This Fight's About More Than Judgeships

By Lincoln Caplan

Sunday, May 8, 2005; Page B03

Republicans in Washington have long been fuming about the federal judiciary, but something snapped with the recent Terri Schiavo case. Emboldened, they charged the judges with engaging in activism so outrageous as to warrant impeachment.

And then, surprisingly, one of the men in black fired back. In the final denial of a request to rehear the case, Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declared that President Bush and the Congress had "acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our founding fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people -- our Constitution." They did so, he wrote, by infringing on "the independence of the judiciary," by seeking to force the courts to exercise their authority "in a manner repugnant to the text, structure, and traditions" of the nation's basic law, and by violating "the fundamental principles of separation of powers."

JK Gailbraith: The Parent Trap

Commentary: Social Security "reform" is being touted as fiscal liberation for the young. What will young families do when it condemns them to care for their elders.

By James K. Galbraith

May/June 2005 Issue

PRESIDENT BUSH IS SELLING his partial privatization plan for Social Security to young voters as a replacement for a system that "won't be there"—so it's said—when they retire. But in the tortured tales of financial crisis, the effects of his proposal on future family life haven't often been mentioned. They should be. For it is not too much to say that Bush's plan, if enacted, would impose a "family responsibility system" for elder care. And down the road, that would tear many American families to shreds.

The Middleman

Asher Karni was “a genius” in South Africa’s military electronics trade. Now he's in jail in Brooklyn, accused of orchestrating a nuclear black market deal.

By Mark Schapiro

May/June 2005 Issue

This story, which will appear in the May/June issue of Mother Jones magazine, comes out of an investigation jointly sponsored by Mother Jones, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the PBS series FRONTLINE/World. View video clips of interviews with key players in the story at FRONTLINE/World's website.

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY 2004, conditions in the Rocky Mountains seemed ideal for the ski vacation that Asher Karni had long anticipated. Fresh snowfall had slowed Denver to a cool calm, and the mountain resorts were bursting with record-breaking crowds. Karni, a 50-year-old, Hungarian-born Israeli and South African businessman, planned on staying in the area for three weeks, according to the dates on his airline tickets, but he never made it to the slopes. As he stepped off the plane with his wife and a teenage daughter at Denver International Airport, U.S. Customs agents arrested him on charges of violating American export laws. Specifically, he was accused of exporting, without the proper license, quantities of a device known as a triggered spark gap.

Stranger Than Fiction

By Bill McKibben

May/June 2005 Issue

MICHAEL CRICHTON’S NOVEL State of Fear, published last December, is a curious volume, combining all the clichés of pulp fiction (heaving breasts, cannibals, poisoning by octopi) with graphs and comment and lengthy footnotes directing readers to journals like Nature and The Lancet, along with the same small set of studies the climate skeptics have been promoting for years. Its premise is that environmentalists have made up a lie about the dangers of climate change in order to raise funds, and that to keep the lie alive they will do almost anything—notably, try to trigger a tsunami that will make people worry about rising sea levels. The latter is a laughable proposition—tsunamis, caused by volcanic explosions or tectonic shifts, are one of the few natural phenomena still unaffected by man, and no one has ever claimed otherwise.

As the World Burns

Climate of Denial: Introduction
By Bill McKibben
One morning in Kyoto, we won a round in the battle against global warming. Then special interests and pseudoscience snatched the truth away. What happened?

Some Like It Hot
By Chris Mooney
A dose of doubt trumps years of solid science, but skepticism doesn’t come cheap. ExxonMobil is spending millions to sustain an echo chamber of global warming denial.

Snowed
By Ross Gelbspan
Why the “balanced” media would rather promote paid flaks and fantasy than report the biggest story on earth

The Machinery of Mendacity

Given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely -- to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.

By Russ Rymer

May/June 2005 Issue

In his article "“Some Like It Hot,” Chris Mooney pinpoints a critical distinction in the battle over global warming. The think tanks, crank scientists, and pseudo-journalists who dispute climate change with the aid of millions of corporate dollars are not just arguing the economics of the problem, as they sometimes pretend. That activity, engaging in a thoughtful discussion of politics and priorities, the wisdom of one or another course of action, could be considered honorable regardless of which side one argued from. Rather, the mouthpieces are ignobly contesting the very science itself, using any tactic, any slipshod fiction, that might throw doubt into the public mind and so deflect the dictates of hard fact. In other words, given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely—to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.

MoJo Blog: Leaked Details on CAFTA`

Time to trade for a second. The White House is currently trying to push the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) through Congress. As it stands right now, more and more Democrats are opposing the agreement, for a wide variety of reasons, and some Republicans who represent districts that would be adversely affected are speaking out as well. So it's not likely to pass, which looks like a good thing. Now in general, I don't much mind free trade agreements, but this one is particularly egregious in its specifics, especially the fact that it would allow the five Central American countries to "lock in" their current labor standards, which are largely atrocious. (CAFTA also comes bearing protectionist gifts to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, by imposing restrictions on Big Pharma's generic-drug competitors abroad. Why this sort of practice gets called "free trade" is beyond me.)

But back to the labor standards. How atrocious are they? Well, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) has been trying to find out, and has been asking the Bush administration for Labor Department reports on working conditions in Central America, but all to little avail. First he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Denied. Then, after a few more congressional maneuvers, the Labor Department finally relented. So the released report is here (pdf). The labor laws and working conditions, not surprisingly, are dismal—and keep in mind that, under, CAFTA, Central American governments would no longer need to "afford internationally recognized worker rights," as they do under the current Generalized System of Preferences. Central American workers would get screwed, with little hope that they could raise their standards of living over time. And yes, it's no surprise that the Bush administration tried to keep these reports hidden for so long, but it's appalling all the same.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 05/06/05 at 02:07 PM

Dear Senator (on Strom Thurmond and bi-racial daughter)

In South Carolina, when the subject of favorite son Strom Thurmond and his illegitimate, biracial daughter comes up, the first thing you invariably hear is, "At least he took care of her." The comment pithily conceals as much as it backhandedly reveals. It has the same breezy effect as the knowing wink and the throaty chuckle. Like its brethren, it superimposes cordiality. It hints at a vague, unacknowledged understanding, but above all it maintains silence.

The Avenging Angel (abolitionist John Brown)

See Barbara Ehreneich's review of the same book on April 16--Dictynna.

by MARTIN DUBERMAN

[from the May 23, 2005 issue]

Who, if anyone, has the "right" to kill? And from what source does the right derive? When does (or should) taking another life bring honor, and when disgrace? Is there such a thing as a "just" war that merits medals and heroes--the American Revolution? The fight against fascism?--or is slaughter always slaughter, and never worthy of praise? Do certain circumstances mitigate the crime of murder? Is "self-defense" the chief of these? On what grounds would one deny the right of Jews earmarked for Nazi extermination to resist violently? Or the right of black slaves, their lives stolen, their bodies brutalized, to slit the throats of their self-designated masters? Does the same exculpation extend to revolutionaries (American? Algerian? Cuban?) who take up arms to topple tyrannical laws and rulers? To a woman fighting off a rapist? A gay person being fag-bashed? A sex worker threatened and abused?

The ethical conundrums multiply even as their resolution resists consensus. Sometimes the issues at stake can be clarified through historical perspective, by investigating certain singular figures in the past whose lives seem to encapsulate those issues and whose reputations have shifted, in tandem with shifting cultural values, through time. In this regard few lives are more emblematic than John Brown's. Though African-Americans have always and overwhelmingly regarded John Brown as a noble, heroic figure, few whites have. And while the civil rights movement produced a limited shift in attitude, very few white historians have written with any sympathy for the violent tactics John Brown employed during the mid-1850s war to make Kansas a free state, or for his subsequent attempt in 1859 to lead a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Though Nat Turner has also been dismissed by some white historians as a sort of crazed religious fanatic, too addled to tote up the overwhelming odds against the success of his rebellion, his somewhat more favorable press derives from the fact that he and those who joined his uprising were blacks, direct victims of the system they hoped to overthrow. Fighting on behalf of one's own liberation has been treated as more legitimate than fighting, as did John Brown (or the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, or the white freedom fighters during the civil rights era) for the liberation of somebody else. According to this canon of judgment, itself derived from capitalist ethics, morality is defined as devotion to one's self-interest.

