[EXCERPTED FROM "Kerry's Failed Joke, Bush's Sick Humor."]

John Kerry's failed "stuck in Iraq" joke once again highlighted the Massachusetts Senator's uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  But as George Bush, Dick Cheney and their amen corner try to make hay at Kerry's expense to help the GOP's flagging midterm prospects, they should take care that Americans not be reminded of the President's own sick sense of humor.  After all, Bush's jokes usually come at our expense.

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[EXCERPTED FROM "Hutchison Backs Iraq Partition, Endorses Clinton Balkans Policy."]

With the looming midterm elections and the imminent report from James Baker's Iraq Study Group facing them like a double-barreled shotgun, Congressional Republicans are beginning to cut and run on President Bush's failed Iraq strategy.  In recent days, Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and John Warner (R-VA) have garnered most of the attention with their critiques of a "stay the course" policy that has left Iraq "drifting sideways."

But it is Kay Bailey Hutchison from the President's home state of Texas who is now performing the greatest pre-election turnabout.  And in seeking cover from the woes of President Bush, Senator Hutchison has paradoxically lauded President Clinton's intervention in the Balkans, a policy she once vehemently opposed.

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[EXCERPTED FROM "A Sad Week for Black Republicans."]

Like the spotted owl or the Pacific sea otter, Black Republicans are something of an endangered species.  This week, a select group of African-American conservatives and their GOP allies showed why.

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[EXCERPTED FROM "Katrina Flashback: The Warnings."]

With the one-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans now at hand, the Bush administration has launched its revisionist history project.  (Last week's stage-managed journey of the Big Easy Republican Rockey Vaccarella was just the first salvo of the full scale blitz from the White House.)

Central to President Bush's effort to evade responsibility for the calamitous federal response to Katrina was and will be the "failure of imagination" defense.  Like Condi Rice's stunning 9/11 claim that nobody "could have predicted that these people...would try to use an airplane as a missile," Bush, Rove, Mehlman and the GOP machinery will declare that the inundation of New Orleans was unknowable.  As President Bush said on September 1, 2005, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

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[EXCERPTED FROM "Bush Flip-Flops on Bin Laden."]

In the four years plus since the 9/11 attacks, the simplest way to gauge President Bush's changing political fortunes has been his changing attitude towards Osama Bin Laden.  In the Bush playbook, the threat posed by Bin Laden danger is directly proportional to the threat to the President's political standing.

Trying to fight back the growing public outcry over his illegal domestic wiretapping program, President Bush used the Bin Laden bogeyman once again during his remarks Wednesday at the National Security Agency.  Bush lashed out at his critics:

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In case you missed the fun and frolic in Tennessee yesterday, here is the  special edition, commemorative Justice Sunday II program.

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