Benjamins for W: Thanks to the big tax cuts he passed last year, George W. Bush personally saved $31,000, according to tax documents filed yesterday. Bush paid $227,490 in taxes on an adjusted gross income of $822,126, but I suspect that's not his entire tax picture: according to a July 2003 profile, W's net worth is estimated between $9,634,088 and $26,593,000. (For a detailed breakdown, see the Center for Public Integrity's site The Buying of the Presidency 2004.)

Reactions to Bush's press conference: The most frightening part of the president's press conference last night was his repeated statement that before 9/11 "we weren't on a war footing." His eyes seemed to light up (or was it the soft ka-ching of dollar signs?): imagine it, eternal war! That, and the fact that on four occasions he sidestepped questions about his own culpability or fallibility--he makes no apology, like Richard Clarke did, for errors leading up to 9/11; he feels no personal responsibility for his agencies' inability to prevent the attacks; he couldn't come up with an answer about his "biggest mistake" since 9/11; and he refused to acknowledge that perhaps he wasn't so great at communicating his oft-confused messages. This is a man without humility. The right answer: I did my best, but I apologize; I could've done better.

Other opinions: David Sirota compares Bush's claims versus the facts, and Juan Cole posts his point-by-point counterarguments to Bushian logic, including:

Bush: "See, the war on terror had changed the calculations. We needed to work with people. People needed to come together to work. And, therefore, empty words would embolden the actions of those who are willing to kill indiscriminately."

I can't understand what this string of Bushisms could possibly mean. If Bush needed to work with people, why did he blow off the Security Council in March of 2003? If people needed to come together to work, wouldn't they need to come together about launching a major war that affected the entire world? Why then did Bush go to war virtually unilaterally (bilaterally at most)? That wouldn't represent much in the way of "people" "coming together." If empty words would embolden killers, wouldn't turning the entire United Nations Charter, which forbids unilateral wars of aggression without Security Council permission, into so much scrap paper be a way of "emboldening" such killers?

The Guardian offers a rundown of US press reactions, from the Washington Post's Tom Shales' assessment of Bush's 17-minute intro as "a peculiar performance... He might as well have been reading letters off an eye chart" to Michael Tackett of the Chicago Tribune: "The president who spoke repeatedly about being on a war footing hardly seemed sure-footed, even on questions that could scarcely be seen as overly aggressive."

30,000 dead? From LewRockwell.com, an article about neocon Lawrence Kaplan, "Senior Editor of the New Republic, former top editor at Irving Kristol’s National Interest, current op-ed columnist at the Post, and – most significantly – co-author with William Kristol of that definitive neocon text, The War Over Iraq." His assessment in a recent Washington Post Op-Ed? Our citizenry would gladly accept losing 30,000 American dead in Iraq if such losses were required to achieve neocon strategic objectives.

More interested in PB&J than PDBs: From AriannaOnline:

I’ve watched a lot of TV cop shows over the years, and, as far as I can remember, the good guys are never told exactly where and when crimes are going to occur. They investigate, follow leads, talk to informants, and generally track down the bad guys. Bush should have made damn sure his top terror cops were doing the same. Instead, it appears that we have a president more consumed with his PB&Js than his PDBs.