Smith vs. Darwin

Commentary: Like Intelligent Design, the idea of the Invisible Hand stubbornly persists in the face of overwhelming evidence

By James K. Galbraith

December/January 2006 Issue

In today's great God-versus-Science debate, both sides maneuver for the middle ground. Though he's otherwise tolerant of nothing, George W. Bush calls for evolution and Intelligent Design to be taught together in the science classes of public schools. Meanwhile, our great gray citadel of secular humanism, the New York Times, finds it comforting to tell us (on the front page on August 23) that there really are good Christian scientists out there who do evolution on weekdays and church on Sunday. So what's the problem?

In his wonderful book on American pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand explains what the problem is. God and science really don't mix. Darwin didn't invent evolution. He invented Godless Evolution. Menand writes: "On the Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859. The word 'evolution' barely appears in it. Many scientists by 1859 were evolutionists—that is, they believed that species had not been created once and for all, but had changed over time…. The purpose of On the Origin of Species was not to introduce the concept of evolution; it was to debunk the concept of supernatural intelligence—the idea that the universe is the result of an idea."

Expanding Universe

<>You might want to bookmark this for future reference.--Dictynna

By Frederick Clarkson
Illustration By Peter Hoey
December 2005 Issue

Click on a celestial body to visit the web site of that organization.

Original Intent

Revisionist rhetoric notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution–and it wasn't an oversight.

Susan Jacoby
November/December 2005 Issue

When the Supreme Court, in one of its most important decisions of 2005, ordered two Kentucky counties to dismantle courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Court majority was wrong because the nation's historical practices clearly indicate that the Constitution permits "disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."

The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief—apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment's familiar declaration that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase "free exercise thereof—as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow." The justice's impassioned dissent in McCreary County v. the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.

A Nation Under God

News: Let others worry about the rapture: For the increasingly powerful Christian Reconstruction movement, the task is to establish the Kingdom of God right now—from the courthouse to the White House.

By John Sugg

December/January 2006 Issue

TRINITY CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture of a revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God—a denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream. Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined country roads intersect McMansion subdivisions. If Norman Rockwell were painting suburban sprawl, he’d likely pick Cobb County.

On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The church was host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and patriotism” sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang “We Must Take America Back.”

Protest Reassembles in Crawford

Opponents of War in Iraq Plan to Remain Near Bush Ranch

By Rosalind S. Helderman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 26, 2005; Page A05

CRAWFORD, Tex., Nov. 25 -- Cindy Sheehan has returned to the dusty town of Crawford, where she was transformed from a grieving mother into a symbol of the movement against the Iraq war.

She arrived Thursday night to the cheers of supporters and on Friday presided over the unveiling of a permanent sandstone monument in memory of her son, Casey, a soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

White House Official Seeks Welfare Changes

The Associated Press
Saturday, November 26, 2005; 3:11 AM

WASHINGTON -- The administration's point man on tightening welfare requirements says he senses that Congress is closer to making significant changes to the program than at any time during President Bush's tenure.

"I can almost taste it," said Wade Horn, an assistant secretary within the Health and Human Services Department.

WASHINGTON -- The administration\'s point man on tightening welfare requirements says he senses that Congress is closer to making significant changes to the program than at any time during President Bush\'s tenure.','KEVIN FREKING') ;

Democratic lawmakers don't believe Horn is correct, but say that if he is, the overhaul will occur without bipartisan support.

You Don't Need Oil to Make Fuel

By Governor Brian Schweitzer
Center for American Progress

Thursday 03 November 2005

Many things can be converted fuel, including crops, natural gas, waste, manure, and many other carbon-based substances. In Montana, we are encouraging the production of these kinds of alternative fuels in an effort to catalyze the energy future.

One of these alternatives is gasoline, though not the gasoline we all know. This gasoline comes from coal.

Though it sounds like alchemy, the means to turn coal into synthetic petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel has been around since 1913 and was used in America as early as 1928. Germany used "synfuel" to power most of its vehicles in World War II, and South Africa used the technology to overcome apartheid sanctions starting in the 1950s.

Fish Numbers Plummet in Warming Pacific

By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent UK

Sunday 13 November 2005

Disappearance of plankton causes unprecedented collapse in sea and bird life off western US coast.

San Francisco - A catastrophic collapse in sea and bird life numbers along America's Northwest Pacific seaboard is raising fears that global warming is beginning to irreparably damage the health of the oceans.

<>Scientists say a dramatic rise in the ocean temperature led to unprecedented deaths of birds and fish this summer all along the coast from central California to British Columbia in Canada.

The population of seabirds, such as cormorants, auklets and murres, and fish, including salmon and rockfish, fell to record lows.

This ecological meltdown mirrors a similar development taking place thousands of miles away in the North Sea, which The Independent on Sunday first reported two years ago. Also caused by warming of the water, the increase in temperatures there has driven the plankton that form the base of the marine food chain hundreds of miles north, triggering a collapse in the number of sand eels on which many birds and large fish feed and causing a rapid decline in puffins, razorbills, kittiwakes and other birds.

Battle Lines Set as New York Acts to Cut Emissions

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: November 26, 2005

ALBANY, Nov. 23 - New York is adopting California's ambitious new regulations aimed at cutting automotive emissions of global warming gases, touching off a battle over rules that would sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions while forcing the auto industry to make vehicles more energy efficient over the next decade.

The rules, passed this month by a unanimous vote of the State Environmental Board, are expected to be adopted across the Northeast and the West Coast. But the auto industry has already moved to block the rules in New York State, and plans to battle them in every other state that follows suit.

MyDD: The Real McCain

by Gary Boatwright

Bumped by Matt.

Hat tip to Nathan Newman at The House of Labor over at TPM Cafe for an article about McCain in the current issue of The Nation, The Real McCain.

The Nation has gotten on board the McCain Truthsquad bandwagon started by Matt Stoller in these diaries:

Two Faced McCain

Follow Up On McCain

The McCain Scam

This is the starting point for Ari Berman's article:

The détente with conservatives that began with his vigorous embrace of Bush during the 2004 campaign has become a full-on charm offensive. . . . His office holds regular meetings with conservative leaders in South Carolina, where his approval rating sits at 65 percent. He has met with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whom he denounced as one of the religious right's "peddlers of intolerance" after the 2000 South Carolina primary.

