Digby: Epistomolia

I have written a lot about the right's infuriating epistemic relativism over the past few years. It's a difficult concept to discuss. I always liked Josh Marshall's short tag, "up-is-downism," but nothing has seemed truly sufficient to explain this strange amorphous thing until now. Finally, someone with writing chops and serious brain power has definitively observed this phenomenon. Behold, The Editors:

Far away, in the magical country of Epistomolia, there live two peoples. One people, called the Seers, believed that Truth is, that to know Truth requires Knowledge, and Knowledge is gained from observation, and from the application of reason. The Truth is the Truth is pretty much the Truth, the Seers believed, and the only trick was knowing how to see it. These people are, in many ways, much like you and me.

Digby: They Call The Windbag Pariah

Steve Benen wonders if Ann Coulter has finally reached pariah status. I doubt it very seriously. She entertains the media and that is what they like above all. And I suspect she says many things with which they agree --- or , at least, find funny. She appeals to their puerile sense of humor.

This new controversy is just going to help her sell books. Conservatives love it when the alleged liberal media go after one of their flamethrowers. It validates everything they believe in. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Brian Williams' little scold the other night wasn't designed for that very purpose. Has anyone done any research on what interests they might have in common? I'm serious. This "controversy" is simply not believable in light of the kind of things this shrieking harpy has been saying for years.

Digby: Cipher

Bush is on TV right now, going on and on about Al Zarqawi being a criminal mastermind whose raison d'etre was to stop democracy in iraq. Blah, blah, blah.

Does he have any credibility at all these days? I hear this stuff and my first reaction is to say "sez who?" I realize that I'm a member of the partisan angry left and all, but I have to suspect that at 30%, I'm not the only one.

Digby: Privates

Since I blog anonymously, it's pretty obvious that I'm a big fan of privacy. As such, I admit that I'm kind of shocked at how much information people put online about themselves. It's probably a temperamental thing more than anything else, but I just can't fathom why people are so anxious to lay everything out for strangers. (But then I never got why anyone would go on Jerry Springer either.) And I suspect that it's not a very healthy thing in the long run.

Digby: Coming To Jesus

WASHINGTON -- For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.

He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes's presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.

But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.

Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state's history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.

In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn't know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats' phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.

``A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. ``I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."

Raymond stressed that he was making no excuses for his role in the New Hampshire case; he pleaded guilty and told the judge he had done a ``bad thing." But he said he got caught up in an ultra-aggressive atmosphere in which he initially thought the decision to jam the phones ``pushed the envelope" but was legal. He also said he had been reluctant to turn down a prominent official of the RNC, fearing that would cost him future opportunities from an organization that was becoming increasingly ruthless.

``Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business," he said. ``It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities."

My, oh my. It's amazing what happens to people when they run into trouble with the law, isn't it? Talk about your moral clarity.

State slates hearing to limit checks on voting equipment

Brent Kallestad
The Associated Press
Posted June 9 2006, 6:35 PM EDT

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--A proposed rule change that would prohibit counties from testing their voting equipment without state approval will be argued Monday, a measure that could create some discomfort among Florida's independently elected elections supervisors. One of the more outspoken of Florida's 67 supervisors, Leon County's Ion Sancho, conducted a test last year where elections office workers hacked into a Diebold optical-scan voting system in an effort to show that it could be made to produce false results.

White House Briefing: Specter of a Backbone

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, June 8, 2006; 11:24 AM

Infuriated by Vice President Cheney's stealth campaign to subvert his embryonic attempts at oversight into the administration's domestic spying program, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter yesterday did something very rare inside Republican circles: He went public.

In a blistering, three-page letter, Specter shed light on a modus operandi that is normally obscured in secrecy: The way Cheney bends Congress to his will -- and ignores those who dare defy him.

Wake up: the American Dream is over

Even America's richest think they're getting too many tax breaks from a government determined to keep the poor in their place. As poverty in the US grows, Paul Harris wonders what happened to the Land of Opportunity

Thursday June 8, 2006
The Observer

There is a common response to America among foreign writers: the USA is a land of extremes where the best of things are just as easily found as the worst.

