King of Zembla: Two Wronged Women

Interesting.--Dictynna

Mike Meija of Online Journal draws on two recent articles by Christopher Deliso (here and here) to connect a couple of our favorite dots: fired FBI translator Sibel Edmonds and outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. The gag order against Ms. Edmonds was recently upheld by the Supreme Court, so she cannot directly answer the question Meija poses at the top of the story: "Was Plame's role at the CIA as a weapons of mass destruction expert critical, as old CIA hands like Larry Johnson contend, or was she just a paper pusher, as the pro-Bush crowd proclaims?" But the information she does disclose is quite tantalizing:

According to Deliso's two sources, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, the outing of Valerie Plame may have severely damaged a CIA operation to monitor a nuclear black market faciliated by the shadowy but well-connected Washington lobby group, the American Turkish Council (ATC). (Those familiar with the Sibel Edmonds case will know the ATC is the very same organization that the former FBI translator heard on wiretaps in connection with various alleged illegal activities, some connected to 9/11.) From Edmonds, Deliso obtained the following admission: "Plame's undercover job involved the organizations [the FBI had been investigating], the ATC (American-Turkish Council) and the ATA (American-Turkish Association) . . . the Brewster Jennings network was very active in Turkey and with the Turkish community in the U.S. during the late 1990s, 2000, and 2001 . . . in places like Chicago, Boston, and Paterson, N.J."

Driftglass: Something Elected this Way Comes

No one but the stone-hearted or the compassionately impaired could look at millions of people turning out to stand on line in some of the most dangerous real estate in the world to vote and not be inspired. It is inspiring, as is the routine bravery of soldiers and the sacrifice of thier families. No two ways about it, and no one I know wants the people of Iraq to be the continued heirs to violence and tyranny and exploitation. They have earned a little peace and relief from the pervasive dread.

But that is not a gift we can give them. If we could slip it under the door and run away, great, but we uniquely cannot be the bearer of this endowment.

Digby: Who's Wanking Now

In case anyone still wonder why the cheese eating surrender monkeys and the ungrateful bastards we liberated from Hitler didn't join in our war party, here's the reason:

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

Digby: Father Knows Best

Aside from being a bad son (like his hero, Junior Bush) and publicly disrespecting his much more accomplished father, Chris Wallace is an idiot. Via Americablog:

Asked about DNC chair Howard Dean's recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Wallace told Carr:

"We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it's Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can't win the war."

I guess he's unaware of Tokyo Rose's story (which is typical because he's a rightwing moron)

Digby: Push Back

Is it really true that it's ethical for one journalist to reveal a colleague's confidential source to a third source?

I'm in desperate need of an emergency panel on blogger ethics because I'm confused. David Corn says that Viveca Novak screwed up by not telling her editors that Luskin was using a conversation she'd never mentioned to anyone as a get out of jail card for Karl Rove. That sounds right to me. She really should have told her editors. This was a big story and had they known about Luskin's reaction perhaps they would have pursued the story differently and gotten the truth out to the public.

Digby: Closure

I have turned off all the cable news stations for the rest of the day. Watching the macabre death watch of Stanley Williams gives me the same sick feeling in my gut that seeing those videos of hostages in Iraq does. The endless slide show of pictures of the guy while a little clock in the corner counts down the hours until he will be killed is beyond my ken. I just don't see how this helps anything. Life without parole sounds like civilized justice to me. This state sanctioned cold-blooded execution stuff is something else entirely.

Digby: Novakula Rises

Via Kos, I see that Bob Novak is reporting that Republicans are begging Katherine Harris to drop out of the Florida senate race. Wasn't that the issue that old Bob and James Carville were bantering about when Novak lost it on the air?

ED HENRY: katherine harris went onto the house of representatives. now she wants to move over to the united states senate. today she got the news that the speaker of the florida house won't challenge her for the republican nomination. she is blaming unnamed newspapers for tarnishing her image by doctoring her makeup with photo shop. that computer program. bob, have you been investigating this story?

Digby: Bada Bing

The reporter editor who raises questions about the appropriateness of Dan Froomkin's column is John Harris --- the same guy featured in this interview:

Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?

John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour -- sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations -- the Washington Post included -- were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the '96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn't seem to lead anyplace all that great.But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.

Now who exactly, was asking all those "questions" do you suppose?

Digby: Spinning Fitz

Last night it looked as though Jim VandeHei had broken the Plame case wide open when he said on Hardball that Stephen Hadley had told Rove about Plame. Today, the WaPo is backtracking, saying that VandeHei meant Libby, not Rove. VandeHei wrote last October:

White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove's account said yesterday.

Digby: Deep Throat

Something has gone terribly wrong at the Washington Post. And I'm not just talking about pauvre tinkerbell.

Get a load of Cohen:

To read George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate" is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz -- made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.

Digby: Ask Junior

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

Digby: Run For Your Lives!

I don't know why he's never told us this before, but the president just said that the terrorists are trying to expell the US from the middle east so that they can establish an Islamic Empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia! And then they want to use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks against America!

Digby: Losing His Woody

ReddHedd at Firedoglake noticed something in the Novak story this morning that I missed. It says:

Woodward, a Washington Post editor, recently disclosed that he, too, had been told by an administration figure about Plame's secret identity -- probably, he said, by the same source who told Novak.

ReddHedd explains:

This passage was a little mystical for me, so I confirmed with Rob Christenson that, indeed, that was what was intended, and was told that "Novak made the comment in his speech -- referring to earlier remarks by Woodward."

I haven't heard that before either. If that's true, we can assume that the prosecutor had already spoken with Woodward's source since it's clear that Novak named his sources. And if that's so then it's clear that this source (who Novak described as "not a partisan gunslinger") was not forthcoming with the prosecutor.

Digby: Tom Delay and Charlie Manson

Matthews mentioned the fact on his show today that Nixon got in trouble for saying that Charles Manson was guilty while he was still on trial. It's true. It was a big brouhaha because it used to be considered very inappropriate for a president to weigh in on the guilt or innocence of a defendent because of the possibility he might taint the Jury Pool.

As most of you know, Rick Perlstein is currently writing a book about Nixon's America. He tipped me to this fascinating little blast from the past. As he was exhorting the nation to respect the judicial system, here's what Nixon said:

I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case when I was in Los Angeles, front page every day in the papers. It usually got a couple of minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.

Digby: Ain't She Sweet

by digby

Here's a beautiful woman, brimming with ambition, warmth and joie de vivre:

Irreverent humanitarian Anna Benson is not just another pretty face; she is a woman to be seen and heard. With countless magazine layouts hitting the stands, she balances her time between photo shoots, interviews, and charitable endeavors.

[...]

She's as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Here are some of her humanitarian writings:

I honestly have to tell you…I hate your fucking guts. Forget about how un-American you are, how politically retarded you are, or how fat you look while slobbering your political garbage all over everyone, mainly, I despise you for the fact that you make money off of influencing the young minds of America to be Bush-haters.

You are a pariah to our nation…a fat kid that got beat up by the jocks at school, and this has formulated your hatred of America. If I didn’t know any better, I would thing George W. himself went to school with you and kicked the shit out of your pie-hole everyday for being such a candy-ass. If you are so passionate about politics, use some of your blood-making money to make it a better place instead of making movies that only benefit your fat-ass fanny-pack. No one likes to see Hollywood try to engage our minds with their ridiculous and one-sided political rants during award ceremonies. Your “movies” are just a façade for your own political agenda, which, by the way, is fucking warped.