After the antitax Club for Growth began running ads against McCain in New Hampshire, a state he won in 2000, he reversed positions and supported a procedural repeal of the estate tax. He has endorsed conservative Republican Ken Blackwell for Ohio governor.

I'm Recycling as Fast as I Can

A Conversation with Corporate America
by Juliet Eastland

PAPER, PAPER EVERYWHERE.

In this digital age, it's amazing how many trees we still go through in a day. But eco-warriors, paper-pushers, and guilty liberals rejoice: America recycles! According to the American Forest & Paper Association, U.S. recovery of paper and paperboard increased in 2004 to an all-time high of 50.3 million tons. Good news, right?

Well, sort of, until you look at what America consumes: 98,664,727 tons of paper and paperboard in 2002 alone. To bring it to a more personal level, while the U.N. estimates that the minimum needed to meet basic literacy and communication needs is 66 to 88 pounds per year, the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately 660 pounds of paper annually, according to Worldwatch Institute. But hey, we live in America, land of the beautiful and the big. Wanna make something of it?

The Untouchable Narco-State

Guatemala's military defies the DEA

by Frank Smyth

The alert went out across the state this past July. A McAllen-based FBI analyst wrote a classified report that the Department of Homeland Security sent to U.S. Border Patrol agents throughout Texas. About 30 suspects who were once part of an elite unit of the Guatemalan special forces were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen. The unit, called the Kaibiles after the Mayan prince Kaibil Balam, is one of the most fearsome military forces in Latin America, blamed for many of the massacres that occurred in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war. By September, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested seven Guatemalan Kaibiles, including four “deserters” who were still listed by the Guatemalan Army as being on active duty.

Mexican authorities say the Kaibiles were meant to augment Las Zetas, a drug gang of soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn from Mexico’s own special forces. It’s logical that the Zetas would turn to their Guatemalan counterparts. In addition to being a neighbor, “Guatemala is the preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipment of cocaine to the United States,” the State Department has consistently reported to Congress since 1999. In early November, anti-drug authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala told the Associated Press that 75 percent of the cocaine that reaches American soil passes through the Central American nation.

DeLay's Corporate Defenders

by Andrew Wheat

The legal defense fund of Congressman Tom DeLay—who is facing criminal indictment as a result of an addiction to corporate political contributions—is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional corporate funds to help DeLay beat his criminal rap. Not surprisingly, many of the contributors to DeLay’s defense fund have business before Congress, where this congressman is still an invaluable ally.

Since 2000, when DeLay began fighting what became a slew of House ethics complaints, his legal defense fund has raised more than $1.4 million. This fund has bagged more than $900,000 since 2002, when DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) spent $600,000 in corporate funds to help establish a GOP majority in the Texas House—despite Texas’ prohibition on corporate electioneering. A little-noticed irony of DeLay’s legal defense fund is that it is raising much of its money from the very type of political donors that precipitated DeLay’s indictment. More than 100 corporations have contributed in excess of $400,000 to DeLay’s defense fund, or 28 percent of all the money raised, according to data compiled by Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. The defense fund’s top four corporate donors—Contran, Reliant, RJ Reynolds, and Panda Energy—spent $3.5 million lobbying DeLay and other federal officials over the past five years.

Investing in America

By Molly Ivins

Watching the new film Good Night and Good Luck about Edward R. Murrow reminded me of John Henry Faulk and his own heroic struggle against McCarthyism. Well, okay, Johnny did actually wage a gallant and valiant fight, but since it was John Henry, it was also weird and funny and full of improbable characters—what is it about Texans that we can’t even be heroic without being comical?

In 1955, Johnny Faulk was a successful popular entertainer with a network radio program featuring his impersonations of the down-home Texas characters he invented (actually, a horrifying number of them were based on real people—in fact, he was related to several of the prototypes). He appeared on television quiz panels and hosted CBS’s morning program, being funny and folksy with pipe in hand.

Myths and madrassas

By William Dalrymple

Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrassas.

Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrassa's director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrassa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes - in the form of the Taliban - military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.

Myths and madrassas

By William Dalrymple

Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrassas.

Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is

Truth, lies, and intelligence

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | November 25, 2005

YOU KNOW Dick Cheney is feeling the heat when he hides behind John McCain.

This week, the man lobbying to exempt the CIA from Senator McCain's antitorture amendment used the popular Arizona senator as a shield against renewed questions about the administration's characterization of prewar intelligence.

''The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false," Cheney said in a Monday speech. ''Senator McCain put it best: 'It is a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.' "

The cost of Bush will be huge, lasting

By Dave Zweifel
November 25, 2005

These haven't been a good couple of months for President Bush.

His approval ratings have plummeted so far that even staunch members of his own party are admitting they disagree with him on several key issues and some are now openly challenging some of his policies.

As I predicted after the 2004 elections, we're going to have trouble in a couple of years finding people who will admit to having voted for him, just as nobody would fess up to having voted for "Tricky Dick" Nixon's re-election in 1972.

The Press: The Enemy Within

Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005

The Press: The Enemy Within

By Michael Massing

The past few months have witnessed a striking change in the fortunes of two well-known journalists: Anderson Cooper and Judith Miller. CNN's Cooper, the one-time host of the entertainment show The Mole, who was known mostly for his pin-up good looks, hip outfits, and showy sentimentality, suddenly emerged during Hurricane Katrina as a tribune for the dispossessed and a scourge of do-nothing officials. He sought out poor blacks who were stranded in New Orleans, expressed anger over bodies rotting in the street, and rudely interrupted Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu when she began thanking federal officials for their efforts. When people "listen to politicians thanking one another and complimenting each other," he told her, "you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated." After receiving much praise, Cooper in early November was named to replace Aaron Brown as the host of CNN's NewsNight.

Why Torture Doesn't Work

By Brig. Gen. David R. Irvine, AlterNet. Posted November 22, 2005.

When the Wall Street Journal came out in favor of abusive interrogation, it turned a blind eye on reason in favor of supporting the White House line.

Remarkably, of the nation's major newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal has editorialized in support of torture as a useful tool of American intelligence policy. Regrettably, that position does a huge disservice to the nation and its soldiers. There are really only three issues in this debate, and the Journal carefully turned a blind eye to all three: (1) is torture reliable, (2) is it consistent with America's values and Constitution, and (3) does it best serve our national interests?