Oil projects may get less scrutiny

...Bill Barrett Corp., spent two years and $1 million to comply with the federal law that requires studying what the drilling would do to the environment. The 1969 environmental law also requires consultations with government agencies, Indian tribes and residents before drilling and exploring can begin.

The result: The federal Bureau of Land Management forced changes in the project to protect thousands of rock art and artifacts, as well as wildlife and streams.

"It slowed things down a little bit, so the (Bureau of Land Management) could do it right," says Pam Miller of the College of Eastern Utah's Prehistoric Museum.

But in the future, companies like Barrett that produce oil and gas in the Rocky Mountain West may not have to undergo that kind of environmental analysis.

Debt And Phony Religion Hallmarks Of Bush Administration Run Wild

By Bill Gallagher

DETROIT -- Four years of selected rule and now 100 days into his first elected term in office, George W. Bush has created so much madness it will take decades to undo and whoever succeeds him in the Oval Office will face an unimaginable mess. President 44 already is politically doomed. He will inherit a nation seriously wounded.

It's hard to recall a president who's achieved so little with so little and done so much harm. His hallmark domestic and foreign policies are cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and wage a wild, messianic war in the Middle East to impose democracy and nation-build. The results on both fronts are disastrous.

The tax cuts have created debilitating debt and fiscal insanity. Our first president with an M.B.A. should be an embarrassment to the people at Harvard who let this child of affirmative family influence gets a degree. His administration will become a case study in how to squander a surplus, borrow recklessly, destroy jobs and provide a limping economy in the process.

Overwork in America

There is little question that the way Americans work and live has changed in recent years. The
fast-paced, global 24/7 economy, the pressures of competition, and technology have blurred the
traditional boundaries between work life and home life. Furthermore, this new economy calls for
new skills—skills like responding quickly to competing demands and jumping from task to task. In
response, the topic of being overworked has become a hot subject of discussion in workplaces, in the media, in medical journals, and in homes.

In 2001, Families and Work Institute conducted a seminal study to define and measure the impact of being overworked on employees and employers. Among the reasons we began to investigate this phenomenon were the following:

• Studies by Daniel J. Conti from Bank One and Wayne Burton from Northwestern Medical School first published in the 1990s found that depressive disorders within the workplace were much higher than anticipated and were associated with the highest medical plan costs of all behavioral health disorders.1

• In 1999, The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) stepped forward to report that because the nature of work is changing at whirlwind speed, perhaps now, more than ever, job stress poses a threat to the health of workers, and in turn, to the health of organizations.2

• In 2000, the World Health Organization reported that by 2020, clinical depression was expected to outrank cancer and follow only heart disease to become the second greatest cause of death and disability worldwide.3

• In Ellen Galinsky’s 1999 nationally representative study called Ask the Children, when asked their one wish to improve how their mother’s and father’s work affected their lives, most children wished their mothers and fathers would be less stressed and less tired.4

Our 2001 study on feeling overworked revealed that 1 in 3 U.S. employees experienced feeling overworked as a chronic condition. We were also able to identify some of the factors that lead to being overworked and understand some of its consequences.

Robert S. McNamara: Apocalypse Soon

Robert McNamara is worried. He knows how close we’ve come. His counsel helped the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, he believes the United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal, and dreadfully dangerous.

It is time—well past time, in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signaled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power—a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the current U.S. nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years.

LA Times Editorial: The Imagination Drain

May 6, 2005

The Pentagon fumble in which military officials essentially published on the Web the full version of a supposedly censored report was news last week. But occurring beneath the news radar is a more fundamental cyber-security problem: the Bush administration's cutting the funding of university-based information technology research by nearly half over the last three years.

Since 1961, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, has distributed IT research dollars in largely open-ended grants to universities. The grants encouraged basic research aimed not at marketable innovations but at basic scientific mysteries. DARPA and its investments have paid off handsomely nevertheless.

Its legendary role in developing the Internet as a free-for-all instead of a commercially owned space is widely known. Less so are its militarily and commercially important developments, such as global positioning satellites, the JPEG file format for efficiently storing photographs and Websearching technologies like those later refined by Google.

How long can Bush spin big lies into truth on Iraq war?

BY ANDREW GREELEY

As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president is in Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms, of course. The White House propaganda mill hails it as another victory for the president and ignores the fact that most Europeans still consider the war dangerous folly and the president a dangerous fool.

One hears new rationalizations for the war on this side of the Atlantic. After the hearings on Secretary Rice, a Republican senator, with all the self-righteous anger that characterizes many such, proclaimed, "The Democrats just have to understand that the president really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Report: Vatican sacked Catholic magazine editor

BY MARY VOBORIL
STAFF WRITER

May 6, 2005, 8:39 PM EDT

The editor of "America," an influential Catholic weekly magazine, has been sacked on orders from the Vatican, which threatened to impose a "board of censors" to oversee the magazine if he stayed, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

"He was forced out," NCR editor Tom Roberts said of the Rev. Thomas Reese, S.J., who had run "America" for seven years. Frequently quoted in the secular press, Reese also had been a CNN commentator during the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI.

The Chicken and the Egg, Part II

I meant to dive right into this second installment in my series on the U.S. current account deficit and its root causes (boy, THERE’s a topic to set the pulse racing) but various things intervened over the course of the week – including a few more late nights with my Excel spreadsheets, crunching the data.

I can’t say I’m any better informed than before I started, although I do have a keener awareness of the limitations of comparative international economic statistics – and of my own abilities as a macroeconomic deep thinker.

Stanley Kurtz, mainstreaming the wackos

Washington Post, June 23, 2004, Page A01:

More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be “reborn as new persons.”

At the March 23 ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon’s head. The Korean-born businessman and religious leader then delivered a long speech saying he was “sent to Earth . . . to save the world’s six billion people. . . . Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.”

Not a rare occurance.

Stanley Kurtz makes sure that the clown show keeps rolling with this observation about the public’s concern about far-right theocrats:

We’ve heard all the criticisms of the language and political inclination of religious conservatives. Will we now hear indignation against The Rev. Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman and general secretary of the liberal National Council of Churches? Edgar strongly favors religious politicking–except by conservative Christians. And Edgar believes that the desire of conservative Christians to have fewer activist judges means that: “This may be the darkest time in our history.” I await mainstream media outrage over Edgar’s dangerous quest for a liberal religious theocracy. Note also that Ostling dismisses the link between the tiny fringe movement of dominionists and mainstream evangelicals.

Note also that nobody but Stanley Kurtz has ever made this “link”.

'The people and the political class are at one: neither wants to face the future'

By John Gray

Election: the future - the big picture

The election has resolved nothing. Britain continues to drift, its meandering course guided by the conventional wisdom of a generation ago. Crucial questions of national policy were fudged or deferred, so that when the government does find itself forced to take decisions on them, it will do so without the benefit of forethought or serious public debate. One reason for the palpable public boredom that accompanied most of the campaign was that it was largely fought around pseudo-issues. All the parties studiously avoided talking about the realities that will shape our lives over the coming years.

Tomgram: Mike Davis on the Return of the Vigilante

A few years back, I attended a conference on the Vietnam War and, at one session, found myself listening to the college-age child of Cambodian refugees. Her parents had embarked on a harrowing journey to this country, worked at the worst of jobs, and finally scraped together just enough money to start a small corner store. Now here was their child, eloquently discussing an American-Dream-style future as, perhaps, an international lawyer who hoped to work at the boiling interstices of American commerce in Southeast Asia. I couldn't help thinking, as I sat there, that there was nothing like an immigrant or an immigrant's child to remind you of what the American story can sound like at its most inspiring. Of course, I'm the grandchild of a Galician Jew, who ran away from home, arrived in New York harbor in the steerage of a ship with the equivalent of fifty cents in his pocket in a grim winter in the 1890s. He ended up constructing apartment buildings in Brooklyn until his life crashed just before the Great Depression hit.

