Digby: Stem Sell

"I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is - I'm against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.''

Just in case you are confused, using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is evil:



But using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is good:

(DISTURBING IMAGE: PICTURE OF DEAD CHILD REMOVED--Dictynna)

It looks to me as if the best way to convince Bush and his followers to support stem cell research is to propose that we only use arab embryos.

Via Suburban Guerrilla

Update: Apropos of this subject, Kevin at Catch points to this article By Sidney Schanberg from last week.

Warning: more sad (or in the words on one commenter, "tasteless") pictures. Violent death, I agree, is quite tasteless. The death of a bundle of human cells, not so much. It's unfortunate that one has to illustrate the difference so starkly but in America today it's clearly necessary.

Moyers Fights Back

by JOHN NICHOLS

[from the June 6, 2005 issue]

The Bush Administration allies who have taken over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting may have thought they could turn public television into another of their echo chambers without a fight. But they didn't count on Bill Moyers.

Moyers, who secured thirty Emmys during three decades on PBS, stormed out of retirement May 15 to condemn manipulations of the network's content and programming engineered by Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chair of the CPB board of directors, and to call for a renewed commitment to principled journalism at PBS and throughout American media. "I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has done," Moyers told more than 2,000 activists, academics and journalists gathered in St. Louis for the National Conference for Media Reform. Moyers, who stepped down in December as the host of the highly regarded PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers, detailed Tomlinson's partisan meddling, from the hiring of Bush aides and allies to fill key positions at the CPB to his allocation of $5 million in tax money to develop a weekly broadcast featuring the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. But his main focus was the revelation that Tomlinson spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor to monitor NOW and report on its supposed political bias. "Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent," joked Moyers. "Hell, you could have called me--collect--and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night." (The full text of Moyers's speech is at www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm.)

Frank Rich: It's All Newsweek's Fault

IN the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Fareed Zakaria wrote a 6,791-word cover story for Newsweek titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" Think how much effort he could have saved if he'd waited a few years. As we learned last week, the question of why they hate us can now be answered in just one word: Newsweek.

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.

Richard Clarke: Building a Better Spy

Dear John:

You have been in office as the first director of national intelligence for about a month now. Wishing you were back in Baghdad? I understand. The law that created your job was filled with compromises designed to satisfy Don Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's backers in Congress. As a result, the law is, to be charitable, ambiguous about your authority over Defense Department intelligence agencies and the F.B.I.

The Cram-Down Decade

You met your obligations; your employer didn't. Result: You're screwed.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005, at 1:11 PM PT

It may seem awfully premature to start thinking about defining the decade in finance. But if you start counting from Jan. 1, 2000, it's more than half over. And in this age of the Feiler Faster thesis, it's never too early.

And so Moneybox hereby declares the zeros (the oughts?) the Decade of the Cram Down.

In corporate finance, a "cram-down deal" is defined as a transaction "in which stockholders are forced to accept undesirable terms, such as junk bonds instead of cash or equity, due to the absence of any better alternatives." More broadly, it's what happens when stakeholders who have met their obligations are nonetheless forced to accept returns or compensation that are far less than they were promised. Frequently, cram downs occur because the entity charged with managing the investment has screwed up—it frittered away cash or went bankrupt. And this is the theme that is defining personal, corporate, and government finances this decade.

Robert Parry: For Bush, Iraq Lies Are Fundamental

By Robert Parry

May 22, 2005

More than two years and 1,600 dead U.S. soldiers later, George W. Bush’s defenders concede Iraq may not have had weapons of mass destruction, but the defenders still get their backs up when someone accuses Bush of lying. A mistake maybe, but a lie never!

That defense is anchored in their assessment of Bush’s fundamental decency as a born-again Christian who would never knowingly mislead the American people, especially on something as important as sending U.S. soldiers off to war.

Which is why it’s important to look at Bush’s assertions about his supposed desire to avert the war through good-faith diplomacy in late 2002 and early 2003. Since the entire world watched those events unfold, the known facts can be matched against the more recent words of Bush and his senior advisers.

Daily Howler - May 21, 2005

FAR FROM HEAVEN! When will Liberal Oasis learn—that our big orgs are next door to perfect?

SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2005

FAR FROM HEAVEN: We can all feel especially lucky. We’re lucky because, as it turns out, our big newspapers aren’t “pieces of crap” after all; in fact, they represent “the current state of the art in human perfectibility.” (Well, at least the New York Times does. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/20/05.) And if they weren’t the next best thing to perfection, think how bad their coverage would be—of Priscilla Owen, for example.

With that in mind, be sure to read this report in Liberal Oasis—a report critiquing Thursday’s profile of Owen in the Los Angeles Times. We chuckled to think that the folks at Oasis didn’t realize what Blogger Pangloss explained—that they’re only “enabling the right-wing agenda” when they pen such thoughtless critiques.

Jesus' General: The myth of the female orgasm

Ed Vitagliano
Editor, AFA (American Family Association) Journal

Dear Mr. Vitagliano,

Our great nation ain't what it use to be. Thirty-plus years of feminism has transformed it into a festering canker of wickedness. The womenistas have seized our popular culture with shows like "Maude" and "Sex in the City" and used it to spread the most damaging of all lies--the notion that women should enjoy conjugal relations.

It's a perjury more damaging than any other because it strikes at the very heart of the marital relationship. Women, raised to believe in the myth of the female orgasm, cannot help but be disappointed after fulfilling their marital duties. I've witnessed it many times myself: the dumbstruck look, the inevitable question, "is that it," the crying, the throwing up, the accusations of inadequacy, the claim that my neighbor knows how to do it right (as if Ofjoshua would know anything so personal about Mr. Hernandez).

Prewar Findings Worried Analysts

By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 22, 2005; Page A26

On Jan. 24, 2003, four days before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address presenting the case for war against Iraq, the National Security Council staff put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or programs.

The person receiving the request, Robert Walpole, then the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, would later tell investigators that "the NSC believed the nuclear case was weak," according to a 500-page report released last year by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Juan Cole - May 20, 2005 Part 3

Best of the Web

Scientists in South Korea, unhampered by the tradition of anti-intellectualism that still bedevils the United States, have made a major breakthrough in stem cell research. They took eggs from volunteers, snipped out the nuclei, and inserted nuclei from the skin of eleven patients sick with various disorders. They then jump-started cell division, and the resulting cells were as though they came from the 11 patients. Ideally this process could be used to grow organs and regenerate brain and nerve cells, so as to cure a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Juan Cole - May 20, 2005 Part 2

23 Die In Iraq Violence
Shiite Cleric Assassinated

Guerrilla attacks killed 23 persons in Iraq on Thursday, including one US serviceman. One bomb blew up near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, and an important Shiite cleric was killed.

