Daily Howler - June 11, 2005

KRUGMAN EATS OKRENT FOR LUNCH! Krugman toyed with his foppish tormenter—and told an important tale

SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2005

LET’S PLAY KISS-BALL: Luckily, there are no serious problems in the world to discuss. If you didn’t understand the dynamics involved, you’d think this was a joke. Rom today’s Post, here’s the synopsis of tomorrow’s Chris Matthews Show:

The Chris Matthews Show. Topics are Howard Dean and presidential college grades; with NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Vogue's Julia Reed and Time's Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan (Channel 4 at 10 a.m.). Presidential college grades! This refers, of course, to the past week’s “revelation”—John Kerry’s grades at Yale were about the same as Bush’s.

Luckily, there are no serious problems in the world to discuss, so Matthews can afford to clown with this topic. By the way, can’t you hear the talker’s secret message to Bush? We think we can hear what the talker is saying: Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss.

David Neiwert: Canning our salmon

Saturday, June 11, 2005
A few years ago, then-Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) made headlines when she dismissed salmon-recovery efforts by saying: "How can salmon be endangered when you can buy them in cans in supermarkets?"

The Bush administration, it appears, is intent on making just that kind of wingnut vision into our all-too-stark reality.

Juan Cole - June 11, 2005

5 Marines Killed, 4 Wounded
21 Bodies Found
Sunnis Reject offer on Constitutional Committee

Guerrillas killed 5 Marines near Haqlaniyah in Anbar Province on Thursday.

Some 21 bodies were discovered near Qaim in western Iraq, some executed mafia style with a bullet to the back of the head. Two were beheaded. Twenty Iraqi soldiers were kidnapped recently in that area, but it is unknown whether any of the bodies belonged to those captured.

Ted Rall: Tortured Logic

Bush's Propaganda Rubicon

SACRAMENTO--Pushing the limits of rhetorical credulity has proved one of the Bush Administration's most effective tactics. At a time when leftist postmodernists argue against objective truth and rightist anti-intellectuals promote proven lies as absolute truths, reality has become marginalized by legitimized frauds.

In this twisted post-objective world, White House spinners see every screw-up as a golden opportunity. Not only did he not lose the election, Bush and his media organs drone on, he won a mandate! If WMDs weren't found in Iraq, it just proves that they were moved to Syria--not that the war was based on lies. The former detainees who claim they were tortured at Gitmo? They "hate America," says Bush. Besides, they had been "trained in some instances to disassemble [sic]--that means not tell the truth." Why did the military release anti-American terrorists? They don't have an answer to that. Ye.

Hendrik Hertzberg: FILIBLUSTER

COMMENT

FILIBLUSTER

by Hendrik Hertzberg

Issue of 2005-06-13 and 20
Posted 2005-06-06

The battle in the United States Senate over judicial filibusters has been a field day for martial metaphors (such as “field day,” an eighteenth-century term for a day of military exercises). On May 23rd, war clouds were gathering ominously over the Capitol. The triggering of what had been dubbed the nuclear option seemed just hours away. Armageddon was at hand. Then—like the Wild Bunch, or the Seven Samurai times two, or the Dirty Dozen plus two—a squad of fourteen centrists, half Republicans and half Democrats, rode to the rescue. Their agreement called for (a) free passes for three of President Bush’s pending appeals-court nominations, (b) future nominees to be filibustered only in “extraordinary circumstances” (with everyone free to decide when such circumstances exist), and (c) no funny business with Senate Rule XXII—the rule under which it takes sixty of the one hundred senators to end a filibuster (and sixty-seven to end debate on changing the rule under which it takes sixty).

The Unquiet American

U.S.-Iraq policy and the murder of a whistle-blowing contractor. By Aram Roston

---

The sun sets early in Iraq in December. So, it would have been approaching dusk—calm and eerie—when Dale Stoffel climbed into the passenger seat of his black BMW station wagon at Taji military base outside of Baghdad. He would have held his dull, black Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun tight to his body, the way he always did. The trip back to Baghdad was just 15 miles, but it led through what had become, by December 2004, some of the most dangerous terrain in the world—the Sunni suburbs of Baghdad.

At 43 years old, Stoffel, an American businessman and arms dealer, sported a goatee that gave his grin a mischievous appearance. He probably would have been grinning that day. After all, he believed he had just rescued the biggest business deal of his tumultuous career, one that he thought would not only make him millions but would also help to arm the Iraqi military against the insurgents. It was a deal he believed in with all his heart.

Who paid for Tom DeLay’s trips? The more interesting question is why he went to Saipan at all -- and what happened after he returned.

Perfectly Legal

Who paid for Tom DeLay’s trips? The more interesting question is why he went to Saipan at all -- and what happened after he returned.

By Garance Franke-Ruta
Issue Date: 06.06.05

The troubles House Majority Leader Tom DeLay faces for allowing a lobbyist to pay for overseas trips in violation of House rules provide a perfect example of Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley’s famous dictum: The real scandal is what’s legal.

And the congressional rules that may yet ensnare DeLay suggest another truism: Congressional ethics operate according to the reverse-sieve effect -- instead of catching major ethical lapses that have injured the public interest for years while allowing piddling matters to slip through unmolested, the system captures small, technical rule violations. When it comes to substance, ethics rules have little to say, because in the strange Beltway calculus of right and wrong, engaging in flagrant acts of ethical turpitude is often known simply as policy making.

Reliving History

From David Rosen to Mark Felt to Pol Pot, the right can’t handle the truth.

By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 06.06.05

Print Friendly | Email Article

Though the event took place more than a week ago, it’s worth taking a moment to remark upon the May 27 acquittal of David Rosen, the fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign who’d been charged in a New Orleans federal court with hiding about $800,000 worth of costs for a gala Los Angeles event thrown for the then-first lady during her campaign.

Why is it worth remarking upon? For two reasons. First, in the weeks leading up to the jury’s decision, one could hear the galloping accelerando of wing-nut anticipation; FOX, for example, did more than a dozen segments devoted mostly or partly to Rosen’s fate in the three months leading up to the acquittal.

Owning Up

The housing bubble won't burst like the stock-market bubble, but that doesn't mean it's problem-free.

By Robert Kuttner
Web Exclusive: 06.02.05

Is the housing market experiencing a dangerous price bubble, one destined to pop, like the late stock-market collapse? Housing prices have been rising faster than incomes since 2000, and the ratio of housing costs to incomes is now the highest since the Depression.

To compensate, homebuyers are borrowing more than ever, before homeownership gets away from them altogether. On average, homeowners have less equity and more debt than in 2000. And more buyers are taking bigger risks, using adjustable rate and interest-only mortgages, which leaves them little wiggle room as interest rates rise or housing values decline.

Nationally, housing prices have gone up 15 percent in the past year, the biggest jump since the hyper-inflationary year 1980. In some sub-markets, such as parts of coastal Florida, they’ve risen as much as 40 percent. The rising percentage of investor-speculators buying homes -- over 20 percent according to the National Association of Realtors -- is also inflating the bubble.