No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives. Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been "rendered" to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that "credible evidence" supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his "confession," and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements.

How The Bush Administration Got Spooked

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 26, 2005.

Starting when he blinked in the face of Cindy Sheehan's challenge, the political landscape has tilted steeply away from President Bush in recent weeks.

It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America. You know -- that moment when the curtains are pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed in all that billowing smoke turns out to be some pitiful little guy, and everybody looks around sheepishly, wondering why they acted as they did for so long.

Starting on September 11, 2001 -- with a monstrous helping hand from Osama bin Laden -- the Bush administration played the fear card with unbelievable effectiveness. For years, with its companion "war on terror," it trumped every other card in the American political deck. With an absurd system for color-coding dangers to Americans, the President, the Vice President, and the highest officials in this land were able to paint the media a "high" incendiary orange and the Democrats an "elevated" bright yellow, functionally sidelining them.

Digby: Getting The M.R.S.

What Kevin says. I don't know what to say about the LA Times op-ed page nowdays except, don't bother. Yesterday, we had Jonah's typically puerile blog post he calls it a column. (Some pouty mess about Dinos and Rinos running to the center. Maureen Dowd he ain't.)

Today, David Gelertner reveals that the reason why kids today are so career obsessed instead of learning for learning's sake is because rich, highly educated women used to get married and stay home with thier kids instead of working outside the home. (It's true. They did. They also drank. A lot. Usually because thier only choices in life were to marry some thick-headed moron like Gelertner or work for him as his low paid "office wife." )

Digby: Too Much W-ne

From Atlas Shrugs, centerfold of the Bathrobe Media Empire

G-d bless President Bush, holding himself out there for ridicule and vile hate so that we might be stay free. History will be kind to President Bush and hold him in the highest regard. He sees the future, he sees the realites, he sees the truth s we take so for granted.

Digby: Mr Silver Lining

Hey everybody, welcome David Ignatius to planet earth:

The United States must begin to replenish this stock of support for America in the world. I would love to see the Bush administration take the lead, but its officials seem not to understand the problem. Even if they turned course, much of the world wouldn't believe them. Sadly, when President Bush eloquently evokes our values, the world seems to tune out.

Digby: Priming The Pump For The Masters

Can we please put a merciful end to he "black friday" kabuki, in which retailers put out rediculous promotions to entice customers to stand in line for hours to "buy" things at below profit so they can report that sales are very brisk this year (only to find out that sales and profits were flat or down some time later?) All day long the news stations were interviewing shoppers in the malls and Wal-Marts as if they had made a trek to Lourdes for the cure and all the anchors dutifully reported that everyone was reporting huge crowds. They were even shilling for specific items, trying to "find" the next Tickle Me Elmo. It is mildly entertaining to watch idiots trample each other for a piece of useless junk, but I only need to see it once. 22 times was overkill.

Juan Cole - 11/25/05

Cruel Thanksgiving in Iraq
Over 50 Dead

Over 50 Iraqis were killed and 47 wounded in separate attacks on Thursday.

In Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad, a bomber detonated his payload outside a hospital, killing some 30 persons and wounding 27. Among the wounded were 4 US GIs.

AFP reports, "Also, the US military reported the deaths of two servicemen in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad, while four American soldiers were killed in a series of incidents on Wednesday."

The Long March of Dick Cheney

Good article on Cheney--Dicitynna

Thursday, 24 November 2005

Below is one of the best articles that Sidney Blumenthal has ever written, a chilling, precise and deadly accurate account of the rise of Dick Cheney and the profoundly anti-democratic faction of power junkies and war profiteers that he represents. The article is from the paid site of Salon.com, so we are offering it in full here. (Just click on "Read More" below.)

The Long March of Dick Cheney, by Sidney Blumenthal.

Nov. 24, 2005 | The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" -- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.

The Million-Year Health Standard

Published: November 25, 2005

The Environmental Protection Agency's proposed radiation standard for a planned nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada took a severe battering during a comment period that ended this week. The standard is supposed to protect future residents of the area from hazardous radiation doses for the next million years, but critics, led by the State of Nevada, skewered E.P.A.'s often sloppy justifications and complained bitterly that no other radiation standard now in force would allow the public to receive such high doses.

Public Enemy No. 43,527

The government throws back another small fish.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 4:21 PM ET

Poor Jose Padilla. When the Defense Department decided to release America's last Public Enemy No. 1—Yaser Esam Hamdi—from nearly three years of bondage in a military dungeon without charges, he was shipped off to Saudi Arabia, with a firm handshake and commemorative U.S. Navy mug. The terrorist too dangerous to be tried in open court was sent home to his parents for a seriously enforced new bedtime. But Padilla—perhaps because he grew up in America, or maybe because his name could be readily stapled onto another conspiracy case—faces criminal charges and a lifetime in prison.

Padilla is not, nor was he ever, a central figure in the war on terror. The Brooklyn-born former gang member who converted to Islam has sequentially been demoted from the "Dirty Bomber" to the "Apartment Bomber" to "Random Bad Fella." And thus he joins Hamdi, Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and most of the other big terror suspects we've convicted, or incarcerated without charges, as walk-ons repurposed to be special guest villains in the legal war on terror.

Abramoff probe broader than thought: paper

Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:11 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department's probe of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is broader than previously thought, examining his dealings with four lawmakers, former and current congressional aides and two former Bush administration officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Prosecutors in the department's public integrity and fraud divisions are looking into Abramoff's dealings with four Republicans -- former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, the paper said, citing several people close to the investigation.

Paul Krugman: Bad for the Country

The New York Times<>
Friday 25 November 2005

"What was good for our country," a former president of General Motors once declared, "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." GM, which has been losing billions, has announced that it will eliminate 30,000 jobs. Is what's bad for General Motors bad for America?

In this case, yes.

Most commentary about GM's troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don't think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.

We shouldn't be so complacent. I won't defend the many bad decisions of GM's management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of US manufacturing, especially the part of US manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.

Michael Kinsley: The Phony War against the Critics

By Michael Kinsley
The Washington Post

Friday 25 November 2005

"One might also argue," Vice President Cheney said in a speech on Monday, "that untruthful charges against the commander in chief have an insidious effect on the war effort." That would certainly be an ugly and demagogic argument, were one to make it. After all, if untruthful charges against the president hurt the war effort (by undermining public support and soldiers' morale), then those charges will hurt the war effort even more if they happen to be true. So one would be saying in effect that any criticism of the president is essentially treason.