[...]

Perhaps someone should ask for her thoughts on how the coarsening of the culture affects children the next time she testifies before congress. She's an expert.

Digby: Making Rove Happy

by digby

Murray Waas has a very interesting article up today that reveals that the Plame smear happened concurrently with another smear job against Francis Townsend. It's pretty clear that the cabal around Cheney has been operating as a shadow government within the White house agitating for its own policies from the beginning. (And Scooter Libby is a real piece 'o work.)

The senior staff in the Office of the Vice President adamantly opposed Townsend's appointment. The staff included two of Cheney's closest aides: Libby, then the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president; and David Addington, who at the time was Cheney's counsel but who has since succeeded Libby as chief of staff.

Digby: If The President Does It It's Not Illegal

by digby

Oh for Gawd's sakes. Tom Brokaw is on Matthews boo-hooing that this NSA story stepped on Junior's wonderful Iraq triumph. He explains that when you are at war you need to do things that are difficult and believes that most people in the country will agree that the administration needed to spy on Americans after 9/11. He agrees with analyst Roger Cressy (who I used to think was sane) that once the "window" of a possible impending attack closed they should have gone up to the hill and sought permission to keep spying on Americans with no judicial oversight. (I haven't heard about this "window" before. Tom and Roger both seem to have a fantasy that the administration would not simply say that the "window" remains open as long as evil exists in the world.)

Juan Cole - 12/17/05

Religious Shiite Coalition Sweeping South;
Allawi's Showing Weak

Al-Zaman [Ar.]/ AFP: 10-11 million of Iraq's 15 million potential voters came out on Thursday, according to al-Zaman. Of Iraqis abroad, 320,000 voted (a relatively small proportion of those eligible).

The Kurdistan Islamic Union is said to have gotten 140,000 votes in three Kurdish cities. This party's workers had been being physically attacked in Dohuk before the elections by activists from Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, but they seem likely to get some seats. Presumably Kurdish Islamists will tend to vote with the Sunni Arab religious coalition, and both of them may find some common ground with the fundamentalist Shiite United Iraqi Alliance.

Bottle of Blog: Bubble Boy 43: The Final, Most Disturbing Horror

His character was forged by hard-won struggles with drink and more shadowy demons, and he has been redeemed by faith. Bush sometimes compares himself to other presidents, usually in terms of how not to do the job.

Hahahahaha! Your liberal media! Biased and cruel, isn't it? Bush's "character", which I'm at a loss to recognize at all, was forged, like steel, with "hard-won struggles" with drink and "more shadowy demons".

First, I'll say, alcoholism is no joke. It's not something you shrug off like coffee or donuts, because they're bad for you. It's a tough addiction to beat, and it kills thousands of Americans every year. And it ruins tens of thousands of lives, every year.

Bottle of Blog: Total Hosers

Yesterday in a speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa, US Ambassador David Wilkins warned Canadians to tone down their criticism of the United States in their current national political campaigns. Canadian elections are scheduled for January 23rd…

It was hardly the most caustic speech you've ever heard. But it's the essence of diplomatic etiquette that foreign ambassadors simply don't poke their noses into their host country's election campaigns, especially not to tell them not to criticize his country, except in cases where the host country amounts to a dependency or de facto protectorate.

<>

[...]

How on earth do 35% of Americans delude themselves into thinking these totally incompetent Bush clowns are going to help bring about an American friendly democracy in the Mid-East when they can't even bring about an American friendly democracy in fucking Canada???

Avedon Carol: Bloody blinkered

"I haven't read Off Center yet," says Atrios, "but these posts by Yglesias and Chait pretty much cover the weird world of Matt Bai."

All this is about Bai's review of a book he has chosen not to understand, because it talks about an environment he doesn't understand, either. Chait:

There is a strong conventional wisdom running through political punditry which holds that the system does what the people want. If one political party is winning, then it must be because they reflect majority opinion, and/or the other party is just screwing up.

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written a book called Off-Center that powerfully challenges this conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson show that public opinion has not moved rightward over the last two decades, and that the Republican Party has had to go to extraordinary lengths to hide its unpopular domestic agenda from the public.

We've discussed on many occasions the fact that around 60%-80% of the American public supports the liberal position on most major issues. We've also observed that Republicans pretty much lie about their own programs and pretend to be liberal on issues that matter, derailing substantive discussion of their differences with liberalism by talking about trivia.

The End of Democracy in Ohio?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Free Press. Posted December 12, 2005.

New legislation passed by Ohio Republicans may just institutionalize those famous "voting irregularities."

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP, any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal U.S. Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.

House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse and ineffectual.

Onward Christian Soldiers: How minority faiths are treated in the US Military

Why can't some people understand the concept of religious freedom?--Dictynna

By Lorie Johnson

Sun Dec 04, 2005 at 01:32:03 PM EST

I am a USAF brat and a USAF veteran. I was also one of a group of military Pagans and Wiccans who dared to poke our heads out of the broom closet and ask for fair treatment. That was also how I learned about how the hard-core evangelicals in the military treated minority faiths... the hard way.

My encounters with the hard-core Christians started early in my career- while I was in tech school. I was in the earliest stages of my own esoteric Path, studying Hermetic and Gnostic philosophy. Church and standard religion held no interest to me, but I was more indifferent to it than hostile. To be fair, some of the best people I knew during my Air Force career were chaplains, and one of my favorite hangouts was the Fishbowl at Keesler. I spend many a fun hour watching movies and chatting with friends there.

But I was constantly- and politely- turning away the religious prosetylizers. When I was in civilian clothes, I would often get sharply questioned about my choice of jewelry- a simple, small, and unobtrusive Ankh pendant. "That is a Satanic sign", one righteous fellow told me after cornering me in a base laundromat. "You will go to hell if you don't renounce Satan and surrender to Christ." I ignored him, just like I ignored the tracts slid under my door, the sometimes not-so-subtle invitations to go to 'parties' which turned out to be altar calls, and the insular cliques of fellow students who were bussed to evangelical churches off base.

Atrios: Lib Crit

I composed and deleted about 5 different replies to Foer's strangely self-contradictory article, but I think Anonymous Liberal (depsite responding to something else) gets at the issue:

In other words, we don't think the media is actively pursuing conservative interests; we think that the media, through its rigid adherence to certain journalistic conventions, has unintentionally contributed to the cheapening of political discourse. Put another way, unscrupulous partisans have learned to game the system. They've realized that the painfully formulaic structure of today's mainstream political reporting allows even the most dishonest and misleading talking points to gain currency.

Cafferty's Rant: Who Cares, Just Do It

Jack Cafferty (video):

Who cares about whether the Patriot Act gets renewed? Want to abuse our civil liberties? Just do it.

Who cares about the Geneva Conventions. Want to torture prisoners? Just do it.

Who cares about rules concerning the identity of CIA agents. Want to reveal the name of a covert operative? Just do it.

Americablog: Bush never even tried to get Congress to give him the authority to spy on Americans

by John in DC - 12/17/2005 09:55:00 AM

In three years he NEVER EVEN TRIED to get Congress to change the law that he now claims was so onerous he needed to break it. From the NYT:

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation....

