The Ultimate Deception? (updated)

WARNING: This info may not be accurate...the source has been called into question on other matters. See this link.--Dictynna

A Bush-watcher website identified as TBRNews.org is reporting under the byline of "domestic intelligence reporter" Brian Harring that the Department of Defense is using a cynical tactic to mislead the public regarding the true death toll for American military personnel in Iraq. Harring claims he has an internal pdf. file from the D.O.D. which establishes that nearly 9000 Americans have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but that the official number has been held to 1713 by designating as Iraq deaths only those who perish on Iraqi soil. The remainder, he says, are military personnel who have died en route to Germany or in German hospitals-- casualties of the war, but not listed in the official death toll.

If this is true it would explain the apparent statistical discrepancy between dead and wounded. A combat action which produces nearly eight times as many officially wounded-- 13000 plus-- as officially dead...well, it's not the norm. It goes without saying it would also further jolt a public majority already disturbed by the war's "progress" and eager to see the troops come home.

Throat Job

by Matt Taibbi

I've seen some horseshit in my time, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like last week's Newsweek cover story on Deep Throat, by Evan Thomas.

The Thomas piece is remarkable on a number of levels, not the least being its frank and undisguised hypocrisy: Evan Thomas was one of the figures involved in the Koran-toilet-unnamed-sources fuck-up, and so an article written by him that denounces as unpatriotic the "legacy" of America's most famous unnamed source is humorous from the outset.

Thomas halfheartedly attempts a revisionist history of Watergate, arguing that the scandal was just an ordinary power struggle in which Nixon's part was that of a Capra-esque outsider president trying, quite reasonably, to assert his independence from an entrenched Democratic Party bureaucracy that was the Washington legacy of FDR. Thomas makes it sound like all Nixon was trying to do was break big-government gridlock. This is hilarious stuff, but it pales in comparison to the meat of the article.

Senator Goes Missing

Where are the soldiers? The issue the press never asks McCain about.

by Sydney H. Schanberg
June 7th, 2005 10:28 AM

John McCain has won the press's heart—and a sizable chunk of the public's—by championing progressive causes, not least his dogged drive to clean up campaign financing.

The reporters covering the 2000 presidential primaries virtually swooned inside his campaign bus, which, you'll remember, was named the Straight Talk Express. The Arizona senator's message was: The rest of the candidates are dedicated spinners; I'll tell you the truth. Now the press is gushing over his leadership in breaking the Senate stalemate on the White House's nominees for federal judgeships. Journalists love this kind of politician. He's different, a Republican maverick, a thorn in the side of his own party and its president, George W. Bush. To sum up, he makes great copy. He also has made some laudable contributions to better government.

There is one part of his record, however, that the press almost never asks him about. They never ask why this decorated navy pilot and Vietnam P.O.W. has spent so much of his time and energy as a senator pushing through legislation to block the release of information about American P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s who are still not accounted for.

W.Va. Court Awards Gay Partner Custody

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:35 p.m. ET

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- The state's highest court on Friday gave custody of a 5-year-old boy to his dead mother's lesbian partner, despite the protests of the woman's blood relatives.

Tina Burch had appealed to the West Virginia Supreme Court for custody of the son of her partner, Christina Smarr, who died in a 2002 car accident. Within hours of her death, Smarr's relatives had given the child to his grandparents.

Gov. Bush Calls for Probe of Schiavo Husband

By REUTERS

Filed at 6:51 p.m. ET

MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush asked a prosecutor on Friday to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago and how long it took her husband to call for help -- a move the husband denounced as an outrage.

Bush, who worked to keep the brain-damaged woman on a feeding tube before her March 31 death, said in a letter to State Attorney Bernie McCabe that the autopsy report released on Wednesday showed a gap between the time Michael Schiavo discovered his wife unconscious and the time he phoned 911 to summon medical aid.

``Between 40 and 70 minutes elapsed before the call was made and I am aware of no explanation for the delay,'' Bush said in the letter.

Congress Assaults the Courts, Again

The House of Representatives took a little- noticed but dangerous swipe at the power of the courts this week. It passed an amendment to a budget bill that would bar money from being spent to enforce a federal court ruling regarding the Ten Commandments. The vote threatens the judiciary's long-acknowledged position as the final arbiter of the Constitution. It is important that this amendment be removed before the bill becomes law.

During consideration of an appropriations bill for the Departments of State, Justice and Commerce, Representative John Hostettler, Republican of Indiana, introduced an amendment to prohibit any funds from being used to enforce Russelburg v. Gibson County. In that case, a federal court ruled that a courthouse Ten Commandments display violated the First Amendment and had to be removed. Mr. Hostettler declared that the ruling was unconstitutional, and inconsistent with "the Christian heritage of the United States."

Juan Cole - June 18, 2005

First Round of Iran's Presidential Elections Inconclusive
Turnout Stronger than Expected

The Presidential elections in Iran produced a messy result that will require a run-off between the two top candidates. The final outcome won't be clear until Saturday afternoon at least, but it seems that former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will be one of the two.

Mosque Attack Wounds 4
US Raids against al-Dhari, Muqtada

Sibernews reports, 'A car bomb has exploded close to a Shia mosque in eastern Baghdad as people were emerging from Friday prayers, injuring at least two people [the Guardian reports 4 wounded]. The driver seems to have rammed a fuel lorry passing through the Kamaliya district, police sources said.

Zarqawi and the Scarlett Pimpernel

WESTLEY: ' Well, Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me to his cabin and told me his secret. "I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts," he said. "My name is Ryan. I inherited this ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia." Then he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley." '

-William Goldman, "The Princess Bride"

Bill Montgomery's "Form over Substance" goes beyond expressing skepticism about the shadowy stories coming out of Iraq about top aides of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi being arrested.

The secret engines of the world (PR)

Posted by Teresa at 11:21 AM * 26 comments

Paul Graham’s The Submarine talks about one of the secret engines of the world: the PR industry.

“Suits make a corporate comeback,” says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, January, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, February 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. April 2001.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren’t about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms….

Symbiosis

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren’t dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won’t bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they’ve worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don’t want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it’s the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it’s so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. …

Once upon a time, I was the typesetter for a smallish weekly newspaper. I had keys to the place, and kept my own hours. The owners would leave me a stack of draft material. When they came back, the sheets of typeset repro would be hung up like the week’s laundry on a piece of string stretched across the office.