You would think we would celebrate the immigrant. After all, most of us, or our parents or grandparents, once were. On the other hand, the resistance to immigration has a long, grim, powerful history in this country -- of legal constraint, of walls descending, of bitter prejudice, racism, and finally vigilantism. It's this history in its California guise that Mike Davis considers below. Tom

Vigilante Man

By Mike Davis

"The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them -- armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand." -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot.

Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse

By Robert Parry
May 6, 2005

The “October Surprise mystery” – did Republicans strike a secret deal with Iran in 1980 to sabotage Jimmy Carter and win the White House for Ronald Reagan? – has similarities to the storyline of the action movie “National Treasure,” only in reverse.

Walt Disney’s “National Treasure” is the imaginative tale of a search for a treasure hidden by America’s Founding Fathers to keep it away from the British monarchy. To find the treasure more than two centuries later, the hero – played by Nicolas Cage – travels from city to city in pursuit of complicated clues, including some concealed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

Documents Show Vioxx Sales Tactics

May 6, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- What Merck & Co. calls good salesmanship -- emphasizing the positive in selling the painkiller Vioxx -- a Democratic congressman says is disinformation designed to deflect safety concerns. The public got an extraordinary glimpse Thursday into the world of drug marketing, as lawmakers released confidential Merck documents that detail how a sales army of 3,000 aggressively pushed the multibillion-dollar drug before it was pulled from the market last fall because of heart attack risks.

Instructions were as detailed as how long to shake a physician's hand -- three seconds -- and how to eat bread when dining with doctors -- "one small bitesize piece at a time."

Sales representatives were offered $2,000 bonuses for meeting sales goals, and worked in campaigns with such code-names as "Project Offense" to try to boost sales even as regulators were about to increase warnings on the drug's label.

Don't bring up the heart risks, warns a Feb. 9, 2001, memo.

Some Kan. Board Members Skipped Readings

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 12:08 p.m. ET

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- As a State Board of Education subcommittee heard more testimony Friday on how evolution should be taught in Kansas classrooms, one member acknowledged that she hadn't read all of an evolution-friendly draft of science standards proposed by educators.

Kathy Martin of Clay Center made the comment while attempting to reassure a witness who said he hadn't read the entire proposal, just parts of it. Russell Carlson, a biochemistry and molecular biology professor at the University of Georgia, said he had reviewed an alternate proposal from intelligent design advocates.

''I've not read it word for word myself,'' Martin said of the other proposal, eliciting groans of disbelief from a few members of the audience.

The board expects to consider changes in June in how Kansas students are tested statewide on science. The three-member subcommittee began hearings Thursday, and will hear more testimony Saturday and again next Thursday.

Bush Administration Rolls Back Rule on Building Forest Roads

By FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON, May 5 - The Bush administration on Thursday supplanted a Clinton-era rule banning road construction in nearly 60 million acres of national forest with a complex prescription for state-by state decisions on which areas should retain protections.

The new rule gives governors a primary role in making recommendations. If the governors choose not to take the opportunity in the next 18 months, the Forest Service may begin an analysis of whether and where activities requiring roads, like logging and mining, would be appropriate. The final decision on the status of all 56.5 million acres once protected as roadless will rest with the federal government.

"Our approach will protect roadless values," Mark Rey, the under secretary of agriculture in charge of the Forest Service, said in a conference call on Thursday. "It's my prediction that many of the state rules will protect the same areas as the 2001 forest rule."

Before the earlier rule was adopted as President Bill Clinton was leaving office in January 2001, federal rules set aside about 24 million acres, prohibiting road development there. These remain protected. But as a result of Thursday's decision, about 32 million acres are now potentially subject to development pressure.

In Pacific Islands, Mixed Feelings About a Lobbyist's Work

By JAMES BROOKE and KATE ZERNIKE

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands, May 5 - Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist under criminal investigation, used to say that the government here needed his services because it was the only American territory without a nonvoting delegate to Congress.

But in previously unreleased documents, Mr. Abramoff described how he worked hard to kill a bill in Congress that would have given the islands a delegate. He did so by exploiting his ties to Republican House leaders, including Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority leader whose travels arranged by the lobbyist have raised ethical questions.

The men here who hired Mr. Abramoff said they had no regrets about paying for his influence. But four years after Mr. Abramoff left, his work remains hotly debated here, 8,000 miles and 14 time zones ahead of Washington.

Many people say hiring Mr. Abramoff was a waste of money. Some accuse him of double-dealing the Marianas, one of his first big lobbying projects, in much the same way he is now accused of defrauding Indian tribes.

States and Employers Duel Over Health Care

By REED ABELSON

The relentless rise in health care costs is causing states and businesses to fight over whose job it is to insure workers. And nearly two dozen states, struggling with the growing burden of providing public assistance to people with jobs but no insurance, are looking to shift more of the financial burden onto the workers' employers.

Last month, for example, Maryland, which spends roughly $350 million a year on health care for the uninsured, passed a bill requiring the state's very largest employers to spend at least 8 percent of their payrolls on health benefits for their workers. Lawmakers elsewhere, including Connecticut, are considering legislation that may also require some companies to provide coverage, either directly or by paying into a state fund.

Some measures, as with a New Jersey proposal, would let companies bid on state contracts only if they provided health insurance for their workers.

At the very least, some states would embarrass companies whose workers are on Medicaid or other forms of state assistance by publishing the employers' names - as Massachusetts has already done with a list of companies including Dunkin' Donuts, Stop & Shop and Wal-Mart Stores. Dunkin' Donuts says individual franchised stores, not the company, are responsible for coverage, while Wal-Mart challenged the findings. Stop & Shop declined to comment.

In Kansas, Darwinism Goes on Trial Once More

By JODI WILGOREN

TOPEKA, Kan., May 5 - Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin's theory be challenged in the classroom.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life's complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

Chopping Off the Weakest Branch

By RON CHERNOW

LEADING evangelical conservatives are taking on the federal judiciary, which they see as hostile to religion, and they have much more in mind than simply putting an end to Senate filibusters against judicial nominees. Some have now proposed that Congress cut off federal financing for judges and even abolish some lower-level courts that they feel have issued decisions that mandate a secular, anti-Christian state. "We set up the courts," said the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, a key ally of the evangelicals. "We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse."

Some religious political leaders are fond of invoking the nation's founders as kindred spirits. But those founders - a notably fiery, opinionated bunch - seldom spoke with one voice on any issue, especially when it came to the federal judiciary. How Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton would have felt about Senate filibusters against judicial nominees we can only speculate, as the filibuster wasn't introduced until 1825.

But as for denying money to or dismantling courts, historians can speak with far greater authority. This is because we are witnessing a re-enactment of a historic drama that unfolded two centuries ago, shortly after Thomas Jefferson's election as president.

NYT Editorial: Bringing Back the 30-Year Bond

On Halloween 2001, the United States Treasury said it would no longer issue a 30-year bond. The federal budget had been in the black for four years, and President Bush was still riding high on the $237 billion surplus he had inherited from the Clinton administration. "We do not need the 30-year bond to meet the government's current financing needs, nor those we expect to face in coming years," said the administration official who announced its demise.

Oh, for the good old days. Since 2002, annual deficits have added nearly $1 trillion to the nation's debt, bringing it to $4.3 trillion last year, nearly double what budget experts were projecting back in 2001. Yet the Treasury says that the nation's ballooning indebtedness is not a factor in its recent decision to consider reissuing the 30-year bond. Not a factor?

Paul Krugman: A Serious Drug Problem

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure, twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a session literally held in the dead of night.

Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress about the bill's likely cost.

But the real scandal is what's in the legislation. It's an object lesson in how special interests hold America's health care system hostage.

