When conservatives talk of George W. Bush’s “transformational” role in American politics, they are referring to a fundamental change they seek in the U.S. system of government in which the Republican Party will dominate for years to come and power will not really be up for grabs in general elections…

Four years ago, some hopeful political analysts predicted that the rightward swing of the media pendulum, which so bedeviled Bill Clinton in the 1990s, would lurch back leftward once Bush took office in 2001…

But no self-correction ever occurred. Instead, as Bush enters the fifth year of his presidency, major news outlets are continuing to swing more to the right…

[W]hile commentators expect Democrats to praise Bush, the major news media acts as if Republican disdain for Democrats is the natural order of things. There was barely a peep of media objection on Jan. 20 when triumphant Republicans jeered John Kerry when he joined other senators at the Inaugural platform on Capitol Hill.

But it’s not only Democratic politicians who can expect rough treatment these days.

A system glorifies its winners. The mass media and the rest of corporate America are enthralled with professionals scaling career ladders to new heights. Meanwhile, the people hanging onto bottom rungs are scarcely blips on screens.

Far from the media spotlights are countless lives beset with financial scarcity, often in tandem with chronic illness, monotony, adversity and despair. The same institutions and attitudes that lavish outsized respect on high achievers (the wealthier the better) are apt to convey ongoing disrespect for low achievers.

The flip side of adulation for winners is often contempt for people with cumulative misfortune, who routinely slog through murky quasi-netherworlds and do their best to keep from going under. According to mass-media calculations, they just don’t rate. In a society overdosing on unmitigated capitalism, it’s not just a matter of scant disposable income. As a practical matter, the country treats many people as disposable.

When personal dreams of success or even equilibrium sink below horizons, the same media outlets that laud the successful have little

The more things change, the more things stay the same. And Gallup is showing us that a leopard doesn’t change its spots.

On the heels of the Iraqi election, and with the White House needing a boost in Bush’s image and approval ratings as he tries to ram through a terrible budget and Social Security privatization plan to a wavering GOP, much was made yesterday about the most recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll done over the weekend. This poll, bull-horned through the media and rightwing blogosphere, showed an incredible jump in Bush’s approval rating to 57%, a five-point jump from the polls done in early January. Yet even those earlier January polls it turned out were suspect because, you guessed it, they were based on a sample that had more Republicans in it than Democrats (37.2% GOP, 35.6% Democrat, and 27% Independent).

So is this recent poll, showing Bush with a growing and mandate-building approval rating of 57% a clear sign of emerging Bush strength?

The northern North Americans in Canada are taking another cautious step for drug policy reform. NAOMI, the North American Opiate Maintenance Project, will shortly begin providing maintenance doses of heroin to addicts in Vancouver, moving later in the year to Toronto and Montreal as well. Drug warriors in the US and Canada alike are likely to characterize the project as reckless or wrongheaded. In reality it is a cautious first step only, but an urgently needed one.

In Vancouver's Downtown East Side, where many of the city's hard drug users congregate, the addicted each day face unnecessary levels of risk from overdose, spread of infectious diseases such as Hepatitis or HIV, marginalization from society and the health system, a wearing and time consuming search for money to pay for expensive street drugs, general destabilization of their lives, and all the obstacles to survival, recovery or prosperity these conditions present.

President Bush submitted a $2.57 trillion budget to Congress which eliminates or drastically cuts 150 governmental programs. The budget is an attempt to meet his goal of slashing the deficit in half by 2009, without giving up tax cuts for the wealthy which were implemented during his first term. When asked about the cuts, Bush said “Spending discipline requires difficult choices.” But much in Bush’s budget runs contrary to his administration’s rhetoric.