The Hightower Report

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RESPONSIBILITY FOR POINDEXTER

Oh, good, John Poindexter is gone. I hope that someone wrapped him gently in a warm blanket and took him away, far, far away to some quiet place where professionals can soothe his raging, right-wing demons ... and where he can do no more harm.

Poindexter is the convicted felon from the Reagan White House who, for some bizarre reason, was brought back into play by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of imperial weirdness. He was given a Pentagon office, staff, lots of money, and -- scariest of all -- real power. In service to the Bushites, he became the maniacal Dr. Strangelove of the Pentagon.

Poindexter was the Orwellian lunatic behind TIA -- the supersnooper "Total Information Awareness" computer program designed to compile detailed dossiers on all of us. More recently, his little shop of horrors produced P.A.M. -- the "Policy Analysis Market" that would have created a federal betting parlor on terrorism. It was to be the Pentagon's own futures trading market, only instead of speculating on the future price of pork bellies, investors worldwide would have been able to gamble on the likelihood that, say, Israel's prime minister would be assassinated or that the Turkish parliament would be bombed.

Luckily, public outrage has curtailed this guy's TIA program, shut down his P.A.M. scam, and ultimately forced him to resign. So we can all have a good laugh and rest easy now ... right?

Not so fast. Where were the higher-ups? His ideas were so jaw-droppingly stupid that some quasi-sane superior should have stepped in and said: No, John, no. Yet, Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Bush's White House, and Congress all authorized millions of our tax dollars for his whacked-out schemes -- some of which are continuing. Poindexter is gone, but the kookiness runs all the way to the top.

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LEAVING CHILDREN BEHIND

Taxes might be one of the few things in life that are certain, but taxes certainly don't have to be as grossly unfair as the political Scrooges in Washington make them.

Take, for example, the massively regressive tax giveaways that Bush and his plutocratic cohorts in both parties have enacted. Having shoved the vast preponderance of this money up to the wealthiest Americans, they then tossed a political sop to middle-class families in the form of a $400 tax credit for children. They even touted this sop as deliverance on George W.'s favorite piece of political rhetoric: "Leave No Child Behind."

That's a sweet slogan, but their delivery on it hit a sour note when it was revealed that they had, in fact, left lots of children behind -- for example, the children in 6.5 million low-income working families were not included in Bush's bill. Public outrage at this exclusion has forced the Senate, under unrelenting pressure by Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, to pass another bill belatedly extending the child tax credit to these children.

The House, however, where ideologically extreme Scrooges rule the roost, has refused to include the low-income children. "Ain't going to happen," barked a smirking Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader who is nuttier than a whole peanut factory. He says that low-income working families don't deserve the child tax credit, because they don't pay taxes.

Earth to Tom: While they don't pay federal income taxes, a disproportionate amount of their meager incomes goes to pay sales taxes and other assessments. Add up all the taxes, and the poor pay a bigger percentage of their incomes than do the rich. As for who "deserves" the tax credit, a million of the families Bush is scorning are U.S. military personnel, including 250,000 children of our soldiers who are on active duty.

The next time Bush uses his leave-no-child-behind line ... remember these children he left out.