The Rude Pundit: In Perpetuity, Forever and Ever, Amen:

The Rude Pundit Defends Durbin and the Constitution--Dictynna

The point yesterday when Deputy Attorney General J. Michael Wiggins told the Senate Judiciary Committee, in answer to a question from Joe Biden, that, regarding inmates at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, "It's our position that, legally, they can be held in perpetuity" was the moment that the zombie corpses of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams should have burst into the chamber and ripped the head off the government stooge who just declared the United States shits on three and a half centuries of legal precedent. Then the three Founders should have divided and eaten Wiggins's depraved brain before heading over to the increasingly misnamed Department of Justice to dine on Alberto Gonzales's intestines. Ahh, sweet vengeance of history - the government that has eaten away the Constitution will now get eaten by those who created it.

Expect terrorists to bring war to us

June 17, 2005

BY ANDREW GREELEY

In May there were 90 suicide bombings in Iraq. That means that 90 young Arabs, mostly from Saudi Arabia, smuggled themselves into Iraq through Syria, fastened a jacket of explosives around their bodies and blew themselves up in search for Islamic martyrdom, killing scores of other Muslims in the process. The war in Iraq, billed as an essential component of the war on terror, is creating more terrorists.

Bush hand seen in public broadcasting

RAW STORY

E-mail messages obtained by investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting show that its chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, extensively consulted a White House official shortly before she joined the corporation about creating an ombudsman's office to monitor the balance and objectivity of public television and radio program, the New York Times reports Saturday. Excerpts follow.

Black-bag jobs in the Heartland

Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

06.17.05 - The revelation that W. Mark Felt, the 91-year-old former FBI deputy director, was "Deep Throat" ended a mystery that had lasted for more than thirty years. Felt's admission, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine, brought out the Nixon remnants, a coterie of former ex-convicts, bagmen, and apologists for the disgraced president. Within hours of the revelations, former Nixon Administration operatives, Charles Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and Pat Buchanan took to the cable news airwaves.

The three amigos helped kick off a media-driven debate over the ethics of Felt's actions. It was more than a bit surreal to hear these Watergate figures vigorously commenting on Felt's morality and ethics. The fact that both Colson and Liddy were Watergate criminals and served time in prison did not slow down their rush to judgment.

Billmon: Form Over Substance

Bernhard at Moon Over Alabama notes a certain repetitiveness in the news dispatches about the hunt for evil terrorist mastermind Emmanual Goldstein . . . I mean, Abu Musab Zarqawi:

June 16, 2005: U.S. Says It Has Captured Al Qaeda Leader for Mosul Area

June 5, 2005: Militant linked to Zarqawi arrested

May 25, 2005: Top aide to al-Zarqawi arrested north of Baghdad

May 25, 2005: US: al-Zarqawi aides arrested

May 9, 2005: Gains seen after new arrest of al-Zarqawi aide

April 19, 2005: Iraqi Security Forces Capture Two Zarqawi Associates

March 9, 2005: A Zarqawi cell "prince", six others captured in Baquba

And so on -- and on and on and on and on.

Daily Howler - June 17, 2005

MORE LIARS THAN LIBERALS! Liars outnumber actual liberals—if you watch Sunday TV: // link // print // previous // next //

FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 2005

THE TIMES WON’T SET RULES FOR ACCUSERS: To its credit, the New York Times reports today about Edward Klein’s astounding new book. But just as it did with the Swift Boat Vets, the Times focuses on the conservative backing for the book and ignores the book’s kooky content. The Times never told you that Unfit for Command was full of blatantly crackpot claims and episodes of self-contradiction. So too with today’s report by Raymond Hernandez about the new Klein book.

Juan Cole - June 17, 2005

6 US Servicemen Killed at Ramadi
10 Iraqis Killed, 38 Wounded

Guerrillas near Ramadi detonated a roadside bomb on Wednesday as a Marine convoy went by, killing 5 Marines. A sailor attached to the Marines in Ramadi was shot down dead in Ramadi, as well. Altogether, Guerrillas killed nearly 60 persons in the past month.

Shiites Compromise with Sunnis over Constitution Drafting Committee

al-Sharq al-Awsat and AFP Jawad Maliki, the deputy leader of the Da`wa Party led by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, affirmed yesterday that the parliamentary constitution-drafting committee agreed to increase the number of Sunni Arab members to 25. Of these, 10 would be non-voting advisors. Initially, Shiites in parliament were offering the Sunnis only 2 voting members on the committee and another 13 advisory members. Maliki admitted that the 10 advisory members "will not play a big role in the discussions."

Friedman and Imaginary Troops

Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times, makes several policy decisions with regard to Iraq. The first is to stay the course until an effective Iraqi force could be stood up. Another is to find ways of re-involving the United Nations in Iraq. Both of these ideas have things to recommend them, though Bush is highly unlikely to go for the latter.

The Mahablog: Today's Gulag News!

David Niewert at Orcinus has a must-read post on torture, the right-wing mob, and Dick Durbin.

Spin and distortion are, as always, playing a critical role in the brouhaha. The key is that conservatives are deliberately misrepresenting what Durbin said, and twisting his words into a campaign to paint liberals as treasonous vermin worthy of extermination....

The Mahablog: Today's Corruption News!

Now we know why Dick Cheney doesn't want to close Gitmo.

Halliburton to build new $30 mln Guantanamo jail

A Halliburton Co. unit will build a new $30 million detention facility and security fence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects, the Defense Department announced on Thursday.

The announcement comes the same week that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the jail after U.S. lawmakers said it had created an image problem for the United States.

The new facility is supposed to be air conditioned, but still ...

Under the deal with the Norfolk, Virginia-based U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic, the work is to be wrapped up by July 2006. It is part of a larger contract that could be worth up to $500 million if all options are exercised, the Defense Department said.

With so much cronyism in plain sight, makes you wonder what they're hiding.

SPECIAL REPORT: A Great Nuclear-Age Mystery Solved

By Greg Mitchell

Published: June 16, 2005 11:45 PM ET

NEW YORK One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved today: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945?

The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just two years ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy today, discovered them after the reporter's death.