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

McCain Defeats Cheney

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 16, 2005; 3:36 PM

President Bush's cave-in yesterday on Sen. John McCain's torture ban was embarrassing for him -- but it was a total debacle for Vice President Cheney.

Cheney had publicly taken the lead in trying to scuttle McCain's proposal. When that proved both unseemly and ineffective, Cheney was equally publicly pulled off the case.

'Intelligent Design' Deja Vu

By Douglas Baynton

Saturday, December 17, 2005; Page A23

School boards across the country are facing pressure to teach "intelligent design" in science classes, but what would such courses look like? Thankfully, we need not tax our imaginations. All we have to do is look inside some 19th-century textbooks.

The one science course routinely taught in elementary schools back then was geography. Textbooks such as James Monteith's "Physical and Intermediate Geography" (1866), Arnold Guyot's "Physical Geography" (1873) and John Brocklesby's "Elements of Physical Geography" (1868) were compendiums of knowledge intended to teach children a little of everything about Earth and its inhabitants.

Bush Picks Controversial Nominees for FEC

By Thomas B. Edsall and Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 17, 2005; Page A09

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

In addition, Bush proposed a second term for commissioner David M. Mason and nominated Steven T. Walther, a Nevada lawyer with close ties to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Two WWII Vets Spearhead Anti - Iraq Campaign

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:49 a.m. ET

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. (AP) -- In 1945, Jay Wenk was a shy Brooklyn boy full of patriotism fed by Life magazine and World War II movies. He signed up and was shipped off at age 18 to fight in Europe.

''I remember riding the first time up to the front and hearing the guns and saying, 'This is exciting!'''

Six decades later, Wenk now fights to stop young people from doing what he did a lifetime ago. He and another World War II era veteran, Joan Keefe, have been arrested twice for distributing anti-enlistment fliers outside a military recruiting center in a mall.

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.

A bit off topic...--Dictynna

By CARL ZIMMER

I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?

A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution.

His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.

Australia's Dangerous Fantasy

By EVA SALLIS

Adelaide, Australia

LAST Sunday on Cronulla Beach, a suburb of Sydney, thousands of drunken white youths attacked anyone they believed was of Arab descent. Inspired by reports that Lebanese-Australians had assaulted two white lifeguards, text messages calling for a Lebanese "bashing day" appeared on thousands of cellphones. Some of Sunday's assailants wore T-shirts that proclaimed, "We grew here; you flew here," or, "Ethnic cleansing unit."

For many, the Cronulla Beach incident did not come as a surprise. Rather, it was the bubbling up of an undercurrent that is increasingly evident in Australian life.

Newcomers, especially those who form linguistic or ethnically distinct groups, always have a hard time in Australia at first. But Australia is a country that has been created by many streams of immigrants and has come out the better for it. Greeks and Italians are among the largest non-Anglo groups and are fully integrated. Melbourne has the world's third largest Greek community. Vietnamese immigrants experienced racism and hostility when they first arrived in the late 70's and early 80's, but time, and the entry of increasing numbers of Vietnamese-Australians into public life, have eroded that prejudice.

Political Science

December 18, 2005

'The Republican War on Science,' by Chris Mooney

Review by JOHN HORGAN

Last spring, a magazine asked me to look into a whistleblower case involving a United States Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named Andy Eller. Eller, a veteran of 18 years with the service, was fired after he publicly charged it with failing to protect the Florida panther from voracious development. One of the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act, the panther haunts southwest Florida's forests, which builders are transforming into gated golf communities. After several weeks of interviews, I wrote an article that called the service's treatment of Eller "shameful" - and emblematic of the Bush administration's treatment of scientists who interfere with its probusiness agenda.

My editor complained that the piece was too "one-sided"; I needed to show more sympathy to Eller's superiors in the Wildlife Service and to the Bush administration. I knew what the editor meant: the story I had written could be dismissed as just another anti-Bush diatribe; it would be more persuasive if it appeared more balanced. On the other hand, the reality was one-sided, to a startling degree. An ardent conservationist, Eller had dreamed of working for the Wildlife Service since his youth; he collected first editions of environmental classics like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." The officials who fired him based their denial that the panther is threatened in part on data provided by a former state wildlife scientist who had since become a consultant for developers seeking to bulldoze panther habitat. The officials were clearly acting in the spirit of their overseer, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a property-rights advocate who has questioned the constitutionality of aspects of the Endangered Species Act.

Bush Gesture to McCain: Less than Meets the Eye

By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 16 December 2005

In deciding not to follow through on his threat to veto Sen. John McCain’s amendment against torture, Bush actually surrendered very little. Torture is still in the eyes of the beholders in the defense and intelligence communities.

The unseemly spectacle of Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush openly opposing the McCain amendment banning torture for a torturous five months has done irreparable harm to America’s standing abroad. The damage will not be attenuated by the president’s reluctant acquiescence to the McCain amendment yesterday. The most that can be said is that the harm would have been still greater if McCain caved in to Cheney’s incredibly obtuse opposition, or if Bush had to veto must-pass defense legislation in order to defeat the amendment.

Iraqi Vote Draws Big Turnout of Sunnis

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Jonathan Finer
The Washington Post

Friday 16 December 2005

Anti-US sentiment is motivator for many.

Baghdad - More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs belatedly joined in force to build a new Iraq, walking to polls by the hundreds of thousands Thursday for national elections that drew a robust turnout from across the country's sectarian and ethnic divides.

The Sunni outpouring was a long hoped-for victory for the Bush administration, concluding a U.S.-planned timeline aimed at establishing a government that will hold together after U.S. troops withdraw. An overwhelming number of Sunnis made clear, however, that they were drawn to the polls by their dislike of the U.S. occupation and Iraq's U.S.-supported, Shiite-led transitional government.

Robert Scheer: The Wonderful World of Outsourced Torture

Posted on Dec. 14, 2005

By Robert Scheer

The more we learn of the Bush administration’s pervasive outsourcing of torture, the more sensible it seems as a policy. Evidently, our intelligence people, tainted as they are by the squeamish morality of Western civilization, are just not fully up to the task of getting prisoners to tell us what the administration wants us to hear.

Sure, they tried water boarding and extreme stress positions in Guantanamo, but would U.S. interrogators be willing to pull out fingernails or use electric shock, as was inflicted upon at least a dozen of the 625 Baghdad inmates released Sunday from yet another secret, inhuman jail run by our Iraqi surrogates? Not guaranteed, and anyway, some conscious-stricken soldier likely would release photos, as one did at Abu Ghraib, and let the world in on our use of such special methods.

Elections Aren't Enough

Seeing Iraqis vote is wonderful, but you can't rush democracy.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005, at 5:28 PM ET

Whichever way today's Iraqi elections go, the very fact of their existence is irresistibly inspiring. Watching these long-oppressed people exercising their franchise as citizens, hearing them express their hopes for a better, freer life—who could fail to be moved or to wish them well?

Yet as we await the results (a process that could take weeks, followed by the months it will likely take to form a government), it's an apt time to step back and consider the broader prospects for Iraqi democracy. Unfortunately, they don't look so good.

