17 June 2006

Daily Kos: What I'm Really Worried About

by Steven D Wed Jun 14, 2006 at 07:51:57 AM PDT

(Front paged at Booman Tribune; also posted at My Left Wing)

When the next big crisis in America occurs (war with Iran, new terrorist attacks, a flu pandemic, a stock market crash, double or triple digit inflation, etc.) what will become of what's left of our Republic? Will it withstand the assault to our freedoms and liberties from the Radical Right, as it did during the era of the Great Depression or will our Republic end its days in tumult and political violence?

I don't know, frankly, but let me explain why I am so concerned about our Nation's future at this moment in time.

Digby: Insurgent Sympathisers

I'm sure you've all heard about the charming song "Hadji Girl" by now. Here's a little clip of the video from German TV if you haven't had a chance to see how some US Marine officers uphold American values in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Meanwhile, the NY Times today reports that special operations troops used abusive techniques, but in at least a couple of cases, they were against "insurgent sympathizers." This is a new phrase but I suspect it is going to be a very useful one. See, Hadji Girl's little sister (the one who gets her brains blown out in the song) could easily be an "insurgent symnpathizer." Indeed, anyone who is related to an insurgent or even knows one --- little kids especially --- can be seen as soft on insurgency when they cling to their mothers and fathers begging for their lives. The rules of engagement being what they are, apparently, killing these insurgent sympathizers is a-ok.

Digby: Original Inquisitor

Kieran Healy makes what I think is the most salient observation about the Supremes gutting of the fourth amendment in Hudson v. Michigan and I would really love to see some smart legal scholars ask Justice Scalia about it at his next controversial speech:
Scalia, writing for the majority, is happy to set his originalism aside and argue that the growth of “public-interest law firms and lawyers who specialize in civil-rights grievances ... [and] the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline ... [and] the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability” all mean that the fourth amendment can be reinterpreted.

Digby: Creative Scapegoating

Wow. It's rare to see conventional wisdom being created right before your eyes, but this Chuck Todd piece is a masterpiece. Cokie just got her cocktail party chatter in nice bullet pointed talking points:
"From 30,000 feet, all of the elements for a big Democratic triumph seem to be in place, but zooming in closer on the nation's landscape reveals a Democratic Party that just isn't sure enough of itself to lead.

Digby: V I Day At Last

This is just awesome. The US found some al-Zarqawi documents that prove that we are smokin 'em outa their caves and that we've gottem on the run! And Bush was right all along! Yeaaaah!
A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening.

Digby: Democratic Terrorists

This new Lieberman poll is an earthquake. Ned Lamont could win this thing. The word is that Lieberman is actually quite serious about leaving the party, but that's not actually correct. Connecticut Democrats seem to be leaving him.

Naturally, this is just terrible. Who has ever heard of supporting a candidate in a primary to challenge an incumbent with whom you are unhappy? Why, it's political terrorism, I tell ya!

Digby: Brand Ex

This is probably going to be an interesting site. I haven't had a chance to read it over very carefully (except to note that Elain Kamarck is openly suggesting that we run the Dukakis campaign again because it might work this time.) But I think it's probably going to be a useful insight into the thinking of the strategic workings of the Democratic party.

Digby: Pandermonium

Ana Marie Cox's latest dispatch from YKOS online cautions all you funny little bumpkins who have never been to a political bash before to be careful of being co-opted by the elite. She's been a real "journalist" for almost five minutes now so she understands how to handle being handled. You, on the other hand, are putty in their hands. Word to the wise.

Digby: He Threw it Away A Long Time Ago

Josh Marshall has a nice response up to Jonah Goldberg's plaintive cry of "where can Rove go to get his reputation back?"
As Andrew Sullivan aptly quips, maybe Rove can go look for it in South Carolina. More to the point, let's not forget the salient facts here. The question going back three years ago now is whether Karl Rove knowingly participated in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative for the purpose of discrediting a political opponent who was revealing information about the White House's use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Digby: Brass Ones

You've got to hand it to the Republicans. Karl Rove must have heard that he was off the hook --- and the first thing he did was head up to New Hampshire to raise money for the most crooked state GOP operation in the nation:
MANCHESTER, N.H. --Presidential adviser Karl Rove is the keynote speaker Monday night at the state Republican Party's annual dinner -- which Democrats say is to raise money to help the party pay legal fees in a phone jamming case.

