lives, give them the chance to decline or get excused for good reason, then give them time to present a platform and vote on which one of them gets the office.  Derails the good old boy network completely.  We couldn't guarantee the new candidates wouldn't be greedy, but their greed would at least be less organized and not part of the sophisticated behind the scenes network that exists today.


I'm sorry but for this judge to throw

out the tests for those firerighters who studied hard and earned those promotions and didn't get them merely because they were all white with one hispanic man.  To me...that is racism right there.  They didn't get the promotions because of their skin color.  Had they been a more motley crew of races, they would have gotten those promotions.  It is truly a sad day when hard work and studying doesn't benefit you because your skin color isn't that of a minority. 


I'm all for equal rights between the races and all of these firefighters were given the same studying materials and the same amount of time to study.  How can you take away those promotions from the people who studied hard and scored the highest merely because most of them are white? 


This doesn't present a very good opinion of this judge so far to me.  She also made a comment about how with her experience and her being a latino women, she could make better decisions than a white male.  Racism?  Hello?  If  a white man had said that he could make better decisions than a black man, woman, or latino.....OMG.....the race card would have been thrown out and that would have been the end of his career.  Why is it that minorities are allowed to say racist things and be racist and that is okay, but the moment a white person says something remotely racist.......that is the end of that person's career.  More double standards.


The surplus also followed him out eh? We know because it's now in the bank accounts of the rich.
A lot of people made a lot of money during the Clinton years - that's real money, honey, and they're still rich, accounting for our current revenues. Without the Clinton boom years your president's buds (and your president himself, let us remind you) wouldn't have gotten their 100,000 tax break checks. Sure, the boom couldn't hold, but the point is that the favorable conditions created by a sounder Democratic fiscal policy allowed that boom to come about.

Now all we have is empty coffers, slashed public spending, and China owns us. Big improvement huh? Oops, but people like Frist are still getting over big time on their big time stock trades - all's clear in the upper 1% But since you likely aren't in it, it's hard to see what you find so appealing about being a credit slave one paycheck away from poverty. Is that working out good for you?
No need to wonder...current mortgage bank crisis...
brought to you courtesy of greedy democrats on Congress and greedy Democrats at the top of Fannie Mae. The handwriting is on the wall. This one's on you. McCain saw it coming in 2005 and the dems shut him down. Well, we are reaping what they sowed. To quote Toby Keith...how do you like them now?
Bank Bailout Facts (2-min. video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JUWYEc0Fg&feature=related 
Bank Bail Out True Facts
 
Everyone and their mother withdraws their cash from the bank.
dd
No, not at all. But, leaves the bank with no money to loan.
dd
World Bank computer hacked
I don't believe for one minute the computers were hacked by some kids just trying to do it.  I find it very disturbing this originated in China.  Why haven't we been told about this before now, a year later?   This is China's government doing this.... When will we ever learn our lessons and stop doing business with communists countries.  We buy all their crap, because we are indebted to them to the tune of trillions of dollars, and they buy nothing from us.  Now there's fair trade at its best!!  Of course, what happens when you are indebted to someone/somthing?  You kiss their butts!!!!!!
Fed approves Chinese Bank CCB to open in US

Am I the only one who finds this scary?


Fed approves Chinese bank CCB to open office in US


Mon Dec 8, 5:15 pm ET


WASHINGTON (AFP) –– The US Federal Reserve said Monday it had authorized China Construction Bank, a leading Chinese state bank, to operate in the United States.


The proposed New York City branch of CCB "would engage in wholesale deposit-taking, lending, trade finance, and other banking services," the Fed said in a statement.


The US central bank recalled that China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) is 57.0 percent owned by the Chinese state, 19.7 percent by US banking group Bank of America and 5.7 percent by Temasek Holdings, a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of Singapore. The remainder of the capital is publicly traded.


CCB is the second-largest bank in China, with total assets of approximately 1.1 trillion dollars, it noted.


The Fed said it had determined that CCB had adequate anti-money laundering safeguards and had committed to respect US laws on money laundering.


CCB's own funds exceed the minimum set by the 1998 Basel Capital Accord and "is considered equivalent to capital that would be required of a US banking organization," the US central bank said.


CCB would be the fourth mainland Chinese bank -- excluding banks in Hong Kong -- to open operations in the US, after the Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications.


The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China's top bank, also has asked the Fed for authorization to open a branch in New York.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081208/pl_afp/uschinabankregulatebankingcompanyccb


Ahem. The West Bank is not theirs. Neither is Gaza.
So just how does that justify illegal settlements and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank?
GW started socialism with the bank bailout..
So go fry your baloney.
After seeing what happened when the last administration's bank bailout.....
There has to be some oversight somewhere! The banks can't/won't tell us what happened to the money...........
Greenspan Backs Bank Nationalization

by: Krishna Guha and Edward Luce, The Financial Times


photo
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has come out in favor of nationalizing some banks. (Photo: Reuters Pictures)




    The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.