This is a cliché. But it is often hard to argue with when surveying America's political and cultural landscape. America has some of the worst urban sprawl in the world and also the most beautiful and well-protected wildernesses. Its politics is awash with lobbyist inspired corruption. Yet passionate political engagement among millions of Americans puts many other countries to shame.

Cursor - 06/09/06

As Sen. Biden expresses hope that Zarqawi's death improves President Bush's approval ratings and "emboldens him to take bolder moves in terms of his policy in Iraq," the pro-war right in its 'last throes' is seen to imply "that our policy of trying to discriminate between civilians and terrorists is too restrictive."<>A report by the Council of Europe, which finds strong circumstantial evidence of "a global spider web" of secret detention centers and transfer points woven by the U.S. with the collusion of several European countries, is said to arouse only "a calculated treatment in the American media."

An amendment to close the "School of the Assassins," is debated in the House, as four South American countries refuse to send their military to this "US army-run Spanish-language military academy" which was the alma mater of at least 11 dictators.

The House 'increases indecency fines tenfold,' and passes "the most extensive telecommunications legislation in a decade" without net neutrality provisions, while the Appropriations subcommittee votes to cut $115 million from public broadcasting.

Media Matters catalogs some of the "numerous media figures and Republican strategists" who came to Ann Coulter's defense after her attack on the 9/11 widows, as NBC, despite concerns about "civility," refuses to rule out giving her a forum in the future.

As Billmon considers the implications of "the massive propaganda firepower being trained on one mild-mannered Middle East specialist with a blog," a conservative advocacy group founded by Lynn Cheney tries to paint the professoriate as "a beehive of swarming left-wing radicals," using the "metaphor of Ward Churchill."

Paul Krugman: The Delay Principle

--The New York Times, June 9, 2006

The federal estate tax had its origins in war. As America moved toward involvement in World War I, Congress - facing a loss of tariff revenue, but also believing that the most privileged members of society should help pay for the nation's military effort - passed the Emergency Revenue Act of 1916, which included a tax on large inheritances.

But today's Congressional leaders have a very different view about wartime priorities. "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes," declared Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, in 2003.

Digby: It's Now or Never

Most of you have probably seen this one by Glenn Greenwald today. It seems that Arlen Specter has introduced a bill that will give give blanket amnesty to the president and his cohorts for the wireless wiretapping:I

The idea that the President's allies in Congress would enact legislation which expressly shields government officials, including the President, from criminal liability for past lawbreaking is so reprehensible that it is difficult to describe. To my knowledge, none of the other proposed bills -- including those from the most loyal Bush followers in the Senate -- contained this protective provision. And without knowing anywhere near as much as I would need to know in order to form a definitive opinion, the legality of this provision seems questionable at best. It's really the equivalent of a pardon, a power which the Constitutional preserves for the President. Can Congress act as a court and simply exonerate citizens from criminal conduct?

I have two thoughts about this.

Daily Kos: Blanket Pardons Proposed for Illegal NSA Spying

by georgia10
Fri Jun 09, 2006 at 08:20:05 AM PDT

Glenn Greenwald explains:

A bill proposed yesterday by Arlen Specter to resolve the NSA scandal -- literally his fifth or sixth proposed bill on this subject in the last few months -- would drag the Congress to a new low of debasement. According to The Washington Post, Specter has introduced a bill "that would give President Bush the option of seeking a warrant from a special court for an electronic surveillance program such as the one being conducted by the National Security Agency." This proposal is the very opposite of everything Specter has saying for the last several months:

Specter's approach modifies his earlier position that the NSA eavesdropping program, which targets international telephone calls and e-mails in which one party is suspected of links to terrorists, must be subject to supervision by the secret court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Michael Kinsley: Secrets and Spies

What we can learn about confidential sources from Wen Ho Lee.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, June 9, 2006, at 5:36 AM ET

Remind me: Who is Wen Ho Lee again? Oh, yeah; he's "an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage." That was the New York Times' seven-word summary in its story last week about the settlement of Lee's privacy suit against the government. This settlement comes seven years after Lee—an American citizen—was arrested, held in solitary confinement for nine months, and subjected to an organized campaign of leaks using private information from his personnel file and painting him as a spy for China and a traitor to his country on a par with Benedict Arnold.