The Other Asian Miracle

The intimidating secrets of raising high-achievers.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005, at 1:33 PM ET

In 2001, a how-to book called Harvard Girl Liu Yiting surged to the top of the Chinese best-seller list. Written by two parents from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, it laid out the rigorous "family education" methods they credited with getting their daughter into America's best known Ivy League university—the current pinnacle of academic success in a country now thinking globally. According to press accounts of the manual, Yiting's parents launched the regimen with a cognitively stimulating "verbal barrage" when she was 15 days old. On top of intensive home studying, Yiting went on to endure toughening feats like swimming long distances and holding ice-cubes in her bare hands. By 2003, Harvard Girl had sold about 3 million copies. It also spawned more than a dozen imitators peddling techniques for raising successful Chinese applicants to Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University. (Yale, it seems, might need to work on its marketing.)

Argentina to Pay Entire IMF Debt 4 Years After Default (Update)

Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Argentina said it will pay back its entire $9.8 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund, severing 22-year-old ties with the lender that the government blames for its 2001 debt default.

President Nestor Kirchner, who at rallies and speeches this year has called IMF officials ``rude'' and demanding, said at a press conference in Buenos Aires the government will make the payment after three years of economic growth bolstered foreign currency reserves. The economy grew 9.2 percent in the third quarter on a surge in public spending, the government said today.

Kirchner, 55, vowed to take the decision on several occasions this year to ensure the administration isn't dependent on policies endorsed by the Washington-based lender, including spending caps and higher utility rates. The announcement comes two days after neighboring Brazil said it would repay its $15.5 billion IMF debt.

Cops Dig Anti-Game Crusader

By John Lasker

No definitive link has ever been discovered showing violent video games cause violent behavior. Even so, thousands of law-enforcement officers on our streets are being told otherwise.

Meet Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, one of law enforcement's most in-demand speakers and trainers.

Grossman, an ex-Army Ranger and West Point psychology professor, has been on the road 300 days a year since 2001, speaking mostly to law-enforcement departments and academies. He's booked solid through late 2006.

One of Grossman's key messages is that "violent media and video games are the largest single threat to modern civilization."

Rove, Hadley email 'at crux' of CIA leak investigation

Jason Leopold

In late January 2004, the grand jury investigating whether top officials in the Bush administration knowingly leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's name and covert CIA status to reporters subpoenaed the White House for records of administration contacts with more than two-dozen journalists going back two years, to determine if any officials talked about Plame with the media.

According to people close to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's probe, one such document was not turned over to the grand jury by the Feb. 6, 2004 deadline: an email White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had sent in July 2003 to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. In the email, Rove told Hadley that he spoke to Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the administration's prewar Iraq intelligence.

The US is now rediscovering the pitfalls of aspirational imperialism

Bush's desire to implant western-style democracy in Iraq is profoundly reminiscent of past British imperial practice

Linda Colley
Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian

The war in Iraq has had at least one redeeming feature. Along with events in Afghanistan, it has revived serious debate into some of the most important and long-standing issues in history and politics. Type the four words "Iraq", "Afghanistan", "America" and "empire" into Google, for instance, and you get around 3.5 million hits. There are the usual mad bloggers and propaganda rants but there is also a wealth of discussion on offer that expands every day. Is the US an empire? If so, what sort of empire? Is imperialism good or bad, or sometimes both? And, of course: why has it proved so hard for America, the most formidable military and economic power the world has seen, to effect its will? The passion behind this on-screen questioning is evident. So, very often, is a limited understanding of what imperial ventures have usually involved.

Spying & the Public's Right to Know

By Robert Parry
December 17, 2005

The New York Times has disclosed that George W. Bush secretly waived rules restricting electronic surveillance inside the United States, allowing spying on hundreds of Americans that normally would require a court warrant. But almost as stunning was the Times admission that it had held the story for a year.

Indeed, it appears the information about Bush’s secret spy order was leaked before Election 2004, but was kept from the American people because the Bush administration warned Times executives that the story’s publication might endanger national security.

German abduction case gets murkier - did U.S. pay?

Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:12 AM ET

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent

BERLIN (Reuters) - German politicians expressed surprise on Thursday at reported U.S. comments that Washington had apologized and paid money to a German citizen it abducted to Afghanistan and held for months as a terrorist suspect.

The case of Khaled el-Masri, who is suing the Central Intelligence Agency for wrongful imprisonment and torture, took a new twist with comments from Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble in parliament on Wednesday.

Schaeuble shed new light on a conversation on May 31, 2004, between his predecessor Otto Schily and then-U.S. ambassador Daniel Coats, at which Coats first told the German government that one of its citizens had been detained.

Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: December 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 ­- Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Bush Now Says He Doesn’t Think DeLay is Innocent…

Posted on December 16, 2005 at 8:37 PM.

President Bush said Friday his statement that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was innocent of criminal charges in Texas was meant to signal confidence in the justice system and not to make a pronouncement about the individual case.

The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers

By A Global Exchange Report . Posted December 12, 2005.

On issues like war crimes, torture, toxic dumping and stifling freedom of speech, corporations like Coca Cola, Chevron and Philip Morris are way out ahead of the rest.

Corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times, but it is increasingly difficult to hold them to account. Economic globalization and the rise of transnational corporate power have created a favorable climate for corporate human rights abusers, which are governed principally by the codes of supply and demand and show genuine loyalty only to their stockholders.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 12/16/05

Reporting the existence of a 2002 presidential order authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and others inside the U.S. without court-approved warrants, the New York Times also reveals that it sat on the story for a year after the White House asked that it not be published.

"This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration," said the director of the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), who also told the Washington Post that the secret order "may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity."

The ACLU has objected to a Patriot Act provision that according to one interpretation, "makes holding an un-authorized sign" at an event "designated by the Secret Service as a 'national special security event' a felony punishable by a year imprisonment."

Media reports find President Bush having "caved in" after being "humiliated and repudiated" on Sen. John McCain's torture ban amendment, but one "big, fat exception" could still allow 'Torture by the Back Door.'

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying

Post-9/11 Order Bypassed Special Court

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A01

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

Paul Krugman: Drugs, Devices and Doctors

The New York Times
December 16, 2005

Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, is under siege. And one side effect of that siege is a public relations crisis for the Cleveland Clinic, a celebrated hospital and health care organization.

But the real story is bigger than either the company or the clinic. It's the story of how growing conflicts of interest may be distorting both medical research and health care in general.

Senate Rejects Extension of Patriot Act

By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 12 minutes ago

In a stinging defeat for President Bush, Senate Democrats blocked passage Friday of a new Patriot Act to combat terrorism at home, depicting the measure as a threat to the constitutional liberties of innocent Americans.

Republicans spurned calls for a short-term measure to prevent the year-end expiration of law enforcement powers first enacted in the anxious days after Sept. 11, 2001. "The president will not sign such an extension," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and lawmakers on each side of the issue blamed the other for congressional gridlock on the issue.

The Senate voted 52-47 to advance a House-passed bill to a final vote, eight short of the 60 needed to overcome the filibuster backed by nearly all Senate Democrats and a handful of the 45 Republicans.

In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2005.

Moyers addresses the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy and its bullying and manipulation of PBS.

Note: This is the prepared text of the address delivered on December 9, 2005, by Bill Moyers for the 20th anniversary of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, in Washington D.C. Collaborating with him on this speech was Michael Winship, a long-time colleague and journalistic collaborator.

Thank you for inviting me to take part in this anniversary celebration of The National Security Archive. Your organization has become indispensable to journalists, scholars, and any other citizen who believes the USA belongs to the people and not to the government.