    In an interview, Mr Greenspan, who for decades was regarded as the high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, said nationalisation could be the least bad option left for policymakers.


    "It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do."


    Mr Greenspan's comments capped a frenetic day in which policymakers across the political spectrum appeared to be moving towards accepting some form of bank nationalisation.


    "We should be focusing on what works," Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told the FT. "We cannot keep pouring good money after bad." He added, "If nationalisation is what works, then we should do it."


    Speaking to the FT ahead of a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, Mr Greenspan said that "in some cases, the least bad solution is for the government to take temporary control" of troubled banks either through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other mechanism.


    The former Fed chairman said temporary government ownership would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them."


    But he cautioned that holders of senior debt - bonds that would be paid off before other claims - might have to be protected even in the event of nationalisation.


    "You would have to be very careful about imposing any loss on senior creditors of any bank taken under government control because it could impact the senior debt of all other banks," he said. "This is a credit crisis and it is essential to preserve an anchor for the financing of the system. That anchor is the senior debt."


    Mr Greenspan's comments came as President Barack Obama signed into law the $787bn fiscal stimulus in Denver, Colorado. Mr Obama will announce on Wednesday a $50bn programme for home foreclosure relief in Phoenix, Arizona. Meanwhile, the White House was working last night on the latest phase of the bailout for two of the big three US carmakers.


    In his speech after signing the stimulus, which he called the "most sweeping recovery package in our history", Mr Obama set out a vertiginous timetable of federal decisions in the coming weeks that included fixing the US banking system, submission next week of the 2009 budget and a bipartisan White House meeting to address longer-term fiscal discipline.


    "We need to end a culture where we ignore problems until they become full-blown crises," said Mr Obama. "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles… but it does mark the beginning of the end."


Well by all means...throw the whole country...
to the dogs because he has a dynamic mentality. By ALL means. lolol.
You said it - and any other Clinton throw-aways
What is up with all this???? They did enough damage when they were in there before. Albright was one of the most useless secretary of state and countries held little respect for her. She made the country a laughing stock before Bush ever got in there.
How much does it cost to throw a party?
Look, I don't care if Obama's inaugaration party is costing 21 million, but in the light of where our economy is right now, do you think it's a good idea? I mean, can't you have a good party for around 10 million? This is NOT a political question. I'm not attacking Obama, it's more of an economic question.
Personally, I want to throw up every time the
nm
Government prying into people's bank accounts nothing new.

And they're not just snooping on terrorists, as they claim.


http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06


Pay too much and you could raise the alarm


By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06



PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that everything changed after 9/11 thing.

But not Walter.

We're a product of the '60s, he said. We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

When you mess with my money, I want to know why, he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

The more I'm on, the scarier it gets, he said. It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to others, he said.


(Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence Journal. E-mail bkerr@projo.com.)



(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)


McCain throw tantrum and cancels

With all the hoop-lah about Obama "refusing" to submit to interview with Focks, seems McCain is throwing another temper tantrum (which I did see on CNN, but could not find to include in this post.  He cancelled his scheduled appearance on Larry King over what he considered to be an "over-the-top" inerview between Campbell Brown and Tucker Bounds. 


 


Here's a link to an article about the cancellation.  I could not get good audio on their link to the interview video, so I am providing this second link where I could:


http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/02/mccain-cancel-cnn/


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/212194.php


 


Any comments from the gallery? 


Dems throw flags in garbage
Click the link below.  Tsk, tsk, tsk.  How unpatriotic.
A couple of facts sure seem to throw JM's flock
su
why don't u just throw yourself on the floor and kick your feet
talk about childish - I never called you anything until you called me  "an old hag" - so throw your little tantrum and try to convince yourself how "real" you actually are. Actions speak louder than words and..........well, you might have a case of mistaken identity here - I don't harass anyone - I stay out of the petty pssing matches. Get all flustered up over what you consider SACRED - who cares???? I don't. And no, I DON'T have to agree with you or anyone else for that matter and I don't give a flying fk if you agree with me.
Hurry up Fitzgerald..Im waiting to throw a party!
 It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 16 October 2005


    There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on The Early Show on CBS. Last week the setting was Today on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.


    As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts, Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in Psycho. Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.


    That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.


    Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.


    Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.


    Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that the intelligence and facts about Iraq's W.M.D.'s were being fixed around the policy of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.


    The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in A Pretext for War, writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.


    The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's escalation of nuclear rhetoric could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about uranium from Africa in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.


    Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took responsibility for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.


    It was not until the war was supposedly over - with Mission Accomplished, in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.


    It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were not involved with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as Bush's brain, he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.


    Bush's Brain is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in Bush's Brain, bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by a layer of operatives from any ill behavior that might implicate him. There is no crime, just a victim, Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.


    THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.


    Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another victory for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.