The Interrogation Room

A former sergeant describes sex techniques used on detainees -- and why we all should be ashamed. TAP talks to Erik Saar, author of Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo.

By Tara McKelvey
Web Exclusive: 06.08.05

Erik Saar, a clean-cut, former Bible-college student dressed in a white shirt, looks like someone who’s just left the Army and still kind of misses it. Saar, 30, speaks nostalgically about his days as a sergeant and Arabic linguist -- right up to the moment when he was sitting in an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay and watched things go terribly wrong. Sitting in a Starbucks in Rosslyn, Virginia, Saar talks about female interrogators, thongs in a supervisor’s office, and, of course, Newsweek’s “Periscope” item.

What was your first impression of Guantanamo Bay?

I got there on December 10, 2002, and stayed until June 20, 2003. It was 80 degrees and sunny every day. And there was Camp Delta. It hit me as an unfortunate realty of war. On day one, or even during the first two months, I did not say, “Wow, what a terrible place this is.” I felt like, “This is what you do when you need to defend yourself.” To be honest, it sometimes has appeared in the media that my book is nothing more than a chronicle of abuses. But I volunteered to go to Guantanamo Bay. I wanted to be at “the tip of the spear,” as you say in the Army. That’s where you’re out in front, gathering intelligence, and sitting down with the worst of the worst.

They're not anti-EU, they're anti-Brussels

By Tom Hundley Tribune foreign correspondent
Sun Jun 5, 9:40 AM ET

In the end, the vote against the European Union constitution wasn't a vote against Europe; it was a vote against one particular city in Europe: Brussels.

For many ordinary Europeans, "Brussels," the city that houses the European Union's headquarters, has become a kind of shorthand for the imperious ways of an overweening bureaucracy that seems increasingly unresponsive to their concerns.

So when ordinary Europeans in France and the Netherlands got a chance last week to express their feelings on the latest diktat from Brussels--the new "Constitution for Europe," a 200-page, 448-article document of turgid prose and numbing detail--they trashed it. Enthusiastically and emphatically.

Most Europeans support the idea of a harmonious and inclusive Europe. That much was clear in interviews and casual conversations with dozens of voters over the last few weeks.

They like the idea of open borders and the free movement of goods across Europe. They generally support the single currency, even though it seemed to make prices go up everywhere.

What they don't like is the way Brussels seemed to meddle in the little things.

An eye for detail helps maimed GIs

By Sean D. Hamill Special to the TribuneWed Jun 8, 9:40 AM ET

The plastic bottles of color that Vince Przybyla uses to change injured soldiers' lives are clustered like an artist's palette at the side of his small work table at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

"It looks like an artist's palette because that's what he is--an artist," said Army Sgt. Brian Doyne, one of Przybyla's many patients and fans.

Doyne, 25, should know. He was in Przybyla's small office not long ago so Przybyla could touch up one of his most recent canvases: Doyne's new prosthetic eye.

A month earlier, like a modern-day Geppetto, Przybyla, the only ocularist working for the Army, had taken soulless plastic and conjured vibrant life from it--or at least the appearance of life, if not a window to the soul. With the help of paint and red thread he made Doyne a blue left eye.

The first time Doyne put it in was two months after he was nearly killed when a roadside bomb exploded in front of him Feb. 24 near Tikrit, Iraq.

"I was able to look at myself, where there had just been a socket before, and say, `Now I look more like myself,"' said Doyne, of Fayetteville, Ga., whose face is still heavily scarred from shrapnel wounds.

New findings show a slow recovery from extreme global warming episode 55 million years ago

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Most of the excess carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels will ultimately be absorbed by the oceans, but it will take about 100,000 years. That is how long it took for ocean chemistry to recover from a massive input of carbon dioxide 55 million years ago, according to a study published this week in the journal Science.

James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led an international team of scientists that analyzed marine sediments deposited during a period of extreme global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor revealed an abrupt change in ocean chemistry at the start of the PETM 55 million years ago, followed by a long, slow recovery.

Space measurements of carbon offer clearer view of Earth's climate future

10 June 2005

Follow the carbon – this is the mantra of researchers seeking to understand climate change and forecast its likely extent. A workshop heard how improved detection of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from space promises to revolutionise carbon cycle understanding.

This week saw more than 60 researchers from Europe, the United States and Japan gather at ESRIN, ESA's establishment in Italy, for the three-day Carbon from Space workshop, jointly organised by ESA, the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the Integrated Global Carbon Observations Theme (IGCO) of the Integrated Global Observing Strategy (IGOS) and the Global Carbon Project (GCP), with support from the European Union's CarboEurope project.

Editor of Climate Reports Resigns

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: June 10, 2005

Philip A. Cooney, the chief of staff to President Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality, resigned yesterday, White House officials said.

Mr. Cooney’s resignation came two days after documents revealed that he had repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between building greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures.

A Program to Fight Malaria in Africa Draws Questions

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: June 11, 2005

Though its budget for fighting malaria has risen since 1998 to $90 million from $14 million, the United States' foreign aid agency is spending 95 percent of the money on consultants and less than 5 percent on mosquito nets, drugs and insecticide spraying to fight the disease.

'The Survivor': Measuring His Success

By ALAN EHRENHALT

Published: June 12, 2005

MILLIONS of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990's, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals' longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Williams's Minimum Wage Bill Softened

Labor Activists See Loss of Key Element

By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 11, 2005; Page B01

City Administrator Robert C. Bobb yesterday backed away from a plan to compel a broad swath of District businesses to pay their workers at least $9.25 an hour, saying Target, Costco and other retail establishments should not be required to pay a city-ordained "living wage."

Under pressure from local business leaders, Bobb said the administration would modify Mayor Anthony A. Williams's original living-wage proposal. That measure called for employers who benefit from city funds -- including tenants of publicly financed buildings and shopping centers -- to pay their workers $10.50 an hour for jobs without health insurance or $9.25 for jobs with benefits, a significant increase over the city's current $6.60 minimum wage.

Billmon: The Flytrap

Be sure to scroll down for the picture.--Dictynna

A growing number of Islamic militants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa are fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq, fueling the insurgency with foot soldiers and some financing, U.S. military officials say . . .

A small vanguard of veterans are also returning home to countries like Morocco and Algeria, poised to use skills they learned on the battlefield in Iraq, from bomb making to battle planning, against their native governments, the officials said. (emphasis added)

The New York Times
As Africans Join Iraqi Insurgency, U.S.
Counters With Military Training in Their Lands
June 10, 2005

_____________________________

Some time before the Iraq war, I found myself musing out loud to someone close to the inner circles of the Bush administration . . . I voiced some worries about what might happen if an occupied Iraq became a target for international terrorism. Wouldn't U.S. soldiers become sitting ducks? . . .