Daily Howler - May 6, 2005

KRAUTHAMMER’S KUTS! There are no cuts, the Post pundit says. Dems have to know how to answer
FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2005

KRAUTHAMMER’S KUTS: What’s in a “cut?” As we’ve told you, a semantic war is now under way—a semantic war about the word “cuts.” And we’ll be discussing this tedious topic over the next several weeks. Has Bush proposed “cuts” in Social Security? Or will everyone’s benefits “increase?” Dems need to know how to answer those questions—and no, it don’t come easy. From 1994 through 1996, for example, Dems kept saying that the Gingrich Congress was proposing sharp “Medicare cuts.” But they did their typical hopeless job when challenged to explain their claim, and Clinton was called a liar for two solid years—even though he was making perfectly accurate statements. Similarly, it isn’t enough to offer a peremptory diktat and declare the current war won, as Kevin Drum more-or-less did on Wednesday. (“If you spend less than you've promised on a program, you've cut the program. President Bush should shelve the nonsense about how a cut isn't really a cut.”) If Dems want to win the current fight on the merits—a strategy they routinely eschew—they have to know how to argue this point. Which brings us to Charles Krauthammer’s war-like column in this morning’s Washington Post.

The Black Commentator: Bad, Bad Janice Brown is Back

The GOP Judicial Theater of the Absurd is on the road, this time with a biblical theme, starring Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, Supreme Court Justices in their home states of California and Texas, respectively. The two were among ten Republican nominees given the hook in George Bush’s first term, through threats of Democratic filibusters. Now armed with an invisible mandate, Republicans vow to exercise their “nuclear option” by changing the 200-year-old rules of the Senate to end filibusters of judicial nominees if Brown and Owen are not allowed seats on the federal appellate bench – a heartbeat away from the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats say that if Republicans pull the nuclear trigger, they will respond by shutting down the Senate.

Daily Kos: It Begins: Dems "Excommunicated" From Church?

by georgia10
Thu May 5th, 2005 at 18:12:18 PDT

For those that thought that there has not been a full scale war lanched against liberals; for those who didn't take the radical right's promise to "eradicate liberals" seriously, I present to you, Exhibit A: East Waynesville Baptist Church has just kicked out all its Democratic members.

Yes. You read that right. If you didn't vote for Bush, you had to "repent your sin". And finally, they figured why deal with the liberal sinners at all..

From libnnc over at DU:

"One of the local women who got excommunicated said on TV that it was like a cult. Another man who got excommunicated said that the rest of the congregation stood up and applauded as the Democrats were told to leave."

The news report has been confirmed by others on that thread. The broadcast @ 11 pm on WLOS will run the story again.

The Poor Man: Tragedy and Farce

Like a scab I can’t stop picking, it’s back to National Review, and Jonah Goldberg, the Pillsbury Pantload. First, Jonah draws on the extensive military expertise he gained by playing Warcraft to explain to USA Today readers that no comparison can be made between Vietnam and Iraq - because Iraq has, like, way more sand - except that bad news in both was entirely the fault of liberals and journalists not waving their pom-poms enthusiastically enough. Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher notes, correctly, that Goldberg is an idiot. Goldberg then resorts to his usual tactic: compulsively posting endless anonymous emails from NRO readers and pretending that means something.

Vietnam Vet, Journalist Hackworth Dies

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

Thu May 5, 3:39 PM ET

HARTFORD, Conn. - Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, a decorated Vietnam veteran who spoke out against the war and later became a journalist and an advocate for military reform, has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 74.

Churchgoers Barred for Being Democrats

It's True

Here's the video of the WLOS-TV story (A Sinclair Station!). Unbelievable. Churchgoers being barred from the East Waynesville (NC) Baptist Church for being Democrats. 40 others walked out in protest.

Welcome to hell.

Video capture by Spiffarino of Democratic Underground.

Posted at 08:36 PM

Digby: Reefer Madness

Well, this makes good sense.

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.

Digby: While The DLC Slept

Matt Yglesias and Atrios both take issue with Marshall Wittman's comparison of Move-on to Tony Benn, british lefty leader of the 70's and 80's. Yglesias ably proves that there is very little actual policy difference between Move-on and the DLC but he gives short shrift to what I think are the underlying reasons for the comparison --- style and temperament. Benn wouldn't sit down and shut up and it drove the other Labour leaders insane as they were trying to modernize their image and transition from mild market socialism to savvy free marketers. They didn't like the resistence and felt it undermined their goals. In those days it seemed important that the left shed its radical image.

Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 22 July 2003 (revised 7/25/03)

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
  
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  
• Uncertainty avoidance
  
• Need for cognitive closure
  
• Terror management

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

Digby: A Moronic Proposal

From "the sage," Larry Elder:

Weyco Inc. and Investors Property Management may be onto something. If employers seek to control costs, improve morale, boost the company image and reduce workplace drama [by not employing smokers], why not refuse to hire ... Democrats?

Democrats -- compared to Republicans -- on average are less affluent, more unhappy, more prone to anti-social behavior, more prone to self-destructive behavior, and more likely to have been shot at, robbed or burglarized. More of them see X-rated movies, more of them smoke, and they're less likely to be married and more likely to have separated or divorced.

George Washington University professor Lee Sigelman looked at 22 years of survey data collected by University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Overall, he found Democrats less affluent, more distrustful, more sickly and more suicidal, and thus doomed to an earlier death. In short, Democrats as a class -- like smokers -- have, uh, issues. So let's just extend this hiring ban to cover unhappy, anti-social, self-destructive, unhealthy Democrats.

Olin Foundation, Right-Wing Tank, Snuffing Itself

by Lizzy Ratner

Shortly before 4 o’clock on a crisp April afternoon, James Piereson, the executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, sat in the foundation’s sparse conference room in midtown, looking like a man who had just devoured a particularly satisfying steak.

'Propaganda' bill nixed in House

I guess we can expect a lot more fake news...--Dictynna

PETER URBAN

WASHINGTON — House Republicans Wednesday soundly rejected an effort by Democrats to ban the Department of Education from spending money on "covert propaganda."

The House voted 224 to 197 against a measure, championed by Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, and George Miller, D-Calif., aimed at blocking the department from creating sham news stories or hiring columnists to promote policies.

The Right's Bitter Pill

Carole Joffe
May 05, 2005
Carole Joffe is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

“Contraceptive use in the United States is virtually universal among women of reproductive age: 98% of all women who have ever had intercourse had used at least one contraceptive method...82% had ever used the oral contraceptive pill.”

The above quote, from a recent CDC report on the use of contraception in the United States, points to the futility of current campaigns in this country to limit women’s access to contraception. Birth control is not only widely used, it is strongly supported by Americans. (Some 80 percent, in a recent poll, believed that contraception should be covered by all health insurance plans.) This does not bode well for the prospects of one of the most unusual new fronts in the never-ending abortion war in this country—the growing instances of "pro-life" pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for oral contraceptives—a.k.a. the pill.

What Didn't Happen In Ohio

Russ Baker
May 05, 2005

Russ Baker —an investigative reporter and essayist—is a longtime TomPaine.com contributor. He is involved in the development of a new not-for-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing investigative journalism in America. To read more about the problems in the 2004 presidential election and proposals for reforming our electoral system, see Best Of TomPaine: Election Irregularities In 2004.

Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. They weren’t. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings— but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush.

Teachers, Scientists Vow to Fight Challenge to Evolution

Creationists Seek Curriculum Change; Kan. Education Hearings Open Today

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 5, 2005; Page A03

TOPEKA, Kan., May 4 -- Alarmed by proposals to change how evolution is taught, scientists and teachers are mobilizing to fight back, asserting that educational standards are being threatened by what they consider a stealth campaign to return creationism to public schools.

This week's battle is focused on Kansas, where State Board of Education hearings begin Thursday on evolution and intelligent design, a carefully marketed theory that challenges accepted understandings of Earth's origins in favor of the idea that a creator played a guiding role.

