Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."

Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:

Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.

Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."

It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."

Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.

Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.

During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.

The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?

But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:

Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:

Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.

The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4

When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.

The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.

African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):

Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.

Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.

If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.

As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.

More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.

Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.

And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.

Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?

Still secret: Corruption in the White House.

Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.

Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.

Anyway, the report notes:

Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.

And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.

It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.

Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.

In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.

Osama wants Americans to convert, but many of us are already religious fanatics.

Sounding like a presidential candidate, Osama bin Laden sympathized with our "insane taxes and real estate mortgages," according to Al Qaeda's tape, brilliantly dissected by Anne Applebaum in Slate.

Bin Laden's solution for beleaguered Americans? Convert to his brand of hardline Islam.

That wouldn't be much of a leap for many Americans, because 12.6 percent of us are "traditional evangelical" Christians, according to a 2004 survey by the political science prof John Green at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

And what do traditional evangelical Christians believe in? Evangelizing, by definition, which is what bin Laden was doing on that tape.

And here's a reminder: Most evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, as beliefnet.org's Deborah Caldwell noted in an excellent 2002 article. For you who are unaware, this is how religioustolerance.org explains the Rapture:

And Americans make fun of Islamic fanatics' beliefs about meeting virgins in Heaven?

Bin Laden's a violent creep, but his brand of religious fanaticism would be a pretty good fit for evangelical George W. Bush. Reporters for Frontline's The Jesus Factor (2004) talked with top Southern Baptist official Richard Land — whose denomination is the biggest in the U.S. — about Bush's inauguration for his second term as Texas governor:

OK, I'm convinced: God is vengeful.

(Land, by the way, wears presidential-seal cuff links; see my September 2004 item "The Christocrats.")

I guess that those of you who voted for Bush — Twice! For Christ's sake! — are off the hook, in both senses of the phrase.

Judging by the results of the 2004 religious survey, the turban of conservative Muslim bin Laden would wear well on quite a few other Americans, as much as they rightly detest him.

Hardliners of one religion have more in common with hardliners of another religion than with the rest of us. They all believe in conservative, patriarchal "family values" and they give us the same fiery message: Convert, or burn in hell — and we'll light the match.

You still think there's no comparison between bin Laden's homicidal brand of Islam and the beliefs of America's Rock-of-Ages-rigid traditional Christian evangelicals? Here's the grim FAQ about the future of us unbelievers, according to the killer logic of raptureready.com:

Let this be a warning.

The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

This may hurt.

A new GAO report stops the White House spin on Iraq in its tracks. Golly, why couldn't the Washington Post wait until the White House massages General David Petraeus's info into a suitable "progress report" to be released on 9/11?

Iraq is still unreasonably hot, and the White House is still blustery. I know, you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, but getting your hands on a GAO report draft helps. Here's this morning's story by Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks:

And how's that "surge" working for you?

The best news is that the number of whistleblowers in D.C. is increasing. That may slow the Bush regime's spin enough that we can see what's actually going on in Iraq. The story notes:

Get ready for a mid-August rain of propaganda.

Bush is "pleased with lower poverty rate." Here on our planet, the situation is different.

Wednesday was a good day at the beleaguered White House, a chance to finally spring some good news on Americans. "President Bush Pleased With Lowered Poverty Rate" was the headline cranked out by the press office:

Only slightly marring this great development:

"Challenges remain in reducing the number"? That's a clever lie, denying the truth that the number of uninsured Americans is in fact increasing and that the "rising incomes" are illusory. From the hardworking Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a mainstream centrist think tank, comes this analysis:

Now let's get realistic. The federal poverty level is $20,000 annual income for a family of four. You try raising a family on that.

Social-service pros routinely measure "low-income families" as those whose annual income is 200 percent of the official poverty rate. The National Center for Children in Poverty breaks it down in language that even Bush, whose handlers are busy building his library, could understand, if he bothered to read anything:

Yes, there are always poor people, but there are more and more of them you. And while Bush trumpets the "progress" in the Census figures, his regime is actually taking action that will guarantee worsening future numbers. As the CBPP's Robert Greenstein points out:

That policy is the real news coming out of the White House.