Lest one fear that he might be saying that, Cheney immediately added, "I'm unwilling to say that" - "that" being what he had just said. He generously granted critics the right to criticize (as did the president this week). Then he resumed hurling adjectives like an ape hurling coconuts at unwanted visitors. "Dishonest." "Reprehensible." "Corrupt." "Shameless." President Bush and others joined in, all morally outraged that anyone would accuse the administration of misleading us into war by faking a belief that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear and/or chemical and biological weapons.

Digby: Walking In Each Other's Shoes

I hear that Jean Schmidt is unrepentant this morning, saying, "There's no way that I remotely tried to impugn his character" speaking of her remarks about John Murtha.

This is a very important principle for her.

Digby: Of Course It's True

I was busy yesterday so I didn't get to comment on the amazing story that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters. I think what surprised me the most is that anyone thinks that it might not true. Of course, it's true.

Juan Cole leads us through the evidence, the most compelling being that he blew the shit out of two other Al Jazeera offices!:

The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.

The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2004, not so long before Bush's conversation with Blair. That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, "We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.''' Given what we now know about Bush's intentions, that may have been a mistake.

Digby: I See Marty's Underpants

I get these neat little e-mails from Marty Peretz at the New Republic telling me that I should read this or that article in the magazine (and subscribe, of course.) It's always amusing how "he" chooses to frame certain arguments. Here's one that cracks me up:

The first of these is a long piece (with a dejected Napoleon on the cover) by Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, the prize-winning book of two years ago, relating France's xenophobia towards America to its historic arrogance about France as the perfect model for everyone, including its Arab and African immigrants.

Digby: In Our Dreams

Yesterday on Matthews there was this little exchange between Tweety, Chuck Todd and Deborah Orrin:

ORIN: ... I think we are close to starting to pull troops out. Talk to people at the White House and the Pentagon, they feel the Iraqis really are stepping up. And some of them, if you want to be conspiracy theorists, think this was all a Democratic game so that when we announce after the elections in December, that they are a success and when we start pulling troops out, Democrats can say see, we are responsible. We did it.

Dissing Fitzgerald & Prosecutorial Politics

By Robert Parry

November 24, 2005

When special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the outing of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame is debated on TV, one of Fitzgerald’s fiercest critics has been Joseph diGenova, who is described as a former independent counsel himself.

At times diGenova has been remarkably strident, sounding more like an angry defense attorney for George W. Bush’s White House than someone who could have plausibly worn the title “independent” when he investigated an alleged abuse of government power by George H.W. Bush’s administration a dozen years ago. [More on that below.]

Juan Cole - 11/24/05

Dulaim Chief's Murder Splits Iraqis

Guerrillas detonated another bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 2 and wounding another 2.

The murder of Khadim Sarhid al-Hamaiyim, leader of a branch of the Dulaim tribe, on the outskirts of Baghdad, has been interpreted in different ways by Iraq's ethnic groups. The hard line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars pointed out that the attackers had been wearing Iraqi army uniforms, and said that the attack was the work of fanatical Shiites who had infiltrated the Iraqi military. A police major named Falah al-Muhammadawi replied that uniforms are easily bought in today's Iraq, and even official army vehicles are often stolen. Al-Muhammadawi was trying to convince us that the Iraqi army was not behind the killing, but I fear he has only convinced us that the security situation in Baghdad is truly awful.

Juan Cole - 11/25/05

White Phosphorus Round-up

George Monbiot of the Guardian weighs in on the current state of the debate on the US military's use of white phosphorus at Fallujah.

I think he is too categorical about many ambiguous issues. Long-time readers know that I am from a military family, and I want to be very careful about charges made against US troops, especially of behaving in ways they knew to have been illegal. Monbiot argues for the latter. I don't think he has proved his case.

In Miss., Time Now Stands Still

Recovery Is Stagnant In Post-Katrina Towns

By Michael Powell

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 25, 2005; Page A01

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. -- Three months ago, Katrina all but scoured this old beach town of 8,000 off the face of the Earth. To walk its streets today is to see acres of wreckage almost as untouched as the day the hurricane passed.

No new houses are framed out. No lots cleared. There is just devastation and a lingering stench and a tent city in which hundreds of residents huddle against the first chill of winter and wonder where they'll find the money to rebuild their lives.

One in Six Women Suffers From Domestic Violence: WHO

By REUTERS

Published: November 24, 2005

Filed at 8:50 a.m. ET

GENEVA/LONDON (Reuters) - One in six women worldwide suffers domestic violence -- some battered during pregnancy -- yet many remain silent about the assaults, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.

In its first global study, the WHO also said physically- or sexually-abused women were more likely to suffer longer-term health problems, including distress and suicide attempts.

Rise in Gases Unmatched by a History in Ancient Ice

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: November 25, 2005

Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today.

The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos

By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.

Rep. Pombo steers public lands to private hands

Bill Berkowitz
November 23, 2005

DeLay clone sponsors legislation putting America's public lands up for grabs

Rep. Richard Pombo, a California Republican who represents the state's 11th District and who is the chair of the House Resources Committee is making a name for himself these days by offering up a series controversial bills relating to land use in America's national parks and other critical environmental issues. In a recent iteration of the House budget bill (Deficit Reduction Act of 2005), Pombo authored a proposal that would have opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling (that provision was removed from the budget reconciliation bill but it could still be re-inserted). Pombo also made headlines when he recently proposed privatizing 15 of America's national parks. He later claimed to be only joking!

Now it appears that Pombo is no longer joking. The former real estate salesman now in his seventh term in Congress came up with another doozy of a proposal that was tucked deep into the same 187-page House budget bill in a section called "Miscellaneous Amendments Related to Mining."

Torture claims 'forced US to cut terror charges'

· Dirty bomb evidence came from al-Qaida leaders
· CIA worried case would expose prison network

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian

The Bush administration decided not to charge Jose Padilla with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city because the evidence against him was extracted using torture on members of al-Qaida, it was claimed yesterday.

Mr Padilla, a US citizen who had been held for more than three years as an "enemy combatant" in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad. After his arrest in 2002 the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert was also accused by the administration of planning to blow up apartment blocks in New York using natural gas.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 11/24/05

Charges of violating the Official Secrets Act have been brought against a British civil servant accused of leaking a memo purportedly describing a threat made by President Bush against Al-Jazeera headquarters.