And what he said surprised me. If the terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine, he said. But if they come and get us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London. "Think of it as a flytrap," he ventured.

Andrew Sullivan
Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds
September 6, 2003

Billmon: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution

Check out what Billmon does with old posters.--Dictynna.

The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.

Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News columnist
CU is Worth Fighting For
March 4, 2005

In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China
Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum
August 1966

_____________________________

I have undertaken the task of organizing conservative students myself and urging them to protest a situation that has become intolerable.

David Horowitz
The Campus Blacklist
April 18, 2003

Students on University campuses were organized into groups of “Red Guards” and were given the chance to challenge those in authority. Students quickly turned their attacks on their closest adversaries, their teachers and university administrators.

Therese Hoffman
The Chinese Cultural Revolution:
Autobiographical Accounts of a National Trauma
2001

Talking Points Memo on 'The Plot Against Social Security'

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I hadn't heard of this book before today. But it's one I'm certainly interested in reading and one I imagine a lot of TPM Readers would be too. Please note, I have not read the book yet. So I can't say it's a recommendation per se. But I want to bring it to your attention.

t's called The Plot Against Social Security : How the Bush Plan Is Endangering Our Financial Future. And it just came out in May.

It's by Michael Hiltzik, a business columnist for the LA Times.

Democrats List More Names in Inquiry on Bolton's Access

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: June 11, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 10 - Senate Democrats have prepared a list of approximately three dozen "names of concern" and are asking the Bush administration for assurances that John R. Bolton did not misuse his access to highly classified intelligence to seek information about them.

The request is outlined in a letter sent Thursday by Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, two of the leaders of the Democratic opposition to Mr. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations. The letter was sent to the senior Republican and Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee, who have also been involved in negotiations with the Bush administration over access to information about Mr. Bolton's actions when he was an official at the State Department.

Daily Howler - June 10, 2005

THE POST SEES NO EVIL! The “Houston Miracle” was a big fraud. But how about Prince George’s County?

FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2005

KRUGMAN SLUGS BACK: Paul Krugman’s column today is priceless for its puckish humor, and deeply important as a piece of analysis. For that reason, we’ll hold our discussion until the morrow. But what a shame! What a shame that so many “career liberals” took a dive when this warrior was so slimily attacked by the foppish interests he won’t stop discussing. We can only hope that they’re richly rewarded for their undisguised public cowardice. Go ahead—scroll back through their fiery web sites. We think you’ll see who we mean.

ROBINSON WRONG: In this morning’s Post op-ed column, Eugene Robinson is wrong from the start. Why does he think this is accurate?

Katha Pollitt: Brooklyn Prof in Godless Shocker

So it's 2005 and this is the academic question that has driven the Daily News and the right-wing New York Sun into apoplectic fits, and caused heartburn all over CUNY: Should Tim Shortell, an atheist, be allowed to assume the chair of the sociology department of Brooklyn College? You know, an atheist--someone who doesn't believe in God. An anticleric. A disrespecter of religion. A mocker of Christianity. Someone like, oh, Diderot ("Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"). Or Voltaire ("The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning"). Or Bertrand Russell ("The Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world"). Actually, Russell is a particularly relevant example here. The appointment of one of the twentieth century's greatest logicians to a professorship at City College in 1940 set off a hysterical campaign against the "Godless advocate of free love" on the part of the Episcopal and Catholic churches, the Hearst papers and Tammany Hall. A flagrantly trumped-up lawsuit was fast-tracked through the system, Russell was denounced in the state legislature and the job offer was withdrawn.

Billmon - June 10, 2005

A Clarification

Probably because of the title of my last post on Howard Dean -- Howard's End (a really stupid choice, in hindsight) -- a lot of people now think I'm calling on Dean to resign as DNC chairman.

I'm not. I just think he either needs to tone down the rhetoric and concentrate on party building, or improve his aim as a partisan hit man. But if he can't or won't do either, then yeah, he should leave. But personally I hope it doesn't come to that.

Saddam's Song

The lyrics aren't so hot, but it's got an interesting beat, even if you can't dance to it:

An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."

So did he, baby. So did he.

Ralph's Solutions

I see Ralph Nader wants Congress to impeach George Bush -- his nominal opponent and sometime political benefactor:

It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the ''I" word.

I guess while they're at it they should also bring charges against Al Gore -- because hey, he was just as bad as Bush, right Ralph?

Juan Cole: June 10, 2005

Attacks in Yusufiyah, Mosul, Kut
Islamic Parties Meet to Shape the Constitution

A vehicle accident near Hit in Iraq left a Marine dead on Wednesday, according to AP. 1,683 US military personnel have died so far in Iraq.

al-Sharq al-Awsat: A mortar attack aimed at a military site at Yusufiyah instead hit two civilian homes and killed two Iraqis and wounded 3. Guerrilla attacks in Mosul killed two policemen and wounded several other persons, including the wife, children and relatives of one of the policemen, whose house was targetted. The other policeman died when mortar shells rained down on the police station in Mosul. 5 were wounded in that attack. In Telafar the day before yesterday, a car bomb went off prematurely and killed 4 guerrillas. In Kut, police said that the day before yesterday, a grenade attack on the center of the Islamic Action Organization in the city left 2 persons wounded and wrought extensive damage to the building and its environs.

Piles of Smoking Guns

Kind readers have drawn my attention to other leaked documents on the British side that lend support to the implications of the Downing Street memo, which alleges that Bush had decided on a war against Iraq by summer, 2002 and would fix the intelligence around the policy.

The Downing Street Memo and "Fixing Around"

At least one commentator has been quoted in the press as questioning what British Intelligence chief Richard Dearlove meant in the Downing Street Memo by the phrase "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The full passage reads, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

David Neiwert: Terror at home

Well, we can now add the New York Times editorial page to the list of people who are gradually recognizing that the Bush administration's handling of domestic terrorism is increasingly leaving Americans vulnerable to very real violence:

A draft planning document from Homeland Security obtained by Congressional Quarterly includes a survey of domestic threats notable for an excessive focus on extremist groups on the political left -- miscreants committing crimes in the name of the environment or animal rights. It specifies the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front as potentially violent activists, along with the familiar array of Islamist militant groups. Glaringly omitted are the militia fanatics, white supremacists and other violent groups at the other end of the spectrum -- antigovernment groups like Aryan Nation and anti-abortion extremists with a proven appetite for murderous violence.

Democrats fear cover-up in probe of ouster at rally

Salazar, Udall, DeGette, lean on Secret Service

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News
June 10, 2005

Three congressional Democrats used the word "cover-up" Thursday in complaining about lack of results in the Secret Service investigation into the forced removal of three people from a presidential speech in March.

The Secret Service and the White House both know, but refuse to reveal, the identity of the man who looked and acted like a Secret Service agent, and ousted the three from the president's Denver appearance solely because of a "No more blood for oil" bumper sticker.