Billmon: Baghdad Bush

We can only guess whether Shrub's secret repeat visit to Iraq was dreamed up before the Abu Zarqawi Hour went off the air, as the White House claims, or whether the trip was actually thrown together on the fly in an effort to milk a little more free publicity from the final episode. Either way, the stunt revealed as much about the depleted state of the Cheney administration's bag of propaganda tricks as it did about the gang's determination to keep pouring blood and treasure into the world's largest hole in the desert.

Sending America's titular head of state to Baghdad the first time, to celebrate Thanksgiving with the troops in 2003, was a clever stroke -- just the thing to distract the media from the rapidly deteriorating security situation, which only a few weeks before had sent generals and diplomats (including the current president of the World Bank) scurrying for cover in their underwear.

The US has a "real" unemployment rate of 13.3%

by Colman
Thu Jun 15th, 2006 at 08:14:03 AM EST

This (European) morning, Jérôme did a story on Eurotrib about a report from the McKinsey Global Institute think-tank that the FT had covered with the headline 'Real Swedish jobless rate 15%'. So much for the vaunted Scandinavian model, eh?

The report contains this lovely graphic, displaying the breakdown of what they call the Swedish de-facto unemployment.

Avedon Carol: Highway to hell

Human Events is a source I usually avoid, and Jerome Corsi is not someone I would trust to tell me how John Kerry performed on a swift boat - or anything else - but the fact that Thom Hartmann was citing his article "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway" piqued my interest, and the fact that this is not an article that looks to have been paid for by BushCo. makes it especially interesting. The content makes it scary as hell:

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.

Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation's most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new "SENTRI" system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City.

White House Hotheads

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, June 16, 2006; 1:14 PM

Inspired by my fun-loving colleagues at Wonkette, who are compiling a list of White House Hotties , allow me to put forth today's contenders for the title of White House Hothead.

* There's Tony Snow, who yesterday made a particular mess of things in the White House briefing room.

* There's just-arrived domestic policy adviser Karl Zinsmeister, out with a new interview in which he talks about sex ("it's intense, it's fire"!) and its role in perpetuating what he has previously described as a "morally repugnant" underclass.

NS Interview - Chomsky

The New Statesman Interview
Andrew Stephen
Monday 19th June 2006

The New York Times calls him "arguably the most important intellectual alive", yet he has needed police guards on his own campus. Andrew Stephen discusses Iraq, Iran and Blair with a man who divides opinion like no other

You might think the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be well designed, but you would be wrong. I arrived to see the legendary Professor Noam Chomsky with five minutes to spare, but it then took 20 minutes of misdirections and meanderings before I finally reached MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where Chomsky has reigned supreme for 51 years.

Michael Kinsley: CryptoKids at War

The hypocrisy of our government agencies.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, June 16, 2006, at 6:15 AM ET

"So, put aside your Captain Crunch decoder ring," recommends the Central Intelligence Agency, "for the moment." This is on the Internet site of the CIA's legal department. You can have your Captain Crunch ring back after you read a pitch for recruits so startlingly moronic—even as an attempt at adorable self-mockery—that you think it must be some subtle comment on the double meaning of the word "intelligence." Or perhaps it's a sly joke on the very concept of a legal department at the CIA. (And the other departments?) "If the theme music from Mission Impossible runs through your head, or you get the urge to order a martini 'shaken, not stirred' at the mention of the letters 'CIA … ,' " why then you're just the kind of lawyer we want!

Paul Krugman: The Phantom Menace

The New York Times
Published: June 16, 2006

Over the last few weeks monetary officials have sounded increasingly worried about rising prices. On Wednesday, Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, declared that inflation "is running at a rate that is just too corrosive to be accepted by a virtuous central banker."

I'm worried too — but not about recent price increases. What worries me, instead, is the Fed's overreaction to those increases. When it comes to inflation, the main thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Discussions of inflation can be numbingly arcane — are you a core C.P.I. type or a trimmed-mean P.C.E. person? But the real issue is whether there's a serious risk that inflation will become embedded in the economy.

Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers

Published by Greg Palast June 16th, 2006 in Articles

by Greg Palast
As reported for Democracy Now!

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.

Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.--Alan Wolfe

By Alan Wolfe

I.
Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance.

About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers--at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that. But even if many commentators think that Republicans may retain control over Congress, very few think they should.

16 June 2006

Bill Moyers: Pass the Bread

by Bill Moyers
Text of Baccalaureate Address
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
May 20, 2006

I will make this brief because I know you have much to do between now and your farewell to Hamilton tomorrow, and that you are eager to get out and enjoy this perfect day in this glorious weather that somehow never gets mentioned in your promotional and recruitment literature.

One of my closest friends and colleagues, David Bate, graduated in 1938, and patriot that he is, headed right for the U.S. Navy where he served throughout World War II. David's father graduated from Hamilton in 1908 and two of his children continued the tradition. I asked David what he learned at Hamilton and he told me Hamilton is where you discover that being smart has nothing to do with being warm and dry...Just kidding! Thank you for inviting Judith and me to share this occasion with you. Fifty years ago both of us turned the same corner you are turning today and left college for the great beyond. Looking back across half a century I wish our speaker at the time had said something really useful--something that would have better prepared us for what lay ahead. I wish he had said: "Don't Go."

Juan Cole - 06/16/06

Zarqawi sought US-Iran War

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hoping to provoke a US-Iran war as a way of bogging the Americans down further and defeating them in Iraq.

Remember all those times Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld came out and said they suspected that Shiite Iran was somehow aiding the Sunni Arab insurgency? You remember how baffled I was at this bizarre allegation? You wonder whether they were being fed disinformation by a Zarqawi agent, and falling for it.

After they fell for the biggest whoppers of the 21st century, as retailed by Ahmad Chalabi, have Bush administration officials been gullibly swallowing an al-Qaeda black psy-ops operation intended to mire US troops in the Dasht-i Kavir? For people who think of themselves as tough as nails hardheaded realists, the Bushies seem awfully easy to fool.

Eminently Quotable

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
-- Charles A. Beard, historian (1874-1948)

"There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy."
-- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

Doc-in-a-Box springs open

Turning the ubiquitous shipping container into a mobile clinic.

Helen Pearson

Architects and a public health expert have unveiled a new solution to some of the world's ills: Doc-in-a-Box. The mass-produced medical clinics, housed in empty shipping containers, could help bring vital healthcare to needy communities.

Thousands of discarded shipping containers clog up ports around the globe because it is too expensive for companies to send them back. The tough, steel boxes are a standard size designed to travel on ships and trucks everywhere.

Former journalist turned global health advocate Laurie Garrett, a fellow at New York's Council on Foreign Relations, saw a recycling opportunity. Around two years ago she came up with the idea of converting the containers into mobile medical centres that could be mass-produced cheaply and transported around the world.

Thawing permafrost a significant source of carbon

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
15 June 2006

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- Permafrost, permanently frozen soil, isn’t staying frozen and a type of soil called loess contained deep within thawing permafrost may be releasing significant, and previously unaccounted for, amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, according to authors of a paper published this week in the journal Science.

Preliminary assessments by scientists from Russia, the University of Florida, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks indicate that loess permafrost, which covers more than a million square kilometers in Siberia and Alaska, is a large carbon reservoir with the potential to be a significant contributor of atmospheric carbon, yet it is seldom incorporated into analyses of changes in global carbon reservoirs.

15 June 2006

Bill would limit consumers' credit rights

SEATTLE — Congress is considering pre-empting laws in 17 states that allow anyone to freeze their own credit and instead restricting the privilege to ID theft victims.

The proposed Financial Data Protection Act of 2006, expected to be voted on by the House as soon as next week, comes on the heels of the recent theft of sensitive data for 26 million veterans and active duty military personnel. If it becomes law, vets and military personnel who live in states that permit unrestricted credit freezes would lose that option.

Internet neutrality may be dead, Republican senator says

RAW STORY
Published: Thursday June 15, 2006

Google and other Internet companies are unlikely to prevail in the Senate on legislation to require ``network neutrality,'' a key Republican lawmaker said today, which was carried in a brief by the Mercury News. Brief follows.