Linda Heard poses a hypothetical question: had Al-Jazeera headquarters been bombed, "Would the U.S. have confessed to its role in the aftermath or would the mythical Abu Musab Al Zarqawi have been set up to take the fall?"

A Washington Post editorial asks, "If an American pilot is captured in the Middle East, then beaten, held naked in a cold cell and subjected to simulated drowning, will Mr. Goss say that he has not been tortured?"

A federal jury in Virginia rejected a U.S. citizen's claim that he confessed under torture in Saudi Arabia and convicted him of "joining al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush."

Charges brought against Jose Padilla, after President Bush ordered him "released from detention by the secretary of defense and transferred to the control of the attorney general," make no mention of the "dirty bomb" plot of which he was originally accused.

There Will Be No Patrick Fitzgerald for the 9/11 Attacks

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by James Ridgeway

Members of the 9/11 Commission made news this week by including serious criticisms of the Bush Administration in their latest "progress report." At a public forum on November 14, former 9/11 Commissioners chastised the White House for failing to implement recommendations aimed at preventing another terrorist attack, made some 16 months ago in the 9/11 Commission Report. They also pointed to new problems -- including the mistreatment of detainees, which they say might aid in terrorist recruitment. “The flames of extremism undoubtedly burn more brightly when we are the ones who deliver the gasoline,” said Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste.

Such criticisms may seem relatively tame, but they sound quite tough-minded compared with the careful, timid statements made by the 9/11 Commission in its July 2004 report. Were the Commissioners, along with most of the media, waiting for the President’s approval ratings to drop before jumping on the anti-Bush bandwagon? Or are they only able to show some moxie when they no longer have any real power to influence the political life of the nation?

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders

Bush's Spin Machine

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted November 22, 2005.

According to this administration's lame attempt at intimidation, noting that the Iraq war is a disaster is the same as spitting on our soldiers.

We've had two nifty opportunities to study the Bush spin machine at work here lately, both offering such a neat schematic of how it's done that one is tempted to applaud. Or something.

The first was the counter-offensive launched by President Bush on Veterans Day against those who have the nerve (!) to notice that the administration manipulated intelligence in order to justify an unnecessary war.

Cheney's Trouble with Truth

By Robert Scheer, AlterNet. Posted November 23, 2005.

What Dick is, and has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers.

You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

In speeches Friday and Monday, the vice president, who has long insisted that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were allies, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, we would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad, and that the Iraqi insurgency is in its "last throes," again evidenced his trademark inability to speak the truth.

Can You Spell Withdrawal without O-I-L?

By James Howard Kunstler, kunstler.com. Posted November 24, 2005.

It would be nice if we could have a coherent public discussion about staying or going in Iraq, and you can't do that without talking about the oil of the Middle East.

Neither Jack Murtha, the congressman who set the cable news networks afire this weekend, or Frank Rich, the lead dog on the New York Times Sunday op-ed page, mentioned the word "oil" once. I only mention it myself because it would be nice if we could have a coherent public discussion about staying or going in Iraq, and you can't do that without talking about the oil of the Middle East.

But it does illustrate how deep the national denial runs and how foggy the debate gets. Even poor George W. Bush seems to think we're in Iraq in order to turn the people into Jeffersonian democrats, so the only issue for his opponents is whether that is possible or not.

Arthur Silber: The Padilla Indictment: Stalling for Time, Avoiding the Issue...and the Fight Goes On

Several weeks ago, I wrote an essay titled, Three Strikes and We're Out. My focus in that piece was not on the Bush administration's foreign policy, but on the effects that policy continues to have on liberty and individual rights here at home. I wrote: "As profoundly disastrous as the Bush foreign policy has been and continues to be, what will determine the future of our country is whether the basic constitutional principles which have maintained the United States for over 200 years continue to be maintained domestically."

Sifu Tweety for The Poor Man: They can call it Neo Orleans

I was reminded by this post at Right Hand Thief that I’d decided it was time for me to do some constructive New Orleans blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as convinced as ever that no engineering solution is likely to keep the city safe (as Mayor Nagin says, “There is no science to build a Category 5 levee protection now”), but obviously, it’s going to be rebuilt anyways. Given that, I have to say that some portions of the army of urban planners descending on the city are doing some very good work:

Firing off a collection of bold ideas, the group also proposed creating a public development corporation that would buy and sell property to speed the city’s redevelopment; establishing an oversight board with broad powers over the city’s finances; and engineering a secondary flood-control network inside the city that would use natural ridges, levees, water reservoirs, and green space to stop widespread flooding.

David Neiwert: Unhinged: Unhonest

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

1: The Unbearable Lightness of Malkin

2: Eye of the Unhinged

3: The Unhinged Right

4: Hunting Liberals

5: Extremists? What Extremists?

Conclusion: Keeping Our Cools

The Poor Man made a noteworthy point the other day about an interesting facet of the conservative movement: "how even the tiniest example of wingnuttery is a near-perfect replica of the whole edifice, substantively consonant in every particular but scale."

Michelle Malkin's work, particularly her new book, Unhinged, is like that: a kind of embodiment in miniature, as it were, of the conservative movement as a whole. Just as Malkin ignores the clear presence of extremism within the ranks of conservatism and instead projects those tendencies onto her enemies, so too does the conservative movement as a whole.

King of Zembla: No-Account Counts

On the off chance that recent developments have left you feeling overconfident about the '06 midterm elections, check out the news from North Carolina --

Voting machine companies should have to abide by a new law requiring they turn over information on how their systems work, a Winston-Salem woman says in a court filing.

Joyce McCloy, founder of the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting, wants a Wake County Superior Court judge to limit or remove an order that relieves companies from having to meet all the law's disclosure requirements.

-- and Ohio --

Although delayed results are not the worst problem that can happen in an election, the first experiment with electronic voting machines clearly points to a need for the Lucas County Board of Elections to isolate the problems that occurred Nov. 8 and make it clear to voters what went right and what went wrong. The problems cannot simply be waved off until the next general election in 2006.

The board has come up with several differing explanations for delays in vote-counting, the latest one being that there was not enough space in a secure room to process election returns. There was room for only six tabulation machines, as against, for example, Montgomery County, where Dayton is located, which used 13 machines to count a somewhat smaller number of votes.