BradBlog: Patriot Act Hearings

As originally reported here yesterday, Democrats on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee invoked a rarely used rule to extend Committee hearings on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Apparently, they inappropriately called witnesses to testify today from whom the Republicans did not wish to hear. And thus, in what can only be seen as an unprecedented tyrannical abuse of Majority power in the U.S. House of Representatives, Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), suddenly and without warning, gavelled the hearings to a close! Unilaterally, without debate, and in the middle of ongoing testimony!

Paul Krugman: Losing Our Country

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

Cox In The Henhouse

Lee Drutman

June 10, 2005

Lee Drutman is the communications director of Citizen Works and the co-author of the book The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.

In Washington this past week, leaders of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines told a Senate panel that they didn’t have the money to cover the pensions of 150,000 workers and retirees, and that they’d probably go bankrupt on account of it. If so, they would join their troubled competitors, U.S. Airways and United Airlines, who also broke their pension promises to thousands of employees and then turned to the government to cover at least part of the difference. (At $10 billion, United’s pension default is almost as big as WorldCom’s record-setting accounting fraud—though for whatever reason it has hardly produced the same uproar.)

These latest pension failures come closely on the heels of the resignation of William Donaldson as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange and the speedy nomination of free-market ideologue and corporate sycophant extraordinaire Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., to be the agency’s new head. Though the two events are certainly unconnected on the surface, both bode poorly for the ability of hard-working Americans to enjoy an adequate retirement.

Panel Faults Tactics in Rush to Install Antimissile System

By Bradley Graham

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 10, 2005; Page A07

An outside panel chartered by the Pentagon has concluded that the rush to deploy a national antimissile system last year led to shortfalls in quality controls and engineering procedures that could have better assured the system would work, according to the panel's final report.

Bent on meeting President Bush's deadline to install the first elements of the system by the end of 2004, Pentagon officials put schedule ahead of performance, the report says. Among risky shortcuts that were taken, the panel says, were insufficient ground tests of key components, a lack of specifications and standards, and a tendency to postpone resolution of nettlesome issues.

Pre-9/11 Missteps By FBI Detailed

Report Tells of Missed Chances To Find Hijackers

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 10, 2005; Page A01

The inability to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking plot amounts to a "significant failure" by the FBI and was caused in large part by "widespread and longstanding deficiencies" in the way the agency handled terrorism and intelligence cases, according to a report released yesterday.

In one particularly notable finding, the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded that the FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers -- Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar -- after they first entered the United States in early 2000.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Latin America’s major nations have balked at an American plan to establish under the aegis of the Organization of American States a permanent committee to oversee the exercise of democracy in the hemisphere.

At first blush, one might infer from the reluctant countries’ reaction that they are less enthusiastic about the notion of democracy than the United States. These countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay, have good reason to believe , however, that the truth of the matter can be located quite the opposite way around.

What they know (and most of us do not) is that the Bush Administration bore major responsibility in 2004 for the overthrow of democracy in Haiti, an OAS member state.

Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s lawful president, had been democratically elected twice, and by indisputably wide margins. With the encouragement of Washington, an emboldened band of anti-democratic thugs, bearing American arms and equipment, began in early 2004 making their way across the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, moving toward Port-au-Prince, the capital, burning, razing, killing as they went, town by petrified town.

The Children's Crusade

By Jennifer Wedekind, In These Times

Posted on June 10, 2005, Printed on June 10, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22192/

Tarsha Moore stands as tall as her 4-foot 8-inch frame will allow. Staring straight ahead, she yells out an order to a squad of peers lined up in three perfect columns next to her. Having been in the military program for six years, Tarsha has earned the rank of captain and is in charge of the 28 boys and girls in her squad. This is Lavizzo Elementary School. Tarsha is 14.

The Middle School Cadet Corps (MSCC) program at the K-8 school is part of a growing trend to militarize middle schools. Students at Lavizzo are among the more than 850 Chicago students who have enlisted in one of the city's 26 MSCC programs. At Madero Middle School, the MSCC has evolved into a full-time military academy for kids 11 to 14 years old.

Policy on Syria Moves Toward Regime Change

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 8, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/15051

WASHINGTON - In the wake of Lebanon's first elections following Syrian withdrawal, American policy toward the world's remaining Ba'athist government is approaching support for regime change.

President Bush's top foreign policy advisers met last week to discuss the government of Bashar al-Assad, mulling, according to two administration officials briefed later, a tougher policy that would allow American forces or encourage Iraqi soldiers to pursue terrorists that escape to Syria from Iraq for safe haven.

At the State Department, the Bureau of Near East Affairs and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor have asked Congress for explicit legal authority to fund liberal opposition parties inside Syria through regional initiatives that have hitherto focused on reforming American allies such as Jordan and Egypt, two administration officials told The New York Sun.

Billmon: Downing Street Redux

Eric Boehlert at Salon does a more thorough and concise job than I did of flaying the corporate media over its mishandling of the Downing Street Memo story -- although personally I think the piece would have benefited from a few scatalogical insults hurled at melon heads like Tim Russert. Truth is a defense, after all.

In my own screed on the subject yesterday, I should have included links to two other organizations that are working to keep the story alive -- afterdowningstreet.com and the Big Brass Alliance, a coalition of lefty bloggers who are also pushing the issue with admirable intensity.

Pour on the Media!

By Robert Parry

June 10, 2005

So what’s made the difference?

As George W. Bush’s poll numbers sink to his personal lows and the mainstream news media finally reports on the Downing Street Memo, what political factors should get the credit for these changes? And what are the lessons for the future?

As readers of Consortiumnews.com know, I have long argued that the American liberals/progressives made a historic mistake three decades ago when large funders decided to shift money away from national media outlets. The idea was to concentrate on local grassroots organizing and on direct activism, such as feeding the poor or buying up endangered wetlands.

Daily Howler - June 9, 2005

BRIT HUME CONQUERS THE RUBES! How long will the press corps put up with this clowning? Massah Brit plans to find out

THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2005

THE DAYAFTER: Finally! David Kirkpatrick was really smokin’ in his New York Times profile of Janice Rogers Brown. “[S]ome Senate Democrats have even singled her out as the most objectionable of President Bush's more than 200 judicial nominees,” the Times tough-talker said. Nor did he shrink from explaining Dem fury; Dems had been “citing [Brown’s] criticism of affirmative action and abortion rights but most of all her sweeping denunciations of New Deal legal precedents that enabled many federal regulations and social programs—developments she has called ‘the triumph of our socialist revolution.’” Indeed, at the very start of his piece, he laid out the justice’s oddball views. The headline in our hard-copy edition: “Seeing slavery in liberalism:”

Juan Cole - June 9, 2005

Hersh on Journalism and the Internet

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh is interviewed in The Guardian. He has some canny comments on journalism and blogging. Hersh is a giant in investigative journalism who broke both My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and without him the Republic would be in even worse shape.