The government never produced any good evidence that Lee was a Communist spy and apparently no longer believes it. To get out of solitary and back to his family, Lee copped a plea to a trivial offense. But no matter how long Wen Ho Lee lives, the headline on his obituary will be "atomic scientist once suspected of espionage." And on the "where there's smoke" principle, people have been left with a vague sense that—who knows?—maybe he was a spy after all. Knowing nothing but what's been published about the case, I plead guilty to a baseless but lingering suspicion myself.

Report: Abramoff Ex-Partner Knew of Slaying

Friday June 9, 2006 4:01 PM

AP Photo NYET803

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - A man who purchased SunCruz Casinos with lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2000 has told authorities he knows who killed the casino's founder the following year, according to a report published Friday.

Adam Kidan told authorities in a 2-hour interview last month that John Gurino, who was later killed by a business partner, shot SunCruz founder Konstantinos ``Gus'' Boulis in 2001, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. The paper did not say how it obtained the taped interview.

Kidan and Abramoff had previously insisted, through their attorneys, that they knew nothing about Boulis' killing. Three other men are charged with murder in the case.

CIA Leak Investigation: What Ashcroft Was Told

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, June 8, 2006

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft continued to oversee the Valerie Plame-CIA leak probe for more than two months in late 2003 after he learned in extensive briefings that FBI agents suspected White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of trying to mislead the FBI to conceal their roles in the leak, according to government records and interviews. Despite these briefings, which took place between October and December 2003, and despite the fact that senior White House aides might become central to the leak case, Ashcroft did not recuse himself from the matter until December 30, when he allowed the appointment of a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to take over the investigation.

House Backs Telecom Bill Favoring Phone Companies

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, June 8 — The House of Representatives approved the most extensive telecommunications legislation in a decade on Thursday, largely ratifying the policy agenda of the nation's largest telephone companies.

The bill passed by a lopsided vote of 321 to 101.

Supporters of the legislation said it would promote competition and lower costs by enabling the telephone companies to offer bundled packages of video, telephone, broadband, wireless and mobile phone services in new markets. They said the legislation was an important antidote to rapidly rising cable television subscription rates.

But even as the House took up the measure on Thursday, the political action had already swung to the Senate, which has been peppered by lobbyists and executives from many major telecommunications companies in recent days as it prepares to draft its own version. The prospects there are uncertain.

House Ignores Public, Sells Out the Internet through Passage of COPE Act

Net Neutrality Advocates Look to Senate to Save Internet Freedom

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

WASHINGTON - Yesterday, the US House passed the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE) without meaningful network neutrality provisions promoted by the diverse, right-left www.savetheinternet.com coalition of public interest and business groups.

The 152 to 269 vote coincides with a massive lobbying effort by telephone companies to enter the national television market and prevent preservation of network neutrality requirements.

Catching Up On DIGBY

Thursday, June 08, 2006

The Theme

by digby

I cannot say that I'm entirely surprised by the Busby results in CA-50 on Tuesday. The minute I heard her gaffe, I knew it would become an iconic symbol of the Republican's meme for this mid-term --- Democrats are stealing elections by having illegal aliens vote. They can piggyback on the Democratic drumbeat of the last few years about stolen elections and rile up their racist base all at the same time. It's tailor made for them.

Blogging from Hell

by digby

No, I'm not in Las Vegas. I was actually hoping to be the official "not at Yearly Kos" liberal blogger. (Think of me as that one member of the cabinet who doesn't attend the State of The Union in case somebody bombs the Capitol.) I figured there needed to be at least one of us out here who is not hungover, busy being feted by the Democratic party poohbahs or making time with some previously unknown blog-hottie and so would have the time to do serious blogging about serious things while everyone else was having too much fun to document the ongoing atrocities. Alas, I began to suspect last night that all the coolest bloggers in the world gathered in Vegas and conspired with BlogSpot to make me entirely irrelevant.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Job Description

by digby

Oh for Christ's sake. Via Americablog I see the WaPo published this ridiculous nonsense from George Will:

By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.

