Today sees the start of the Deep Throat expose post mortem.  Given the conservatives' attack mode, I expect they see this as a threat, a reminder to the American people of the dangers of an imperial presidency during time of war.  The parallels to Nixon get stronger every day, so I expect to either see a LOT more or an eerie silence.

Stem cells really seem to be picking up as the issue of the day, and religion in all its forms continues to drive the letter writers.  There are two good letters about recruiting, and I will lead with the first of them:

Is this one of you?  Did somebody here write this?  One wag on Kos suggested we send recruiters the names of College Republicans.  It sounds like a good idea to me.  It seems particularly timely given the Pentagon's refusal to release recruiting numbers.

The Daily Herald (Everett, Washington)

People of courage should march to war

Re-enlistments are down 41 percent in spite of an increase of Army recruiters to 12,000 and a large increase in cash bonuses.

The time is now for all you who have thought this war and this president was doing the right thing, to announce to your children, your grandchildren, to put on the uniform of our country and truly have the courage of your convictions and march to war.

The soldiers need your help now.

A bumper sticker doesn't quite cut it.

DALE FISCHER

Everett

The Oakland (California) Tribune

Bush will hurt himself and his party on stem cell research.  Yes, the religious zealots helped him win in '04, but they helped him win like the nerd that hit the free throws at the end of the game, not like the center that played 42 minutes, scored 35 points, had 15 rebounds and three blocked shots.  There are a lot of wealthy old fashioned Republicans out there with an uncomfortable intimacy with the diseases such research might cure. A cartoon making the same point follows.

Bush goes against will of people on stem cells

PRESIDENT Bush is going against the political will of Congress and the American people on the issue of federal funding for stem cell research. ...

Where is government funding in the United States? The National Institutes of Health, which oversees $28.6 billion in annual spending, has distributed just $54 million for stem cell research over the last four years on cells derived from embryos produced before Aug. 9, 2001. ...

The House last week passed a bill that would increase federal funding for stem cell research. California's Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a critic of administration inaction, has introduced a bill to relax restrictions.

But Bush vows to veto any bill that comes to his desk. This could set up an interesting battle on Capitol Hill. The president has not used the veto since taking office. But he said recently, "I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable," and he would never allow "federal taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life." ...

This is a very personal issue for Americans. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., cited his battle against Hodgkin's disease as a medical condition that could benefit from stem cell research. He predicts the Senate will pass the measure if it comes to a vote -- and has enough votes to override a Bush veto. ...

It's time to bring the stem cell issue to a head and force Bush to veto or accept a stronger stem cell bill. Vetoing it could be a very unpopular move.

Bush's stance encourages researchers in other nations to initiate and accelerate research. It has already driven some of our best medical researchers overseas. Stem cell research is an issue that transcends pro-life ideology.

Anniston (Alabama) Star

I keep thinking of Bob Dylan's With God On Our Side,  an ode to our absurd sense of self-righteousness and surety we need not observe the rules because we are right.  

Another exception to our ideals

Having seen Amnesty International's description of Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times," the Bush administration has reacted loudly and angrily.  ...

There it is -- true "American exceptionalism" on display. This old argument is that the country must compromise on its highest ideals just this once because it's really, really vital. Practically from the country's founding, leaders have trotted out exceptions to our rules. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789 made political opposition illegal. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended certain civil liberties. Much the same thing happened during World War I, the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the student protest movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Did we mention the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II?  

The point is that all these detours from America's greater self came as a result of what leaders at the time believed to be a different kind of war. ...

It would be a pity to be hung up over the meaning of gulag, and lose a sense of the larger and more disturbing picture.

Anniston (Alabama) Star

The whole idea of stop loss orders in the military has made the entire recruiting process a lie of even greater perfidy than the stupid attempts to get fake GEDs for applicants.  It reduces our All Volunteer Army to victims of 19th century press gangs, lied to and abused.  Huge changes will be required, whether it is a draft, big adjustments to recruiting and use of our men and women, or (and maybe this is what it is all about) privatization and a mercenary army.  Can you imagine the profits for Haliburton?

Speak out ... On truth in recruiting

If the U.S. Army's offer of 15-month contracts to enlistees sounds too good to be true, consider what the courts say. A federal appeals court ruled the Army could use its stop-loss authority to keep all soldiers, including 15-month recruits, in service beyond their original military obligation.  

The Army's 15-month contract is really a lifetime contract and could be a life-ending contract. If President Bush's pre-emptive war with Iraq is so popular, why must the U.S. Army use "Words of Mass Deception" to mislead recruits?  

Joe Boyett

Montgomery

The Bakersfield Californian

The whole argument that keeping preachers from politics on the pulpit is a violation of free speech is idiocy, as this points out. The point is that political speech is not entitled the a tax exemption.

Keep religious freedom pure

The federal constitutional separation of church and state that has served both institutions well is in jeopardy. It must be allowed to remain intact.  

One tool that helps ensure the survival of the incredibly valuable and historically unique experiment by the founding fathers would be obliterated by the House of Worship Freedom of Speech Restoration Act. ...

If passed, it would remove the Internal Revenue Service's ability to question whether a church's partisan political activity -- including overt candidate endorsements -- jeopardizes its tax-exempt status. The bill would remove partisan politicking as grounds for revoking churches' tax-exempt status. ...

A spokeswoman for Jones says, "It's a freedom of speech issue. There is no reason that ministers, rabbis, what have you, shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other citizens."