The Bush library architect is selected, but it's not too late to suggest epigraphs for his and the building's facades.

George W. Bush's grandest reinforced-concrete legacy — except for the billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdead being built by shanghaied Filipinos — finally has an architect.

No surprise that it's a New York City firm hired to design Bush's presidential library and museum. The name behind Robert A.M. Stern Architects is Yale's architecture dean, and it's a hoity-toity firm. Besides, Bush's New York chum Roland Betts was on the selection committee.

As much as the POTUS library handlers are trying to burnish diffident reader Bush's image for future generations, the president's only certain legacy so far is the one he used to get into Yale because his daddy went there.

The George W. Bush Presidential Libary, however, will be a monument in 3-D, and it's not too late to suggest that its name and a suitable epigraph from Bush's own words be carved on its front facade. I'm thinking of Bush's August 5, 2004, speech as he signed that year's defense bill:

For that bone mot, go to this White House page for the transcript, video, and audio.

That quotation probably won't pass muster with Bush's crew. But it has to be something memorable and/or important, like this August 4, 1822, quotation by James Madison, which is inscribed on the Library of Congress building bearing his name and which was dedicated by Ronald Reagan:

In the alternative, here's a modern-day quotation that seems apropos:

No, that's not about Iraq; it's from a January 6, 2002, essay by Israeli novelist David Grossman, concerning the Arab-Jew death dance. Don't expect to see that quote in either the Israel or Iraq wings of the Bush Libary, though historians will remember the disastrous road to death in Israel as one of Bush's legacies.

You could pick just about anything from Martin Luther King Jr., but here's a morsel from King's 1967 anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York City. Taken out of context, it's also perfectly in context, in a Vietraq sort of way, as a description of Bush:

Maybe carving an epigraph like that into a building is just too old-fashioned for the computer age, and the Bush Libary simply needs something for people to click on, like this:

All you have to do is click. It's a Windows command, so it should work perfectly.

While George W. Bush's handlers are busy writing General David Petraeus's September 11 "progress report" on Iraq — check out the facts they'll be trying to spin — they're not ignoring other health issues.

Just last week, Bush proclaimed National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month *. (It starts in just a few days, so check out this American Cancer Society info too.)

For those Iraqi men who haven't been among the millions fleeing the country, that shows that our government cares.

More good news, again connected to Iraqi men's health: Fewer Iraqi children are likely to die in coming years. The reason? There's a sharp increase in sterility among Iraqi men. As the U.N. news service IRIN reports:

But that just means more danger to Iraqi doctors, as Bashier explains:

Don't think that women are being ignored. October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month over here, and it's likely that fewer Iraqi women will be in danger of contracting the disease. IRIN reports that women’s rights activists are increasingly targeted by militants:

Courageous women like Haifaa Nour will now have fewer worries because she and everyone else will be less able to leave their homes: There's already a curfew in Baghdad from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., but now tighter restrictions have been imposed in advance of a huge annual Shi'ite pilgrimage. As the BBC reported Saturday:

Well, that's good that people will have to stay inside, but the temperatures during the day are still triple-digit, and Baghdad residents have only about three hours of electricity every 24 hours. Whew. No wonder people are on edge.

Tête-à-tête offensive: Bush and Maliki circle the burning station wagons, while our soldiers go nuts from the war.

George W. Bush wasn't crazy Wednesday when he compared the Iraq Debacle to the Vietnam War to the cheers of a VFW crowd in Kansas City.

Thousands of shell-shocked U.S. soldiers wound up untreated, drifting the streets of America after the Vietnam War. The same thing is happening now with Iraq veterans — at least with those who haven't already committed suicide. From an August 17 AP story:

My colleague Michael Feingold, a theater critic who knows a tragedy when he sees one, tipped me off to that wire story. Unfortunately, we'll never know the exact number of crazed veterans — and they'll probably go untreated — because the military is diagnosing many Iraq vets as suffering from a "personality disorder" instead of post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by the war. That way the government can discharge them, claiming that these soldiers were flawed to begin with, and wash its hands of the problem.