#

The House of Representatives already has voted against rules that would forbid high-speed Internet providers such as AT&T and Comcast from charging extra for priority access to their networks

Behind the Spin, the Oil Giants are More Dangerous Than Ever

by George Monbiot

For a company that claims to have moved "beyond petroleum", BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it on to the tundra in Alaska. Last week, after the news was leaked to journalists, it admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to seep across one of the world's most sensitive habitats. The incident was so serious that some of its staff could be sent to prison.

Had this been Exxon, the epitome of sneering corporate brutality, the news would have surprised no one. But BP's rebranding, like Shell's, has been so effective that you could be forgiven for believing that it had become an environmental pressure group. These companies have used the vast profits from their petroleum business to create the impression that they are abandoning it.

Robert Parry: The Moon-Bush Cash Conduit

June 14, 2006

Over the past quarter century, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon has been one of the Bush family’s major benefactors – both politically and financially – while enjoying what appears to be protection against federal investigations into evidence that his cult-like organization has functioned as a criminal enterprise.

Indeed, the newest disclosure about Moon funneling money to a Bush family entity bears many of the earmarks of Moon’s business strategy of laundering money through a complex maze of front companies and cut-outs so it can’t be easily followed. In this case, according to an article in the Houston Chronicle, Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

One Million Americans Urge Senate to Save the Internet

Our real grassroots Coalition called today on Senators to heed growing public outcry for Net Neutrality as we delivered more than 1 million petitions and letters from average Americans to Capitol Hill. During the event we urged Congress to protect Net Neutrality and stand firm against efforts by phone and cable companies to control the Internet.

Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) joined us to call on their colleagues to support the “Internet Freedom and Preservation Act” (S. 2917), a bipartisan bill that would bar companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from blocking, degrading or interfering with content or services on the Internet.

Newsweek's Apology Too Little, 20 Years Too Late

By Caryl Rivers, Women's eNews. Posted June 15, 2006.

Newsweek has finally apologized for its infamous cover story that predicted single women over 40 would probably never marry. But the damage has long since been done.

"We were wrong!"

You almost never see these words on the cover of a major magazine, but on June 5, Newsweek said just that.

The magazine headlined, in boxcar type, "20 years ago, Newsweek predicted that a single, 40-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married."

Over a photograph of a bride and groom, the magazine admitted its 1986 story had been incorrect and titled its new cover piece "Rethinking the Marriage Crunch."

Don't Bow To God's Bullies

By Rev. Jim Rigby, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted June 15, 2006.

If you want to know why Americans are so frightened and why we attack anything that challenges our dominance over others, read the Bible.

Whereas American theology was born out of a hope for democracy, much of it is wedded to a picture of Christ as a benevolent dictator. Should we be surprised that a hierarchical cosmology would produce hierarchical churches and nations? Should we be surprised that religious nations that picture Christ as a loving dictator have produced conquistadors, inquisitors and crusaders?

What else could they produce? As the tree is, so shall be the fruit. The word "Lord" was not in the original Bible. It is an English word from feudal times. Whereas the Greek word kurios had a range of meanings, from a title of respect to a title of leadership to a name for the sacred, the English translation "Lord" refers specifically to a male European land baron. Many people have softened that interpretation in their own minds, but in times of great stress, such nuance falls away and many Christians seek a white male king. He may be called "Pope" he may be called "the decider President," he may be called "televangelist," but the title only masks what he is, a benevolent (or not so benevolent) dictator.

14 June 2006

Southern Baptists Consider School Strategy (removing their children)

Jun 14, 4:14 AM (ET)

By TIM WHITMIRE

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) - As concerns persist about how classrooms are handling subjects such as homosexuality and "intelligent design," some members of the nation's largest Protestant denomination want the Southern Baptist Convention to consider creating an exit strategy from public schools.

A committee at the Southern Baptists' annual gathering was scheduled to report Wednesday on a resolution that would urge the denomination to form a strategy for removing Southern Baptist children from public schools in favor of home schooling or education at private schools.

The group takes up the issue a day after it elected a new president, Frank Page. The 53-year-old pastor at First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., was supported primarily by younger pastors and others who felt marginalized by an older generation that led a conservative takeover of the church in the 1970s and 1980

Paper: Rumsfeld expels US media from Guantanamo Bay

John Byrne
Published: Wednesday June 14, 2006

The United States military has ordered all independent media off the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base following the suicides of three detainees, RAW STORY has learned.