The Revenge of Baghdad Bob

"The Revenge of Baghdad Bob" is my current piece in Salon.com about the bizarrely unrealistic assessments of the Iraq War by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Talabani and al-Hakim Call for Role for Shiite, Kurdish Paramilitaries
4 US Soldiers Killed

Guerrillas killed 4 US servicemen on Wednesday in separate incidents. Other guerrilla operations around Iraq took the lives of at least 9 Iraqis, including two government officials. Guerrillas kidnapped 20 Iraqi soldiers near the Syrian border.

The Mahablog; The Hijacking of Ground Zero

The Right has its knickers in a knot over the International Freedom Center to be built at Ground Zero. This is because of a sour grapes editorial by Debra Burlingham, a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the sister of a pilot who crashed into the towers.

Clearly, the other committee members and Debra didn't see eye to eye about the memorial. The majority of the committee chose a plan Debra didn't like.

Did I say sour grapes? Burlingham's op ed is oozing with 'em.

David Neiwert: Bush in a China shop

Wednesday, June 08, 2005
I've been remiss in failing to post my friend T.M. Sell's recent op-ed in the Seattle Times:

Keeping the train rolling in China's Kaching! Dynasty

Terry is a former colleague from the old Valley Daily News who wrote the definitive text on Boeing a few years back titled Wings of Power, which happened also to be his PhD thesis. We last happened to work together during the 1993 APEC conference in Seattle, when we were both working as Asian economic beat writers. After the doctorate, he got himself a nice teaching gig down in Des Moines (the Seattle suburb) and has been spending the past few months as a visiting prof at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

As he explains, we've been hearing a lot of tough talk out of Republicans over the years regarding China, who seems to be the scapegoat du jour for the increasing economic mess wrought by those record deficits.

Brain degeneration at the Dept. of Agriculture (David Shuster)

Since this is the time of year when so many of us head to barbecues, I want to alert you to a story you need to know. Our federal government is putting all of us at risk of mad cow disease. And the incompetence and erratic approach of the Department of Agriculture has become so bizarre that one begins to wonder if some officials at that agency are deliberately trying to get fired.

First, a refresher: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE is an infectious disease in cattle that causes their brains to degenerate. Animals with the disease will often stagger and become hopelessly agitated before they die, thus the name “mad cow.” The disease is usually fatal to people who eat infected beef. And since the proteins that cause the disease can survive temperatures hot enough to melt lead... turning a hamburger into a hockey puck (while killing off other potential problems) will not make BSE meat safe to eat.

When Marine recruiters go way beyond the call

By SUSAN PAYNTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

For mom Marcia Cobb and her teenage son Axel, the white letters USMC on their caller ID soon spelled, "Don't answer the phone!"

Marine recruiters began a relentless barrage of calls to Axel as soon as the mellow, compliant Sedro-Woolley High School grad had cut his 17th birthday cake. And soon it was nearly impossible to get the seekers of a few good men off the line.

With early and late calls ringing in their ears, Marcia tried using call blocking. And that's when she learned her first hard lesson. You can't block calls from the government, her server said. So, after pleas to "Please stop calling" went unanswered, the family's "do not answer" order ensued.

Bolton The Fixer

John Prados

June 09, 2005

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

As the Bush administration pushes to secure confirmation by the United States Senate of John R. Bolton in his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, controversy continues to simmer—over failure to provide materials requested by the Foreign Relations Committee, over Bolton’s efforts to have intelligence officers fired for their views, over his arrogant management style.

But the truly important issue remains the one few have focused upon: Bolton’s role in making sure that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” as British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove told Tony Blair at a July 2002 meeting of the British Cabinet. Contrary to the mainstream narrative, Bolton’s was no private war with U.S. intelligence. Rather, his actions were crucial in creating the highly charged atmosphere in which the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies bit the bullet, ignored the gaps in their data and told Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the warhawks what they wanted to hear.

The Anti-Christ and I

By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 08 June 2005

Satan rules, at least according to many of my fellow Americans. In recent surveys, over two-thirds of those polled said they believed the devil to be real, whether with or without horns and a tail.

Call him Lucifer, Mephistopheles, or the Evil One, his existence plays a major role in the way Americans see the world. Right-wingers, in particular, have found him extremely useful in attacking their political foes.

Racial segregationists, union-busters, and John Birchers historically pursued their own agendas by attacking opponents as devilish collaborators of "Godless communism." Far-right evangelicals still blast the United Nations as a Satanic force run by his End Time agent the anti-Christ, while Christian Reconstructionists tar-brush every intellectual current from humanism to modern science as the work of a diabolical hand. The Enlightenment was, after all, the devil's assault on faith.

Satan sells in the USA. That's why Ronald Reagan battled "the Evil Empire," and how George W. Bush uses "the Axis of Evil."

All of which boggles my mind. I don't know why, but even in my high school years I never believed in anything supernatural, good or bad, and I've long agreed with historians who view America's unending urge to hunt witches and other fiendish conspirators as a self-destructive defect in our national character. I don't even see the present occupant of the White House and his incubi as some singularly evil force, which often puts me at odds with others on my side of the political divide.

Still, let me suggest a leap of faith - not one that I can personally take, but one that many of my religious readers say they have already taken.

What if rational thought misses the cosmic plot? What if our prayerful president, his oil-soaked pre-emptive wars, and his amen chorus of religious reactionaries have come together to do the devil's work? What if Satan - and not just the demonic Dick Cheney - now drives the global train wreck?

Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer

by Russ Baker

HOUSTON -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

Billmon: Out of the Running

The Washington Post posted a write up of its latest poll last night, and, as Atrios points out, the results don't exactly jibe with the obsolete media myth of Bush the popular wartime president:

By 50 percent to 49 percent, Americans approved of the way Bush is handling the war on terror, down from 56 percent approval in April, equaling the lowest rating Bush has earned on the issue that has consistently been his core strength with the public. Some authorities on war and public opinion said the figures indicate that pessimism about the war in Iraq has reached a dangerous level. "It appears that Americans are coming to the realization that the war in Iraq is not being won and may well prove unwinnable," said retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, now a professor at Boston University. "That conclusion bleeds over into a conviction that it may not have been necessary in the first place."

Bush's overall approval rating, on the other hand, remains roughly where it has been for the past year and a half -- that is, split almost evenly, with 48% approving and 52% disapproving.

Billmon: Going Down on the Downing Street Memo

...
I can't say what's worse about the corporate press's treatment of this story -- the way they've tried to ignore it, or the reason that's often given for ignoring it: That it ain't news.

As Dana Milbank (and he's one of the good ones) suggests in today's Washington Post:

In part, the memo never gained traction here because, unlike in Britain, it wasn't election season, and the war is not as unpopular here. In part, it's also because the notion that Bush was intent on military action in Iraq had been widely reported here before, in accounts from Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward, among others.