I don't know why. The whole country discussed the president's own personal rectum for weeks, in great detail, two years before. People couldn't stop talking about it. I don't know why he needed to be so polite about it when it came to AIDS.

Monday, June 05, 2006

The Vessel Intuition

by digby

Taking a trip through neglected posts from last week when my blog imploded, I find (via Yglesias) that the Wall Street Journal has finally reviewed Ramesh Ponnuru's pathetic flop "The Party Of Death" and surprisingly wrote this:

"It doesn't matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo's life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo's life may need to give way."

Whoa. That, like, makes sense and everything. Yglesias adds:

Ponnuru responds with what amounts to an effort at burden shifting, pointing out that this kind of vague appeal to intuition isn't an argument per se. This is a point I'm sympathetic to as a general matter. But to the best of my knowledge, though abortion rules have varied widely no society has actually considered the deliberate destruction of an early-stage embryo as on a par with deliberate murder of a human being, nor the accidental death of such an embryo (which is very common) as on a par with the accidental death of a human being. Thus, it seems reasonable to me to say that the burden here lies with Ponnuru, and that Berkowitz is merely observing that Ponnuru's argument seemed unpersuasive in light of its wildly counterintuitive consequences.

Bought And Paid For

by digby

Sebastian Mallaby and Paul Krugman both have columns today excoriating the Senate for what it's about to do on behalf of useless parasites like Paris Hilton and Brandon Davis. It is infuriating that some Democrats are signing on to this bullshit.

Mallaby:

For most of the past century, the case for the estate tax was regarded as self-evident. People understood that government has to be paid for, and that it makes sense to raise part of the money from a tax on "fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits," as Theodore Roosevelt put it. The United States is supposed to be a country that values individuals for their inherent worth, not for their inherited worth. The estate tax, like a cigarette tax or a carbon tax, is a tool for reducing a socially damaging phenomenon -- the emergence of a hereditary upper class -- as well as a way of raising money.

But now the House has voted to repeal the estate tax, and the Senate may do the same this week. Republicans are picking up support from renegade Democrats, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. Several more may go over to the dark side if a "compromise" bill, which would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of, is introduced in the Senate. President Bush, who has already muscled a temporary repeal of the estate tax into law, would be delighted to sign a bill making abolition permanent.

So much for the "populism" of these Red State hypocrites. There can be no reason for doing this other than to pay off contributors. If a Democrat from Nebraska can't make the argument that he or she refuses to give tax breaks to movie stars then he or she needs to get into another line of business.

Krugman writes:

The campaign for estate tax repeal has largely been financed by just 18 powerful business dynasties, including the family that owns Wal-Mart.

You may have heard tales of family farms and small businesses broken up to pay taxes, but those stories are pure propaganda without any basis in fact. In particular, advocates of estate tax repeal have never been able to provide a single real example of a family farm sold to pay estate taxes.

Nonetheless, the estate tax is up for a vote this week. First, Republicans will try to repeal the estate tax altogether. If that fails, they'll offer a compromise that isn't really a compromise, like a plan suggested by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, that would cost almost as much as full repeal, or a plan suggested by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, that is only slightly cheaper.

In each case, the crucial vote will be procedural: if 60 senators vote to close off debate, estate tax repeal or something close to it will surely pass. Any senator who votes for cloture but against estate tax repeal — which I'm told is what John McCain may do — is simply a hypocrite, trying to have it both ways.

But will the Senate vote for cloture? The answer depends on two groups of senators: Democrats like Mr. Baucus who habitually stake out "centrist" positions that give Republicans almost everything they want, and moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island who consistently cave in to their party's right wing. Will these senators show more spine than they have in the past?

In the interest of stiffening those spines, let me remind senators that this isn't just a fiscal issue, it's also a moral issue. Congress has already declared that the budget deficit is serious enough to warrant depriving children of health care; how can it now say that it's worth enlarging the deficit to give Paris Hilton a tax break?

I also think it's important to not that an active duty Army captain with two years experience makes $38,656 a year.