Writing for the Miami Herald, journalist Carol Rosenberg stated Wednesday morning that the military had "ordered all independent news media off the base by 10 a.m. Wednesday, and had arranged a flight to Miami to expedite their departure."


EXCLUSIVE: Majority Leader Boehner’s Confidential Strategy Memo For Thursday’s Iraq Debate

On Thursday, the House of Representatives will hold a debate on the Iraq war. Media reports say Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991.”

ThinkProgress has obtained a “Confidential Messaging Memo” from Boehner instructing his caucus to conduct a very different kind of deliberation.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Can Marriage Fix Poverty?

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2006.

There are quite a few surprising -- and surprisingly viable -- alternatives to Bush's marriage-minded anti-poverty program.

I was on panel discussion on poverty a few weeks ago, when NY Times reporter Jason de Parle asked me, in what he said was a spirit of devil’s advocacy, why I slighted marriage as a solution to poverty. Actually, I’d barely begun to slight it—I’d just mentioned that it is the Bush administration’s favored anti-poverty strategy, when the audience, and especially the women in it, broke out into laughter.

De Parle was right to say that married couples do much better financially than single mothers, if only because the single moms lack a male breadwinner. But every time I think of marriage as an anti-poverty program, my mind flips back to a woman I met while researching Nickel and Dimed. She was a deeply religious African American woman, an evangelical Christian, and she broke into tears as she told me that her husband beat her when he got drunk, which was as often as he could find the time for it. (Just to confound any residual racial stereotypes you may have, the husband, whom I met, was white.)

The fatter fat

Fast-food ingredient may pump up your paunch.

Helen Pearson

Eating some fats could make you fatter than others, even if their calorie count is the same.

That's the finding from researchers who fed trans-fatty acids, commonly found in fast food, to monkeys. Those that ate a daily dose of the trans-fatty acids gained 30% more lard around their bellies than those who ate different fats containing exactly the same amount of calories.

'Trans-fats' are already considered to be a dietary villain because they boost levels of 'bad' cholesterol and promote heart disease. But when it comes to obesity, it is generally assumed that trans, saturated and unsaturated fats are equally problematic, because they are loaded with the same amount of energy.

UCI scientists find chlorine may contribute to ozone formation

Study discovers evidence of reactive chlorine chemistry in Southern California surface air

Irvine, Calif., June 13, 2006

Standard methods of predicting air pollution don’t take atmospheric chlorine into account, but the chemical could be responsible for 10 percent or more of daily ozone production in local air, research at UC Irvine has found.

Air measurements taken nearly nonstop in the Irvine area over a two-month period showed that daytime chlorine gas levels typically measured five parts per trillion or less, but occasionally reached as high as 15 parts per trillion. Observation of daytime chlorine is surprising because chlorine molecules break apart just minutes after entering the atmosphere and being exposed to sunlight.

Microbes transform 'safest' PBDEs into more harmful compounds

WASHINGTON, June 14 — Bacteria in the soil can transform the most commonly used flame retardant compound in the United States into more toxic forms that could be harmful to humans, according to a new laboratory study published today on the Web site of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology. The study is scheduled to appear in the July 15 print issue of the journal.

The finding, by a team of environmental engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests these transformations could complicate efforts to reduce or eliminate the most problematic polybrominated diphenyl esters (PBDEs) from the environment.

13 June 2006

What's wrong with the economy?

by EPI President Lawrence Mishel and Policy Director Ross Eisenbrey

1. Profits are up, but the wages and incomes of average Americans are down.

  • Inflation-adjusted hourly and weekly wages are below where they were at the start of the recovery in November 2001. Yet, productivity—the growth of the economic pie—is up by 14.7%.1 (Figure A)
  • Wage growth has been shortchanged because 46% of the growth of total income in the corporate sector has been distributed as corporate profits, far more than the 20% in previous periods.2
  • Consequently, median household income (inflation-adjusted) has fallen five years in a row and was 4% lower in 2004 than in 1999, falling from $46,129 to $44,389.3

US imbalances 'threaten economy'

Global trade imbalances are one of the biggest threats to the world economy, the International Monetary Fund's Rodrigo de Rato has warned.

The reliance on US consumers to support other economies was unsustainable in the long term and had to be addressed, the IMF head said.