Daily Howler - May 5, 2005

LYING TO THE MOTHERS! Bush has some gifts for America’s mothers—disinformation, disrespect, phony fear

THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2005

DRUM GETS IT RIGHT: Our analysts lustily cheered Kevin Drum as he named a famous name in yesterday’s post. (Although he makes a tortured claim about the semantics of “cut.” In a wide array of circumstances, this claim would be less than convincing.) And yes, they cheered Matt Yglesias too, as he named the name of Joe Klein. Liberals and Democrats have to name these burn-outs again and again—and again and again, and again after that. Tomorrow, we’ll continue our look at Michael Kinsley, and you may get a better idea of how burned-out this former giant really is. Liberals and Democrats have to say, loud and clear, that this is no longer acceptable.

These people have to be named by name. They have to be named again and again. Libs and Dems have to say, “Enough!” Our analysts cheered when Drum did it.

David Neiwert: Standing up

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

In my youth, Bozeman was known as a rrrredneck town. It was the kind of place where, if you had long hair and you hitchhiked, you did your best to avoid it. Arlo Guthrie was only one of many long-hairs famously beaten up there.

Sure, it was home to Montana State University, but that only meant the students there were considered redneck too. It was the ag and engineering school.

That's all changed a lot in the past 20 years. The town has mellowed, become a lot friendlier, with a pretty strong hippie/environmentalist subculture. But even with all that, the old reputation lingers.

Redneck or not, the town recently made everyone in Montana proud by standing up and repudiating the candidacy of a white supremacist named Kevin McGuire, who ran for an open seat on the local school board.

In the just-finished vote, McGuire garnered 157 votes, or 3.6 percent:

No Court-Martial in Iraq Mosque Shooting

Thursday May 5, 2005 2:01 AM

AP Photo BAG105

By SETH HETTENA

Associated Press Writer

SAN DIEGO (AP) - A Marine corporal who was videotaped shooting an apparently injured and unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque last year will not face court-martial, the Marine Corps announced Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commanding general of the I Marine Expeditionary Force, said that a review of the evidence showed the Marine's actions in the shooting were ``consistent with the established rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict.''

Editorial: The best face of America

Vigils were held Tuesday in communities across the country - from West Bend, Wis., to Washington, D.C. - to remember the life and work of Marla Ruzicka, the 28-year-old woman who focused global attention on the fate of the thousands of civilians who have been killed and injured in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Soldiers Detained in Colombia Plot

May 4, 9:05 PM (ET)

By KIM HOUSEGO

CARMEN DE APICALA, Colombia (AP) - Colombian police arrested two U.S. soldiers for alleged involvement in a plot to traffic thousands of rounds of ammunition - possibly to outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups, authorities said Wednesday.

The two soldiers were detained during a raid Tuesday in a gated community in Carmen de Apicala, 50 miles southwest of the capital and near Colombia's sprawling Tolemaida air base, where the detained soldiers worked and where many U.S. servicemen are stationed.

National Police chief Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro said officers stopped a suspicious man in the area, who offered a bribe to be allowed to go free. Under threat of arrest, the man led the officers to a nearby house where more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition for assault rifles, machine guns and pistols were found, officials said.

Congress eliminates government funding for fake news

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

News from Free Press and The Center for Media and Democracy:

WASHINGTON -- Free Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today applauded Congress for barring federal agencies from producing video news releases (VNRs) that do not clearly disclose the government as their source. But the groups called on lawmakers to make the one-year ban permanent and pass stronger measures against the broadcast of government and corporate propaganda.

Digby: McCarthyite Watchdog

I would imagine that most people have heard of Walter Winchell, the McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist. Fewer of you have probably heard of another influential McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist of the period, Fulton Lewis Jr. But, you should probably read up on him a little bit because it's actually going to be important in your own life right here and now:

That he was considered a controversial commentator is mostly reflected in his strong conservative stances in a time of increasing liberalism. Throughout the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, Lewis continued to defend his beliefs. In pre-war America Lewis supported and encouraged the America First stance of Charles A. Lindbergh, which espoused that America spend its money and resources on building up our own defenses and stay out of the European conflict. Lindbergh was an admirer of the military capability of National Socialist Germany.

Digby: Useful Idiots

Here's another example of one of those allegedly liberal pundits who have been so tough on George W. Bush:

He proposed that the system be made solvent by reducing benefits on a sliding scale, according to income. This utterly responsible and progressive proposition was greeted by phony bleats of outrage from leading Democrats, who proved once again that they are more interested in the demagogic exploitation of the issue than they are in the impact of baby boom retirement on their grandchildren

Joe Klein, as I have written before, is invested in the idea that private accounts are one of those issues he and Bill Clinton cooked up when they were holed up in a bull session in the late 80's together, creating the fabulous image of what the handsome and virile New Democrat would be like. Sadly when he looked at Clinton, he seems to have thought he was looking at himself.

David Neiwert: Minuteman History

Thursday, May 05, 2005

A little history, perhaps, is in order to help bring into focus just what the problem with the Minutemen is. As I just got done explaining, they do represent an open endorsement of extremist vigilantism by leading media and authority figures.
It should be clear that the Minuteman Project's origins lie with so-called "border militias," whose activities have been documented many times here. These "militias," it must be understood, are direct products of the far-right Patriot movement that produced the same "movement" in the 1990s.

One of the symbolic ways this shows up is in the project's name: the original Minutemen were the heart and soul of the militias who defeated the British army in the Revolutionary War. The name claims a kind of descent from these historical forebears in exactly the same way as the "militia movement".

Debunking a spitting image

By Jerry Lembcke | April 30, 2005

STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.

What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details. The story told by the man who spat on Jane Fonda at a book signing in Kansas City recently is typical. Michael Smith said he came back through Los Angeles airport where ''people were lined up to spit on us."

Commercial Pressure As Insidious As Political

Wise words on the media--Dictynna

Anton Harber
Johannesburg

SOUTH Africans celebrated International Media Freedom Day yesterday secure in the fact that we have minimal government interference in our media.

Now the focus shifts to other forms of control or influence over our public debate. As political control over the media recedes, commercial influence steps in. And the lesson we are learning is that it can be almost as damaging to the flow of information and quality of national debate as direct political interference.

Intelligence Whistleblower Fired After Speaking At Event

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

News from Project On Government Oversight:

After speaking on Capitol Hill at an event for national security whistleblowers last week, Intelligence Analyst Russ Tice has been notified by the National Security Agency (NSA) that his security clearance is permanently being taken away and that he will be fired as of May 16, 2005. Tice is a member of the newly formed National Security Whistleblowers Coalition being led by Sibel Edmonds (see http://www.justacitizen.com for more about the Coalition).

Why media ownership matters

By Amy Goodman and David Goodman

George Bush must have been delighted to learn from a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that 56 percent of Americans still think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war, while six in 10 said they believe Iraq provided direct support to the al-Qaida terrorist network — notions that have long since been thoroughly debunked by everyone from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to both of Bush's handpicked weapons inspectors, Charles Duelfer and David Kay.

Long live the king

Very shrewdly, President Bush beat a tactical retreat on the role of religion in politics during his recent White House press conference. Speaking soon after "Justice Sunday," a closed-circuit telecast in which certain of the Republican Party’s more fervid theologians decreed that Democrats had shown their enmity to "people of faith" by rejecting a handful of his judicial nominees, Bush was asked if that struck him as an appropriate characterization. After a bit of tap-dancing—the president said he didn’t agree with calling Democrats anti-God, but wouldn’t call it inappropriate, either—Bush eventually emitted a bit of bedrock Americanism. "I think faith is a personal issue," he said. "And I take great strength from my faith. But I don’t condemn somebody in the political process because they may not agree with me on religion. The great thing about America is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want. And if you chose not to worship, you’re equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you’re equally American if you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. And that’s the wonderful thing about our country and that’s the way it should be."

Juan Cole: Is Bigotry All Right in Politics?

John Aravosis argues that Pat Robertson should be a political pariah after his remarks on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that Muslim Americans are not fit to serve in the US cabinet. It is actually much worse than that. Robertson also implied that Jews are unfit to serve on the Supreme Court because some of them defend the ACLU, which he equates with defending Communism. The anti-Jewish bigotry among some evangelicals that codes Jews as a "cultural elite" promoting non-Christian values just drips from his words. I give the relevant parts of the interview below.