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. And no one in this town has done more to fight for open democracy or done more to see that the Freedom of Information Act fulfills its promise than the Archive. The fight goes back a long way. You'll find a fine account of it in Herbert Foerstel's book, "Freedom of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Application of the Freedom of Information Act" (Greenwood Press, 1999). Foerstel tells us that although every other 18th century democratic constitution includes the public's right to information, there were two exceptions: Sweden and the United States.

Fear Of The Pill

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney
December 15, 2005

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat, represents the 14th district in New York City. As the former co-chair of the Women’s Caucus, Maloney is a nationally recognized advocate for women’s and family issues, with special emphasis on funding for women’s health needs, reproductive freedom, and international family planning.

In the face of an alarming movement across the country to prevent women from getting birth control, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has been repeatedly asked at press briefings if the president is opposed to contraception. In response, McClellan has been evasive, ambiguous and unable to give a straight answer.

And to think, this question has nothing to do with Karl Rove.

America's Gulag Problem

Aziz Huq
December 15, 2005

Aziz Huq heads the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Everybody but Dick Cheney knows it: America has a Guantánamo problem. While Vice President Dick Cheney continues to insist that Guantánamo’s detainees are “the worst of a very bad lot,” the rest of the world sees the Cuban prison as a symbol of hubris and a rallying cry for Al Qaeda. Calling the camp “an anomaly that has to be dealt with,” even staunch administration ally Tony Blair has joined the worldwide chorus pressing the Bush administration to solve Guantánamo.

But Congress is about to pass a bill that cuts off the only real route out of the Guantánamo mess: A path involving the meaningful review of the factual basis for detention decisions in an independent federal court. An amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, first introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham, now threatens to constrain tightly federal courts’ historic habeas corpus jurisdiction on behalf of prisoners detained at Guantánamo. And the administration is adding language that would not only give those who commit abuse immunity in court, but would also allow detainees to be locked up based on evidence extracted by torture—a first ever in American law.

Iraq's Tipping Point

Robert Dreyfuss
December 15, 2005

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

It’s election day in Iraq. If October’s constitutional balloting is any precedent, we will not know the Iraqi government’s final tally for a few weeks.

Of course, that won’t stop President Bush from declaring the elections a victory for democracy. Yet such a statement does democracy a major disservice, for democracy is much more than an election. Democracy can only be the outgrowth of an earnest national consensus—a consensus that Bush, for some unknown reason, has done everything possible to avoid building.

Don't Whig Out

Sean Wilentz responds to Fred Siegel.
Compiled by Kevin Arnovitz
Updated Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005, at 12:21 PM ET

That's An Overstatement: Sean Wilentz is flattered by the review of his new book in Slate, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln — a work Fred Siegel calls "impressive" — but the historian takes issue with Siegel's interpretation of an article Wilentz penned in The New York Times Magazine on the parallels between today's Republican Party and the Whig Party of old:

I was delighted to read the review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Fred Siegel, a historian I greatly admire. Yet I'm afraid that he has misapprehended my book as a brief on behalf of the modern Democratic Party. He bases his misreading not on the book itself but on an article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which pointed out some of the similarities between the forgotten Whig Party and today's Republican Party. Siegel says that the article flatly equates the Whigs and the Bush Republicans, and that this somehow betrays an esoteric polemical agenda behind my book. Actually, the article stated that "there are significant differences between the Whigs and today's conservatives." I pointed out some important points of similarity between the past or the present, but did not, as Siegel surmises, construct "a tidy lineage" or "suggest there are historical plumb lines" that place all virtue on the side of one political party. Nor does my book claim, even cryptically, that only good things were contained in the Jacksonian Democratic Party, and only bad things were Whig.

U.S. consumer prices post biggest drop since 1949

Last Updated Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:59:27 EST
CBC News

A record plunge in the price of gasoline in the United States in November pulled consumer prices to their biggest drop in over 50 years, the U.S. government said Thursday.

Last month's drop of 0.6 per cent in the Consumer Price Index was the largest on record since the 0.9 per cent retreat back in July 1949, the U.S. Labour Department said.

Philip Morris Wins Reversal of $10.1 Bln Damage Award (Update6)

Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA doesn't have to pay a $10.1 billion damage award to smokers of ``light'' cigarettes who accused the company of misleading them about health risks, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled.

Shares rose $4.45 to $78.18 or 6 percent at 10:49 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

The Springfield, Illinois-based court reversed a decision by a lower court judge who said Philip Morris ``intended to deceive consumers'' into believing its Marlboro Lights and Cambridge Lights were safer than regular brands. The court found that Illinois law didn't permit the suit because the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had authorized cigarette makers to characterize their products as ``light'' or ``low tar.''

Iraqi Officials Deny Forged Ballots Seized at Border

By Alisha Ryu
Baghdad
14 December 2005

Iraq's interior minister on Wednesday denied published reports that a tanker truck filled with forged ballot papers was seized a day earlier near Iraq's border with Iran. Sectarian tension is increasing before Thursday's all-important parliamentary elections in Iraq.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr says his ministry received no reports of a tanker being seized by Iraqi border police in the town of Badra, east of Baghdad, after it crossed over from Iran.

The New York Times newspaper reported the seized tanker contained several thousand partly completed ballots. The newspaper said the Iranian driver of the tanker told authorities that at least three other tankers, loaded with forged ballots, had recently entered Iraq from Iran at different border crossings.

Jury scheduled to meet canceled, MSNBC reports

Jason Leopold

Late Tuesday evening, RAW STORY received word from two attorneys close to the CIA leak case that Patrick Fitzgerald intended to meet with the grand jury Wednesday morning to present the recently obtained sworn testimony from Robert Luskin, Karl Rove’s attorney, and Time magazine reporter Viveca Novak.

At 10 p.m. EST RAW STORY reported that the grand jury was going to meet. On Wednesday morning, our reporters followed up on Tuesday evening’s information and phoned Randall Samborn, Fitzgerald’s spokesman. He said he could not confirm or deny that the grand jury would meet.

Eighteen House Democrats meet Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld to discuss Iraq

They scare me when they do this.--Dictynna

RAW STORY

As part of his two-week effort to regain credibility on the war in Iraq, President Bush and senior members of his Cabinet met privately with 18 moderate House Democrats on Wednesday in order to gauge their concerns and once again make the case for the war, ROLL CALL reports Thursday. Excerpts:

#

Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the Democrats to the White House for the hour-long session. The meeting was held just one day before the Iraqi national elections.

Publicly, Democrats characterized the meeting as a positive give-and-take session. Privately, however, some worried that the White House may be trying to provide itself political cover.

BBV: Leon County, FL to Dump Diebold After Undetectable Hack Reverses Test Election!

Blogged by Brad on 12/14/2005 @ 9:36am PT...

Results Completely Flipped Despite 800 Documented Officials Told by Diebold That It Couldn't be Done!
Election Supervisor Requests Funds to Replace Diebold in County, Says 'We will never use Diebold in an election again'

The bad news keeps rolling in for Diebold. But that is hopefully good news for democracy and America! And it doesn't get any plainer than this stunning report from election...

The bad news keeps rolling in for Diebold. But that is hopefully good news for democracy and America! And it doesn't get any plainer than this stunning report from election watchdogs at BlackBoxVoting.org

Even as the beleaguered American Voting Machine company smarts from yesterday's filing of a securities fraud class action suit a test election was carried out on Diebold voting machinery in Leon County, Florida. Diebold's security measures failed miserably and were easily defeated by a hack performed by a computer security professional on a Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine and Central Tabulator.

