It took Bush only 131 executions to find a case where he thought there might be some doubt about the matter. No, I take that back. He did once grant a pardon: He had to. That was the memorable case of Henry Lee Lucas, the serial liar, who confessed to 150 murders before our brighter law-enforcement minds started to wonder if he was telling the truth.

The impeccable Texas criminal justice system -- about which the governor is so certain he has repeatedly said he has never had a shred a doubt about any of the 131 executions on his watch -- managed to convict Lucas of a murder that rather demonstrably occurred while Lucas was in another state entirely. Ooops.

It is particularly entertaining to watch Bush on national television solemnly explaining that those on Texas' Death Row have "full access to the courts."

You probably remember Kristy Reyna -- she was the only one of the 400 Austin High graduates who was in a wheelchair. Kristy was the young woman with the million-dollar smile -- always reminds me of Magic Johnson's. That smile and the big thumbs up as she rolled across the stage lit up the whole Erwin Center. I think she got a bigger hand than your daughters. It was a lot harder for her. The entire Reyna clan was there, on their feet, cheering madly.

Kristy was born 21 years ago with spina bifida and has been through 10 operations to correct some of the effects of that birth defect. So it took her a little longer to get through school. Her mother is Hope Reyna, single mother of five, who supports her children by working as a housekeeper. (Let's hear it for Big Rudy, who kept up the child support and who was there to see their second-oldest child graduate.)

Much in the news is the charmingly misleading headline that says, "Bush Proposes Deep Cuts in U.S. Nuclear Arsenal." If true, that would be welcome news indeed, but that ain't what his proposal is about. What George W. Bush actually said was: "To heck with the ABM treaty -- we're going to build Star Wars."

The one Bush proposal with no downside is to "take as many weapons as Possible" (all Bush's proposals have this maddeningly vague lack of detail) off high-alert, hair-trigger status. Let's hear it for Bush on that one.

Unilateral reductions in the number of missiles also sounds like a peace proposal, but it doesn't work out that way. Because he is also proposing to build the infamous Star Wars, the Russians, who now want to cut their nukes, are not going to agree to missile reductions.

When Israel completed its pullout in late May, most U.S. news outlets remained in sync with the kind of coverage that they've provided for more than two decades. In March 1978, the U.N. Security Council demanded unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Ever since, the flagrantly illegal -- and brutal -- military occupation has been shrouded by a thick media haze in the United States.

All through history, of course, occupiers have come up with benign-sounding buzzwords to put a lofty gloss on their iron boots. But journalists aren't supposed to adopt the lexicon of propaganda as their own.

Unfortunately, dozens of major American newspapers and networks have continued to matter-of-factly use the preferred Israeli fog words -- "security zone," "buffer zone" and "buffer strip" -- to identify the area in Lebanon long occupied by Israel.

Of course, if we had any details of George W. Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, this would be an easier column to write. Which is exactly why you won't see him filling in the blanks anytime soon.

Our first consideration is: Is this move necessary?

The much-ballyhooed bankruptcy of the Social Security system is based on the unlikely premise that the economy will grow no faster than 1.7 percent a year. (It did better than that during the Great Depression.) For the past three decades, the economy has grown at twice that rate.

But let's assume the laws of economic gravity have not been repealed, the "new economy" is not the discovery of perpetual motion and capitalism will behave like capitalism. We need to do something about Social Security, particularly given the demographic bulge of the baby boomers, who will begin retiring in 2011.