Al-Sabah says that when Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met with Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf on Thursday, he insisted that "There is no evidence that Iran is supporting terrorism." He said Iran would be happy to help restore security in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that the Americans have decided to get more involved in mediating Iraqi decision-making, in an attempt to reverse the deadly drift and political gridlock that has gripped the country. It seems obvious, as well, that left to themselves the Shiites and Kurds who won the Jan. 30 elections are perfectly happy to cut the Sunni Arabs out of the deal, and to risk prolonging and deepening the Sunni guerrilla war.

Juan Cole - May 20, 2005 Part 1

Why Jacoby is Wrong

Jeff Jacoby argues that there is something peculiar about the reaction of Muslims to the allegations that the Koran was disrespected at Guantanamo prison by US military interrogators.

Jacoby's position is pure bigotry. We have to be clear about this. Anti-muslimism is a form of racial prejudice no different from any other. If Jacoby said, "What is wrong with those people of African descent, that they are so violent all the time when nobody else is?" he'd probably be fired. It is not all right for him to do the same thing to Muslims. While Muslims are a religious group, in the contemporary United States they most often are racialized. It comes to the same thing.

Mahablog; The Natives Remain Restless

Having decorated their huts with Mark Whitaker's shrunken head, and having confined Michael Isikoff in a little cage so that the tribal children can poke him with sticks, the rightie tribe has moved on--to the Newspaper Guild and Editor & Publisher.

The Rectitudinous Righties are not worked up over anything published as news by the evil "MSM," however. A week ago Linda Foley, national president of The Newspaper Guild, made some comments at a National Conference for Media Reform that put her on the tribal hit list. At the conference in St. Louis, Foley said of U.S. forces in Iraq:

Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal.

It's not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem.

Like it or not, Ms. Foley is not pulling these charges out of her butt. Jeanne d'Arc has documented incidents that look suspiciously like journalist targeting.

Mahablog: Dissing Our Troops

Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog wrote what I was going to write about the newly released details of Afghan inmates' deaths.

Maybe you're the kind of idiot who reads a story like this and has no reaction except "How dare the liberal media undermine our troops?" If so, listen up: The people responsible for this are the ones who are undermining the troops. The people who are too stupid to know that you don't do this when you're in a global battle for hearts and minds are the ones who betrayed our country.

And I'm referring less to the torturers than to the high mucketymucks who gave the go-ahead for this kind of interrogation or suggested with a nod and a wink that it was a good idea, while turning the job over to callow amateurs understandably flush with post-9/11 righteous indignation...

Speaking of idiots, this is a fairly typical rightie reaction:

... the ugly truth is that there are a lot of liberals in this country, perhaps a majority of them, who don't support the troops, who -- as one poster on the Democratic Underground put it -- look at the our troops as "Cannon fodder and killers doing what they're told to do".

Of course, since most Americans have a very high opinion of our soldiers, liberals would face enormous political ramifications if they were honest about what they thought. So instead, we get surreptitious assaults on our military.

For example, part of the reason Abu Ghraib has gotten so much attention & the press keeps churning out 2 and a 1/2 year old stories about soldiers working over prisoners is because liberals can use it to smear the troops. "See? That's what they're all like behind closed doors! Sadistic savages."

Many on the Right cling to the belief that "liberals hate the military." I believe this dates from the post-Vietnam era, when all the spitting-on-soldiers-in-airports incidents that didn't happen were being "remembered." And many righties perpetuating this myth are too young to remember the Vietnam era and never faced being drafted into a pointless war, but never mind.

Mahablog: Stooges

Friday, May 20, 2005

Be sure to read Dan Froomkin's column on how Bush is exploiting young people hand-picked for their obliviousness to destroy Social Security.

President Bush's meticulously stage-managed presentations on Social Security have slowly shifted into a new phase, in which White House aides find misinformed young people to share the stage with the president and assert that Social Security won't be there at all when they retire.

And rather than correcting them on their misconception -- government estimates, after all, say that after 2041 Social Security will still be able to pay at least three-quarters of currently promised benefits without any changes -- Bush congratulates them on their perspicacity.

Froomkin says Bush is skillfully using carefully selected youth in his scare campaign:

He's still telling seniors not to listen to all those unspecified people trying to frighten them by saying their benefits are about to be cut.

But he himself is forcefully asserting to young people that for them, when it comes to Social Security, the sky is falling.

A New Chapter In The Valerie Plame Case

Insights Gained From The New Edition of The Book by Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson

By JOHN W. DEAN

Friday, May. 20, 2005

The grand jury investigation into the illegal leak of Valerie Plame's covert CIA identity still has not led to the public revelation of any suspect who might be responsible for the leak. Yet according to columnist Robert Novak, who published the leaked information, the suspects are two "senior" Bush Administration sources - who may be high-profile.

A number of reporters have already voluntarily testified before the grand jury. But New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Mathew Cooper are not among them. In a recent column, I explained why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did not protect Miller and Cooper's ability to hide their sources - and why I believe the U.S. Supreme Court is very unlikely to step in. Someday soon, then, the grand jury is very likely to hear from Miller and Cooper - or else Miller and Cooper will opt for jail.

Destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest

May 20 2005: The Brazilian government released figures this week showing that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest was the second worst ever, with more than 10,000 sq miles (26,000 sq km) cleared by ranchers, loggers and farmers. The following are images from some of the worst affected areas.

Senator concerned politics played role in base closings

By John Byrne | RAW STORY
Advertisement Click Here

A Democratic senator has raised questions on whether politics played a role in a Pentagon proposal to close and transfer jobs from U.S. military bases in a report analyzing the net job loss/gains, RAW STORY has learned.

In a carefully worded statement, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) questioned why states that supported President Bush's reelection (red states) had a net job gain of 11,000, while states that oppposed Bush (blue states) lost nearly 25,000 positions.

Daily Howler - May 19, 2005

DAVID AND KATRINA! Brooks licks every man in the house. We’ll zero in on Katrina:
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2005

DAVID AND KATRINA: How about credit where credit is due? David Brooks is essentially right, about all comers, in today’s New York Times column.

First, he’s right about our embarrassing White House. “I can't believe what I'm seeing,” he says, denouncing the Bush Admin’s reaction to the ballyhooed Newsweek flap. “[W]hat have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers,” Brooks writes. “They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.”

And, yes, Brooks is also right about his conservative colleagues. “Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media,” he writes. “Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness.” What a shame it took a conservative pundit to state a couple of obvious facts: “The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.” We don’t necessarily agree with every particle of that last statement. But no—the perfumed poodles running Newsweek are not a bunch of crazy liberals. They proved this, over and over again, in their wars against Clinton, then Gore. But it’s amazing how hard it is to get our fiery “liberal spokesmen” to say this. They have decided to “get over” those recent wars—wars which their fiery “liberal” publications all agreed to ignore in real time.