Billmon: The Straight Shooter

President George W. Bush on Thursday acknowledged that Social Security could be shored up without private accounts in another sign of flexibility about his plan that faces stiff opposition in Congress. "You can solve the solvency issue without personal accounts," Bush said in an interview with the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

Reuters
Bush signals flexibility on private accounts
June 2, 2005

______________________________

"I feel strongly that there needs to be voluntary personal savings accounts as a part of the Social Security system. I mean, it's got to be a part of a comprehensive package."

George W. Bush
Press Conference
April 28, 2005

You could argue that Bush's about face (actually I'd call it another move in his fan dance) raises some potentially serious political risks for the Democrats because it might actually force them to negotiate over issues like cutting benefits, raising taxes and lifting the retirement age.

Personally, I've come around to the idea that any Social Security fix based on accumulating surpluses now to balance shortfalls decades down the road is strictly a sucker's game, since the neo-Peronist wing of the GOP will only use the money to "pay" for more tax cuts and spending boondoggles -- albeit for billionaires, not the shirtless ones.

Bush's SEC Choice Hyped 'Chinagate'

By Robert Parry

June 9, 2005

George W. Bush’s nominee to oversee Wall Street produced a congressional report in 1999 that laid the principal blame for China’s alleged theft of nuclear secrets on the Clinton administration when the primary rupture of secrets actually could be traced to the Reagan-Bush administration of the 1980s.

Last week, Bush picked the report’s author, Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., to become chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates stock trading in the United States. Bush’s choice of Cox, a self-described “free market” advocate, is seen as a possible retreat from a period of aggressive SEC enforcement that followed scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other major companies.

The Daily Howler - June 8, 2005

YOU’LL HAVE TO USE FORCE! Will the press corps reject the Hillary slime? Yes, they will—if you force them: // link // print // previous // next //

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2005

WHERE DO THEY FIND THEM: “There is nothing novel about blathering on,” Stacy Schiff writes. And then, the pundit proceeds to prove it. In her first replacement column for Maureen Dowd, Shiff manages to hit “invented the Internet,” “what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” and the troubling length of Bill Clinton’s book. She also works in a mention of Clinton’s sex life, and she can’t stop herself—she even cites Paris Hilton. Do you know anyone this inane? Where does our foppish press elite go to find these people?

Driftglass on Conservative Psychology

It’s not true that the Conservatives I know don’t give a damn so much as they are terrified that they were wrong.

Deeply, primally terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of “welfare cheats” and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less. Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy.

Juan Cole: June 8, 2005

33 Dead in Tuesday Attacks, over 70 Wounded

At least 33 persons died in guerrilla attacks or from friendly fire on Tuesday. The Australian Broadcasting Co. reports, ' Nine people were killed in the northern city of Mosul, including four peshmerga militiamen reportedly shot dead by police after they were mistaken for insurgents and three students killed when unknown gunmen burst into their apartment. ' This in addition to the car bombings in the morning at Hawija, and later a mortar attack at Fallujah and drive-by shootings and ambushes north of Baghdad and elsewhere.

David Neiwert: Harassing the harassers

Tuesday, June 07, 2005
I've been contemplating the activities of the folks organizing the SWARM the Minutemen campaign, which is essentially a legal harassment campaign against the Minutemen. It poses something of a thorny ethical issue.

I briefly mentioned the campaign awhile back without endorsing it, noting that tactics like these seem somewhat questionable when it comes to effective change. Among them, as you can see from perusing the suggestions for action section of their site, are such tactics as bombarding them with faxes, e-mails, letters, and phone calls, as well as showing up at border-patrol sites and making lots of noise.

Gene Lyons: Aristocracy on the rise in U.S.

One virtue of American-style capitalism is the way it has sustained democracy by transforming the lust for power into the quest for cash. You don’t need to know much about the biographies of 19 th century robber barons like John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, for example, to be glad they stuck to commerce instead of politics. Not that the two are ever completely separate, but we’re better off with the control freaks in the counting house instead of the White House. This shouldn’t be read as a slap at the inheritors of great fortunes, like Arkansas Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller, nor the universities, libraries, museums and hospitals founded in their names. But it’s worthwhile asking whether the truce between wealth and democracy in America isn’t breaking down as the tycoon class commands an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth and uses it to tilt the political system even further in its favor. Based upon The New York Times’ recent first-rate series on social class in America, two things are happening: A small group reporter David Cay Johnston dubs the "hyper-rich" is making so much money and paying so little in taxes that the nation may be creating a permanent, European-style aristocracy. Meanwhile, social mobility stagnates and the security of the salaried classes looks increasingly threatened.

Judge queries reason behind tobacco remedy cut

Wed Jun 8, 2005 03:34 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The judge in the racketeering case against cigarette makers on Wednesday questioned whether "additional influences" prompted the government to drastically reduce a sanction it is seeking against the industry.

During a second day of closing arguments in the trial, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler speculated about the Justice Department's decision to seek a $10 billion, 5-year quit-smoking program, far smaller than a $130 billion, 25-year program proposed last month by a government witness.

"Perhaps it suggests that there are some additional influences being brought to bear on the government's position in this case," Kessler said.

After LA Times says U.S. reduced tobacco settlement under pressure, Dems seek answers

RAW STORY

Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Marty Meehan (D-MA) have demanded the Office of Inspector general conduct an inquiry into whether political pressure played a role in the sudden reversal of prosecutors to demand compensation from the tobbacco industry, RAW STORY has learned.

Marines 'beat US workers' in Iraq

Contractors say they were treated like insurgents

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Thursday June 9, 2005
The Guardian

A group of American security guards in Iraq have alleged they were beaten, stripped and threatened with a snarling dog by US marines when they were detained after an alleged shooting incident outside Falluja last month.

"I never in my career have treated anybody so inhumane," one of the contractors, Rick Blanchard, a former Florida state trooper, wrote in an email quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos, hazed [bullied] us, called us names."

Global Green Trade

Joseph E. Stiglitz

June 08, 2005

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is professor of economics at Columbia University and was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice- president at the World Bank. His most recent book is The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised that the G-8 meeting on July 6 through 8 at Gleneagles, Scotland, which he will lead, will focus on two of the most important and longstanding global problems—Third World poverty and global warming.

For a long time, these two issues seemed to be at odds. The developing world understandably does not want to sacrifice its growth for a global public good, especially when the United States, the richest country in the world, seems unwilling to sacrifice even a little of its luxurious life style.

Tobacco Escapes Huge Penalty

I presume that some kind of deal was cut.--Dictynna

U.S. Seeks $10 Billion Instead of $130 Billion

By Carol D. Leonnig

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; Page A01

After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.

As he concluded closing arguments in the six-year-old lawsuit, Justice Department lawyer Stephen D. Brody shocked tobacco company representatives and anti-tobacco activists by announcing that the government will not seek the $130 billion that a government expert had testified was necessary to fund smoking-cessation programs. Instead, Brody said, the Justice Department will ask tobacco companies to pay $10 billion over five years to help millions of Americans quit smoking.