A more serious problem is that there is no provision for connecting the precinct voting devices via modem to the board of elections, where staff members had to upload 1,665 individual memory cards that were hand-delivered downtown. [The editors of the otherwise admirable Toledo Blade are inexplicably advocating a change that would make Ohio's Diebold machines more, not less, vulnerable to hacking --S.]

-- and California (via our revered colleagues Avedon Carol and Dave Johnson):

Apparently the Republican Secretary of State in California may be stealthily REVERSING the previous Democratic Secretary of State's decertification of Diebold paperless voting machines! Raw Story and Brad Blog have stories about this. Here's a summary: Democratic Secretary of State Shelley had decertified Diebold machines as dangerous to democracy. (He also sought to prosecute the company for lying to state officials.) Then, after the recall and Schwarzenegger's election Shelley was forced out of office on contrived charges, with a Republican appointed in his place. Now there is funny business going on and it looks like Diebold may be coming back. I tracked down a new document [Note - PDF] outlining requirements for voting machines, and the previous requirement that they produce paper ballot backups is NOT on the list.

Toto's Nemisis Bending Over Backward to Save Own Political Ass

Oops. When you attribute a quote on the floor of the House to a fellow Republican, apparently you'd better get it in writing first.

Danny Bubp, a freshman state representative who is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, told The Enquirer that he never mentioned Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., by name when talking with Schmidt, and he would never call a fellow Marine a coward....

"There was no discussion of him personally being a coward or about any person being a coward," Bubp said....

Hmmm, maybe Mean Jean should choose her political fall guys a little more carefully in the future.

CIA Veterans Condemn Torture

By Jason Vest, Government Executive
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, Nov. 19, 2005

Among the fundamental conceits of the architects of the Bush administration's war on terrorism is that heavy-handed interrogation is useful, even necessary, to get any information that will protect the American people, and that such interrogation techniques are devoid of negative consequences in dealing with real or suspected terrorists. One way this notion has played out in practice is the CIA's use of "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects overseas are kidnapped and delivered to third-party countries for interrogation -- which, not uncharacteristically, includes some measure of torture, and sometimes fatal torture.

Digby: Send In The Lobster

War-room spinners also hope to highlight whatever good news there is to be found in Iraq, and which, they say, doesn't make its way into the American media. They recently dispatched one of their best operatives, Steve Schmidt (no relation to the Ohio congresswoman), to Baghdad to look for ways generate positive press. His answer: build better relations with the reporters. But they may be preoccupied these days by the need to dodge terrorist attacks on their hotels.

I wonder why they haven't gone back to the tried and true.

Digby: The War Marketeer

A lot of people are linking to this fascinating Rolling Stone article on John Rendon, king of wartime propaganda. I've written extensively about the Office of Global Communications and the WHIG, but I didn't know that Rendon was involved. I should have. It's exactly his kind of gig.

I became aware of Rendon after Gulf War I, when it was revealed that he had had a big hand in "shaping the debate." But it shouldn't be assumed that he was the only PR firm involved in such things. Many of you will remember that none other PR giant Hill and Knowlton orchestrated one of the most amazing examples of prowar flackery ever documented:

... nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W.R. Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, got the best reaction. So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and going into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.

Digby: Genie In A Bottle

Nobody is going to ask me who should be hired at The New York Times to replace Judith Miller, but if they did I would say that they should hire the best and most unsung national security reporter in the country --- Jason Vest. If you are unfamiliar with his work, do yourself a favor and have Mr Google look him up. He's a real reporter, not a stenographer, but he also has an impressive interest and grasp of the history of various groups, cabals and individuals who make up the current national security establishment and the Bush administration. And lo and behold, he actually writes about them. This is a huge key to understanding these otherwise inexplicable people and their motives. I highly recommend that you read his pieces wherever they come up and I will continue to bring them to your attention.

Digby: Stuck In Their Groove

It's amazing how the media gets stuck on certain narratives and how hard it is for them to change. On Hardball today, Matthews had on Charlie Cook and Stewart Rothenberg, both of whom are non-partisan, clear thinking political analysts. Chris began by bringing up the president's low poll ratings, the trouble the Republicans are having on the war, the bad press and all of it. Within minutes, as always happens on these shows, they were dissecting the deep, intractable problems .... with the Democrats.

Digby: Holding Their Feet To The Fire

Bob Woodward seems to think that he's been tough on the Bush administration:

WOODWARD: But you know, I would never compromise. You know, if I may, I brought some headlines in "The Washington Post." These -- do these make any sense?

KING: Hold them up a little.

WOODWARD: Yes, OK.

KING: So we can read them.

WOODWARD: This is -- yes, OK. This is November 2002 before -- as the Bush -- word came out about the war in Afghanistan. "A Struggle for the President's Heart and Mind." Struggle. It explains in great detail how Powell had different positions, there was a mass tension and difficulties in the war council. Let's see. This is the second part of that series. "Doubts and Debates Before Victory over the Taliban." Doubts and debate. Now, anyone who knows anything about the Bush administration, they'd rather keep doubts and debate off stage. I bring them on stage in this book.

Daily Kos: MD-Sen: GOP chances fade away

by kos

Rasmussen. 11/16/2005. MoE 4.5% (11/18 results)

Cardin (D) 49 (45)
Steele (R) 41 (40)

Mfume (D) 44 (40)
Steele (R) 45 (47)

Weird. Turns out making up a story about Oreo cookies that turns you into a whiny victim who is hated by black people doesn't garner any sympathy votes.

The Daily Howler - 11/22/05

ALL TOO HUMAN! Gigot cherry-picked a Fitzgerald quote. Ditto Biden with Cheney: // link // print // previous // next //

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2005

ALL TOO HUMAN: Did the Bush Admin cherry-pick intel? You can bet your sweet bippy they did—and they did a lot more. But then, the human mind is deeply inclined to cherry-pick—to produce those facts which support one’s own case, and not a single fact more. On Sunday, for example, Paul Gigot cherry-picked a quote from Patrick Fitzgerald while guesting on Fox News Sunday: CHRIS WALLACE (11/20/05): Paul, what does this [the Bob Woodward matter] mean for the investigation in general, and what does it mean for the indictment in particular of Scooter Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff?