Congress Cuts Research, Education Spending

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press WriterWed Dec 14, 9:26 PM ET

Congressional Republicans made progress on twin tracks Wednesday toward their end-of-year budget goals, passing a bill freezing or cutting back spending on medical research and education and nearing agreement on cuts to the Medicaid health care program for the poor.

The first measure, a $602 billion bill funding a wide variety of health, education and labor programs, passed the House on a 215-213 vote. It would cut federal aid to education for the first time in a decade, and spread about $1.4 billion in cuts across the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

The separate budget bill is a cornerstone of the Republican agenda in Congress, and the House and Senate continued to struggle to find a way to advance a Senate plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

Enemies of the state? Police fail even to question men held as a terror threat

Suspected of plotting terror, a group of men have been held for four years but never charged. Now, in their first testimonies, they reveal the authorities have not even questioned them since their arrests

By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 15 December 2005

Four men deprived of their liberty for four years on suspicion of being international terrorists disclose today that they have not once been questioned by police or security services since being arrested.

The four, who were among 16 suspects detained without trial under post-11 September terror legislation, later overturned by the law lords, give harrowing accounts of the treatment they have suffered. All are now under virtual house arrest. Although three face deportation, The Independent has learnt that there is no prospect of the men ever being questioned over the offences they are alleged to have committed.

President Says DeLay Is Not Guilty of Money Laundering

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 15, 2005; Page A07

President Bush said yesterday he is confident that former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is innocent of money-laundering charges, as he offered strong support for several top Republicans who have been battered by investigations or by rumors of fading clout inside the White House.

In an interview with Fox News, Bush said he hopes DeLay will be cleared of charges that he illegally steered corporate money into campaigns for the Texas legislature and will reclaim his powerful leadership position in Congress.

Is a Terrorist More Likely to Kill You with a Book or a .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle?

Is a Terrorist More Likely to Kill You with a Book or a .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle? The Answer to that Question Tells You a Lot About Why the [Un]Patriot Act is a Soviet-Style Power Grab and Has More to Do with Ensuring Long-term Republican Rule than Protecting Us.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Have you ever been threatened or killed with a book? Do you know anyone who has?

Well, apparently the Bush Administration believes books are so threatening it is rolling out its thuggish lobbying effort to renew the [Un]Patriot Act that will, among other violations of our Constitutional rights, continue to allow the FBI to force libraries to disclose what books we checked out. And the Republican House went along on Wednesday with the Stalinist interest of the Busheviks in ferreting out our book reading habits.

But while we, like you, have never felt at risk when around people with books, we have felt fearful when around people with guns, especially the kind of firearms that can shoot down planes landing or taking off -- or blow up gas storage tanks.

'High turnout' in Iraqi election

Iraqis have voted in large numbers for their first full-term government since the US-led invasion in 2003.

Voting was extended by an hour in some areas because of the high turnout, Iraq's election commission said.

Sunni Arabs, who boycotted the last election in January, appear to have participated in large numbers, even in insurgent strongholds.

Mental health of children most harmed before divorce

The most harm to a child's mental health takes place in the years before parents split up, according to a University of Alberta study that suggests staying together for the sake of the kids is not always the right choice.

"Perhaps we should pay more attention to what happens to kids in the period leading up to parental divorce rather than directing all our efforts to helping children after the event occurs," said Dr. Lisa Strohschein, from the U of A's Department of Sociology. "For example, levels of child antisocial behaviour actually drop following parental divorce for kids living in highly dysfunctional families." Her work is published in the current edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran

By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: December 14, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 - Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.

AP: More Blacks Live With Pollution

By DAVID PACE, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 55 minutes ago

An Associated Press analysis of a little-known government research project shows that black Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

"Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately," said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

With help from government scientists, AP mapped the risk scores for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America's most unhealthy air.

Hong Kong Phooey

Mark Engler
December 14, 2005

Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be reached via the web site http://www.democracyuprising.com. Research assistance provided by Kate Griffiths.

Although much is at stake at the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Hong Kong this week, the success of the talks will largely hinge upon one issue: the willingness of the U.S., Japan and the European Union to live up to their own "free trade" rhetoric and to substantially cut their agricultural subsidies. By providing nearly $1 billion dollars a day in subsidies for their own farmers, the world's wealthiest countries—which regularly preach the virtues of open markets for poorer nations—are guilty of the rankest hypocrisy.

Be that as it may, a key question remains for critics of corporate globalization based both in the first world and in the global South: Is market access really the answer to poverty?

Torture for Dummies

Exploding the "ticking bomb" argument.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005, at 2:24 PM ET

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

EPA Would Ease Pollution Reporting Rules

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press WriterWed Dec 14, 3:36 AM ET

If the Bush administration has its way, some factories won't have to report all the pollution spewed from their smokestacks, making it harder for government scientists to calculate the health risks of the air Americans breathe.

The Environmental Protection Agency, responding to an AP analysis that found broad inequities in the racial and economic status of those who breathe the nation's most unhealthy air, says total annual emissions of 188 regulated air toxins have declined 36 percent in the past 15 years.

But the EPA wants to ease some of the Clean Air Act regulations that have contributed to those results and proposes to exempt some companies from having to tell the government about what it considers to be small releases of toxic pollutants. The EPA also plans to ask Congress for permission to require the accounting every other year instead of annually.

Democrats trying to avoid filibuster of Patriot Act

RAW STORY

With House passage of the USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization conference report expected as early as today, Senate Democrats are mapping out a delicate strategy to block one of President Bush’s top legislative priorities while hoping to avoid the stigma of filibustering homeland security measures, ROLL CALL reports Wednesday... Excerpts:

#

A handful of Senate Republicans are already planning to oppose the report over civil liberties concerns, even as leading Democrats are pushing the Senate to put off debate on the bill until next year, while stopping short of calling for a filibuster.

Fitzgerald briefs grand jury Wednesday

Jason Leopold

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will present additional evidence to a grand jury Wednesday morning in the CIA leak case that could result in an indictment being handed up against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, sources close to the investigation told RAW STORY.

When asked Wednesday what the prosecutor was briefing the grand jury about, Randall Samborn, Fitzgerald's spokesman, said he had no comment and "can't confirm or deny" the prosecutor was meeting with the grand jury.

Bush friend linked to top job in Russian oil industry

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Wednesday December 14, 2005
The Guardian

A former cabinet minister and close personal friend of George Bush may be appointed head of Russia's leading state oil company, it was reported yesterday.

Donald Evans, who was until early this year US commerce secretary, has been offered the position of head of the board of directors of Rosneft by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the respected business daily, Kommersant, reported yesterday.

Will Rove be Indicted?

As rumors fly, here’s what’s known at this point.

There have been rumors flying around Washington in the last few days that Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, might soon be indicted in the CIA leak investigation. At least for now, the rumors appear to be based on someone hearing that someone else had heard something, or that someone had gotten a sense that something was about to happen and told someone else. Are there any facts to back up such gossip and guessing? No one seems to know.

But it is true that there is growing nervousness among people who support Rove's side in the case. They know that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in addition to presenting some new evidence to a new federal grand jury, has also re-presented previously-gathered evidence to that grand jury. To most observers, that suggests Fitzgerald could be planning to indict someone.