Air Force Finds No Trace of Lost Nuke

By RUSS BYNUM, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 24 minutes ago

The first government search in decades for a hydrogen bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 found no trace of the sunken weapon, the Air Force said Friday.

The report — issued nine months after scientists tested radiation levels off Tybee Island — concluded that there is no danger of a nuclear blast from the 7,600-pound bomb and that the weapon should be left where it is, buried somewhere in the muck.

"We still think it's irretrievably lost. We don't know where to look for it," said Billy Mullins, an Air Force nuclear weapons adviser who led the search.

A damaged B-47 bomber jettisoned the Mark-15 bomb into Wassaw Sound about 15 miles from Savannah after colliding with a fighter jet during a training flight.

A possible conflict for DeLay?

BY J. JIONI PALMER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

June 17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay owns stock worth more than $50,000 in ExxonMobil, according to financial disclosure reports, while at the same time he is one of the driving forces behind legislation that would shield that company and other manufacturers of the gasoline additive MTBE from lawsuits that could cost them millions.

Already under fire for alleged ethical lapses, DeLay, a Texas Republican, has hired the Houston law firm Bracewell and Giuliani to defend against those charges. But the firm, in which former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is a partner, also represents a host of MTBE manufacturers in court and in Congress.

Mocking the Downing Street Memo

By Robert Parry

June 18, 2005

If American progressives think they have enough media clout to make a real issue of George W. Bush’s possible impeachment over the Iraq War, they should read the account of Rep. John Conyers’s rump hearing on the Downing Street Memo that appeared in the Washington Post.

The story by political correspondent Dana Milbank drips with a sarcasm that would never be allowed for a report on, say, a conservative gathering or on a topic involving any part of the American political spectrum other than the Left.

Cursor's Media Patrol - June 17, 2005

Some extracts--Dictynna

In a "NewsHour" debate on the memos between former CIAers Reuel Gerecht and Ray McGovern, Gerecht says the Robb-Silverman commission concluded that the Bush administration "had not tried to distort the intelligence," but Robert Parry points out that each of the pre-war intelligence investigations was "barred ... from examining that issue."

At Thursday's White House press briefing, ABC's Terry Moran asked Scott McClellan seven different versions of: "is the insurgency in Iraq in its last throes?"

A fragging incident at Forward Operating Base Danger is "believed to be the first case of an American soldier in Iraq accused of killing his superiors," and a military spokesman says that "charges against additional soldiers could not be ruled out."

The Boston Globe finds Congress "using the military's budget to steer billions to pet projects," and reports that "the $80 billion war bill passed earlier this year" included $35 million for "a wastewater treatment plant in Desoto County, Miss."

Vanity Fair's London editor writes that watching U.S. TV news in hotel rooms over the last three years has been "like witnessing a time-lapse study of emasculation," as "Broadcasters have largely accepted that attacks on the White House can only harm America's interests, and when they don't they are bamboozled and vilified by the shrill voices of the right."

Bush's Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.--Dictynna

By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush's plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Forty-two percent of the people responding to the poll said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job, a marked decline from his 51 percent rating after of the November election, when he embarked on an ambitious second term agenda led by the overhaul of Social Security. Sixteen months before the midterm elections, Congress fared even worse in the survey, with the approval of just 33 percent of the respondents, and 19 percent saying Congress shared their priorities.

N.Y.U. Moves to Disband Graduate Students Union

I wonder if this was NYU's idea, or if someone 'hinted'...--Dictynna.

By KAREN W. ARENSON

New York University is moving to close down its graduate students union at the end of the summer, the labor movement's only toehold among graduate students at private universities.

Union officials quickly attacked N.Y.U. 's plan and vowed to fight the university in any way they could.

In a memo circulated yesterday, N.Y.U.'s provost, David W. McLaughlin, and its executive vice president, Jacob J. Lew, said that they had proposed that the university stop recognizing the five-year-old union when its contract expires Aug. 31.

They said the collective-bargaining process had produced benefits for student teaching and research assistants, like better compensation and clearer work rules, but that union grievances had threatened academic decision-making.

Paul Krugman: What's the Matter With Ohio?

June 17, 2005

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Toledo Blade's reports on Coingate - the unfolding tale of how Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation misused funds - deserve much more national attention than they have received so far. For one thing, it's an entertaining story that seems to get weirder by the week. More important, it's an object lesson in what happens when you have one-party rule untrammeled by any quaint notions of independent oversight.

In April, The Blade reported that the bureau, which provides financial support for workers injured on the job, had invested $50 million in Capital Coin, a rare-coin trading operation run by Tom Noe, an influential Republican fund-raiser.

An Insider's Troubling Account of the U.S. Role in Iraq

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The failures of the Bush administration to prepare adequately for the postwar period in Iraq are by now well known, underscored by the revelation this week that a briefing paper, prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain eight months before the invasion, warned that "a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise" and that "little thought" had been given by the United States to "the aftermath and how to shape it."It is a subject explicated in chilling - and often scathing - detail by "Squandered Victory," a new book by Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and a leading American scholar on democracy and democratic movements. In this book, Mr. Diamond contends that the postwar troubles in Iraq - a bloody and unrelenting insurgency, the creation of a new breeding ground for terrorists and metastasizing ethnic and religious tensions - are the result of "gross negligence" on the part of a Bush administration that rushed to war. He asserts that "mistakes were made at virtually every turn" of the occupation, and that "every mistake the United States made in Iraq narrowed the scope and lengthened the odds for progress."

Savings Glut

The self-serving explanation for America's bad habits.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005, at 12:56 PM PT

Why are there imbalances in the global economy? Until recently, conventional economic wisdom has held that the U.S. has a huge trade deficit, a gaping current account deficit, and large federal budget deficits because Americans consume too much and save very little. Newly emerging conventional wisdom takes the opposite view. The problem in today's global economy is that the rest of the world, in particular people in Asia, consume too little and save way too much.

The Murder of Emmett Till

The 49-year-old story of the crime and how it came to be told.
By Randy Sparkman
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 10:29 AM PT

Till: murdered

Despite initial protests from Emmett Till's family, the Department of Justice earlier this month exhumed the remains of the black 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. At the time of the 1955 murder, Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made certain the case file crossed the desks of both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It met with calculated indifference. Now, however, the Till case is one of a pair of decades-old civil rights crimes in which federal and state prosecutors are seeking a measure of justice. This week, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen went on trial for planning the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Miss. Prosecutors in that case and in the Till investigation are encouraged by convictions in the last decade for the 1963 murder of NAACP official Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., the same year.