Daily Howler - May 20, 2005

BLOGGER PANGLOSS! Good Lord! Kevin Drum says the New York Times is “state of the art” in perfection
FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2005

TWOFER: Our whirring engines went down on Thursday, so we were unable to post. If you want to read Thursday’s HOWLER, you know what to do—just click here.

YOUR U.S. TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Today’s New York Times details the treatment of a 22-year-old prisoner at Bagram. Given recent, mainly irrelevant food-fights about the Guantanamo toilet allegation, it’s worth recalling the kinds of conduct which have been fully documented at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Tim Golden is the Times reporter:

Digby: Pulpified

If you are having trouble staying awake this morning, read this account in the New York Times about how the US forces beat prisoners to death in Afghanistan; you will possibly never sleep again. Apparently, they commonly used what is known as a "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee. They did this so often to certain prisoners within a short period of time (mostly just to hear them scream --- it was funny) that they developed blood clots from the injuries and died. The tissue on their legs, as the coroner described it, "had basically been pulpified."

Paul Krugman: The Chinese Connection

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Stories about the new Treasury report condemning China's currency policy probably had most readers going, "Huh?" Frankly, this is an issue that confuses professional economists, too. But let me try to explain what's going on.

Over the last few years China, for its own reasons, has acted as an enabler both of U.S. fiscal irresponsibility and of a return to Nasdaq-style speculative mania, this time in the housing market. Now the U.S. government is finally admitting that there's a problem - but it's asserting that the problem is China's, not ours.

And there's no sign that anyone in the administration has faced up to an unpleasant reality: the U.S. economy has become dependent on low-interest loans from China and other foreign governments, and it's likely to have major problems when those loans are no longer forthcoming.

Ordinary but for the Evil They Wrought

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: May 20, 2005

n his absorbing new book about the 9/11 hijackers, the Los Angeles Times reporter Terry McDermott provides a detailed portrait of one of those hijackers, Ziad al-Jarrah, and his tortured marriage to the vivacious Aysel Sengün. When they first meet at a German university, Mr. McDermott writes in "Perfect Soldiers," he seemed a good match: "a big-city boy with an easy smile, like her a moderate Muslim who enjoyed a good time," and like her, an aspiring dental student.

As he is drawn deeper and deeper into radical jihadi politics, however, Jarrah grows increasingly secretive and elusive, and Ms. Sengün begins nagging him to share more of himself. But even as Jarrah's absences grow longer - he has moved to America to learn how to become a pilot - she continues to dream of the life they will share: she will become a dentist, while he will get a job with an airline. "It made sense to Aysel," Mr. McDermott writes. "He had told her years before how much he had loved flying as a child; he constantly drew pictures of airplanes." In February 2001, they discuss having a baby together.

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths

By TIM GOLDEN

Published: May 20, 2005

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Digby: Downing St. Revelations

I suppose that I understand to a certain extent why the press is so disinterested in the Downing Street memo. It's because they think that the memo merely says the US was inevitably going to war as early as 2002 --- and everybody already knows that. In fact, we knew it at the time. As Juan Cole documents in detail in this Salon article, Bush and his national security team made it quite clear that they wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and launched into high gear to make it happen immediately after. This memo is an official rendering of something that I think the press believes people have absorbed --- and assume that the election settled. They're wrong, but then what else is new?

Digby: Ricky In Paris

I think it's fairly predictable that we are going to see the 101st keyboarders go into high gear tomorrow in response to the blogstorm developing over Little Ricky Santorum's Hitler remarks. They are going to bring up Robert Byrd's previous statements and say that it's even steven. And the press will probably see it that way as well. Overheated rhetoric, he-said-she-said and all that.

While I agree that it's probably not a good idea to evoke Hitler on the floor of the senate, I do think it's fair to take a look at the substance of the two statements by Byrd and Santorum and see if there is any actual merit in either of them.

Bush Resumes Well-Staged Social Security Roadshow

By Warren Vieth
Times Staff Writer

1:53 PM PDT, May 19, 2005

MILWAUKEE — As President Bush resumes his cross-country campaigning to promote his vision of Social Security restructuring, it's no secret that he's relying on outside organizations to help provide the supporting cast.

Yet a memo circulated this week among members of one group, Women Impacting Public Policy, illustrates the lengths to which the White House has gone to make sure that the right points are made at the president's public appearances.

"President Bush will be in Rochester, N.Y., for an upcoming event and has called on WIPP for help," the memo to members stated.

It went on to describe several types of workers the White House wanted to appear on stage with Bush, starting with a young wage-earner "who knows that SS could run out before they retire."

'We are a banana republic'

By Pepe Escobar

BANGKOK - With a playful smile, Paul Krugman says China will inevitably become the world's No 1 economy, depending on the criteria one applies, "by 2020 to 2040". You can't be too careful when it's early evening, but the internal clock says it's early morning US East Coast time, you crave for breakfast, but soon have to address a US$250-a-plate dinner. Krugman adds - to the despair of many a neo-con - that a multipolar world is also inevitable, the poles being the US, the European Union, China and India (not Russia). But China has to watch out for environmental constraints and address its pressing water problem ("they say that the Yellow River never reaches the sea".)

Professor Paul Krugman, currently enjoying the status of being the Mick Jagger of political/economic punditry, is in Bangkok to address a seminar on how Thailand should position itself in the global economy - although he's also careful to point out he's no Thailand specialist; he does not even know exactly what "Thaksonomics" means - a reference to Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's policies. He says Thailand has not experienced a "searing recovery like Malaysia or even Argentina" and "has not returned to the growth rate of 1996, before the Asian crisis". But "it could be a lot worse". Thaksin would take that as an endorsement.

Al Franken: What in God’s Name is Going On?

Last Friday I was on the panel of Bill Maher’s season finale of his HBO show “Real Time.” Bill’s guest by satellite was Senator Norm Coleman from my home state of Minnesota. Because Coleman serves on the homeland security committee, Maher asked him to comment on former homeland security director Tom Ridge’s recent revelation that the Bush administration would often issue terror alerts that he didn’t think were warranted. Could it be that they were using terror alerts politically?

Coleman answered that it was always good to err on the side of caution. Maher followed by asking Coleman if it struck him as odd that there haven’t been any terror alerts since the election?

After a long laugh from the audience, Coleman answered with some stuff about there still being a high level alert, but then reassured everybody with: "If in fact people used these things for political purposes, I’m sure Congress will look into that."

Digby: Try Again

I appreciate George Will's ongoing attempt to distance himself from the Theocratic freak show, I really do. But using postmodern theory to advance rightwing epistomology (while attacking postmodernism), may be a truthful description of right wing propaganda techniques; however it is hardly noble or meritorious. (Not that Will has any conception of what he's actually saying, because he he clearly doesn't.)