True. And they do have those rights -- they just shouldn't be able to do it tax free. No one else does. All they have to do when they want to work for political causes is to do it outside the church.

The example is shown best by another member of Congress, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Kansas City, Mo., and a Methodist minister. He has never endorsed anybody from the pulpit, he says, including himself.

"When the church and state sleep together, the church rises the next day without respect. The church must retain its purity. What we are obligated to do from the pulpit is say, 'Thus says the Lord,' and the Lord, as far as I know, has not gotten into giving endorsements."

The Gainesville (Florida) Sun

This looks like a local story, but is just a local example of a national trend- taking money from public schools and giving it to private schools with religious affiliations. The public schools fail tests, and the private schools get money and no testing.  We just have to "believe" they are better.  It is, in my humble opinion, not a coincidence that the Catholic Church discovered for the first time this last election cycle that there were abortion supporters taking communion.  There is an ENORMOUS amount of money to be gained by Catholic schools, by far the largest block of private schools in the country, from the whole NCLB and school voucher boondoggle.

Jeb's half-baked pie

Gov. Jeb Bush says that private school vouchers are as "American as apple-pie." But from the very beginning, Bush's apple-pie recipe for privatizing education reform was half-baked. ...

So public schools are held accountable for the public dollars they receive. But what about the private schools that take state-funded vouchers? Do voucher students do better than public-school students? Nobody knows, and the state has shown virtually no interest in finding out. ...

Ultimately, it will be the Florida Supreme Court that will make the final call on vouchers. The state's constitution has a fairly explicit ban on taking money from the "public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution." Since many voucher schools are church-affiliated, two lower courts have already held Bush's voucher programs to be unconstitutional....

Even if the Florida Supreme Court were to, somehow, find vouchers are indeed constitutional, it appears that the Legislature is growing wary of the notion that the way to reform public education is to throw money at private schools. We predict that, ultimately, Florida's flirtation with private-school vouchers will be remembered as a half-baked vanity on the part of a governor who confused political platitude with good public policy.

King County (Washington) Journal

Ah, snarkiness.  What better way to respond to the stupidity that is "intelligent design"?

OK, let's teach the children

Kids should be taught both sides of controversial topics.

Let's require that science classes teach that a flood covering the Earth would have left an even layer of silt in the substrata around the globe -- but that no such layer exists. And that any such flood would have saturated the soil with salt, making it impossible to grow food -- starving any humans or animals who managed to survive the flood.

Let's have the English classes explore the contradiction of a loving ``ruling person'' who supposedly cares for each of his subjects who nevertheless annihilates whole cities of them -- children included -- because he's irritated with the behavior of some of the adults. Let's teach them that homosexual behavior occurs quite naturally in dozens of animal species.

Do all this and I'll have no objections to lessons exploring the ``weaknesses'' in evolutionary theory.

Laura Billington

Maple Valley

Lansing (Michigan) State Journal

Bolton has no business representing our country, but he will probably get shoved through and then ignored.  Yes, he is a terrible choice to be U.N. Ambassador, but this Administration hates the U.N. anyway.  It's sort of like being sent to stay at your in-laws during a divorce- the idea is insane, but ultimately futile.

Bolton: Senate vote should convince Bush to nominate another

Democrats in the U.S. Senate were right last week to block the confirmation vote of John Bolton as our United Nations ambassador.

The Democrats have a bigger beef with the White House besides not liking Bolton. They've asked the Bush administration for several weeks to provide information about Bolton's work in his current assignment, as the State Department's arms control chief.

The administration has rebuffed those requests. ...

President Bush still may get his way on the Bolton nomination, and he could hasten matters by forwarding the information requested by the senators. Better yet, he could have Bolton withdraw from the process, freeing the president to choose someone less of a lightning rod to represent the United States at the U.N.

The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts)

I expect this will be the first of many Deep Throat editorials in The Daily Pulse.  The conservative attack against him is fascinating, and to me indicates just how deep this Administration is in the shit, and how clearly they know the whole facade could come tumbling down.  The Downing Street Minutes are a lever, but the fulcrum is not yet in place.  The fulcrum, much like that used to move Nixon, was an unpopular war.  Watch Bush's numbers fall as the body count rises, and the fulcrum starts to move into place.

A decades-old secret becomes trivia answer

Watergate was a clumsy attempt by the highest government officials in Washington to deceive the American people.

The bungled break-in and the cover-up nearly destroyed America's faith in the federal government and its leaders. ...

The identity of Deep Throat remained a mystery for nearly 33 years until it was revealed Tuesday by Vanity Fair and confirmed by his family members and The Washington Post.

W. Mark Felt was the second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s. ...

The greatest political mystery of our time now becomes the answer to a trivia question. Most Americans, at least those of a certain age, rarely, if ever, think of Watergate. It is a lesson no American should ever forget.

Watergate is a story of a president who sought to overthrow his own government even as he held the government's highest office. It is the story of men who thought they were above the law and acted without regard for the law. It is a story of secrecy and deceit. It is a story of the First Amendment and a free press at work.

Watergate threatened to undermine the integrity of the American government, yet the public's faith was not easily destroyed.

Reforms triggered by Watergate include the Ethics in Government Act, the Government in Sunshine Act, the Special Prosecutor provision, Congressional ethics codes, Freedom of Information Act amendments, House and Senate Open Meeting Rules, and FBI domestic security guidelines among many others.

History will not forget Richard Nixon. It should soon not forget W. Mark Felt, either.