U.S. Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan

Global-Warming Science Assailed

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 17, 2005; Page A01

Bush administration officials working behind the scenes have succeeded in weakening key sections of a proposal for joint action by the eight major industrialized nations to curb climate change.

Under U.S. pressure, negotiators in the past month have agreed to delete language that would detail how rising temperatures are affecting the globe, set ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and set stricter environmental standards for World Bank-funded power projects, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Negotiators met this week in London to work out details of the document, which is slated to be adopted next month at the Group of Eight's annual meeting in Scotland.

Atrios: "Tough" Foreign Policy

Warning...crude sexual reference at the end of this post--Dictynna

Charles Dodgson discusses us a brief excerpt from an Atlantic article about North Korea. He writes:

The newest Atlantic has an article wargaming the current North Korea mess. This is, you'll recall, a situation where Dubya came in denouncing Clinton's soft policy on negotiations, and instituted a new "get tough" policy -- the result of which is that the North Koreans now have, at least, several more nukes than they had when he entered office.

But, say Dubya's defenders, the Koreans were cheating on their deal with clinton. Replies the guy who negotiated with the Koreans for Clinton:

Excuse me. The Soviets cheated on virtually every deal we ever made with them, but we were still better off with the deal than without it. ...

When the Clinton folks went out of office, the North Koreans had only the plutonium they had separated in the previous Bush administration. Now they've got a whole lot more. What did all this "tough" shit give us? It gave us a much more capable North Korea. Terrific!

Billmon: Getting Traction

If the idea behind today's DSM hearing was to give the media a fresh news hook to talk about the memo and put pressure on the White House to respond, then I guess I'd say mission accomplished."

For whatever reason (and contrary to my original pessimism) the story seems to be growing legs. I particularly liked this lead from -- of all places -- yesterday's Star & Stripes:

Several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ask for congressional hearings on the Downing Street memo, which one mother called President Bush’s “Watergate.”

It will be interesting to see if the White House and the Republicans continue their "deaf, dumb and blind" PR response -- or rather, lack of response -- or whether they will shift to "slime and defend" mode.

David Neiwert: Eliminate them

Friday, June 17, 2005

This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated.

-- KVI's John Carlson, discussing Sen. Dick Durbin, on his Seattle-based talk show Thursday

The right is in full froth over Sen. Dick Durbin's remarks comparing the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to the way other regimes -- including the Nazis, the Soviets, Pol Pot, and other dictators -- treated their prisoners.

The frenzy is reaching ugly proportions very rapidly. And don't think for a minute that they'll stop with Durbin.

The Fatherhood Demotion

By Amy DePaul, AlterNet. Posted June 17, 2005.

The Republicans' new set of welfare reforms emphasize fatherhood in the context of marriage -- at the expense of economic issues.

One of the lesser-reported provisions of a set of conservative welfare reforms in Congress includes an attempt to encourage fathers who do not live with their children to participate more fully in raising them.

The fatherhood programs that House Republicans are proposing would receive little federal funding — $20 million, compared to the $200 million in marriage-promotion programs included in the same legislation. But these fatherhood programs, however meager, spotlight a neglected aspect of welfare policy. The problem is that the programs emphasize fatherhood in the context of marriage at the expense of economic issues.

Public Triumphs, Private Rights

Ellen Chesler, Ms. Magazine

Rights and Liberties: Estelle Griswold and Margaret Sanger helped women gain access to birth control and abortion — but just one Supreme Court justice could take it away.

Nestled in a grove of trees, about two-thirds of the way up the steep hillock that contains the cemetery of the old Congregational Church in historic Wethersfield, Conn., an unassuming flat headstone marks the grave of Estelle Trebert Griswold, born June 8, 1900, and laid to rest beside her husband, Richard, on August 13, 1981.

Estelle is buried among dozens of kinsmen reaching back many generations, but the family name was enshrined in American history only 40 years ago, on June 7, 1965, when she prevailed in a historic ruling by the United States Supreme Court.

The rise, fall and rise of Brazil's biofuel

By Robert Plummer BBC News

As oil prices continue to hover above the $50-a-barrel mark, amid fears that the world may soon run out of fossil fuels, carmakers and politicians alike are desperate to come up with alternative ways to power the world's motor vehicles.

Even a man as closely linked with the oil industry as President George W Bush is now spreading the message that one day we may be growing our fuel instead of digging it out of the ground.

"An interesting opportunity, not only for here but for the rest of the world, is biodiesel, a fuel developed from soybeans," he said on Tuesday night at his joint news conference with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A Star War that Fails the Test

by Craig Eisendrath & Helen Caldicott

On May 18, Tim Weiner reported in the New York Times that the Air Force is seeking President Bush's approval for a national-security directive that would bring the country closer to deploying offensive and defensive weapons in outer space. The article suggests that such a move poses the danger of provoking a space arms race, particularly with Russia and China, and that costs could escalate into the trillions of dollars. The obvious question is: Why are we doing this?

Try-outs for a Christian fundamentalist presidential candidate are in the works

Christian right groups set sights on '08

By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Leaders of conservative Christian organizations plan to jointly interview Republican contenders for the 2008 presidential nomination, perhaps even endorsing one of them — steps that could expand their already considerable political influence.

"We'd like to try to stay together," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said at a breakfast with reporters Wednesday. The ad hoc group includes "free thinkers" and "strong personalities," he says, but they might unite behind a candidate who "unquestionably" best represented their views and priorities.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Charged With Murder

Thursday June 16, 2005 11:46 PM

By PATRICK QUINN

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. Army staff sergeant was charged with murder in connection with last week's deaths of two Army officers at a base outside Baghdad, the military said Thursday.

Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez, 37, a supply specialist with the Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 42nd Infantry Division, New York Army National Guard, was charged Wednesday in connection with the June 7 deaths of the two officers at Forward Operating Base Danger, near Tikrit - Saddam Hussein's hometown 80 miles north of Baghdad.

The officers killed were Capt. Phillip T. Esposito, 30, of Suffern, N.Y., and 1st Lt. Louis E. Allen, 34, of Milford, Pa. Esposito was company commander and Allen served as a company operations officer.