This argument is particularly galling coming from someone who supports a president who recently made a speech in Eastern Eurpose essentially accusing Roosevelt and Churchill of being equivalent to Stalin.

L.A. Woman Finds Hate Message In Copy Of Koran

By REUTERS
Published: May 19, 2005

Filed at 2:48 a.m. ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Muslim group on Wednesday demanded a public apology from online bookseller Amazon.com for its part in delivering a used copy of the Koran with the words ``Death to all Muslims'' scrawled across the inside cover.

Los Angeles graduate student Azza Basarudin, who ordered a used copy of the holy book through Amazon.com from a third -party, said that when she discovered the message ``I actually dropped the book.''

``I was taken back to after Sept. 11 and my fear of even leaving my apartment,'' Basarudin told a news conference.

Ballot Fight on Evolution Ends in a Tie

By JAMES DAO
Published: May 19, 2005

The battle over teaching evolution in the Dover Area School District in southeastern Pennsylvania ended in a draw in elections on Tuesday, as two competing slates won separate primaries, setting up a rematch in November.

A slate of seven incumbents, all of whom support a policy requiring high school biology students to be told about "intelligent design," an alternative theory to evolution, won in the Republican primary.

But a slate of seven challengers, all of whom support discussing intelligent design as a religious concept in humanities courses instead of biology classes, won in the Democratic primary. There are seven open seats on the nine-member board.

Kaboom! How to enrage Iraq's Sunnis.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 2:04 PM PT

The most dismaying thing I've read in a while is a Page One story in the May 17 Philadelphia Inquirer, by staff reporters Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy, headlined, "Iraqis Lament a Call for Help." If you want to know why we're not winning in Iraq, and why we're not likely to win anytime soon (if ever), there is no more brutally illustrative tale.

The story concerns Operation Matador, last week's clash between U.S. forces and foreign jihadists in the desert villages of western Iraq. Officials have portrayed the operation as a grand success. Allam and Dulaimy depict it as a grave disaster.

Ellen Goodman: Score one for Cupid

By Ellen Goodman | May 19, 2005

NOW THAT WE have celebrated the paper anniversary of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, may we pause for a moment to admit that the opponents were right: Same-sex marriage is proof of a crisis in traditional marriage.

But gay marriage is not the cause of the crisis, it's a consequence. The true culprit is, well, Cupid.

What's Love Got to Do With It? Precisely. Until roughly two centuries ago, the institution of marriage was considered far too important to leave up to the emotions of two people. Marriage was about economics and politics and, more than anything else, about creating new in-laws.

A steeper ladder for the have-nots

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | May 18, 2005

IT IS STUNNING to see the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times simultaneously devote a series to the American class divide. The Journal reported last Friday, ''Despite the widespread belief that the US remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity."

In an echo, the Times wrote vitually the same thing, adding that in America, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance than in Denmark, the Netherlands, or France. The best that could be said was that class mobility in the United States is ''not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place."

George's Dirty Tricks

Thirty-eight years ago I was a 21-year old Marine Corps reservist/antiwar activist. I and two Air Force reservists had formed the G.I. Association, an anti Vietnam War group that organized reservists around the county to oppose that mortal sin of a war.

Needless to say the Nixon administration was not amused by our organizing efforts. They had a draft back then but, so many US kids were dying every week they had to keep stoking that furance with warm bodies, and they did not want us messing with those kid's heads.

While we advocated peace rather than violence and broke no laws, national or international, we suddenly found ourselves ass-deep in FBI agents wherever we went, 24/7. When my mail arrived an FBI would rush to the box and copy down the return addresses off the envelopes before returning them to the box. If he and I reached the box at the same time I had to wait until he was done.

This was hardly a covert operation. They wanted us to know they were there, watching. They amused themselves further by loosening the lug nuts on the wheels of our cars parked on the street overnight. After two of my wheels rolled by me on Golden Gate Bridge, I started checking the wheels instead of my oil every morning.

Nonprofit Snoops?: Don’t let groups ‘red-flag’ names for feds

May 12,2005
The Monitor View

It could well have been just what a Department of Homeland Security press spokesman said, a response "to a hypothetical question with a hypothetical answer." But if Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is even toying with such an idea, he should think better of it.

According to National Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman, at a private meeting of security-industry officials organized by the Information Technology Association of America, Chertoff "floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity and send names of suspicious people to his department."

Chairman of coalition aimed at killing filibuster pirated Dem, GOP memos on judicial nominees

RAW STORY

The chairman of a massive coalition of groups working to kill the filibuster was forced to resign from the Senate Judiciary Committee last year after admitting to raiding thousands of private Democratic and GOP strategy memos relating to judicial nominees without permission—a fact that continues to go unnoticed in media reports, RAW STORY has found.

Newsweek Finds Bad Stories Aren't Equal

By Robert Parry
May 18, 2005

Newsweek is the latest U.S. news outlet to be slapped into the stocks for sloppy journalism, pelted with criticism for a story alleging American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet. But the case also underscores the fact that some stories are politically riskier than others – especially if they upset the Bushes.

Newsweek certainly has engaged in bad journalism before, though perhaps not to this level of notoriety. In the late 1980s, when I worked there, I often witnessed senior editors getting excited about some hot story and brushing aside doubts from reporters.

Digby: Historical Blindness

Stuart Rothenberg, usually a fairly dry and non-partisan observer, just said on CNN that one could rightly blame "the court" for the impending nuclear showdown in the senate. He claimed that until the late 60's the court never involved itself in the kind of controversial issues that upsets people. Even William Schneider looked surprised.

I guess Stu had a wild 60's because he apparently doesn't realize that there was a little kerfluffle about the actions of the supreme court quite awhile before the late 60's --- long before the rightwing adopted a "culture of life," they were screaming about this:


Thurgood Marshall, center, chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is surrounded by students and their escort from Little Rock, Arkansas, as he sits on the steps of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., Aug. 22, 1958.

Digby: Who Shot Sam

“You must be careful what you say, as well as what you do”
Don Rumsfeld

I've been a little bit busy this week so I guess I missed the outcry of the warbloggers and white house against the Washington Times for this:

(Via Altercation)



Washington Times cartoon sets Pakistan on fire

Mahablog: This is Why

I hope somebody sends a clip of today's Paul Krugman column to Peter Beinart.

You may remember that Beinart is the New Republic editor who thinks Democrats need to become hawks to win back American voters. Beinart wrote last December,

Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a "historical re-education" has indeed occurred--replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

Beinart reached back to the liberal establishment of the late 1940s, which he says was divided between the "hards" who favored aggressively anti-communist policies, and the "softs" who were less interested in the struggle against communism than in the preservation of rights and progressive policies at home.

David Neiwert: Malkin on a Roll

Some things never change. Take, say, Michelle Malkin's methodology.