Did They?

by digby

Atrios links to this from Evan Bayh:

Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”

Yes, we've heard that. Apparently, it's supposed to excuse the fact that the administration ignored its own government, but whatever. This trope about France, Russia and Germany is dragged out with such frequency it's become a matter of faith. But is it true?

Punked

by digby

The excellent Steve Benen, pinch hitting over at Washington Monthly, highlights this rather stunning story from the LA Times in which we learn that the Army is eliminating the prohibition against "humiliating and degrading" treatment from the new edition of the field manual:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Laughin' With Yo Homies

by digby

I write a lot about tribal identity, specifically conservative tribal identity, and I think it's an issue we need to think about in order to understand how our politics really work. Mostly, I have felt throughout my adult life, since Reagan anyway, that I didn't have much of a tribe, certainly not a political tribe. The left has been defined for so many years by the exaggerated cartoon image created by the wingnuts that it's often been difficult to even admit you are a liberal, much less publicly identify and congregate with others explicitly on that basis. You'd pick an issue or a candidate, maybe. You'd speak in a sort of code. But you rarely gathered in one place as liberals or revel joyously in calling yourself one.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Puppies

by digby

There are a bunch of posts today on the subject of media narrative that are very much worth reading as a series. I'm going to link them all below.

This discussion about media narratives is incredibly important. We must not forget that a great many people are infected with these media storylines (although according to this fascinating analysis by Stirling Newberry, they are less infected than we think.) But there is one group that is almost completely controlled by it and that's the political establishment. The blogosphere and other forms of alternative media provide some other voices, but in the main, the beltway's relationship to the people is almost entirely constructed by the media narrative. And it's killing Democrats.

The Mood of The Country

by digby

I read this series of posts over on TPM and got really depressed. A number of readers wrote in to either agree with or criticize Josh for taking the New Yorker to task for perpetuating the same old creaky political narrative that we've been hearing for the last 25 years.

This one, in particular, made me feel very, very tired:

I was holding back, but dude?!?

"The vast majority of Democrats totally understand that Dems running in reddish states can't have stereotypically liberal positions on hot-button social and cultural issues. I think everybody gets that."

Vanity Fair: Niger Yellowcake Forgery May Have White House Ties

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20060607_vanity_fair_nigeria_yellowcake/

Posted on Jun 7, 2006

Vanity Fair’s Craig Unger reports that the Italian Secret Service likely concocted the Saddam-Niger forgery to bolster Bush’s case for war. The article raises questions about the involvement of a prominent White House-connected neocon in the “black ops” campaign.

---

Vanity Fair:

It’s a crisp, clear winter morning in Rome. In the neighborhood between the Vatican and the Olympic Stadium, a phalanx of motor scooters is parked outside a graffiti-scarred 10-story apartment building. No. 10 Via Antonio Baiamonte is home to scores of middle-class families, and to the embassy for the Republic of Niger, the impoverished West African nation that was once a French colony.

Markets And The Common Good

Thomas Palley

June 08, 2006

Thomas Palley runs the Economics for Democratic and Open Societies Project. He is the author of Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism. His weekly economic policy blog is at www.thomaspalley.com

Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, there are indications that the Democratic Party may finally be awakening from its long slumber and realizing it lacks a compelling identity. That lack of identity is especially clear regarding the economy, and it contrasts with Republicans who have long emphasized free markets. The current moment of Republican unraveling offers Democrats an historic opportunity to close this identity gap and change the direction of American politics.

The Republican free market message resonates with deep-seated cultural attachments to individualism and freedom, and their message tacitly treats free markets as identical to free society. Democrats should challenge this message with one about “markets and society,” meaning that markets should serve both individuals and society. Whereas free markets are especially good at promoting the interests of individuals, there are important societal interests—such as democracy and community—that they fail to address and may actively harm. That calls for institutions other than markets to represent those interests, and also for thoughtfully balancing markets with society’s other interests.

Jesus Loves A Machine Gun

It's the new 'Left Behind' video game, where you maim and murder and hate, all in God's name. Praise!

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Are you a true believer? Do you just know deep down in your black Wal-Mart socks that every word of the Bible is the absolute literal truth and nothing dare be doubted and anyone who thinks that God is merely an ambisexual omniblissful bloom of moist divine nondenominational honeydew melon should be strung up by their small intestine and beaten with sticks sharpened by Mel Gibson's teeth?