This disgraceful action on the home front will only cause more problems in the long run because the insanity in Iraq in the short term is increasing. Yesterday, gunmen attacked villages in Diyala province where Sunni militiamen who recently joined — supposedly — the U.S. "surge" lived. As Carol J. Williams of the L.A. Times reports this morning:

Sounds like Vietnam, just as the crumbling regime of Nouri al-Maliki sounds like the South Vietnamese government of 40 years ago. The updated National Intelligence Estimate is nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will add even more pressure to Maliki's shaky rule. From Reuters, via SwissInfo:

Wait, wait, wait. Once again the press fails to note that the White House will actually write the report. That's nuts, too. Anyway, back to the Reuters story:

At least the cabinet members' boycott of Maliki's government appears to be ending. Well, maybe that's not such good news:

Crazy, huh? Not as crazy as the treatment of our own soldiers returning home shell-shocked. The Christian Science Monitor recently noted:

But this scandal emerged months ago; here's a story published last Christmas Eve that must have driven some soldiers' families crazy:

By the way, Steven D. Green, the GI accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family (with the help of others in his rape crew), was diagnosed with "anti-social personality disorder" and shipped home shortly after that March 2006 massacre — before the story of the murders fully came out, charges were brought, and he was arrested as a civilian.

That, too, is crazy.

Was Green so screwed-up before he went to Iraq? His tour in that nightmare desert couldn't have helped. As the AP reported last summer:

Hell, no, we won't go.

Speaking to veterans sure not to boo the president, George W. Bush's handlers have launched a new offensive in the Vietnam War, which has been over for 30 years.

Offensive is right. In essence, if you take a look at our soldiers patrolling in Phuoc Vinh, Vietnam, in 1967-68 and in Iraq's Diyala River Valley in August 2007, Bush is telling 21st century America: "Phuoc you."

It's now the Vietraq War. Forty years ago, we were telling a president, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Now we have a president telling us, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Even though Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who really has no choice if he wants to keep his job and his life, is telling us, "Go."

Over here, we'd better run for cover, because we're likely to hear this rat-a-tat-tat from Bush for awhile. Dick Cheney's regime launched this new war Wednesday in Kansas City at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, having Bush say:

Bush's handlers plan more of the same next week at the American Legion gathering in Reno. As Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang reported this morning in the L.A. Times:

Rove, whose name (as I've pointed out) doesn't rhyme with "dove," will go hunting for real doves when he leaves the White House at the end of the month. But he's still on patrol in the West Wing, and we're his pigeons.

All the propaganda isn't coming from the White House. We already knew that, but here's fresh proof. While the excellent McClatchy D.C. Bureau (formerly the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau), headlined its story "Bush Steps up Sales Push to Sustain His Surge in Iraq" (accurately depicting Bush as the regime's salesman), the L.A. Times story carries the softer headline "Bush Has a New Angle on Iraq Debate" (not really accurate because it's his handlers' angle). And the POTUS-pushers didn't write the L.A. Times's sub-headline:

Even the White House's Kevin Sullivan didn't use the adjective "progress." But newspapers and TV are already calling the upcoming Petraeus report, which will be written by the White House, a "progress report." Considering the debacle that is Iraq, how about just calling it a "report" and mentioning that it will be written by the White House?

Instead we'll be inundated in the next couple of weeks — before the report is released on super-jingoistic 9/11 Day — with the words "progress" and "Vietnam." Those words never did quite fit together when JFK, LBJ, and Nixon used them.

Oh, by the way, the White House will be writing Petraeus's report.

"Words convey ideas," the late, great John Bremner told me once and as I've now told you twice. Actually he told me that a thousand times. I'd like to add that words are particularly good for expressing harebrained ideas.

In addition to my own work, here are two Pentagon maps of Iraq. The black-and-white one is from August 2002, and the only reason we can even look at it is that the National Security Archive pried it out of the U.S. government. The nice color one is part of the Pentagon's slide-into-hell show, freely available at a May 31, 2007, press briefing.