Audits find flaws in U.S. handling of Iraq deals

I wonder....is it possible that some of this money made its way back to the US and is financing the GOP steamroller?--Dictynna

Wed May 4, 5:18 PM ET

The United States has carelessly, and possibly fraudulently, handled some Iraqi money meant for rebuilding and poorly managed billions of dollars of U.S.-funded contracts, said U.S. audits released on Wednesday.

In one area of Iraq alone, nearly $100 million in cash used for rebuilding was unaccounted for. Incompetence by U.S. procurement staff ranged from contractors being paid twice to files being misplaced.

The Jihad Is a Civil War, the West Only a Bystander

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'NO GOD BUT GOD'
The Jihad Is a Civil War, the West Only a Bystander
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: May 4, 2005

For many in the West, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center turned a page in world history. They signaled the onset of a monumental struggle between fundamentalist Islam and modern, secular democracy, what the Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington has called a "clash of civilizations."

Not so, Reza Aslan argues in "No god but God." "What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West," he writes. "The West is merely a bystander - an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story."

Brad DeLong:

the dismal science
Pozen Pill
How Bush's version of "progressive indexing" would kill Social Security.
By Brad DeLong
Posted Tuesday, May 3, 2005, at 2:45 PM PT

George W. Bush has come out in favor of a proposal for cutting Social Security benefits called "progressive price indexing."

Or has he? On May 1, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card appeared on Meet the Press. A proposal by Robert Pozen "... is really not necessarily the president's plan," Card noted. "It's directionally consistent with the president's plan." So what does Pozen say, and where does Bush differ?

Proof Bush Fixed The Facts

Ray McGovern
May 04, 2005

Ray McGovern served 27 years as a CIA analyst and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour.

"Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity.

Daily Howler - May 4, 2005

HOW TO SUCCEED AT SEMANTICS! “Which word is right,” Brooks Jackson asks. But that’s not the way to approach this

HOW TO SUCCEED AT SEMANTICS: Yes, a semantic war has broken out about Bush’s proposal for Social Security. At FactCheck.org, former CNN ace Brooks Jackson has already noted the problem:

JACKSON (4/29/05): Sometimes it seems as though Democrats and Republicans are living in parallel universes. Consider these two duelling quotes from April 29, regarding the President's announcement that he is supporting "progressive indexing" of Social Security benefits for future retirees:

President Bush: I propose that future generations receive benefits equal to or greater than the benefits today's seniors get.

Senator Harry Reid: This plan will provide deep benefit cuts for middle-class seniors.

So which is it—steady benefits or reduced benefits?

Echidne: What We Didn't Know

About all these wars. Well, we did know, perhaps. At least some of us. Bush attacking Iraq after bin Laden attacked the U.S. was nonsensical from day one, unless one assumed that the plan to invade Iraq had been in the works for a very long time indeed. Which it had, of course, as we now know from the newly revealed documents that are hurting poodle Blair in the U.K.. Bush cannot be touched by any of this, it seems. This is because he has a funny wife, and must therefore not be a monster, after all.

Atrios: Wanker of the Day

The always useless Jeff Dvorkin.

This one's quite astonishing, really. He's condoning that the press actively engage in coverups. Additionally, this stuff wasn't just posted up by pesky bloggers, it was all over the Italian press.
-Atrios 11:46 AM

Myths of Democratic Renewal

May 3, 2005

One of the hardest things to do is to change. That's why people--and parties--frequently try to avoid it.

That's a problem because Democrats need to change to take advantage of both their long-term opportunities (as laid out in The Emerging Democratic Majority) and the considerable opening that has been provided in the short-term by Bush's and the GOP's recent political missteps. As a number of recent surveys have documented, despite these missteps, Democrats have not generated commensurate political gains and remain bedeviled by public perception that they stand for little and lack clear ideas to deal with the nation's problems.

Rather than pursue the changes necessary to address this failure, however, much of the Democratic party seems in thrall to one or another of a series of myths about how the Democrats can renew their popular appeal.

Digby: Charlie Brown Pundits

Kevin Drum endorses EJ Dionne's column today in which it is finally clearly set forth by someone other than the shrill Paul Krugman that the Republicans aren't playing by any rules and therefore cannot be trusted to act in good faith on Social Security. This has been obvious for some time, but it's good to see Dionne writing about it in a major establishment paper. Reportedly Howard the Fine was so taken aback that he said on Air America today that this charge would have to be taken seriously now that Dionne, a reasonable liberal, had brought it up. Good news. But as Kevin points out, this is hardly the end of the tale:

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of thuggish Republican behavior. Keeping floor votes open for hours of arm twisting and vote buying, for example, instead of the usual 15 minutes. Preventing Democrats from so much as offering amendments to Republican legislation. Increased use of "emergency" late night meetings. Keeping the text of legislation secret until mere hours before scheduled votes. Squeezing the time for debate by allowing no more than one or two days a week for work on real legislation. Slashing the number of bills considered under open rules. And, of course, threatening the "nuclear option" to cut off judicial filibusters. You can get more details here in Rep. Louise Slaughter's detailed report.

Matthew Yglesias on Social Security

(May 04, 2005 -- 10:28 AM EDT)

I don't like the term "add-on accounts" which, to me, frames the issue poorly and suggests a feeble-minded tactical response to the effort to phase-out Social Security. Programs designed to broaden the scope of asset ownership in America are more than defensible on their own terms, and like lots of other things I support (health care for the uninsured, a military capable of handling post-conflict stabilization missions better, etc.) shouldn't really be viewed as either a substitute for, or an enhancement of, Social Security as such.

Digby: Nanny's Not A Wingnut

So I watched the show "Super-Nanny" last night to get a sense of this "Focus on the Family" shill job. The ad is perfect for the show, which featured a very dysfunctional family on the verge of chaos -- the two kids (aged 3 and 7) were rude, undisciplined and out of control and the parents were in way over their heads. The FOF ads were very slick; they could have been a clever government sponsored spot, like those produced for Partnership For A Drug free America. They appeared to be connected to the show --- and one would guess that the show endorsed the program by the way it was presented. The show featured a couple of very undisciplined brats which the ads, featuring little demon children saying they are going to wreak havoc on their parents' lives, seemed to indicate the FOF program could cure. I bet they got some calls.

Digby: Business As Usual

I missed this one. Apparently, two female schoolteachers in their 50's who had the nerve to attend a public Bush rally without the proper Republican approvals were arrested and strip-searched.

Alice McCabe and Christine Nelson, both in their 50s, were among five protesters arrested at the Sept. 3 rally. The pair were handcuffed, taken to the county jail, strip-searched and charged with criminal trespass. The charges were dropped months later.

Digby: All Together Now

Man, we liberals can't win for losing, can we? First we are told that we're a bunch of immoral libertines who are trying to destroy the fabric of our nation with our nasty talk and perverted big city ways, and then John Tierney says today that we are a bunch of stiffs who don't understand what a bunch of rollockin', ribald partiers those real American Red Staters are.

The Poor Man: Failure and lies

The Poor Man refutes Bushies on North Korea/Clinton--Dictynna.

Yen Falls Against Dollar, Euro After North Korea Fires Missile

Political instability may hurt the outlook for investment in the region and threaten Japan’s economic recovery. North Korea has told Japan that any move to impose economic sanctions would be considered a declaration of war. The yen had its biggest gain in more than two months on April 29, when a state- sponsored newspaper in China said the government may let the yuan trade more freely at any time.

Collapse of North Korea wishful thinking?

At 30: Iraq and the Vietnam Syndrome

The Iraq war, of course, is not like Vietnam, in many ways. But in many other, profound, ways they are much alike. Jonah Goldberg, writing in USA Today, finds the comparisons silly. What about the 57% of Americans, according to Gallup this week, who feel the current war is "not worth it"?

By Greg Mitchell

(May 01, 2005) -- The flood of stories in the press marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is near its end (the anniversary having passed on Saturday). There have been articles lamenting that we ever set foot in Indochina, others claiming that we could and should have won the war, and every view in between.