US trade plunges further into red

The gap between US exports and imports has surged unexpectedly, as the US economy has sucked in oil.

In October, the trade deficit was a record $68.9bn (£38.9bn), up 4.4% from the month before, the Commerce Department said.

Although the price of oil fell during October, the volume of oil imported soared 9.3%, with industrial goods also entering the US at record levels.

Economists warned it could signal slower growth.

Most had forecast the deficit would shrink, to about $63bn.

Bush takes on Iraqi war critics

US President George W Bush has accepted that the decision to invade Iraq was based on faulty intelligence, but said it was still the right choice.

On the eve of Iraq's parliamentary election, he made a robust defence of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"Saddam was a threat, and the American people and the world are safer because he is no longer in power," he said.

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit

Updated: 7:51 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2005

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

CREW Sues Dept. of State Over Katrina Records

State Refuses to Hand Over Katrina-Relates Docs to Ethics Org

Washington, DC – The US Department of State has refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for Katrina-related documents from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

On September 7, 2005, CREW sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of State, asking for records and communications regarding the federal government’s preparedness and response to hurricane Katrina.

Those Secret Torture-Prisons: A Modest Proposal

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
December 13, 2005

I am always open to innovative ways of raising money for cash-strapped governments, as long as it doesn't cost me anything extra. Many states, for example, sponsor lotteries; nobody is forced to buy in, but millions of citizens purchase tickets that help underwrite our schools and road-repairs.

In that light, I have a modest proposal for the Bush Administration: Auction off torture rights.

Republicans attack 'weak' Democrats

E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

12.13.05 - WASHINGTON — After this week's elections in Iraq, will our national debate be about what the United States should do to salvage the best outcome it can from a war policy that has been riddled with errors and miscalculations? Or will we mostly discuss how politicians should position themselves on the war?

Here's a bet on the triumph of spin. Politicians, especially Democrats, will be discouraged from saying what they really believe about Iraq for fear of offending “swing voters.” Slogans about “victory” and “defeatism” will be thrown around promiscuously.

Ecosystem changes a threat to human health: WHO

Fri Dec 9, 2005 10:29 AM GMT

BANGKOK (Reuters) - The rise of deadly new diseases such as SARS and bird flu could be linked to the destruction of the environment, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

"Human health is strongly linked to the health of ecosystems, which meet many of our most critical needs," Maria Neira, director of WHO's Department of Protection of the Human Environment told a news conference at the launch of a new report.

Population growth and economic development were leading to rapid changes in global ecosystems and this was affecting human health, the report said.

ACLU pushes for release of prison, torture documents

RAW STORY

The American Civil Liberties Union has appealed a federal court's decision to allow the CIA to withhold documents allegedly signed by President Bush, authorizing the establishment of secret CIA prisons overseas and detailing what the administration would consider appropriate treatment of prisoners. To date, the CIA itself has refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such documents.

Time: Rove's Lawyer Told of Conversation

By PETE YOST, Associated Press WriterMon Dec 12, 3:53 AM ET

During much of 2004, Karl Rove's lawyer was on notice that his client, a senior aide to President Bush, might have disclosed Valerie Plame's CIA status to a Time magazine reporter.

It wasn't until Time's Matt Cooper was under intense pressure from investigators to reveal his source that Rove, Bush's top political adviser, corrected his grand jury testimony, telling Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald of the conversation he said he'd forgotten.

The timeline of the Rove camp's early knowledge emerged Sunday in a first-person account by Time reporter Viveca Novak.

Novak said she passed along the information to Rove attorney Robert Luskin when he said, in effect, that "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt," Novak wrote. "I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me."

Justices to Hear Workers' Wage Case

Monday December 12, 2005 4:16 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear an appeal by a Georgia floor-covering company sued by current and former employees who allege the firm hired hundreds of illegal immigrants to suppress worker wages.

The high court will focus on whether a company and its agents, in performing corporate duties, can be considered a racketeering enterprise under civil provisions of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act

The appeal was brought by Mohawk Industries Inc., a Georgia manufacturer of rugs and floor coverings. A trial court judge denied Mohawk's request to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the current and former employees, and the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court.

An extraordinary meeting

For Muslim leaders to admit Islam is in crisis is a bold move, to act on it would be revolutionary, writes Brian Whitaker

Monday December 12, 2005

Leaders of more than 50 Muslim countries met in Saudi Arabia last week for an event billed as "The Third Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference". The title was quite a mouthful and it failed to set the western media alight with excitement, but the event itself was extraordinary in every sense of the word.

Always right, never wrong

Jonathan Chait
December 11, 2005

LAST WEEK, I wrote that conservatives think they have "won the war of ideas" when, in fact, they have simply reduced their ideas to a few simple bromides. There's also another reason why conservatives have such misplaced confidence in the superiority of their beliefs: They refuse to ever question them.

Liberal writer Rick Pearlstein explained this recently when he appeared at a conference on conservatism. "In conservative intellectual discourse, there is no such thing as a bad conservative," he said. "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." So whenever conservative policies crash and burn in the real world, rather than rethink their ideas, conservatives simply redefine the failures as un-conservative.

A whiff of Watergate in the air

By MARTIN DYCKMAN, Times Columnist
Published December 11, 2005

One of the vital strengths of the United States is a Justice Department that prides itself on being above politics. No matter who's in power, the career people there do not check for party labels when they're on the trail of crooks. Neither, for the most part, do the politically appointed district attorneys.

The Randy Cunningham indictment and the bloodhounds baying after Jack Abramoff's congressional courtesans are in keeping with the integrity that prevented the corrupt Spiro Agnew from becoming president at the climax of Watergate.

But it bears remembering what elevated Watergate from a "third-rate burglary" to an impeachable offense: Richard Nixon's attempt to corrupt the Justice Department.

There's a whiff of Watergate in the air.

The new machismo

By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist | December 11, 2005

IT'S MACHO time in America.

When Democrats challenge the Bush administration regarding its policy in Iraq, Republicans challenge their patriotism and toughness.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee released a new Web video. It features a white flag of surrender and this theme: ''Our country is at war. Our soldiers are watching, and our enemies are too. Message to Democrats: Retreat and Defeat is not an option." The video highlights recent critical comments about the Iraq war made by Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

In essence, to the GOP, ''staying the course" is a measure of strength and masculinity, whether or not the course proves to be successful. And some top Democrats buy into the thesis.

''When people feel uncertain, they would rather have someone who's wrong and strong than somebody who is weak and right," Bill Clinton said in a much-quoted speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in December 2002.

A truth-optional approach to dealing with the public

Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist

Thomas Jefferson understood.

He said that if asked to choose between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, "I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Jefferson knew that a free and adversarial press was the people's best defense against the excesses of their government and a fundamental building block of healthy democracy.

Unfortunately, that was 40 presidents ago.

The present president has a decidedly different view of the news me-dia's role. His administration sees the press as a thing to be bought. In fact, while political manipulation of the news is hardly new, Team Bush has a long and singularly sordid record of trying to turn the media into a wholly owned public-relations subsidiary.

Now they're taking their act on the road. And get this: They're doing it under the guise of building democracy. Which is rather like stealing from the collection plate under the guise of giving to the needy.