The other day, Eric Muller pointed out that Malkin had finally gotten around to correcting one of the more audacious smear jobs in her book In Defense of Internment -- namely, her groundless attack on lawyer/historian Peter Irons, whose work in uncovering misfeasance by Justice Department lawyers played a critical role in the court cases overturning the wartime convictions of internment protestors Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu.

Here's the passage in question, from pp. 122-23 of In Defense of Internment:

While working for the commission, [Aiko] Herzig Yoshinaga parlayed her tax-subsidized archival research -- which "formed the core" of the commission's primary documentation -- into evidence for private lawsuits challenging the Supreme Court's World War II rulings upholding the war powers of the executive branch. She had met and befriended Peter Irons, an activist attorney and legal historian, during her tenure on the commission and surreptitiously shared confidential documents with him.

This passage was a central part of Malkin's sweeping condemnation of the effort to in the 1970s and '80s to provide reparations for interned Japanese Americans. Malkin characterizes these efforts as an ideological campaign led by a pack of sneaking connivers, and her smear of Irons and Herzig-Yoshinaga are of a piece with this.

David Neiwert: Mainstreaming the Minutemen

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Great. First we get a senator who endorses the Minutemen. Then the governor of California.

Now senior government officials from Homeland Security are endorsing the concept:

"We need more Border Patrol agents, there's no question about that," Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner told members of the House Government Reform Committee. CBP is in charge of the Border Patrol.

Bonner said his team has worked up a proposed increase in agents. He said the number is in the thousands but declined to be more specific, saying he still has to walk the plan through the Homeland Security Department.

... Bonner said CBP also is evaluating the effectiveness of using citizen patrols in a more formal way. He referred to the Minuteman Project, which set up citizen camps along a 23-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border in April to observe and report illegal activity.

Minuteman organizers claim their efforts helped the Border Patrol apprehend 335 individuals illegally trying to enter the country, and deterred others who would have tried.

"The actions of the Minutemen were, I believe, well motivated," Bonner said. "There were no incidents, there were no acts of vigilantism, and that's a tribute to the organizers and leaders of the Minuteman Project."

Now, I suppose you can say that the Minutemen were "well motivated" -- if you ignore all that talk about how Latinos are ruining the country and the presence of folks like the Aryan Nations and other white supremacists. You could even suggest it was well-run -- if you ignore the fact that neither the quality of vetting the participants (very few of the promised weapon-permit checks were made, for instance, and numerous white supremacists were in fact enrolled, despite promises to refuse them) nor the levels of participation (some 1,300 were promised, and only about 300 showed) were even close to acceptable.

Curious timing on the arrests by Pakistan

It is as if these people were bargaining chips, with the Pakistanis drawing from their reserves of terrorists and cashing them in one by one, depending on the needs of their relationship with the great American "friend."

Bernard-henri Levy

Published May 18, 2005

Let's recap: The Pakistani special forces squad arrested Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al-Qaida's third in command, on March 1, 2003, a few hours before informing the Americans that Pakistan would not back a resolution in favor of the war in Iraq.

They arrested Yasser Jazeeri, another key Al-Qaida operative, in March 2003, a few months before Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited Camp David, where he was promised foreign aid to the unprecedented tune of $3 billion.

In March 2002, they collared Abu Zubeida, Al-Qaida operations chief, and they did this during a big U.S. congressional debate on the question of foreign aid to Pakistan, as well as on delivering the F-16 fighter jets that had been held back by the Pentagon because of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions. (The delivery of the jets was even more hotly debated because it was at the top of the list of demands made by Daniel Pearl's kidnappers.)

Mahablog: What Was That About UNscam?

Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson of the Guardian dropped a bomb on the UN oil-for-food scandal so beloved by the Right, but don't hold your breath waiting for the righties to acknowledge it.

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

The righties are still holding victory orgies to celebrate the slaying of the great beast Newsweek, but they might want to take a break and pay attention to this new twist in UNscam, because it could be huge. The best blog analysis I've seen so far is from Steve Soto at The Left Coaster:

We already know that Bush let Zarqawi get away several times in the year before the war, and now the man is killing our soldiers. We now find out that Bush allowed Hussein to enrich himself illegally at a time when Bush was planning to invade his country and commit our troops to toppling him. Worse yet, Bush had the US Navy provide escort to the ships of Odin Marine, who were shipping Saddam's crude from an unauthorized Iraqi port to Jordan, with Saddam getting kickbacks for these transactions as late as early 2003. Bush was helping Saddam line his pockets in the months leading up to the invasion, and some of that money probably helped finance what our soldiers are enduring now. What was the reason for allowing Saddam to profit from illicit oil deals circumventing the UN program? To allow Jordan and Turkey to get a source of oil that was hindered by the UN sanctions against Iraq,and to buy their support in other areas. Yet the US not only knew about it and condoned the enrichment of Saddam, but provided a navy escort for the oil shipments.

Bush and the GOP have the gall to call for Kofi Annan’s head over the administration of the Oil for Food program, and now it turns out that Bush let a member of the Axis of Evil profit from illegal transactions when just months later it was Saddam’s noncompliance with UN requirements that was cited by Bush as a reason for going to war? And we now find out that the Bush Treasury Department stonewalled the Volcker Commission's efforts to find out the US role in these illicit transactions, even after Colin Powell's State Department pressed Treasury.

You'd think the depths of Bushie corruption wouldn't surprise me any more, but I'm stunned. It's been obvious for several months that the Bushies were hyping UNscam to discredit the UN and keep the natives stirred up. They must have figured no one would notice they were the biggest scammers.

Mahablog: Losing It

''Despite the widespread belief that the US remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity."

That's from the Wall Street Journal, mind you.

Mahablog; Losing It, the Sequel

Glenn Reynolds has had a high old time this week, dancing around the victory fires and shaking his mighty blog spear. Today he writes that we've reached the tipping point that will cause the decline of the "influence" of "big media."

Somewhere, right-wing power brokers are rubbing their hands and saying, "excellent."

"Big media" has its flaws, but the most likely alternative--swarming packs of partisan news goons--does not comfort me.

Robert Scheer: Our own worst enemy

05.17.05 - So far this month, more than 450 Iraqis and dozens of U.S. troops have been killed by an Iraqi insurgency that, even after two years, shows signs of intensifying. Yet the Bush administration, which originally expected U.S. troops to be greeted as liberators and then promised that elections would fatally undermine the rebel cause, remains clueless as to the composition of this virulent enemy.

"The Mystery of the Insurgency" was the headline on a Sunday New York Times article reporting on the consensus of U.S. guerrilla warfare experts that the insurgents' motives and actions are simply baffling. However, "it clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said defense analyst Loren B. Thompson. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region."

'United States Turning into Argentina'

Almost Unnoticed, Bipartisan Budget Anxiety

By Dana Milbank
Post
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; A04

The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country's most pressing problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina.