Do you feel, furthermore, that human cretins like, say, gays and Jews and Wiccans and all those hippie weirdos with their iPods and low-cut jeans and easy laughter are a plague upon this fine and holy land?

Overselling Terror

By Robert Parry
June 9, 2006

The killing of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and the arrest of 17 suspects in an alleged terror plot in Canada have buoyed George W. Bush’s political prospects by refocusing America’s attention again on the terror threat, much as the orange color-coded warnings did from 2002 until Election 2004.

But the recent developments in Iraq and Canada have obscured other new evidence that points toward a very different reality: that the Islamic terror threat was never as severe as Bush made it out to be after the 9/11 attacks and that it has been fading ever since.

The Important Stuff

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; 12:45 PM

President Bush is running around the country this week talking about immigration, and on Monday he gave a much-hyped speech on gay marriage. In neither case has he said anything remotely new, and yet the press coverage is intense.

But what about the stuff the White House doesn't want us talking about?

Myth of the Liberal Nanny State

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted June 8, 2006.

Economist Dean Baker lays waste to one of the most cherished myths of conservative philosophy.

Our economic arrangements, and the political discourse that supports them, balance precariously on some deeply held myths.

Among the most fanciful is the notion that conservatives are self-reliant actors who embrace a private sector free from government meddling. Supposedly, the right is content to take on the free-market with strength and skill, and let the chips fall where they may, while liberals look to the state to be their protective nanny, there to iron out the wrinkles of a dynamic, entrepreneurial society.

It's a "zombie lie" -- no matter how many times you shoot it in the face, it keeps coming back to haunt you.

How the Press Discriminates Against Democrats

By Jamison Foser, Media Matters for America. Posted June 8, 2006.

John Murtha, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton are just the latest Democrats to face biased media coverage -- but they won't be the last.

Last week, Media Matters wrote:

At this point, you'd have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can't continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It's all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.

The recent media treatment of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) illustrate this point: No matter who emerges as a progressive leader, or a high-profile Democrat, they're in for the same flood of conservative misinformation in the media. Too many people chalk up outrageous media treatment of, say, Al Gore or John Kerry to the men's own flaws, pretending that if they were better candidates, they'd have gotten better press coverage. That's naïve. The Democratic Party could nominate Superman to be their next presidential candidate, and two things would happen: conservatives would smear him, and the media would join in. To illustrate this, we look back over the last dozen or so years.

Policy makers draw up list of 'top 100' ecological questions

Environmental policy makers have come up with a list of the "top 100" ecological questions most in need of an answer. The list, published online in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, is the result of an innovative experiment involving more than 600 environmental policy makers and academics, and includes crucial questions such as which UK habitats and species might be lost completely due to climate change, and what are the comparative biodiversity impacts of newly emerging types of renewable energy? The list should help bridge the gap between science and policy that exists in many disciplines - including ecology - and could therefore have a major impact on future ecological research and its funding.

Evidence human activities have shaped large-scale ecological patterns

A new study published in the Journal of Biogeography provides some of the first evidence that ecological patterns at large spatial scales have been significantly altered within recent human history suggesting a role for human activities as potential drivers.

Jim Towey's brave new faith-based world

The head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives moves on after successfully promoting and expanding the president's religion-based patronage system

Unlike the sudden resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss on Friday, May 5 – which caught the media by surprise -- the long anticipated replacement of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan with columnist and the Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, or the recent replacement of Treasury Secretary John Snow with Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson, when Jim Towey announced his decision to move on, the media barely blinked an eye.

On April 18, 2006 Towey, who served for more than four years as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, announced that as of July 1, he would become president of Saint Vincent College, a small Catholic school in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff

By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Published: June 4, 2006

THE sunlight was brilliant in New York City on Memorial Day weekend, and the sailors deposited in town by Fleet Week looked brilliant in it. Nothing, including the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, has shaken American affection for the troops. Nothing should. These men and women go to war so we can party on. Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security. We've even been rewarded with a prize that past generations would have found as jaw-dropping as space travel: a wartime dividend in the form of tax cuts.