Australian Mobs Hunt Arabs

[Violent drunken mobs try to put some Arabs on the barbie]

Massive race riots have erupted on the beaches of suburban Sydney, with 5,000 whites hunting down Arabs and savagely beating any they caught.

An ambulance tried to reach five victims and was itself attacked by the berserk throngs.

The drunken mobs of white Australians have been building up to Sunday's incredible display for weeks. White thugs have used cell-phone text messaging to bring hundreds of their followers to Cronulla Beach at a moment's notice to attack Middle Eastern beachgoers.

E-mails calling for attacks on Arabs have made the rounds, too. "Bring your mates and let's show them that this is our beach and they are never welcome," one message said.

Black Contracts

In this Prospect exclusive, a reporter sheds light on the murky world of CIA contracts and the Duke Cunningham investigation.

By Laura Rozen
Web Exclusive: 12.10.05

Print Friendly | Email Article

We know about the hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts that former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, using his position on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, helped steer to individuals who had given him bribes. We also have reported about allegations that he used his position on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to help some of the same individuals who had offered him bribes to secure intelligence-community contracts. And it’s perhaps not surprising that the chair of the House Intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), has said he intends to launch a full-fledged investigation into any possible corruption of the committee.

CIA contracts are not public, and there’s an added veil of secrecy and opaqueness to the “black” contracting world. Cunningham bragged about his ability to help influence the procuring of contracts from this secretive Congressional source in a letter to San Diego contractors, saying he was in a position to influence the awarding of “black” contracts after he was assigned to the House Intelligence committee in 2001. An individual who has been identified in press reports as Co-conspirator One in the Cunningham indictment, San Diego-based defense contractor Brent Wilkes, who has not yet been charged, has more than a dozen companies in his corporate empire. Efforts by journalists to sort out which companies might have received CIA contracts have gotten nowhere -- until now.

Daniel Ellsberg on Exiting Iraq

The man who released the Pentagon Papers talks about the quagmire and why the Bush Administration won’t withdrawal our troops from Iraq.
By Brad Kennedy


Two obstacles stand in the way of the prompt and safe return of U.S. troops from Iraq, according to Daniel Ellsberg. First, a real “mission accomplished” is unlikely any time soon. Second, President Bush doesn’t want their prompt return.

Ellsberg disavows claim to expertise in Mid-Eastern affairs, but without question he has deep experience with wars of insurgency and with embattled American presidents. He incurred the ire of President Richard Nixon by making public the Department of Defense’s secret history of the Vietnam War, commonly known as the Pentagon Papers, which he helped compile. His firsthand knowledge of our Vietnam policy serves as his prism for viewing our involvement in Iraq, and it reveals disturbing parallels.

Obama says Republicans practice "Social Darwinism"

By Barbara ListonSun Dec 11, 2:49 PM ET

Republicans controlling the federal government practice Social Darwinism, a discredited philosophy that in economics and politics calls for survival of the fittest, according to a Democratic U.S. senator.

Sen. Barak Obama of Illinois, a fast-rising Democratic star, told Florida party members that only a philosophy among Republicans of sink or swim explains why some Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans still live in cars while Republicans in Washington prepare next week to enact $70 billion in tax breaks.

"It's called the 'Ownership society' in Washington. This isn't the first time this philosophy has appeared. It used to be called Social Darwinism," Obama said late Saturday at the Democrats meeting at Walt Disney World.

"They have a philosophy they have implemented and that is doing exactly what it was designed to do. They basically don't believe in government. They have a different philosophy that says, 'We're going to dismantle government'," Obama said.

Sunday lunch with... Neil Cavuto

December 11, 2005

BY DEBRA PICKETT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Neil Cavuto, the host of the Fox News business show "Your World with Neil Cavuto," is waiting in the lobby of Catch 35, the Wacker Drive seafood restaurant just down the street from Fox's Chicago broadcast studio, when I arrive. The first thing I notice -- because it's really hard not to -- is the American flag pin in his lapel.

It's not possible, I remind myself, for an inanimate object to be sanctimonious. So I must just be imagining it.

In the past few weeks, Cavuto has been traveling the country to promote his new book Your Money or Your Life (Regan Books, 280 pages, $25.95), a collection of the brief commentaries that end his shows. Cavuto -- who is careful to describe himself as a "host" rather than a "reporter" or even an "anchor" -- has been offering up these editorials since his days at CNBC, where he spent seven years before leaving to join the newly created Fox News Channel in 1996. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the commentaries, which often had sentimental, human interest-y overtones, have taken on a more resolutely political tone.

A Tough Look at Sulzberger, the 'NYT' and the Miller Affair

By E&P Staff

Published: December 11, 2005 8:40 PM ET

NEW YORK In June 2002, media reporter Ken Auletta wrote a lengthy and much-talked-about piece about Howell Raines’ New York Times for The New Yorker, and now this week he does the same for Bill Keller’s New York Times. This time Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gets star billing in a piece called "The Inheritance," with a subhed asking if he can "save the Times--and himself?"

The latest from Auletta, unfortunately for the Times, comes in the wake of the Judith Miller affair and declining stock values.

Spin it as you please -- this is a mess

By Joseph Galloway

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The spinmeisters are having a field day.

President Bush journeyed to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., to declare before a safe audience that he will never cut and run in Iraq. He's staying the course, and that's that.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld chimed in to warn that any withdrawal from Iraq short of victory would lead to radicals taking power throughout the Islamic world. Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to Fort Drum in upstate New York to stand before the usual photo-op backdrop of soldiers in desert uniforms and add Spain to Osama bin Laden's Islamic empire.

Paul Krugman: Big Box Balderdash

The New York Times
December 12, 2005

I think I've just seen the worst economic argument of 2005. Given what the Bush administration tried to put over on us during its unsuccessful sales pitch for Social Security privatization, that's saying a lot.

The argument came in the course of the latest exchange between Wal-Mart and its critics. A union-supported group, Wake Up Wal-Mart, has released a TV ad accusing Wal-Mart of violating religious values, backed by a letter from religious leaders attacking the retail giant for paying low wages and offering poor benefits. The letter declares that "Jesus would not embrace Wal-Mart's values of greed and profits at any cost."

Supreme Court to Review Texas Redistricting

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer 57 minutes ago

The Supreme Court said Monday it would consider the constitutionality of a Texas congressional map engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay that helped Republicans gain seats in Congress.

The 2003 boundaries helped Republicans win 21 of the state's 32 seats in Congress in the last election_ up from 15. They were approved amid a nasty battle between Republican leaders and Democrats and minority groups in Texas.

The contentiousness also reached Washington, where the Justice Department approved the plan although staff lawyers concluded that it diluted minority voting rights. Because of past discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes to ensure they don't undercut minority voting.

Bush Advisor To Reporter: Katrina “Has Fallen So Far Off The Radar Screen, You Can’t Find It”

On September 15, President Bush stood in Jackson Square in New Orleans and made a promise:

And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Here’s Washington Post reporter Mike Allen today on Meet the Press:

I’m going to tell you something to amaze you; it amazed me yesterday. The last time the president was in the hurricane region was October 11, two months ago. The president stood in New Orleans and said it was going to be one of the largest reconstruction efforts in the history of the world. You go to the White house home page, there’s Barney camp, there’s Social Security, there’s Renewing Iraq. Where’s renewing New Orleans? A presidential advisor told me that issue has fallen so far off the radar screen, you can’t find it.