While Washington plunged into a procedural fight over a pair of judicial nominees, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning Brookings Institution's economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to bemoan what they jointly called the budget "nightmare."

Daily Howler - May 18, 2005

KURTZ TO THE RESCUE! Howard Kurtz profiles Newsweek’s Mark Whitaker. And boss-man has never seemed brighter

KURTZ TO THE RESCUE: Kurtz to the rescue! We couldn’t help chuckling as Howard Kurtz profiled Mark Whitaker in today’s Post. Newsweek, of course, is owned by the Post—and Whitaker, Newsweek’s man-in-charge, has never looked better than he does in this timely portrait. For us, the gushing peaked when Kurtz allowed Howard Fineman to spout about boss-man’s brilliance:

KURTZ (5/18/05): Newsweek has won four National Magazine Awards during Whitaker's tenure, ranging from coverage of 9/11 to the Iraq war to the 2004 election, and staffers describe the man as a fount of ideas. Fineman says Whitaker ordered him to do a "Bush and God" cover story in 2003 based on his past coverage of the president and religious conservatives. "He put two and two together in a way I hadn't thought of," Fineman says.

Buzzflash News Alert: Galloway to Coleman

Galloway (excerpt):

Senator [Coleman], in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers, sent to their deaths on a pack of lives, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, who's dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened, to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens, you are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

And more, much more.

MUST See Video at Crooks and Liars

Also read: US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals', The Guardian, May 17, 2005

More unpleasant surprises await American troops in Iraq

By Steve Chapman

Originally published May 18, 2005

We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency.

- Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, Nov. 18, after offensive against Fallujah

CHICAGO - Could it be that we've misclassified the insurgency in Iraq - that it's an invertebrate, able to absorb bone-crushing blows because it has no bones to crush? It seems to be more like a dandelion, which, when smashed, only spreads more seeds.

Seven months after U.S. forces leveled the enemy stronghold, the insurgents are causing as much trouble as ever. The lull in violence that followed the January elections was taken to mean the rebels were in disarray. If so, they've regrouped, and Iraq has reverted to chaos. Nearly twice as many Iraqi security personnel died in attacks in March as in January. April was almost as bad. May looks worse still.

Echidne: How Bush Won Office

The Interesting Part of the Poll

"The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press" conducted a few days ago, tells us all sorts of things about the opinions people hold on issues such as the president's overall job rating (low, at 43%), the Social Security debacle, DeLay's possible ethics violations and so on.

But the most interesting part of the survey is that most people just don't care, don't follow the news and don't know what their opinion might be:

The president's Social Security proposal attracted very close attention from 36% of the public, while 30% closely followed news on the economy. Only about one-in-five (22%) tracked reports on the selection of the new pope very closely, and even fewer tracked the debate over the Senate filibuster rules (14%) and ethics complaints against DeLay (8%) very closely.

This is useful to keep in mind next time when we wonder how people can vote for the idiots: most of this stuff that I love never makes a dent in the awareness of the average person.

Juan Cole: May 18, 2005

18 Killed in Violence
Kharrazi in Baghdad

Will blog more later on Wednesday.

For now, Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi made a historic visit to Baghdad on Tuesday. He pledged help in controlling the borders between the two countries, and made the point that if Iran were actually supporting insurgent infiltration of Iraq (as Washington has alleged), the situation would be much worse than it is. He pledged Iranian non-interference in Iraq, saying that such interference would be "an insult."

The General on Duvall's Idiotic Slur

The sad, sorry plight of the white, conservative male

William Duvall Jr.
District One Judicial Commissioner
State of Maryland

Dear Commisioner Duvall,

Your recent problems illustrate something I've been saying for a long time: conservative white males are the most persecuted group in America. We just can't catch a break.

Like you, I can't understand why anyone would be offended simply because you called a women's jail "a warehouse for illegal female wetbacks." There's nothing whatsoever offensive about that term. Brown people like to be called that. That's why they're always yelling, "call me a wetback, again" when they are beating the hell out of me for being a conservative white male.

Don't let the attacks get to you. I, for one, find comfort in the knowledge that you're representing us. I'm sure that your judicial picks are every bit as good as Our Leader's. In fact, I bet words similar to the one you used were uttered by Our Leader when he first considered nominating Charles W. Pickering to the bench.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot | 2:22 AM

The Evolution of Jeffrey Sachs

By Robert Cole, AlterNet

Posted on May 18, 2005, Printed on May 18, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22032/

President Bush's favorite philosopher Jesus Christ once declared, "The poor we will always have with us." Jeffrey Sachs is a man on a mission to prove him wrong.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time is an autobiography, a moral call to arms, and a technical blueprint all rolled up into one massive book dedicated to eradicating extreme global poverty by 2025. Here is what extreme poverty looks like today: over a billion people struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, while another 1.5 billion exist on less than two dollars per day. Some 114 million children are denied any education whatsoever, even as six million children die of malnutrition before the age of five each yea

Daily Howler - May 17, 2005

FLYWEIGHT FOLLIES (PART 1)! Your press corps works on flyweight standards. Here—let the MRC prove it:

// link // print // previous // next //

TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2005

E UNUM, PLURIBUS: As in the earlier case of Dan Rather, we’re puzzled when liberals, centrists and Democrats seem inclined to vouch for Newsweek in its recent blundering. Here, for example, is a pungent passage from today’s New York Times, from a front-page report by “Kit” Seelye:

SEELYE (5/17/05): Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was retracting the part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had ''backed away'' from his original account, the magazine could ''no longer stand by'' it.

As we’ve told you, your modern “press corps” has many slippery techniques for making weak stories seem stronger. (No one knows this any better than Seelye.)

Digby: Lovely DiRita

So everybody is rightly quoting the liar Myers (he must be since his version of events is completely at odds with the new "Newsweak Lied" meme), based upon Kit Seelye's article in the NY Times. And there is some discussion of Lawrence DiRita's intemperate remark as quoted in Evan Thomas' article:

Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"

But, what I haven't seen (and, granted, I may have missed it) is the acknowledgement of what DiRita himself was quoted as saying in this AP report on Saturday:

Jesus' General: Owning the message

We're very excited about the changes Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson is compelling PBS to make. Here's a preview from their soon to be launched web site:



5pm A Very Special Bert and Ernie Special
Sesame Street becomes Rapture Road after Pastor Bob and Freedomland Development Corp. run all of the brown people out of the neighborhood. Homeless, penniless, and desperate, Bert and Ernie accept the Lord Jesus into their lives and begin reparative therapy.

Avedon Carol: Um... Should I be worried about this?

Remember after the election when all those people were talking about seceding from the slave states? The first thing I said to them was, "Which states are the centers of military production?"