USDA plants its own pro-CAFTA news

BY ANDREW MARTIN AND JEFF ZELENY
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture has churned out three dozen radio and television news segments since the first of the year that promote a controversial trade agreement with Central America opposed by labor unions, the sugar industry and many members of Congress, including some Republicans.

Amid an intense debate over government-funded efforts to influence news coverage, the pre-packaged reports have been widely distributed to broadcast outlets across the country for easy insertion into newscasts.

About a third of the reports deal specifically with the politically powerful sugar industry, which has emerged as the major obstacle to the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.

In one radio segment, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said that passing CAFTA should be an easy decision for members of Congress.

"I can't imagine how any senator or House member from ag country could stand up and vote against CAFTA," Johanns said. "It makes no sense to me. It's voting against our producers."

US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor

17 June 2005

American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.

Yesterday's disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

Tug of War

by ANDREW J. BACEVICH

[from the July 4, 2005 issue]

This illuminating and wonderfully subversive book is, without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of US national security policy to appear in the past decade. Nominally, Perils of Dominance reinterprets the origins of the Vietnam War, recounting the crucial decisions made between 1954 and 1965 culminating in the commitment of American combat forces. In retracing this familiar sequence of events Gareth Porter, an independent scholar who has published on the war for more than three decades, challenges and overturns conventional explanations of how the United States blundered into that conflict. But the revisionist interpretation that he puts forward is of far more than historical interest. Perils of Dominance demolishes our most fundamental assumptions about how national security policy is formulated. Perhaps of even greater significance, it undermines the very notion of the cold war as a construct that explains the postwar era and as a source of myth used to justify actions well into the present.

Document Shows Top Pentagon Officials Warned About Guantanamo Bay Interrogation Tactics

Memo: Pentagon Concerned About Legality of Interrogation Techniques

Jun. 15, 2005 - The interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in 2002 triggered concerns among senior Pentagon officials that they could face criminal prosecution under U.S. anti-torture laws, ABC News has learned.

Notes from a series of meetings at the Pentagon in early 2003 -- obtained by ABC News -- show that Alberto Mora, general counsel of the Navy, warned his superiors that they might be breaking the law.

During a January 2003 meeting involving top Pentagon lawyer William Haynes and other officials, the memo shows that Mora warned that "use of coercive techniques ... has military, legal, and political implication ... has international implication ... and exposes us to liability and criminal prosecution."

The Mahablog: How Many Times?

In today's Charlotte Observer, an editorial on the Senate apology for lynchings:

Historians have documented 4,743 lynchings between 1882 and 1968, most of them in the South. Some historians think there were many more. It's disheartening but not surprising that in less than 1 percent of those lynchings was there a serious attempt to find the perpetrators.

More than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress in the first half of the 20th century. A federal law could have gone a long way in deterring lynching and saving lives. The House passed bills three times, but each time the Senate balked. With this apology, the Senate takes rightful responsibility for its predecessors' failure to act against this locally sanctioned homicide....

Billmon: Blade Runner

If you saw the movie, then you remember that Harrison Ford's love interest, Rachel, was actually a replicant who had had a bunch of false memories implanted in her mind so she would think she was a human being.

Someone seems to have done the same to Howie Kurtz:

I sympathize with Pelosi about the Democratic position being reduced to two sentences in many stories. With Republicans running everything in D.C., the minority party often gets short shrift. The Republicans had the same problem in '93 and '94. Lacking that White House megaphone makes a huge difference.

Of course: that must have been why Clinton's health care plan was such a PR triumph -- nobody was listening to the Republicans!

Billmon: Danger Ahead

We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a [gay] lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports. Something is wrong with this picture.

Rev. Bill Banuchi
Executive Director, New York Christian Coalition
As quoted by MidHudsonNews.com
June 12, 2005

(Via Rox Populi)

Nazi concentration camp badges, made primarily of inverted triangles, were used in the concentration camps in the Nazi-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The shape was chosen by analogy with the common triangular road hazard signs in Germany that denote warnings to motorists.

Wikipedia
Nazi concentration camp badges

Billmon: Looking for a Scapegoat

Before I poked fun yesterday at Tom Friedman's latest attempt to fish his journalistic reputation out of the Iraq War toilet, I probably should have paused to consider the significance of his casual slur

about liberals who "deep down" want to see Bush fail.

Why? Because it bore such an uncanny resemblance to this poisonous 2003 comment from National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation where the political opposition stands against our foreign policy, and even secretly (and not so secretly) hopes for its failure, cannot reform a region as recalcitrant as the Middle East. (emphasis added)

As I mentioned at the time, Kurtz's version of the stabbed-in-the-back theory eerily echoed the original, as expounded by the leader of an extreme nationalist party in a certain central European country in the grim years following World War I.

I'd mention their names, but I don't want to sound "shrill."

Billmon: Truth and Consequences

By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
1973

Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.

However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.

LMSM, the 'Lying Mainstream Media'

By Robert Parry

June 17, 2005

The Washington Post is reasserting its august judgment over what qualifies as news in the face of citizen complaints that it and other mainstream media outlets neglected leaked British memos about the deceptions behind George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

The Post’s lead editorial on June 15 mixed a patronizing tone with derisive comments in assuring its readers that “the memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.”

Oh, really?

Daily Howler - June 16, 2005

WOLF AND MCLEAN DEBATE KLEIN! How should Hillary deal with Klein? Dems simply have to decide: // link // print // previous // next //

THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 2005

WHY WE NEED RULES FOR ACCUSERS: What are the press corps’ rules for accusers? The need for such rules is apparent again in the wake of the Terri Schiavo autopsy. In this matter, as in so many others, crackpot accusers seized control of the discourse with little regulation from the mainstream press. Indeed, one such accuser, Randall Terry, was still lobbing bombs last night, in the rogue state known as Scarborough Country. Terry knows nothing about medicine—but so what? He started by suggesting that the autopsy had just been wrong:

TERRY (6/15/05): In the last month of Terri’s life, you had innumerable friends and family go in to see her. And one by one they came in front of the camera and said, “Terri did this. Terri responded to this story”....Either all of them were lying or they were witnessing the activities of a “brain-dead person.”