On the August 2002 map, I count four "exploits," three "protects," one "fix," one "isolate," two "seizes," one "gain control," and one "suppress." Oh, and one "shock and awe."

On the May 2007 map, we've got only one "protect," but we have three "disrupts," two "extremists," two "defeats," and two "transitions." Instead of "shock and awe," we've got an "expand progress."

Draw your own conclusions, but this is just dangerous and misleading wordplay, though I do like maps and I perversely like the way the Pentagon throws around words.

I can't wait for the wordplay in General David Petraeus's September report to Congress, which, as Bush Beat reader Frances Lynch points out, via this recent Los Angeles Times story, will be written by the White House — yes, you heard me:

Those astounding paragraphs are the story's 28th and 29th. I know you didn't read that far down.

So much dirty laundry that the government needs an extra-long spin cycle, so the current plan is to reveal Petraeus's "report" on the anniversary of 9/11. Watch out for that government spin. But as is often the case, reporters and editors do enough of their own spinning: Waiting until way, way down in a story about Petraeus's upcoming report to mention that, oh by the way, Petraeus's upcoming report is actually going to be written by the White House is one example.

Maybe numbers are the best way to see the war, though they're likely to make you not just dizzy but sick. Here are only a few numbers — they're also freely available from the Pentagon, but you won't see these flashed on a screen for reporters:

To unravel the tortured excuses for Abu Ghraib abuses, go back to June 25, a day of brilliant journalism.

Once so proud of plans for "War on Terror detainees" that they even showed off their special Gitmo chains and other jewelry, the Bush regime's various soldiers are now crying, as the Nazis did, "We were only following orders." Or they're saying, "Hey, I didn't even give the orders."

Blame them, but save the biggest share of blame for their higher-ups — all the way up to Vise President Dick Cheney.

The freshest example is that of Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, whose court-martial right now at Fort Meade, Maryland, for Abu Ghraib abuses that occurred on his watch is a travesty of cover-up upon cover-up.

Despite the fact that the soldiers under Jordan got off by torturing and humiliating prisoners — most of whom were innocent and none of whom were of any intelligence value — Jordan himself will probably get off with a wrist-slap.

Today's account of this extremely important trial is buried on page A14 of the Washington Post:

The news cycles of real news, especially follow-ups, cause so much frustration. How can anyone put his or her hands around what's going on?

Abu Ghraib blazed in the headlines in 2004, but now that details of who did what and when are coming out, it's considered old news. That's why I try to salt my posts with so many links. All we can do is point to some stories that point to the facts and provide context.

And one unmistakable fact is that no matter what happens to Jordan, the torture scandal goes all the way up the chain of command, right into the White House run by Dick Cheney.

When it comes to Abu Ghraib, all you really have to do is focus on just one day's worth of brilliant journalism. Go back to this past June 25 and you'll see what I mean.

Now, I'm not faulting the Post for burying today's Jordan story. It has kicked the ass of the New York Times on almost every topic since the Bush regime came to power. While Jordan's court-martial continues, go back and re-read the Post's stellar series on Cheney, particularly Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's June 25 "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," which I wrote about that day. Here's how that Post story began:

Remarkable stuff. Too bad it didn't come out before the November 2004 presidential election.

If you really want to understand how such a coverup happened — and what tragic roles this Colonel Jordan and various other officials played in this sick drama —go back to Seymour Hersh's brilliant piece "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties," also published on June 25.

Taguba's investigation (PDF of his report) was circumscribed by his higher-ups, Hersh reveals. And of course now it comes out that Jordan supposedly wasn't read his rights at the proper time and he might skate on serious charges.

What about the people above — way above — Jordan? Hersh's reporting explodes the Bush regime's lame excuse that Abu Ghraib's abuses were the work of a few "rogue soldiers":

Rogue soldiers? No, a rogue presidency.