Now I'm hearing about all these closings of military bases for no apparent reason, and I can't help but feel nervous. And I thought maybe I was just being twitchy and paranoid, because no one else was even talking about it. Only now Ken McLeod sends me this link - which isn't from one of my preferred news sources, I admit - but I'm thinking, um, maybe it's not me:

The most salient aspect of the latest Pentagon restructuring plan is the continuing geographic shift in military resources from the Northeast and Midwest (and to some extent, from the West Coast) to the South and Southwest. Of the 30,000 net loss in military-related jobs, half comes from just three closings in New England: Portsmouth Navy Yard in Maine, Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and the Groton, Connecticut, submarine command. Thousands more personnel are being moved out of the Northeast with the closure of Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine, Niagara Falls Air Reserve station in New York, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and the Willowgrove Naval Air Station and Pittsburgh Air Reserve Base in Pennsylvania.

There are, to be sure, some base closings in the South, including the Naval Air Station in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Ft. McPherson in Georgia, and three in Texas: Ingleside Naval Air Station, the Red Rock Army Depot and Brooks City Depot in San Antonio. But these are more than offset by shifting of additional military resources from the North and East and an influx of 70,000 Army troops from overseas, especially Germany. Fort Bliss, Texas, for instance, will gain 11,354 soldiers as the 1st Armored Division returns from Germany.

The Army is being concentrated within the borders of the continental United States, building up from 26 to 40 brigades. The additional forces will all be located in the South and West, with the biggest increases at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Carson, Colorado, and Fort Riley, Kansas, as well as Fort Bliss.

The majority of US nuclear assets are being redeployed to the deep South as well: all B1-B long-range bombers are being consolidated into Texas, with the closure of Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. Construction, servicing and deployment of nuclear submarines are also being shifted to the South. After the closure of the Groton submarine command, Navy personnel will be moved to Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

There have been a few cautious references in the press to the geographic imbalance in the US military structure. The Los Angeles Times reported that the cuts "hammered many Northern and Midwestern states and gave the military an increasingly Southern accent." Newsweek magazine spoke of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's planning for "a broad shift of bases away from the North and the East-the epicenter of defense through the 19th and 20th centuries-and out to the South and, to a lesser extent, the West."

Think about how little sense this makes in terms of national defense against potential foreign invaders.But then, think about how much sense this would make if the principle focus of our military was not defense at all, but something else entirely

Keith Olbermann: The resignation of Scott McClellan

SECAUCUS — I smell something — and it ain’t a copy of the Qu’ran sopping wet from being stuck in a toilet in Guantanamo Bay. It’s the ink drying on Scott McClellan’s resignation, and in an only partly imperfect world, it would be drifting out over Washington, and imminently.

Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book.

Bill Moyers: Muting The Conversation Of Democracy

May 17, 2005

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support to TomPaine.com.

The following is an excerpt of the closing address Moyers delivered at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo., on May 15, 2005. Click here for video and audio of the speech.

The fight to preserve the Web from corporate gatekeepers joins media reformers, producers and educators—and it’s a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we’re in today. The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. It’s been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist—yours truly—by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

Digby: From The Beginning

Talking about inequality and social mobility, Ezra says:

I've little hope that we'll address this, though. The overarching evils of vast inequality and the transcendent good of do-it-yourself mobility are such foundational philosophical tenets of America's two parties that I can't see either coming to recognize that the fix, such as one exists, might be the same for both. Indeed, while the Democratic party may be convincible simply because the solutions line up with our proposed programs, Republicans will, for good reason, never relinquish the strict dichotomy they've created between individual mobility and general equality. The belief that large social programs must be avoided because they tamp down on individual virtues stretches back to Hoover and Associationalism, it's not going to be given up now.

As I have argued before,at some tedious length, it goes back further than that. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and relates very closely to our little "problem" with slavery. It might even be said that the whole concept of American individualism rests on the back of racism.

David Neiwert: A Little Talk

Sunday, May 15, 2005

I mentioned earlier that I was flying down to Davis, California, last week to give a talk on hate crimes for a local community organization. Jeff Hudson at the Davis Enterprise did a pretty thorough report. I thought this part was worth pointing out:
One widely held myth, he said, is that "hate crimes are commonly committed by 'skinheads' or members of so-called hate groups."

"It's simply not true," Neiwert said, adding that "in reality, only 6 or 7 percent (of hate crimes) are committed by members of an organized hate group. The average (person who commits a hate crime) is a 15-year-old to 19-year-old white male, in every respect an average member of the community. He may have some police contact in his background, or may not. He may have a violent background, or may not."

Very often, communities view young men who are charged with hate crimes as "someone I've known since the third grade. He doesn't wear tattoos or leather. So it's not a hate crime," Neiwert said.

Avedon Carol: Where DID that woman come from?

Cookie Jill calls her priscilla queen of the texas desert, and Jeralyn Merritt proves she is still my cosmic twin by presenting the thought pretty much the way it occurred to me:

Have you been wondering why the Bush Administration is making such a big deal out of nominee Priscilla Owen? The New York Times has the answer: Her entire judicial career has been orchestrated by Karl Rove. At three critical times, he has intervened to push her to the next level.

James Wolcott: Linkage

In an interview two months ago with Raw Story, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter raged against the neocons as godless parasites whose only gift is for destruction. He argued that the mission of Bush appointees--Rice at the State Department, Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank--is to undermine and subvert the very institutions they run to render them ineffectual and incapable of resistance. And Bolton as the U.S.'s UN representative? Same deal. "A high level source, a NeoCon at that, within the system has said to me directly that John Bolton's job is to destroy the UN..."

Checkpoint America

Border Patrol checkpoints deep in the interior of the United States raise the specter of Soviet-style surveillance, and may be intended merely to habituate the public to such police intrusions.
By William Marvel

At twelve or thirteen I read an abridged version of Lés Miserables, which gave me my earliest impressions of Napoleonic France. Of all the brutality in that novel, I was most disturbed by the discovery that citizens of that nation and era had to carry passports just to travel between cities or provinces. For a boy who had, on several occasions, already traversed fifteen states with his parents, without benefit of passports or interference by authorities, the restrictions placed on the movement of nineteenth-century Frenchmen somehow seemed even more oppressive than the Draconian justice system.

Mark Crispin Miller Has a Blog

Disabled youth kidnapped by US Army

Yes, it happened here.

Here is an appalling story of abduction by the US military: abduction of a legal immigrant residing here in the United States. This young man-- learning-disabled and epileptic--was lured into the Army through deception, and now can't get out, nor will they even let his mother talk to him for more than a few seconds. He's captive on a base in South Carolina, terrified and bewildered--and likely to end up somewhere in Iraq.