Terry still thought that Terri Schiavo had been responding and trying to speak.

Digby: Why oh Y

Matt Yglesias took up the "why did we invade Iraq?" meme on Tuesday and others have followed. Matt says:.

... there's a difference between observing that the United States went into war without a plan -- without a realistic assessment of what we could accomplish, how it could be accomplished, and whether the costs of such a course of action would outweigh the benefits -- and the news that our main ally in the conflict made that observation long before the war happened. Yet the Brits joined up anyway. Why?

Juan Cole - June 16, 2005

48 Dead in Guerrilla Violence
Suicide Bombing in Khalis Targets Iraqi Troops

Knight Ridder reports that a suicide bomber in an Iraqi army uniform detonated his bomb belt in the midst of Iraqi soldiers eating lunch in Khalis north of Baghdad, killing at least 26 persons [AFP] and wounding 29. Early details were confused and conflicting. AFP reported that wounded soldiers said that the bomber had been a member of their unit and detonated the bomb in an on-base mess hall. Knight Ridder knows that narrative but reports an alternative one, that the soldiers were eating in a restaurant off base and that the bomber was wearing civilian clothes.

Apartheid for Arabs in Irbil?
Iranian Kurds Riot

An eyewitness has described for me by email driving through the north of Kurdistan and seeing enormous posters of Massoud Barzani (the new president of the Kurdistan super-province) after the manner of a cult of personality.

Gitmo-by-the-Sea: 5-Star Holidays for Oppressed Christians: Fisher

Guest Satire by William Fisher

"Oppressed Christians: Looking for a five-star holiday? Have we got a deal for you!

GITMO-By-The-Sea"

Don’t laugh, folks. Our Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could just be poised to become the country’s hottest tourist destination for folks of faith.

It’s hard to see how it could lose, since it’s being promoted by America’s hottest new tourism entrepreneurs -- Alabama’s Senator Jeff Sessions and California congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee. It’s got a business plan, a high-profile Board of Directors, and all the other bells and whistles of a venture capitalist’s dream.

The Mahablog: Republicans Seek Exit Strategy!

Yep, GOP leaders in Washington finally realized they were stuck in a quagmire ... on Social Security.

Jonathan Weisman and Jim VandeHei write in the Washington Post:

With the Senate Finance Committee at an impasse on Social Security and House leaders anxious about moving forward, Republican congressional leaders have told the White House in recent days that it is time to look for an escape route.

Senate GOP leaders, in discussions with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and political officials, have made it clear they are stuck in a deep rut and suggested it is time for an exit strategy, according to a senior Senate Republican official and Finance Committee aides.

Ultimate Horror at Abu Ghraib?

Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos

From Daily Kos' partial transcript of a video (link to REAL stream) of Seymour Hersh speaking at an ACLU event. He says the US government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Link (via Warren). There's also a piece worth reading in this week's Newsweek about new allegations of rape and sexual torture at Abu Ghraib.

Evidence for Hersh's claims of child sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib?

Following up on this BoingBoing post about allegations by journalist Seymour Hersh of rape and sexual abuse of minors at Abu Ghraib prison Iraq -- there appears to be evidence for those claims in supporting statements that accompany the Taguba Report.

What most of us have seen of the report are excerpts from the 50-page summary. In fact, there are well over 6,000 pages in the report itself, including statements by and interviews with witnesses. Among them, testimony from an Iraqi prisoner that would appear to substantiate Seymour Hersh's claims that boys were sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Taguba evidently found these statements credible -- they supported statements from interviews with soldiers and other witnesses.

The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins is a rising star in a crowded universe of evangelical Christian leaders

Earlier this year, Tony Perkins, the President of the Family Research Council, spent a great deal of time rallying the troops in support of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who died in late-March after being in a "persistent vegetative state" for more than 15 years.

On June 15, after Schiavo's autopsy was performed by Pinellas-Pasco County Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin and was released to the public, Americans United for Separation of Church and State issued a press release lambasting the Religious right for their shameful behavior during the Schiavo Affair.

Campus Crusader

Before 9/11, David Horowitz attacked political correctness on college campuses across the country. These days, under the rubric of academic freedom, bands of Horowistas are waging a vigorous ground war against liberal academics

In April, during a speech in Indiana, a student threw a pie in his face; two months later, his face appeared on the cover of the Western Massachusetts-based Valley Advocate under the headline, "American Gladiator." Florida Governor Jeb Bush has called him a "fighter for freedom." He claims that he's "changed the dynamics" of the debate about "academic freedom" on college campuses across the United States, while at the same time, he accuses the media and his opponents of waging a "malicious campaign" against him.

What Is "Victory" In Iraq?

(posted June 16 2 AM ET)

You can’t help but be amused when NY Times’ Tom Friedman (via Eschaton) writes “Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq” on the same day LiberalOasis urges Dems to talk about Iraq.

(Of course, it’s more ridiculous for him to assert such nonsense while many liberals have been screaming at the top of their lungs for weeks trying to call attention to the Downing Street Memo. Calls which Friedman has so far ignored.)

David Neiwert - Burning crosses

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

[An unsigned painting, originating in Kansas, from the 1920s.]

Those three burned crosses in North Carolina of a couple weeks ago sure got everyone stirred up. Including, it seems, the Ku Klux Klan:

The national director of the Ku Klux Klan on Tuesday denied any involvement in the recent burning of crosses in Durham and offered to add to the reward fund for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.

"Anybody with a copy machine or a computer can make a flier and incriminate the Klan," said Thomas Robb during a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon. "I'm confident that is what they will find this time."

Heaven forfend that anyone should suspect the Klan of burning crosses, for goodness's sake. When have they ever done anything like that?

Ed Klein Rapes the National Discourse

by Arianna Huffington

You’ve probably heard -- because some people will print anything -- the allegations in Ed Klein’s latest piece of garbage, The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President. The most trumpeted one is also the most outlandish, based on the kind of sourcing that would make Jayson Blair proud -- that Chelsea Clinton was conceived when Bill raped Hillary.

Some have already been asking what is going to fill the sleaze slot in the news now that the Michael Jackson Reality Show has had its season finale. Sadly, there’s a good chance it’s going to be filled by Klein. The real title of his book should be: The Truth About Ed Klein: What He Does, Who Helps Him Do It, and How Far He’ll Go to Make a Buck.