Revealed: how oil giant influenced Bush

White House sought advice from Exxon on Kyoto stance

John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday June 8, 2005
The Guardian

President's George Bush's decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.

The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the White House for discussions on climate change before next month's G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of how close the company is to the administration and its role in helping to formulate US policy.

After a Shower of Anthrax, an Illness and a Mystery

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: June 7, 2005

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - During the anthrax mail attacks in 2001, Bill Paliscak, a gung-ho, hockey-playing postal investigator who had missed 3 days of work in 11 years, removed a filthy filter above a mail-sorting machine to preserve it as evidence. Anthrax-laden dust showered down on him.

US scientists pile on pressure over climate change

David Adam, science correspondent
Wednesday June 8, 2005
The Guardian

US scientists have increased the pressure on George Bush and other world leaders to tackle climate change by signing a joint statement calling on G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The statement, from the science academies of the G8 countries, says the scientific evidence on climate change is now clear enough to compel their leaders to take action.

From here to eternity

Islamist insurgents have turned the aftermath of the war in Iraq into a seemingly endless holy war, and are still pouring into the country to fight the 'American devil'. En route, many of them pass through Syria. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad visits the ancient city of Aleppo and hears one jihadi's story

Wednesday June 8, 2005
The Guardian

Aleppo, Syria. Ten brothers were sitting in the courtyard of their house in one of Aleppo's myriad lanes, with a plastic bag full of small pieces of paper, from which they drew lots. Five of them would stay in Syria and look after all 10 families. The others, the winning five, would enjoy the ultimate prize: a jihadi trip to Baghdad. It was March 2003, the Americans had just started bombing Baghdad and, like the 10 brothers, hundreds of young men were eagerly making their way in cramped buses towards the Iraqi border. Most of them were Syrians, but there were many, too, from other Arab and Muslim nations, all driven by a religious fervour fuelled by the cries of jihad from Muslim scholars.

Talking Points Memo - June 8, 2005

Rock the Vote Vs. Rock The Hypocrisy

Okay, we're still working through all the information from readers about Americans for Prosperity and their astroturf offshoot, Social Security for All.

They've been assigned the task of mauling Rock the Vote because RTV has been an effective part of the coalition of groups trying to prevent the White House from phasing out Social Security.

To that end, AforP created yet another group called 'Rock The Hypocrisy' to attack Rock The Vote for being too partisan.

The Conservative Circuit-Court Conspiracy

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on June 8, 2005, Printed on June 8, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22177/

Last Friday, a three-member panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals -- one of the country's most conservative circuits -- upheld a ruling that Virginia's so-called "partial-birth" abortion ban is unconstitutional.

It was not the first time that such legislation -- a sop to social conservatives -- has run into trouble with the judiciary; courts in California, Nebraska and New York have made the same findings about the federal PBA ban passed by George W. Bush in 2003.

Volume of Underfunded Pensions Spikes

If it weren't such a disaster, it would be hilarious--the private pension system is in as bad a shape as Bush keeps saying Social Security is.--Dictynna.

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

WASHINGTON - Lax reporting rules created by Congress, and corporate America's eagerness to take advantage of them, have triggered a spike in underfunded pension plans largely unknown to millions of workers and retirees, the Senate Finance Committee was told Tuesday.

United Airlines may have set an unsavory example for others in the airline industry, committee members were told during a hearing on Capitol Hill. After declaring bankruptcy in 2002, the airline won court approval last month to shed $9 billion in pension obligations - shifting responsibility to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

That has contributed to a $23.3 billion deficit at the agency, which insures private pension plans, and triggered fears of another massive taxpayer bailout similar to the 1980s S&L crisis. The agency's head told senators the number of pension plans that are more than $50 million short of promised benefit levels has risen from 221 in 2000 to 1,108 in 2004. Those funds have an average of just 69 percent of promised benefits on hand.

Senate panel OKs sweeping FBI subpoena powers

I'm very much afraid this this is a solution meant for political problems (dissent?) as opposed to terrorism or crime. The moral cowardice of our 'leaders' is astounding. I wonder how long it will take before people realize this is a nail in the coffin of everything the US stood for.--Dictynna

Tue Jun 7, 9:37 PM ET

The U.S. Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday sided with the White House by proposing broad new subpoena powers for the FBI to use in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations, officials said.

After hours of secret deliberations, the oversight panel voted 11-4 to send to the full Senate a proposal that would give the FBI the power to subpoena without judicial approval a wide range of personal documents ranging from health and library records to tax statements.

The bill would add the subpoena powers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal investigations of foreign intelligence and terrorist activities. Officials said the FBI already exercises the same subpoena powers in criminal investigations.

The legislation approved by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also would make permanent intelligence-related sections of the USA Patriot Act that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

Downing Street Tipping Point?

(posted June 8 1 AM ET)

A common tipping point in a scandal is the moment when the key figure is forced to publicly comment on the allegation.

Often the story is just kicking around on the fringes, but a public comment -- be it a denial, clarification or apology – can prod mainstream media into giving the story new or higher-profile coverage.

Robert Parry: President Bush, With the Candlestick...

By Robert Parry

June 7, 2005

The clues are falling into place, pointing to the incontrovertible judgment that George W. Bush willfully misled the United States into invading Iraq, in part, by eliminating the possibility of the peaceful solution that he pretended to want.

Many of the clues have been apparent for three years – and some were reported in outlets such as our own Consortiumnews.com in real time – but only recently have new revelations clarified this obvious reality for the slow-witted mainstream U.S. news media.

The latest piece of the puzzle was reported by Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press in an article on June 4 describing how Bush’s Undersecretary of State John Bolton orchestrated the ouster of global arms control official Jose Bustani in early 2002 because Bustani’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] was making progress toward getting arms inspectors back into Iraq.

William Greene's Right Wing Rapid Response Team

Following in the footsteps of Richard Viguerie, Greene, a 'conservative Internet guru' and 'rising star' is making his presence felt

He's there to defend Christmas from "attack"; when Terry Schiavo's parents needed some fundraising firepower, they called on him; he's currently advocating for the abolition of the filibuster in the US Senate, defending the embattled Rep. Tom DeLay and the beleaguered John Bolton, and promoting an outfit called the European Conservative Union. In 2002, Campaign & Elections magazine selected him as one of its "Rising Stars of Politics"; the Washington Times has called him a "conservative Internet guru"; and "Who's Who in America" recognized him in 2003 and 2004.

Official Played Down Emissions' Links to Global Warming

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.

Deep Throat's tale revealed

Former FBI agent says 3 FBI officials helped W. Mark Felt leak information about Watergate probe to the press

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer
First published: Monday, June 6, 2005

Copyright 2005, Times Union. This is an expanded version of a story that was published in the Times Union on Sunday, June 5, 2005.

At the height of the Watergate investigation more than three decades ago, three high-ranking FBI officials conspired with the agency's deputy director to leak information about their probe to the press.