GIGOT: Well, I think it potentially helps Scooter Libby. I mean, here's a quote from Fitzgerald he made at his press conference about the Libby indictment. He said Libby was “at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter.”

2006 -- Bush's Accountability Year

By Robert Parry

November 21, 2005

Finally, the prospects are brightening that George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies might face some accountability for their endless deceptions, their high-handed governance of the United States and their repeated trampling of international law.

As unlikely as it might have seemed just a few months ago, the mid-term congressional elections in 2006 are shaping up as not only a pivotal political moment but a referendum on what Bush has done over the previous five years.

The Enduring JFK Mystery

By Lisa Pease
November 22, 2005

Editor’s Note: The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the darkest moments in modern American history. But one of its most pernicious legacies has been the notion that average Americans must be shielded from what really happens on matters of national security, even something as important as the murder of a president.

Since the Warren Commission probe of the JFK assassination, other investigations of serious government wrongdoing, one after another, have been truncated – CIA abuses, Iran-Contra, Contra drug trafficking, Iraq-gate, misuse of Iraq War intelligence, Abu Ghraib – supposedly because the full stories would undermine morale or otherwise not be “good for the country.”

Juan Cole - 11/22/05

Iraqis ask for Withdrawal Timetable

AP reports on the results of the Cairo national reconciliation conference, attended by the major Iraqi political factions, including Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hayat gives the orginal Arabic wording of some articles of the agreement. One provision says, "We demand the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable, and the establishment of a national and immediate program for rebuilding the armed forces through drills, preparation and being armed, on a sound basis that will allow it to guard Iraq's borders and to get control of the security situation . . ."

Sharon's Critique of the Authoritarian Likud Party

Ariel Sharon's resignation from the Likud Party is a more forceful critique of that party than any I have offered.

Likudniks are notoriously unable to deal with being criticized, so my simple and accurate characterization of the party as having colonialist and fascistic tendencies has driven its acolytes on this side of the Atlantic into a piranha-like frenzy. Being cultists of a sort, they play all sorts of dishonest political games, such as equating criticism of their party with racism (?), or equating their party with Israel itself and then saying that I called Israel a fascist state because I had so characterized the Likud. (I did not, of course, but then the surrogate American Likud has millions of dollars with which to smear me and an easy in with the major media, whereas I just have this little web site; so their megaphone is rather louder than mine.)

Guest Editorial on Murtha: Achcar & Shalom

"On John Murtha's Position"

by Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom

There is much of which to approve in the recent speech of Rep. John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Iraq. The hawkish Murtha had been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war for some time, but until now his solution had been to call for more troops. On November 17, however, he recognized courageously that U.S. troops "can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME."

EFF sues Diebold and NC Board of Election of behalf of NC Voters

Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws

EFF Goes to Court to Force E-voting Company to Comply With
Strict New North Carolina Law

Raleigh, North Carolina - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is going to court in North Carolina to prevent Diebold Election Systems, Inc. from evading North Carolina law.

In a last-minute filing, e-voting equipment maker Diebold asked a North Carolina court to exempt it from tough new election requirements designed to ensure transparency in the state's elections. Diebold obtained an extraordinarily broad order, allowing it to avoid placing its source code in escrow with the state and identifying programmers who contributed to the code.

Time to Leave

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 21 November 2005

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.

Superpower?

by Jane Smiley

Back in the year 2000, I believed almost without thinking about it that the US was a "superpower", the only "superpower" in the world. Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't, but there was a lot of money around, Americans were pretty prosperous, and most people around the world had a benign view of the US.

We are a country that can no longer pay our bills, no longer wage an effective military action, and no longer protect our citizens from disaster. And it doesn't matter what fiscal responsibility individuals show, what bravery individual soldiers show, or what generosity individual Americans show. As a nation-as a geopolitical entity-we have been stripped of all of our superpowers and many of our powers, and it has been done quickly and efficiently, in the name of blind patriotism, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their neocon advisors. The very powers that these people thought they were going to enjoy exercising have slipped out of their grasp. It's laughable now to remember the name of the campaign against Baghdad, "Shock and Awe". No one in Iraq feels any "shock and awe" toward the US presence there any longer. "Fear and Loathing" is more like it.

Powell and Bremmer and Joint Chiefs rep said we'd leave if the Iraqis wanted it

by John in DC - 11/22/2005 10:34:00 AM

Well, now they want it.

Secretary of State Colin Powell emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after June 30, they would pack up without protest, but emphasized he doubted such a request would be made....

His statement, which was echoed by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, and the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, came one day after conflicting testimony by administration officials on the issue.

Iraq and the 'L' Word

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, November 22, 2005; Page A29

Along with such creations as American POWs still being held in Vietnam and the Bill Clinton drug-smuggling operation at a remote Arkansas air strip, the unhinged right wing has now invented the myth that Democratic members of Congress have called President Bush "a liar" about Iraq. An extensive computer search by myself and a Post researcher can come up with no such accusation. That's prudent. After all, it's not clear if Bush lied about Iraq or was merely the "useful idiot" of those who did.

Parents' Effect on Achievement Shaky

Other Factors May Play Greater Role, Study Says

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; Page A10

Maria Allen, a parent who has been critical of her Fairfax County school system, recently called the principals of three Richmond elementary schools to find out why -- and how -- it is that their low-income black students were doing better than similar students in her school system.

Their answer was telling, she said.

"The bottom line is this," Allen said one principal told her. "We don't have an expectation of the home. We don't blame the home. We can't teach parents. We don't worry about whose responsibility it should be. We just consider it ours."

Iraqi Leaders Call for Pullout Timetable

By SALAH NASRAWI

The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; 8:38 AM

CAIRO, Egypt -- Reaching out to the Sunni Arab community, Iraqi leaders called for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces and said Iraq's opposition had a "legitimate right" of resistance.

The communique _ finalized by Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders Monday _ condemned terrorism but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.

What Murtha Meant

We're leaving Iraq anyway. At least he's got a plan.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 5:50 PM ET

Everyone in Washington seems to agree that Rep. John Murtha's proposal for getting out of Iraq is a bad idea. But everyone is wrong in describing just what it is that he proposes.

Take a close look at Murtha's now-infamous statement of Nov. 17. You will not find the words "withdrawal," "pullout," or their myriad synonyms. Instead, he calls for a "redeployment" of U.S. troops—which may seem like a euphemism for withdrawal but in fact is very different. Toward the end of his statement, Murtha lays out the elements of what he calls his "plan":

To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.