God knows I’ve had plenty of disagreements with Hillary -- especially on Iraq. But what Klein is doing is disgusting. It has nothing to do with Hillary’s politics -- and everything to do with feeding the right-wing sleaze machine.

Digby: My Peeps

Schwarzenegger Jeered at Graduation Speech:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to his alma mater turned into an exercise in perseverance when virtually his every word was accompanied by catcalls, howls and piercing whistles from the crowd.

Schwarzenegger's face appeared to redden during his 15-minute commencement address Tuesday to 600 graduates at Santa Monica College, but he ignored the shouting as he recalled his days as a student and, later, his work as a bodybuilder and actor.

Digby: Support Guaranteed Health Insurance, Support Osama bin Laden

From my wingnut e-mailer, for your entertainment:

MORE DEMOCRATIC TREASON

Ronald Reagan expressed it most famously when he said , "why do they always blame American first?" Ann Coulter recently wrote an entire book called "Treason" about the Democrats. I recently turned on Air America, the new liberal radio network, to hear Al Frankin pretending to shed real tears about how much he loved our troops in Iraq but two minutes later his patriotism seemed to fade instantly as he made fun of the troops in Afghanistan for not finding Osama Bin Laden. Yesterday, Paul Krugman's ultra liberal column in the Times dismissed the American free market, which is 100% responsibly for giving us the highest standard of living in the history of the world, in favor of single payer socialist healthcare.

Digby: More Entertainment

Freepers on Schiavo:

"Just because the vision center of her brain was blind doesn't mean her brain couldn't have compensated somewhere else."

"Considering that she died of intentionally inflicted starvation and DEHYDRATION, is it any wonder that her brain was half the size of a normal brain?"

"We have to remember that this is from the WaPo, not a credible news organization, so they might find it convenient to omit certain, necessary facts."

Juan Cole - June 15, 2005

Guerrillas Kill 29 Iraqis Tuesday, Wound over 100 in North
3 US Servicemen Dead
Kurds Abducting Arabs, Turkmen in Kirkuk

The Associated Press reports

"And an American soldier was killed when a roadside bomb hit his convoy in southern Baghdad, the military said, adding that two other soldiers assigned to a Marine unit died in a similar attack Monday in Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital."

A suicide bomber killed 23 persons and wounded nearly 100 when he detonated his payload outside a bank in Kirkuk as seniors stood in line to cash their pension checks.

In Kan'an, a half-hour drive north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber targeted an Iraqi military checkpoint, killing 5 troops and wounding 2.

A Rude Note of Encouragement To College Republicans

The Rude Pundit lays it on the line (rudely, of course!)--Dictynna

6/15/2005

Hey, crazy College Republicans, it's time to step up for Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, and good ol' George W. Bush. Ya see, with recruitment for active military and reserves (which, these days, is like active military but without things like benefits) going down faster than a hot coed at a Campus Conservatives for Christ informational mixer, the brave boys and girls in uniform need some new blood to be spilled on the hot streets of Basra and Baghdad.

Man, you College Republicans are da bomb, a'ight, with your Talking Points on Terror that say, "U.S. forces are now working alongside Iraqi security forces to defeat terrorists in militants in the country. America and our coalition forces helped to end the Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, and now that we are helping to promote peace and democracy, the American people are safer." And, in your Muslim Outreach section, you say, "Due to the strong leadership and compassion of our President, the country of Iraq is securing a stable and prosperous future despite those who would thwart the progress." Well, sweet shit, 18-22 year-old motherfuckers, the campaign is over. Your re-elected President o' compassion needs your tender, young flesh to continue the march to a free Iraq. Otherwise, well, shit, the terrorists win, no?

In the American Bunker

"What is it that compels people, by the millions, to doggedly follow those often shallowest and neediest of humans who don the mantle of leadership and take them over the cliffs of hatred and militarism, crashing into great piles of mass carnage on the beach below?"

by David Michael Green

I saw a movie last night that was excellent. It was also awful

The film was "The Downfall", the reputedly historically accurate depiction of the end of the Third Reich, showing Hitler and his crew holed up in their Berlin bunker, awaiting their appointment with the Russian Army.

It was excellent in that it portrayed this scene so vividly, and it was awful because of the scene it so vividly portrayed.

In the film, we see what happened when Germany allowed an emotionally ravenous psychopath to sate the voracious demands of his personal insecurities upon the world's stage. Fifty million deaths later, here is this frustrated painter, delusional and embittered, putting the final touches on his masterpiece with a revolver and cyanide.

Beware the Holy War

by PETER BERGEN

[from the June 20, 2005 issue]

The Power of Nightmares, a three-hour BBC documentary directed by Adam Curtis, is arguably the most important film about the "war on terrorism" since the events of September 11. It is more intellectually engaging, more historically probing and more provocative than any of its rivals, including Fahrenheit 9/11. But although it has been shown at Cannes and at a few film festivals in the United States, it has yet to find an American distributor, and for understandable reasons. The documentary asserts that Al Qaeda is largely a phantom of the imagination of the US national security apparatus. Indeed, The Power of Nightmares seeks nothing less than to reframe the past several decades of American foreign policy, from the Soviet menace of the 1970s to the Al Qaeda threat of today, to argue that neoconservatives in the American foreign policy establishment have vastly exaggerated those threats in their quest to remake the world in the image of the United States.

House Votes to Limit Patriot Act Rules

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 17 minutes ago

In a slap at President Bush, lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the Justice Department and the FBI from using the Patriot Act to peek at library records and bookstore sales slips.

The House voted 238-187 despite a veto threat from Bush to block the part of the anti-terrorism law that allows the government to investigate the reading habits of terror suspects.

The vote reversed a narrow loss last year by lawmakers concerned about the potential invasion of privacy of innocent library users. They narrowed the proposal this year to permit the government to continue to seek out records of Internet use at libraries.

Why Business Needs Government

James Gustave Speth

June 15, 2005

James Gustave Speth is Dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. This article appears originally in the July/August issue of World Watch magazine, released today.

When Ronald Reagan famously said that "Government isn't the solution to our problems; government is the problem," many in business cheered. But what if Reagan had it wrong? What if business is shackled by forces far more powerful than government and, in fact, needs government to free it to do the job it increasingly knows must be done?

