Fox News is asking, “Should Bush set a deadline for Saddam?” Right now, “Yes, we’ve given him too much time already” is leading with 88%, while “No, let the inspectors work” has a mere 10% (”not sure” accounts for the other 2%).

As always, this site encourages you to participate fully in democracy in all its varied guises.

Update: link removed because the poll has run its course. Have a good weekend — I think I’m done here for the week.

A reader draws my attention to this report, titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (.pdf format), from a thinktank called the Project for a New American Century. I haven’t looked through the whole thing yet, but here are a couple of sobering excerpts:

ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for U.S. military forces:
— defend the American homeland;
— fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
— perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security
environment in critical regions;
— transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs”

* * *

… the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event “like a new Pearl Harbor.”

* * *

Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Emphasis added.

Did I mention that this was written in September of 2000? Or that signatories to the original PNAC Statement of Principles included Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and Paul Wolfowitz?

I’m going out to buy some Reynolds Wrap now.

Update: my pal Vance Lemkuhl emails to point out that this was a front page story at his paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, on Monday.

Meant to post this tidbit yesterday, but Patrick Nielsen Hayden has done the heavy lifting:

Can’t…stop…self…must…don…tinfoil…hat:

(1) Prominent Republican Thomas Kean, former governor of New Jersey, is the new chairman of the 9/11 commission.

(2) Kean is also a director of petroleum company Amerada Hess.

(3) In 1988, Amerada Hess formed a joint venture with Saudi company Delta Oil.

(4) One of Delta Oil’s backers is Khalid bin Mahfouz, who is — here’s where you need to clap your hat firmly to your skull — married to one of Osama Bin Laden’s sisters. And suspected of financing Al Qaeda. Oh, and named in one of the lawsuits brought by 9/11 victims. Did we mention that he’s also been involved in deals with the Carlyle Group, the ultra-secret investment group that includes, among others, George H. W. Bush? And also in deals with — yes, your tinfoil hat, properly adjusted, plays 1980s popular music! — BCCI?

There’s more on his site, go read it.

(Update: just to be clear, all joking about tinfoil hats aside, this is originally from Fortune magazine.)

And speaking of the way the world really works — er, that is to say, crazy conspiracy theories — this is from The Hill:

On May 23, 1997, Victor Baird, who resigned Monday as director of the Senate Ethics Committee, sent a letter to Sen. Charles Hagel requesting “additional, clarifying information” for the personal financial disclosure report that all lawmakers are required to file annually.

-snip-

One underlying issue is whether Hagel properly disclosed his financial ties to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a company that makes nearly half the voting machines used in the United States, including all those used in his native Nebraska.

ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group Inc., which is jointly held by the holding firm and the Omaha World-Herald Co., which publishes the state’s largest newspaper. The voting machine company makes sophisticated optical scan and touch-screen vote-counting devices that many states have begun buying in recent years.

An official at Nebraska’s Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in Hagel’s 2002 and 1996 election races.

In 1996, ES&S operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS). The company became ES&S after merging with Business Records Corp. in 1997.

In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do.

Just ponder the implications of that for a moment…

(Via reader Carolyn Kay, but I see that the all-seeing, all-knowing Atrios is on it too.)

An ongoing public service of thismodernworld.com.

Bill O’Reilly wants to know if you think the President’s State Of The Union speech was effective. There are two possible responses, either “Yes - Just what we needed,” or “No-a total disappointment.” Right now the results are running 94% in favor of the former.

Just so you know.

Update: Here’s Wolf Blitzer’s version of the same question.

Nancy Pelosi tries not to laugh as Bush claims that his tax plan will allow 92 million Americans to “keep an average of $1,100 more,” and…

…the President’s stirring rhetoric on Iraq apparently lulls Ted Kennedy into a deep slumber.

Just got this from a reader:

Just to say that I cannot access your website, since the public access facility I use installed “Norton Internet Security Family Edition”. It seems that the guys at Symantec decided that your site is not suitable for family, and hence, as an adult, I am not allowed to see it.

Is this true? Has Symantec decided that children should not be exposed to the politics of this site?

Inquiring minds want to know.

From TomPaine.com:

The president has laid out his agenda. Call it bold, brilliant, audacious or outrageous. But don’t call it “conservative.”

Real conservatives promote fiscal prudence, public accountability and limited government. But the policies promoted by Mr. Bush and his party, as outlined in the State of the Union speech, is a sad parody of those values. Bush and company are running a con game ” they seek to gain our CONfidence by assuring us they are CONservative. But their desire to hold political power has trumped genuine public-spirited principle and the values they profess.

Fiscal prudence? The keystone of today’s “conservative” agenda is a dedication to tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, even though doing so will increase the deficit. That’s short-term thinking at its worst. Because of those tax breaks, the faltering economy and the war on terrorism, some economists estimate we’ll have deficits of $300 billion a year for the foreseeable future. The next generation of Americans will bear the burden of that debt. There’s something profoundly immoral about financing tax breaks for today’s wealthiest Americans by borrowing money from the unborn.

More.

…which side will co-opt this quote first:

“Your enemy is not surrounding your country. your enemy is ruling your country.”

This one also struck me as ripe for appropriation:

“Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.”

“The key weapon in the warriors’ political arsenal was the fear inspired by a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein…..Initially, Safire predicted that the Iraqis would have the nuclear bomb ready to deliver to the United States by 1994 (”The first city he will take out is New York”). A few months into the crisis, in the midst of four consecutive columns on the subject, The Times man moved the deadline up to 1993….. Unfortunately, neither Safire nor anyone else in the West had any dependable information about the Iraqi nuclear program…. even Colin Powell saw the threat as years away.”

From Eric Alterman’s 1992 book, Sound and Fury, via Ziska. And Wampumblog has more deja vu.

…but as the president tries to make the case for war tonight, I think it’s important to remember that this is what he’s talking about. (Via Body & Soul.)