Greenspan says markets signalling weakness

By Andrew Balls in Washington
Published: June 7 2005 03:00 | Last updated: June 7 2005 03:00

Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, on Monday night highlighted the unusual behaviour of global bond markets, and acknowledged that investors might be correctly signalling a period of economic weakness ahead.

Seymour Hersh: WATERGATE DAYS

ssue of 2005-06-13 and 20
Posted 2005-06-06

It was late in the evening on May 16, 1973, and I was in the Washington bureau of the Times, immersed in yet another story about Watergate. The paper had been overwhelmed by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post the previous year, and I was trying to catch up. The subject this time was Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national-security adviser. I had called Kissinger to get his comment on a report, which the Times was planning to run, that he had been involved in wiretapping reporters, fellow Administration officials, and even his own aides on the National Security Council. At first, he had indignantly denied the story. When I told him that I had information from sources in the Justice Department that he had personally forwarded the wiretap requests to the F.B.I., he was silent, and then said that he might have to resign. The implicit message was that this would be bad for the country, and that the Times would be blamed. A few minutes later, the columnist James Reston, who was a friend of Kissinger’s, padded up to my desk and asked, gently, if I understood that “Henry” was serious about resigning. I did understand, but Watergate was more important than Kissinger.

Billmon: Covering the Top

Most people who play or watch the financial markets are familiar with the magazine cover indicator, a forecasting theory which holds that when the major news magazines -- Time, Newsweek, Fortune, etc. -- put a hot market trend on their cover, said trend is ripe for a major reversal.

It's a simple contrarian concept, based on the idea that if magazine editors (who are usually the last to figure anything out) are excited about a particular market, then just about every possible investor must have already piled into it, and will soon realize there are no greater fools left to follow them -- at least, not until prices have fallen a long, long way.

Billmon: Litter Boxes

Via Cursor, we see that the U.N. arms inspectors, having been blocked by the Bush Pentagon from returning to the suspected weapons sites they were monitoring before the Iraq invasion, are still trying to keep an eye on things -- from space . And the big problem isn't what they see, but what they don't see:

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday . . .

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he’s reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said [they] could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. “However, they can also be utilized for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair.”

Billmon: Young Bobos in Paradise

Several people, including Brad DeLong, have taken swipes at this column by David Brooks (who increasingly resembles the stupendously clueless "Arfy" of Catch-22):

Life Lessons From Watergate

The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt. He had graduated from Yale and was finishing a tour in the Navy, but he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was plagued by "angst and a sense of drift," and stricken by "considerable anxiety."

He began networking. "I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate." Then he chanced upon Felt, an established figure in the world he somehow hoped to enter. He peppered him with questions. "Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session," Woodward writes. "I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy."

Bob Woodward, in other words, was in the midst of the starting-gate frenzy.

I'll skip through the Boboian blah blah to get to his main point (such as it is) which is that Woodward -- and by implication Berstein, although Brooks knows better than to spoil his thesis by dragging in such an glaring contradiction -- were products of the same shallow, self-referential yuppie media culture that has given us such pundits as, oh, say, David Brooks.

Billmon: Captains Clueless

The Captain's Quarters (think Captain Queeg, but without the street smarts) argues that the "leftist establishment," which apparently includes me, is taking this whole stomping/kicking/pissing on the Koran thing way too seriously:

This has been front-page news for two or three weeks now, ever since Newsweek decided to run a poorly-sourced item about Gitmo guards flushing a Qu'ran down a toilet. Now we have the Pentagon report detailing five supposed events where guards mistreated copies of the Muslim scripture, and the media and the blogosphere have reacted like this is another My Lai.

Guess what, people? This is a book. It's not the Ark of the Covenant or Mohammed's horse or a splinter of the True Cross.

Leaving aside the idiotic/obnoxious religious parallels (Mohammed's horse???) one can see a certain conservative logic at work here.

Billmon: The Bridges of Chelan County

Judge John Bridges came back yesterday with a ruling in the GOP's last-gasp suit to overthrow Washington State gubernatorial election, and his message to the party (and to would be gov Dino Rossi) can reasonably be summarized as: "Get a life."

In his ruling, Bridges said the GOP failed to make the case for any deliberate, widespread fraud. He rejected the GOP's argument that an analytical technique called "proportional deduction" showed that most of the illegal votes cast in the election went to Gregoire. He also held that even using Republicans' proposed analytical technique, Gregoire still won. (emphasis added.)

The judge found that the Republicans failed to prove that Gregoire received one illegal vote among those improperly cast. In fact, he said, the only "clear and convincing" evidence he saw was the statements of four felons who said they voted for Rossi and one who said he cast a ballot for a Libertarian candidate.

Judge Bridges then proceeded to subtract those same four votes from Rossi's total, which means the net result of the GOP's legal campaign has been to widen Gregoire's winning margin. I can hear the sound of conservative heads exploding from 3,000 miles away. I've got a feeling Judge Bridges has just been added to the right wing's list of "out of control" liberal judges -- notwithstanding the fact that local Republicans were praising his fairness just a few days ago.

Daily Howler - June 7, 2005

FOOLS FOR NON-SCANDAL (PART 1)! Are New York City's kids on the march? A skeptical scribe got it right!

TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2005

HOW THE EDITORIALS SAVED CIVILIZATION: The lead editorial in this morning’s Post argues against the confirmation of Janice Rogers Brown. Early on, the editors discuss Brown’s views on something called “the Lochner era:”

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (6/7/05): Justice Brown, in speeches, has openly embraced the "Lochner" era of Supreme Court jurisprudence. During this period a century ago, the court struck down worker protection laws that, the justices held, violated a right to free contract they found in the Constitution's due process protections. There exist few areas of greater agreement in the study of constitutional law than the disrepute of the "Lochner" era, whose very name—taken from the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York—has become a code word for judicial overreaching. Justice Brown, however, has dismissed the famed dissent in Lochner by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, saying it "annoyed her" and was "simply wrong”...

According to the editorial, Brown “has not just given provocative speeches; ‘Lochnerism-lite’ is a fairly good shorthand for her work on the bench, where she has sought to use the takings doctrine aggressively.” The editorial goes on to discuss a particular ruling by Brown.

Kerry releases records

by kos
Tue Jun 7th, 2005 at 07:23:34 PDT

Unbelievable. Why the hell didn't he release these documents earlier?

Senator John F. Kerry, ending at least two years of refusal, has waived privacy restrictions and authorized the release of his full military and medical records.

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service.

The lack of any substantive new material about Kerry's military career in the documents raises the question of why Kerry refused for so long to waive privacy restrictions. An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service. Indeed, one of the first actions of the group that came to be known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was to call on Kerry to sign a privacy waiver and release all of his military and medical records.

But Kerry refused, even though it turned out that the records included commendations from some of the same veterans who were criticizing him.

Jesus, they had additional substantive evidence that the Swift Boat Liars were full of shit and refused to release it. The incompetent way that matter was handled knows no bounds.