Mr de Rato's speech came amid further market jitters as fears of higher US interest rates hit investor confidence.

12 June 2006

Digby: Meet The New Cokie

I got in a lot of trouble a few weeks ago for being disrespectful toward Ana Marie Cox. I have no intention of being disrespectful now. I think it's just terrific that she's become a full fledged member of the mainstream media and is covering bloggers as if they are pod people from mars. It's the smart career move. Still, it's quite a transition since for several years she represented the liberal blogosphere on countless blogging panels and media appearances. It's a testament to her faking skills that she could convincingly be a blogging pioneer one minute and a befuddled mainstream journalist the next. It's trailblazing, actually.

Digby: Fashionable Babbling

Following up tristero's Dear Joe letter below, here's Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution:
For years Peter "Pe-Nart" Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he's gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it's only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart's book The Good Fight that he's reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

Paul Krugman: Some of All Fears

Back in 1971, Russell Baker, the legendary Times columnist, devoted one of his Op-Ed columns to an interview with Those Who — as in "Those Who snivel and sneer whenever something good is said about America." Back then, Those Who played a major role in politicians' speeches.

Times are different now, of course. There are those who say that Iraq is another Vietnam. But Iraq is a desert, not a jungle, so there. And we rarely hear about Those Who these days. But the Republic faces an even more insidious threat: the Some.

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre
August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

McCain Now Blames Social Security, Not Tax Cuts For Growing Deficits

by Steve Soto

Watch “Straight Talk’s” 2008 campaign go “boom” in his efforts to pander to his party’s right wing. McCain is about to revisit privatization.

After flip-flopping from his earlier opposition to Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, and voting in favor of extending them and their deficits well into the next decade, John McCain will tell the Economic Club of New York tonight that entitlement spending, and not fiscally reckless tax cuts are the culprit behind our fiscal imbalances. He’ll also indicate that both Medicare and Social Security will drain the economy and won’t deliver the promised benefits to retirees.

NSA Blocking Whistleblower From Telling Committee About Shocking, Illegal Activities

Last month, ThinkProgress reported that NSA whistleblower Russell Tice would meet with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss undisclosed unlawful activity that the Agency has engaged in. “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them,” Tice said.

Since that time, little has been reported of Tice’s meeting. CongressDaily (sub. req’d) follows-up today, “Tice met last month in a closed session with senior staff from the Senate Armed Services Committee. Tice said he told the staffers everything he knew. But he said the aides did not say how, or if, they would follow up on his allegations.

Cursor - 06/12/06

The Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. troops are massed around the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, home to "a desperate population of 400,000 people trapped in the crossfire between insurgents and U.S. forces," but military officials deny that a "Falluja-style offensive" is underway.

A U.N. official tells the New York Times that the situation in Afghanistan is "the most unstable and insecure I have seen," and the Toledo Blade questions the provenance of American goods for sale in Pakistani markets.

A former managing editor of the Washington Post contends that "intimidation by classification" is the hallmark of the Bush administration, and challenges the constitutionality of the Attorney General's threats to use the Espionage Act against the press.

The Guardian takes the list of "power players" who came to the convention, which as Markos Moulitsas emphasized in his keynote speech, was entirely organized by volunteers, as a sign of the increased clout of political bloggers.

PZ Myers shares his notes for the YearlyKos science panel, and Chris Mooney recounts that Wesley Clark, "riffed for at least twenty minutes, with impressive eloquence, about the importance of science to the American future."

As George Will casts doubt on the human origin of global warming, and federal funding for climate science is 'on the cutting board,' "inconsistent information policies" are blamed for "the intentional or unintentional suppression or distortion of research findings" in science.

Bush Administration Developing Plans To Keep 50,000 U.S. Troops In Iraq For Decades

The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is making plans to keep tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely:

Mr. Bush on Friday made clear that the American commitment to the country will be long-term. Officials say the administration has begun to look at the costs of maintaining a force of roughly 50,000 troops there for years to come, roughly the size of the American presence maintained in the Philippines and Korea for decades after those conflicts.

Using Children as 'God's Army'

By Kirsten A. Powers, The American Prospect. Posted June 12, 2006.

A new documentary chronicles a summer camp where children, as young as six, are trained to become devout Christian soldiers.