Then there’s Jonah Goldberg’s Op-Ed in USA Today. He used the occasion not to try to come to grips with that war but denounce those -- mainly, he said, “liberal baby boomers” -- who on a “near-daily” basis link Iraq to Vietnam. He said they are simply filled with "nostalgia" for their glory days of antiwar hedonism.

Dark clouds on US economic horizon

By Christopher Swann in Washington
Published: May 2 2005 21:19 | Last updated: May 2 2005 21:19

The administration of President George W. Bush has remained relentlessly optimistic about the outlook for the US economy. Brushing off the recent spate of weak data by arguing that a similar slowdown at the same time last year was followed by a strong resurgence, Carlos Gutierrez, the commerce secretary, told reporters on Monday that there was “a very healthy momentum to the economy”.

But what initially seemed to be a short-lived “soft patch” much like the blip in growth last spring is now looking a little more ominous.

Enigma: The Faustian Bargain of David Irving

by Michael Shermer

When I was a graduate student in a doctoral program in history at Claremont Graduate School in the late 1980s, our German historian called our attention to an emerging “Historikerstreit” among his colleagues on the continent. There is nothing more revealing about character and conscious than a good intellectual brouhaha.

NYT Ed: Hitting the Middle Class, Again

As he moved into the home stretch of his 60-day Social Security road show last week, it became clear that President Bush had saved the worst for last.

Mr. Bush endorsed a proposal that would take a huge bite out of the Social Security retirement benefits for the middle class, claiming that would close some 70 percent of the system's financing gap. That figure is almost certainly overstated. Under the proposed reductions, young workers who now earn about $36,000 would face a 16 percent cut; those earning about $58,000 would face a cut of 25 percent, and those earning $90,000, 29 percent. People not yet in the work force would face even larger reductions.

Mr. Bush says these cuts would enable the system to continue paying benefits at the current level to the 30 percent of recipients who now make less than $20,000. But fully two-thirds of retirees rely on Social Security for more than half of their income. Moreover, the Bush plan gives the false impression that the wealthiest beneficiaries would bear the most pain. That's not the case. The wealthier one is, the lower the percentage of retirement income coming from Social Security, so even a big cut has little impact. By 2075, an average worker's benefit cut would equal 10 percent of pre-retirement income; a millionaire's reduction would be only 1 percent.

For Americans in Sudan, Good Deeds Turn Sour

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
ACTS OF FAITH
By Philip Caputo
669 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Philip Caputo's devastating new novel, "Acts of Faith," will be to the era of the Iraq war what Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" became to the Vietnam era: a parable about American excursions abroad and the dangers of missionary zeal, a Conradian tale about idealism run amok, capitalistic greed sold as paternalistic benevolence, ignorance disguised as compassion.

The novel reads like a combination of Robert Stone (without the drugs), V. S. Naipaul (without the snobbery) and Joan Didion (without the staccato prose) - a modern day "Nostromo" that reverberates with echoes from today's headlines.

Set largely in the 1990's at the height of Sudan's civil war, "Acts of Faith" draws upon Mr. Caputo's firsthand knowledge of war (documented in his ferociously observed Vietnam memoir "A Rumor of War") and firsthand reportorial experience of Africa to tell the fictional story of two Americans who have come to Sudan to create new lives for themselves. Their avowed mission is to bring aid to the starving rebels (opposed to the hard-line Islamic government in Khartoum) but their real agenda is more personal and self serving.

Iraq: When Was The Die Cast?

John Prados
May 03, 2005

John Prados is a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

Coming just days after the release of the original secret legal advice given to the British government on the lack of foundation in international law for invading Iraq, a fresh leak out of London now reveals with stunning clarity that the goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was set at least a year in advance.

Emerging in the final days before the UK's parliamentary election, a memo leaked to the London Sunday Times reveals that Bush decided to go to war by April of 2002, and that by July of that same year it was clear that the United States would fabricate the intelligence necessary to justify the war.

EJ Dionne: Time to Leave the Table

Tuesday, May 3, 2005; Page A21

There is a name for those who continue to sit at a gambling table even after they learn that the game is fixed. They are called fools.

Now that President Bush has proposed Social Security benefit cuts through "progressive indexing," his critics are said to have an obligation to negotiate in good faith to achieve a solution. There are just two problems with that sentence: The words "good faith" and "solution."

On Bloggers and Money

Some Seek Disclosure Rules for Web Sites Paid by Candidates

By Brian Faler
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 3, 2005; Page A19

You could almost hear the blogosphere sigh with relief earlier this spring when federal election officials indicated that they did not plan to crack down on bloggers who write about politics.

U.S. Called Unprepared For Nuclear Terrorism

Experts Critical of Evacuation Plans

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 3, 2005; Page A01

When asked during the campaign debates to name the gravest danger facing the United States, President Bush and challenger Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) gave the same answer: a nuclear device in the hands of terrorists.

But more than 3 1/2 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. government has failed to adequately prepare first responders and the public for a nuclear strike, according to emergency preparedness and nuclear experts and federal reports.

Billmon: The Chicken and the Egg

(First in a series)

If you’ve been following the debate over the increasingly out-of-whack global financial system – and whether it will end in a soft, hard or crash landing for the U.S. economy – you may want to take a look at (www.roubiniglobal.com/archives/2005/05/global_imbalanc.html) by economist Nouriel Roubini.

It isn’t an easy read, especially if you’re not fluent in econospeak. But it does a very good job of laying out the different schools of thought on the issue -- or at least the ones most frequently heard in the corporate media, on Wall Street and at the Fed.

As Roubini notes, these views are so contradictory that the resulting babble of voices can be compared to the movie Rashomon, in which the story of a terrible murder is repeated from point of view of three witnesses and the murderer himself – with predictably confusing results. Although if Kurosawa really had made a movie about the U.S. current account deficit, I’m sure it would have been a lot more interesting – with maybe a bloody sword fight between competing gangs of Ronin central bankers. (Or Alan Greenspan running around without any pants on, like the crazy guy in Seven Samurai.

Daily Howler - May 3, 2005

PELOSIPALOOZA! Every Dem should be dismayed by the Leader’s appalling performance:

TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2005

THE CRAZIES ARE COMING: The crackpots, crazies and former criminals are coming for Hillary Clinton; Raymond Hernandez’s report in today’s New York Times makes this abundantly clear. Liberals, progressives, centrists and Democrats need to decide how they plan to approach this. But let’s make one thing clear—pressure will have to be brought to bear on the nation’s major news orgs. They can’t be allowed to channel these crazies as they did in the endless years of the Whitewater pseudo-scandals. Nor can they be allowed to conduct a war, as they did against Candidate Gore during Campaign 2000. And by the way—what do the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly and the New Republic plan to do this time? These fiery liberals ran and hid during a decade of Clinton-Gore pseudo-scandals. Trust us: The crazies are coming for Hillary Clinton. And these fiery liberals will play dumb again—unless you start assailing them now.

Matthew Yglesias vs. Rich Lowry

National Review editor Rich Lowry accuses Social Security's defenders of "dishonesty" on grounds so spurious I can't quite tell what they're supposed to be. Certainly he doesn't point to any statements that he alleged are inaccurate. My favored approach to calling people liars is to quote what they've said or written and then explain why it isn't true.

Juan Cole: The Nuclear Option, Algeria and David Hume's Perfect Commonwealth

Good post--Dictynna.

Monday, May 2, 2005

What has the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s got to do with the dictatorial way the US Senate Republicans have begun acting with regard to judicial appointments? The war pitted secular and religious forces against one another, killing over 100,000 persons in constant village massacres and urban assassinations over more than a decade. One of the extreme religious factions, the Armed Islamic Group (French acronym GIA), became angered at US and French support for the secular-leaning military government.

Bitch PhD: Tough Kid

Saturday, April 30, 2005

I LOVE THIS GIRL

Remember the argument about whether or not a 13-year old girl in Florida has the right to an abortion? Whether or not the state has the right to think for her, b/c she's a minor, blah fucking blah?