PATRIOT Act, Megan's Law — a novel study of lawmakers' pet names for pet bills

An interesting study by George Mason University grad student Brian C. Jones of the names lawmakers attach to bills and laws makes us breathe easier: We're unlikely to ever see a bill titled "The Rudy Giuliani 9/11 Victims Act."

And Jones's study does spark an awareness of the tools of propaganda. In this era of nonsensical, nonstop political campaigning, such reminders can't hurt.

Jones's project for his master's thesis tested the fictitious and real names of bills among several hundred fellow students at the Virginia school.

One of the examples he used in the survey was the real anti-terrorism bill, on which he slapped Rudy's name. The bad news is Rudy's name kinda fouled up Jones's results. That's because the good news is that faux-9/11 hero Giuliani seemed to be enough of a polarizing figure, now that he's a presidential candidate, that his name didn't make the students necessarily want to support an anti-terrorism bill any more than if it had been called "The Terrorism Act" or the unfortunately real name, "USA PATRIOT Act."

Now, if Rudy had been a victim — instead of a phony hero who mentions 9/11 more often than a nun says, "Hail Mary" — that would be different. Megan's Law, a real law named for the victim of a sex offender, resonated more with the students surveyed. So did a phony name, the "Alice Walker Juvenile Crime Act."

The impact of mass-media b.s. about such bills is beyond the scope of Jones's study. He does come up with other morsels that I'll get into in later posts, but don't think for a minute that you're too smart to be influenced by such silly things as the names of bills and other emotional appeals. Jones cited Ted Brader's 2006 book, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work, noting:

This isn't a new idea. French sociologist Jacques Ellul is dead, but his ideas live, particularly (for me) his '60s book Propaganda, which is still an extremely relevant read and makes a similar point to Brader's. Writing about the mass media and propaganda, here's the prolific Ellul from one of his books:

What I got from Propaganda is that we all get got by propaganda.

In other words, if you're aware of the world around you, particularly the political world, then you're more susceptible to propaganda than those slack-jawed yokels who aren't so interested or aware.

Often referred to as a "Christian anarchist," Ellul painted a frightening portrait of society, viz. this passage in Propaganda:

As we get inundated more and more by marketers political and otherwise, here's one more quote from Ellul's Propaganda that might agitate you:

In advance of the next year and a half of media blitzes in the presidential campaign, consider yourself warned.

In what the GOP hopes will be a boost for next year's elections, General David Petraeus has broadly hinted in the wake of the worst massacre of the war that the U.S. will be able to start withdrawing troops from Iraq next summer.

What spin. Petraeus has always been used for such purposes. Early in the war, he took a spin over Iraq (right) with Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who ensured George W. Bush's 2000 election. Years later, he can spin by himself. Yes, the guy is trying to bring good news, but is that what he should be doing? No, we need information that may be hard to hear, instead of information that he thinks his bosses want to hear.

Like Colin Powell at the U.N. in early 2003, Petraeus is being a good and loyal soldier. After the war, Petraeus will no doubt tell it like it was. Who can wait that long?

Unfortunately, the story in today's Times (U.K.), a morsel of good news for the White House and the frantic legacy-building of Bush's handlers, hints that master builder Karl Rove hasn't left the building yet.

But hundreds of Iraqis have left this mortal coil, as the Times (U.S.) reports:

The New York Times story simply included a statement from Petraeus condemning the bombings. The Times (U.K.) story went deeper, putting Petraeus's broad hint in the context of Tuesday evening's horror:

Petraeus praises the involvement of Sunnis in the battle against terrorists. But for a more objective appraisal — and details beyond Petraeus's pap — read the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's package on "Security in Iraq," which I mentioned in an earlier post. Those stories make clear that this is a Sunni vs. Shia civil war. Throw in the Kurds, assorted holy wars, mix with oil from southern Iraq, and you've got an explosive mixture—and fires that won't go out.

The question is when we're going to get out. Petraeus's latest hint of pullouts is nothing more than al-yada-yada-yada to placate the American public.

George W. Bush nicknamed Karl Rove "The Arch