Iraq's oil: The spoils of war

By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
Published: 22 November 2005

Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year. A report produced by American and British pressure groups warns Iraq will be caught in an "old colonial trap" if it allows foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves. The report is certain to reawaken fears that the real purpose of the 2003 war on Iraq was to ensure its oil came under Western control.

The Iraqi government has announced plans to seek foreign investment to exploit its oil reserves after the general election, which will be held next month. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, the third largest in the world.

Storm Forces a Hard Look at Troubled Public Housing

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

Published: November 22, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - For years, cities across the nation have been declaring old-style public housing complexes a social experiment gone awry, emptying the buildings and, with a good-riddance press of the plunger, blowing them up.

In New Orleans, for better or worse, nature seems to have done some of the job.

Two Ejected From Bush Event in Denver File Federal Suit

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: November 22, 2005

DENVER, Nov. 21 - Two people who say they were ejected from a taxpayer-financed appearance by President Bush in March because of an antiwar bumper sticker filed a federal lawsuit here on Monday, charging that event staff members and federal employees broke the law.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, could transform what had been a public-relations thorn for the Bush administration into a legal thicket. A.C.L.U. lawyers said they would pursue in particular the question of who gave orders to workers at the event, held March 21 at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver.

Former DeLay Aide Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy

By PHILIP SHENON

Published: November 22, 2005

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - Michael Scanlon, a former business partner of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a former top aide to Representative Tom DeLay, pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress and other public officials.

Mr. Scanlon also agreed to repay $19.6 million to his former Indian tribe lobbying clients.

European Investigator Seeks CIA Details

Tuesday November 22, 2005 1:01 PM

By JAN SLIVA

Associated Press Writer

PARIS (AP) - The head of a European probe into alleged secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe is investigating 31 suspected flights that landed in Europe and is trying to acquire past satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland, according to a report obtained by The Associated Press Tuesday.

Dick Marty, a Swiss senator leading the investigation for the Council of Europe, presented a first report on his work at a closed meeting of the human rights watchdog's legal affairs committee in Paris.

Blair talked Bush out of bombing al-Jazeera: report

Tue Nov 22, 2:39 AM ET

US President George W. Bush planned to bomb pan-Arab television broadcaster al-Jazeera, British newspaper the Daily Mirror said, citing a Downing Street memo marked "Top Secret".

The five-page transcript of a conversation between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveals that Blair talked Bush out of launching a military strike on the station, unnamed sources told the daily which is against the war in Iraq.

The transcript of the pair's talks during Blair's April 16, 2004 visit to Washington allegedly shows Bush wanted to attack the satellite channel's headquarters.

Blair allegedly feared such a strike, in the business district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, a key western ally in the Persian Gulf, would spark revenge attacks.

Wal-Mart Puts 12 Lobbyists On Pay Roll To Defeat Employee Benefits Bill…

With a nation watching, Wal-Mart has ramped up its opposition to a groundbreaking bill that would force the retail giant to offer better benefits, a step that could be replicated in state houses across the nation next year.

A dozen lobbyists, nine of them hired in the past six weeks, now represent Wal-Mart in the state capital, two months before lawmakers will consider whether to override Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s veto of the bill.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 11/21/05

'Widespread Violence' kills "at least 155 Iraqis and 7 foreign soldiers" since Friday morning, and "heads were blown off" when a U.S. patrol opened fire on a family traveling in a crowded minivan.

After the 'White House plays chicken with a war hero,' Paul Krugman says, "Mr. Murtha is right": it's 'Time to Leave.'

Frank Rich argues that "Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party ... Election Day 2006" -- which should not obscure "the other war we are losing."

Once merely messianic, Blair is now unhinged

Michael Portillo

Identity cards will not make us safer. That is the view of Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, speaking in Birmingham last week. That opinion must have earned her the prime minister’s contempt. He likes to cite support from the security services or top policemen each time he devises a proposal to limit our historic liberties.

The sniffy response from No 10 was that Rimington was a private individual who was entitled to her opinion. It was a stupid way to describe one who had spent her career defeating terrorism. Her intervention further weakened the government’s flimsy case. Its ID cards bill got a further mauling in the Lords.

Attack of the Cronies

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted November 18, 2005.

While Dems slug it out over the failures of pre-war intelligence, our president tootles merrily along, hiring his clueless friends.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Today's fun challenge is "Spot the Next Brownie." In this fab game for the whole family, review a list of Bush administration cronies in office and see if you can pick the next Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown, another disaster waiting for a hurricane to happen.

Scope out the Bird Flu Czar from Amtrak. Stewart Simonson is now in charge of "the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies," according to his government biography. He is also in charge of ensuring the country has adequate vaccines and antiviral meds to combat an avian flu epidemic. This would be peachy-keen if Simonson had any experience in public health, bioterrorism, epidemics or even management. Unfortunately, he's a political lawyer. As he recently told a congressional subcommittee, "We're learning as we go."

Come Home Again, America

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted November 21, 2005.

George McGovern, subject of a new documentary, discusses the bright and shining moments of his 1972 presidential campaign and how it changed politics forever.

In 1972 at the age of 23, I packed all my belongings in a used van and drove to Mexico. In the high desert mountains of San Miguel Allende, I created an idyllic life for myself, paying $30 a month to live with other would-be artists and yoga folk, buying fresh produce every day in the mercado. But I still read the International Time Magazine and the International Tribune, and I began to learn about a little-known senator from South Dakota, who was exceeding expectations and actually winning Democratic primaries.

Hate Crimes in Prison

By David Holthouse, Intelligence Report. Posted November 21, 2005.

Aryan Brotherhood members make up less than one percent of the nation's prison inmate population, yet the white power gang is responsible for 18% of all prison murders. Why?

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Within the Ronald Reagan Federal Building and United States Courthouse is a courtroom called the "Nuremberg room," for its resemblance to the famous chamber in which 22 leaders of the Third Reich were tried in 1945 and 1946 for crimes against humanity.

Both halls of justice have three-tiered docks where multiple high-profile defendants are shackled to anchors in the floor by chains hidden from view, behind tables and podiums. Like the docks in Germany's Palace of Justice 60 years ago, the docks in Santa Ana this year have filled with self-avowed Nazis, Aryan warriors, and followers of Hitler.