Business leaders know better than anyone that they are trapped in a system, constantly hemmed in by imperatives shaped by market competition, consumer preferences, investor behavior and other factors. These imperatives often preclude attractive options. When the gap between the required answer and the right answer gets too wide, government action to provide new norms and rules of the road becomes imperative.

Justice Dept. Defended Larger Tobacco Penalty

Officials Later Said That Reduction Was Needed to Comply With Ruling

By Carol D. Leonnig

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A05

Senior Justice Department officials argued in a court filing one month ago that the government's demand for a $130 billion smoking-cessation program funded by the tobacco industry was a legal penalty in the landmark lawsuit and unaffected by a February court ruling that rejected other sanctions against the industry.

Last week, the same officials, including one who signed the May 12 document, surprised anti-tobacco activists and the tobacco industry by dramatically scaling back that proposal and demanding a $10 billion program. They said the cut, which came in the closing days of an eight-month trial, was necessary because the larger smoking-cessation program would not legally comply with the same February appeals court ruling.

Legislature To Probe Firings in Ehrlich Era

Republicans Calling For Broader Review

By John Wagner

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page B01

Leading Democrats agreed yesterday to probe the firing practices of Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s administration, promising a balanced look at whether the rights of state workers have been violated.

The investigation -- the first of its kind by the General Assembly in three decades -- was announced jointly by Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. and House Speaker Michael E. Busch and comes at a time of bitterly divided government in Annapolis.

Fraying House of Labor

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A25

The dissident unions of the AFL-CIO are meeting in Washington today to announce that they are building a halfway house.

The Change to Win Coalition-- and boy, is that ever a provisional-sounding and utterly clunky name -- will begin life neither entirely within nor without the AFL-CIO. One of its founders, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the AFL-CIO's largest affiliate, passed a resolution last weekend authorizing its top officers to take the union out of the federation when they deem it appropriate. All signs indicate that will happen soon.

Daily Howler - June 15, 2005

NO LIBS NEED APPLY! Who are the people on Sunday shows? Bill Moyers made matters clear: // link // print // previous // next //

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2005

FIGHTING FOR HILLARY, FIGHTING FOR STANDARDS: As he had promised (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/14/05), Bill O’Reilly came out fighting last night, hammering slimeball Edward Klein for his astonishing book about Hillary Clinton (transcript segments tomorrow). He blasted Klein for his sleazy attacks, then staged a discussion with Naomi Wolf and long-time Dem consultant Kiki McLean about how Clinton should approach this astonishing book. McLean said Hillary should ignore Klein; Wolf said she should come out swinging. We’re inclined to agree with Wolf, but this is a matter which Dems should be discussing all across the land.

Atrios: Coingate Gets Weird

You know, it's starting to bother me that this isn't getting more play on TV,not because it's important and important stories deserve to be covered (I'm not that naive), but because it's a fun story. Great TV. Wacky cast of characters. Interesting plot development.

COLUMBUS — The suburban Denver home of a former employee of Tom Noe was burglarized over the weekend, with thieves making off with artwork, guns, jewelry, cars, and $300,000 in wine — possibly purchased with money from the state of Ohio.

NYT Gets It Right on Social Security

Did these three grafs really appear in the Times? (emphasis added)

Social Security now takes in considerably more money than it pays out in benefits. But as legions of baby boomers retire and begin to collect benefits, instead of paying for them, the retirement system will move toward a deficit. Some actuaries have projected that there will be more money going out than coming in by 2017, although full benefits will be payable for some time because of the surplus being accumulated now. But in 2041, Mr. Bush said, the system will be "bankrupt."

Actually, beginning around 2041 the system would be able to pay about three-fourths of the benefits due retirees, assuming there are no changes in the formula before then. Critics of Mr. Bush's proposals have said there are enough ways, and enough time, to fix the system without a drastic change like a shift to private accounts.

Pattern of Deception Persists in Tillman's Death

By Robert Scheer, AlterNet

Posted on June 14, 2005, Printed on June 15, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22223/

On Saturday, Mary Tillman went to a graduation party, corrected essays written by her junior high school students and got the house ready for a visit from her mother. Life goes on, even though the "friendly fire" death in Afghanistan of her famous football-playing son never fully leaves her thoughts.

And how could it? Although Pat Tillman, 27, was shot to death on a mountain pass in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, his family has been tortured ever since by a pattern of official deception over how he died -- killed by U.S. Army machine-gun fire -- and why the family was kept in the dark.

U.S. Blocks Independent Inquiry into Uzbek Massacre

By Matthew Clark, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on June 15, 2005, Printed on June 15, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22226/

A report that U.S. defense officials helped block a NATO demand for an international probe into last month's killing of protesters in Uzbekistan is proving an air base there to be one of the more diplomatically costly "lilly pads" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's new lean, mean restructuring of the U.S. global military presence.

Located in southeastern Uzbekistan near the border with Afghanistan, the Khanabad base is seen as key to the U.S. war on terror, as a Q&A on the website of the Council of Foriegn Relations, a prominent Washington-based think-tank, explains.

War on Crime, Not on Drugs

By Norm Stamper, AlterNet
Posted on June 15, 2005, Printed on June 15, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22227/

Editor's Note: The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing (Nation Books, 2005).

I say it’s time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement’s financial costs, take a look at DrugSense.org’s Drug War Clock. To the tune of $600 a second, taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure added up to over $20 billion, and that’s just for federal enforcement alone. You can add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement, and even more billions for U. S. drug interdiction work on the international scene. We’re talking well over $50 billion a year to finance America’s war on drugs.

Seattle Confidential

By Laura Barcella, AlterNet

Posted on June 15, 2005, Printed on June 15, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22196/

Norm Stamper is poised to become a very unpopular man -- among conservative law enforcement sorts, anyway.

The retired 34-year police veteran is first to admit to -- but not apologize for -- the ways in which he has alienated fellow cops, from his unusually touchy-feely leadership style (focusing on progressive, demilitarized community policing) to advocacy for decriminalizing drugs and prostitution.

And don't forget the whole '99 WTO protests thing. Yep, it's that Norm Stamper -- the former Seattle police chief who oversaw the tear gas-and-handcuffs-happy chaos that ensued after a few thousand peaceful protestors became, well, not so peaceful.