The Newsweek Backtrack: Did the Right Win a Game of Chicken?

by SusanHu
Sun May 15th, 2005 at 18:14:44 PDT

UPDATES below fold:

The pressure on Newsweek is intense. The rightwing machine descended, blaming its report for riots in Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and Indonesia. Even a UK newspaper headlined Newsweek's guilt for the global riots. What did Newsweek print?

"May 9 - Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash."

But today we see this:

Newsweek magazine backed away Sunday from a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated copies of the Quran [at] Guantanamo ... (CNN)

Even the Pentagon pins the blame on Newsweek:

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita blamed Newsweek's report for the unrest in Muslim countries. "People are dying. They are burning American flags. Our forces are in danger."

There are major problems with the blame-Newsweek tack

: More below :

Diaries :: SusanHu's diary :: :: Trackback ::

Update [2005-5-16 17:23:13 by SusanHu]:

Flash: MSNBC says that, moments ago, Newsweek officially retracted the story.

How a Fire Broke Out | The Editor's Desk

=====================================

Note: SEE BELOW UPDATE on White House response. Scroll to "Newsweek Needs To Do More Than Apologize, White House Says."

Also see earlier updates re WaPo at end of diary, and new quote from another blog, who hijacked our country, and Juan Cole.

=====================================

The major problems with the blame-Newsweek tack:

1. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, in a U.S. State Dept.-issued press release on May 12, said the Newsweek story isn't a chief cause of the riots: " [H]e has been told that the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else."

2. I've found four reports -- with more easily found -- to back up Newsweek's sources on the desecration of Korans belonging to Guantanamo detainees.

The four instances I found:

A. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 20, 2005:

Lawyers allege abuse of 12 at Guantanamo

By Frank Davies
Inquirer Washington Bureau

[.......................]

Some detainees complained of religious humiliation, saying guards had defaced their copies of the Koran and, in one case, had thrown it in a toilet, said Kristine Huskey [an attorney in Washington, D.C.], who interviewed clients late last month. Others said that pills were hidden in their food and that people came to their cells claiming to be their attorneys, to gain information.

"All have been physically abused, and, however you define the term, the treatment of these men crossed the line," [attorney Tom] Wilner said. "There was torture, make no mistake about it." ...

B. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

72.They were never given prayer mats and initially they didn't get a Koran. When the Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it happened it was always said to be an accident but it was a recurrent theme.

C. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

7

4. Asif says that `it was impossible to pray because initially we did not know the direction to pray, but also given that we couldn't move and the harassment from the guards, it was simply not feasible. The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it. It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the interrogation process to "soften us up"'.

D. From the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY and linked as a footnote in a Human Rights Watch report:

Statement of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, "Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay," released publicly on August 4, 2004, para. 72, 74, available online at: http://www.ccr- ny.org/v2/reports/docs/
Gitmo=compositestatementFINAL23july04.pdf,
accessed on August 19, 2004. The disrespect of the Koran by guards at Camp X-Ray was one of the factors prompting a hunger strike. Ibid., para. 111-117.

There are more. This should suffice for now.

I see this incident this way: Newsweek has good sources for its allegations, but has backed off because it finds itself in a dicey, ill-founded public relations nightmare.

Newsweek has foresaken journalism to save what it perceives as its own hide.

I hope you'll all speak up, amplify, and point out areas where we might look further:

I will repeat the inflammatory headlines I found at rightwing blogs yesterday:

Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran
-- Timesonline UK

RoP Riots Over Newsweek Article
-- Little Green Footballs

299 Words from Newsweek ... have yielded death in the streets of Kabul.
-- Roger L. Simon

More on Newsweek's Riots
-- Sisyphean Musings

Following all this, and surely some pressure from the Pentagon -- since a Pentagon spokesperson (see above the fold) has blamed Newsweek for the riots, Newsweek began a hasty retreat.

_______________________________

SEE ALSO: Bernhard's excellent diary, "Newsweek's Non-retraction Retraction.

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Front-paged at BooTrib.

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Update [2005-5-16 14:18:27 by SusanHu]:

Newsweek Needs To Do More Than Apologize, White House Says

POSTED: 6:33 pm EDT May 15, 2005
UPDATED: 12:18 pm EDT May 16, 2005

NEW YORK -- Newsweek's apology for its story about Quran abuse at Guantanamo is not adequate, says a White House spokesman.

Newsweek is extending its sympathies to the victims of the violence in Afghanistan that left 15 people dead in anti-U.S. protests prompted by a story in the news weekly claiming that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay prison had desecrated Islam’s holy book, the Quran.

But White House Press Secretary said Newsweek needs to do more.

“While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story," McClellan said. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not. The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives.”

NBC

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Update [2005-5-16 0:14:51 by SusanHu]:

The tale of two stories at the Washington Post:

"British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War"
By Walter Pincus
May 13, 2005
-- Page A18 --

"Newsweek Apologizes: Inaccurate Report on Koran Led to Riot"
By Howard Kurtz
May 16, 2005
-- Page A01 --

Which story is more important to the Washington Post?

Which story is more important for the American people and our country?

Bill Moyers is correct. The MSM is beyond hope.

_________________________________________

Update [2005-5-16 9:36:46 by SusanHu]:

The Who Hijacked Our Country blog makes perceptive remarks about the extremists:

Newsweek is starting to hedge its bet and "qualify" its story. But these allegations have been leaking out since last Spring. And they go hand in hand with some of the other abuses and tortures committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Extremists on both sides are milking this for every last drop. Radical Islamic leaders are using it to fan the flames and turn the protests into riots. And here in the U.S., the Far Right wingnuts have found another hot-button issue to get themselves worked up over.

Right wing pundits and bloggers are in their tightest lockstep formation since the Terri Schiavo case. And what are they all chanting in unison? It’s Newsweek’s fault. Newsweek caused these riots! Duuhhh!!!

It figures. Last year when the Abu Ghraib tortures were first publicized, rightwing Neanderthals were up in arms. Were they furious that some inbred prison guards were violating the Geneva Convention and putting other American soldiers at risk? Nope. They were furious at the media for airing the story.

And you remember last Fall, when a soldier in Iraq asked Rumsfeld about their substandard equipment, and Rumsfeld gave his famous response of “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.” According to the Chicken Hawks on the Far Right, the main issue was that the soldier’s question had been prompted by a reporter. So what if our soldiers are getting killed because of inferior armor — by God, a reporter snuck in there and planted this question just to embarrass Rumsfeld.

So once again, like a stampeding herd of cattle, the right wing bloggerbots are off and running. Look out; don’t get trampled. Here comes one now; and here's another one. And yet another one. Don’t worry, there're plenty of others, but after awhile one stampeding head of cattle looks pretty much like the rest of them.

So these protests and riots were all caused by a magazine article?!? These right wing dildos have such a clear grasp of cause and effect, they probably think rain is caused by wet sidewalks.

[Emphasis mine. - Susanhu]