Well all of us can just shut the fuck up, b/c this is one 13-year old girl who doesn't need anyone to speak for her. Read this, and then, if necessary, re-think that idea that women--including 13-year old girls in foster care--can't be trusted to think through the realities of abortion on their own. Better than some goddamn bureaucrat at the DCF or a judge who isn't the one carrying the pregnancy.

Great Way to Win Iraqi Support (NOT!)

Oy

Herbert:

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

Atrios: Sucker's Game

Let me just second what Sam Rosenfeld is saying - the Democrats really should hope to "do nothing" about Social Security right now, though they could benefit from explaining exactly why.


The only thing "to do" about Social Security is to improve its long run solvency. The only reasonable way to improve its long run solvency is to pre-fund the Trust Fund. But, we have a president running around claiming the trust fund is just a file cabinet, and a bunch of Republicans in Congress who agree. So, throwing more money into the "file cabinet" is just a way to throw more money at tax cuts for the rich. That is, in fact, what the president has told us.

Digby: Ya Think?

Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP

The day after he won a second term in November, President Bush offered his view of the new political landscape.

"When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view," he said, "and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together."

David Neiwert: Missed motives, hoaxes, and hate

Monday, May 02, 2005
As we've all been discovering lately, sometimes appearances are misleading when it comes to criminal motivations -- especially when it comes to high-profile acts like hate crimes and their related acts of domestic terrorism.

The problem is that in the resulting confusion, it's not uncommon for acts of genuine racial hatred to get glossed over or ignored.

The most prominent national case in which we saw such confusion involved the killings of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother in Chicago. White supremacists, rather logically -- in light of the threats they had directed Lefkow's way -- were considered the chief suspects, and I and many others spent quite a bit of time contemplating the consequences of that.

However, it turned out to have been committed by a mentally ill man with a beef against the judge. The story went away. What went little noticed, as a result, was the deeply disturbing threats that emanated from other white supremacists over the course of the affair.

GOP Gives More Power to Federal Government

States Blocked on Industry Rules

by Susan Milligan

WASHINGTON -- Despite having made a commitment to return power to the states, the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are using legislation and the legal system to quash state efforts to regulate industry, a trend state officials say is weakening hard-fought efforts to protect the health and safety of their constituents.

How Far Will The Army Go?

Apr 28, 2005 9:59 pm US/Mountain
How far will U.S. Army recruiters go to bring young men and women into their ranks? An Arvada West High School senior recently decided to find out. The following is CBS4 Investigator Rick Sallinger's report..

ARVADA, Colo. (CBS4) -- Last month the U.S. Army failed to meet its goal of 6,800 new troops.

Aware of this trend, David McSwane, a local high school student, decided he wanted to find out to what extent some recruiters would go to sign up soldiers who were not up to grade.

McSwane, 17, is actually just the kind of teenager the military would like. He's a high school journalist and honor student at Arvada West High School. But McSwane decided he wanted to see "how far the Army would go during a war to get one more solider."

The National Center for Public Policy Research

Media Transparency original
Bill Berkowitz
May 2, 2005

The foundation that Tom DeLay calls 'The Center for Conservative communications' is involved in the Majority Leader's ethical troubles as well as a number of other right wing projects

Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases

By STEPHEN LABATON, LORNE MANLY
and ELIZABETH JENSEN

Published: May 2, 2005

WASHINGTON, May 1 - The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders - including the chief executive of PBS - to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

Bob Herbert: From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'

By BOB HERBERT

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

Paul Krugman: A Gut Punch to the Middle

By PAUL KRUGMAN

By now, every journalist should know that you have to carefully check out any scheme coming from the White House. You can't just accept the administration's version of what it's doing. Remember, these are the people who named a big giveaway to logging interests "Healthy Forests."

Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing.

Under current law, low-wage workers receive Social Security benefits equal to 49 percent of their wages before retirement. Under the Bush scheme, that wouldn't change. So benefits for the poor would be maintained, not increased.

The administration and its apologists emphasize the fact that under the Bush plan, workers earning higher wages would face cuts, and they talk as if that makes it a plan that takes from the rich and gives to the poor. But the rich wouldn't feel any pain, because people with high incomes don't depend on Social Security benefits.

Cut an average worker's benefits, and you're imposing real hardship. Cut or even eliminate Dick Cheney's benefits, and only his accountants will notice.

A Lobbyist in Full

By MICHAEL CROWLEY

Published: May 1, 2005

Can you smell money?!?!?!'' Jack Abramoff wrote.

It was December 2001, and he was a kingpin of Republican Washington, one of the city's richest and best-connected lobbyists. His former personal assistant had gone to work for Karl Rove, the new president's top political adviser; he was close friends with the powerful Republican congressman from Texas, Tom DeLay, a relationship most of his competitors would kill to boast of. He was making millions on fees of up to $750 per hour; he was the proprietor of two city restaurants; and he was even a man of good works -- a charitable giver and the founder of a private religious school in the Maryland suburbs. Dressed in expensive suits, he moved around the capital in a BMW outfitted with a computer screen, often headed to one of the countless fund-raisers he gave for Republican congressmen and senators at Redskins and Orioles and Wizards games in his private sky boxes. Jack Abramoff was a man in full.

Daily Howler - May 2, 2005

THREE AMIGOS! Pelosi, Dodd and Leahy discussed SS—and embarrassed themselves once again

MONDAY, MAY 2, 2005

THREE AMIGOS: When it comes to Social Security, the world-class bungling by Major Dems continued on yesterday’s programs. Here, for example, was Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), misstating badly on Meet the Press. He appeared with Senator George Allen (R-VA):

ALLEN (5/1/05): The reality is once you get to 2017, the revenues coming in will not be enough to fund that but—to fund the output.

DODD: No, no, no. No, no. George, we know from every single actuary that the issue becomes a “crisis,” if you will, in 2042. And in 2042, 80 percent of the Trust Fund is there, according to actuary accounts. So 20 percent—let me finish.

“We know from every single actuary?” In fact, the current, official CBO estimate says that Social Security is fully solvent until the year 2052. Indeed, in Nancy Pelosi’s otherwise woeful outing on ABC’s This Week, she stressed this factual point from the get-go, directly challenging George Stephanopoulos when he cited the earlier year—the same year Dodd was promoting. Dodd’s statement here is flatly inaccurate—and his misstatement tilts in favor of Bush! Meanwhile, Sunday viewers saw two Dem spokesmen making contradictory presentations about this elementary fact. But Major Dems have performed like this ever since this debate began. No corporation would ever tolerate such inept work from its spokesmen. (By the way: In the latest projection of the SS trustees, the target year is no longer 2042—it’s actually 2041. It became clear during Dodd’s appearance that he doesn’t know this fact. This adjustment occurred back in March.)

In scathing interview, Democrat says Bush Social Security plan won't help; Dubs Cheney 'ass kisser'

By John Byrne | RAW STORY
Advertisement Click Here

In an exclusive interview with RAW STORY, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) slammed President Bush and Congressional Republicans' attempts to take on Social Security, saying he believes Bush has surrounded himself with those who agree with him and has lost touch with America.

Touching on issues from Social Security to the president's energy plan, Congressman Moran asserted that Republicans had repeatedly put the interests of the wealthy before the poor.

Echidne: From the Barricades

Did you know that you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust? This is the language of some pro-lifers. Imagine us as embryos: darting about, fleeing the evil abortionist or whatever, somehow miraculously surviving to the point after which pro-lifers no longer care about us: the birth. Pro-lifers seem to view women as aquaria: some empty, but with water that must be kept clear for future fishes, some with fish already in them and some all dry and dusty, no longer useful at all.

A thirteen-year old in state custody in Florida is one of those aquaria with fish. She is more than thirteen weeks pregnant. She got pregnant after running away from the state home. The girl herself wants an abortion and her state-appointed custodian was helping her to get one until higher powers-that-be decided to intervene. The pro-life plot is to keep the case in court until abortion is too late.