"It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who retired after his stint as a commander in Iraq and became an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld. He told The Wall Street Journal that "it was almost surreal" that the only time some Americans "think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car."

Bankruptcy Law in Shambles

What happens when the credit card industry writes congressional legislation? According to the judges who have to enforce it, anarchy

By Brian J. Rogal

In December, Alfonso Sosa, a house painter in Fredericksburg, Texas, fell behind on the payments for the mobile home he shared with his wife Melba. The mortgage holder moved to foreclose, and Sosa filed an emergency petition in federal court for bankruptcy protection. But the Sosa family quickly ran afoul of the country’s new bankruptcy law, which had gone into effect only six weeks before. One of the many new provisions requires all debtors to take a simple, one-hour credit counseling class before they file, but the Sosas had not known about the requirement.

Although Sosa had taken the class by the time they got back to court, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Frank R. Monroe quickly dismissed their case, leaving the Sosa trailer open to foreclosure.

Conservatives Watching Senate Debate on Gay Marriage

By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, June 5 — President Bush's push for the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that is being debated in the Senate this week comes as many Republicans and religious conservatives are beginning a campaign to help lawmakers who support it during this year's elections — and to punish those who do not.

Though people on both sides of the debate say they do not expect the amendment to come anywhere near winning approval this week, both sides say they expect it, and an anticipated version in the House, to be used as a conservative litmus test in elections this fall.

"It is true what this vote will do will be to help the voters identify who is and is not supportive of the family," Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said in an interview on Monday. "And I think those that are not are going to have to answer for it."

Medical Privacy Law Nets No Fines

Lax Enforcement Puts Patients' Files At Risk, Critics Say

By Rob Stein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 5, 2006; Page A01

In the three years since Americans gained federal protection for their private medical information, the Bush administration has received thousands of complaints alleging violations but has not imposed a single civil fine and has prosecuted just two criminal cases.

Of the 19,420 grievances lodged so far, the most common allegations have been that personal medical details were wrongly revealed, information was poorly protected, more details were disclosed than necessary, proper authorization was not obtained or patients were frustrated getting their own records.

Paul Krugman: Shameless in the Senate

--The New York Times, June 5, 2006

The Senate almost voted to repeal the estate tax last fall, but Republican leaders postponed the vote after Hurricane Katrina. It's easy to see why: the public might have made the connection between scenes of Americans abandoned in the Superdome and scenes of well-heeled senators voting huge tax breaks for their even wealthier campaign contributors.

But memories of Katrina have faded, and they're about to try again. The Senate will probably vote this week. So it's important to realize that there's still a clear connection between tax breaks for the rich and failure to help Americans in need.

Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule

The Pentagon's move to omit a ban on prisoner humiliation from the basic guide to soldier conduct faces strong State Dept. opposition.

By Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writer
June 5, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Firedoglake: There Is No War on Terror

By Pachacutec , Firedoglake. Posted June 6, 2006.

The past six years have been an attempt to seize power and steal money. We're stronger than this.

There is no "War on Terror."

There is, however, a "war" on the U.S. Constitution.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we've learned that we can take a punch and move on. We've faced far worse threats to our national survival -- the Civil War, the War of 1812, World War II, to name a few -- but we never abandoned our Constitution.

Until now.

A Guided Tour of Class War

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 6, 2006.

In this in-depth interview, Barbara Ehrenreich reveals how the class war rages on, and why middle-class Americans are so worried.

You turn into a middle-class, suburban housing project on the periphery of Charlottesville, Virginia, and at a row of attached homes, you pull up in front of the one with the yellow "for sale" sign on the tiny patch of grass. Ushered inside, you take in an interior of paint cans, a mop and pail, and cleaning liquids. On the small porch that overlooks a communal backyard, workmen are painting the weathered wood railings a nice, clean white. Later, when they're gone, we step out for a minute, on a balmy late spring afternoon, and she says, "You know what I need out here? Flowers!" And it's true, the nearest neighbor's small porch is a riot of red, orange, and purple blooms, while hanging from her railing are three plant holders with only dirt and the scraps of dead vegetation in them. ]