Gandhi once said if Christians lived according to their faith, there would be no Hindus left in India. He knew how powerful the fundamental tenets of Christianity -- fighting poverty, caring for the least among us, loving your enemies, eschewing materialism and embracing humility -- could be if everyone who called themselves a Christian truly followed them.

The new documentary, Jesus Camp, which chronicles a North Dakota summer camp where kids as young as 6 are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in "God's army," is an illustration of this sentiment in the extreme.

Stick Your Neck Out, America!

By Ray McGovern, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2006.

Americans, for the most part, are blissfully unaware of our own power -- even as the claws of fascism creep steadily closer.

Hope is here. The cold light of truth is piercing the cloud of lies conjured by Donald Rumsfeld and others about the war in Iraq -- even in the defense secretary's own bailiwick.

A matter of conscience …

Several months ago, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada decided that U.S. involvement in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Like so many of us, Watada concluded that intelligence was manipulated to "justify" the invasion. Unlike so many of us, he has had the courage to stick his neck out and pay the price for resistance.

Voodoo economics

Financial monitoring has borrowed a few ideas from science, but they may be the wrong ones, argues Philip Ball.

Philip Ball

The past few weeks have been a time of turmoil for economic markets. They have been lurching and plunging all over the place, prompting a rash of 'explanations' from market analysts.

"The noise in the markets is the sound of everyone and his dog coming up with post-facto justifications for the apparently random movements in assets from gold to equities, copper and the dollar," says Tom Stevenson in his 23 May investment column in the Daily Telegraph. But "what drives financial markets is not the ebb and flow of investment ratios and economic statistics but the fickle and often lemming-like workings of investors' minds," he adds.

Fed's Pianalto says troubled by rise in inflation

1 hour, 30 minutes ago

Recent news on U.S. inflation has been troubling, but if the economy moderates as forecast, a federal funds rate of 5 percent is near a point that will gradually improve the inflation outlook, a top Federal Reserve official said on Monday.

"The core CPI (consumer price index excluding food and energy) has increased at an annualized rate of more than 3 percent during the past three months. This inflation picture, if sustained, exceeds my comfort level," said Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Sandra Pianalto in a speech at a meeting of the Broadcast Cable Financial Management Association.

On the other hand, she acknowledged the U.S. central bank had already increased borrowing costs some way since it began raising them in 2004, and may have done enough to control prices.

11 June 2006

Digby: Committing Hara-Kiri For Your Emperor

Isn't this rich?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The former emergency management chief who quit amid widespread criticism over his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina said he received an e-mail before his resignation stating President Bush was glad to see the Oval Office had dodged most of the criticism.

Digby: Death Star Strategery

So Newtie's getting serious about running. And he's going to be running as the kinder, gentler, smarter GOP. I kid you not. Of course, he's as insulting as ever:
When Americans look at the current roster of Republican and Democratic leaders, Gingrich said, they face an unappealing dilemma.

"We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable," he said, adding that he would put "even money" on the Democrats taking back the House this fall. "Neither party currently is where the country is."
President Gingrich? Unthinkable, all right.

Frank Rich: How Hispanics Became the New Gays

He never promised them the Rose Garden. But that's where America's self-appointed defenders of family values had expected President Bush to take his latest stand against same-sex marriage last week. In the end, without explanation, the event was shunted off to a nondescript auditorium in the Executive Office Building, where the president spoke for a scant 10 minutes at the non-prime-time hour of 1:45 p.m. The subtext was clear: he was embarrassed to be there, a constitutional amendment "protecting" marriage was a loser, and he feared being branded a bigot. "As this debate goes forward, every American deserves to be treated with tolerance and respect and dignity," Mr. Bush said.

The Case of the Missing $21 Billion

Who's Following the Iraq Money?

By DAVE LINDORFF

During the days of the Nixon Watergate scandal investigation, reporter Bob Woodword was famously advised by his mysterious source, Deep Throat, to "follow the money" as a way of cracking the story.

Well, there is a lot of money to follow in the current scandal that can be best described as the Bush/Cheney administration, and so far, nobody's doing it.

My bet for the place that needs the most following is the more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports, and for which there has been little or no accounting.

Power Grab

By Elizabeth Drew

1.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it. Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.

House for Sale: more on Letitia White and Trident Systems

Posted on Friday, June 9, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.

It looks like there might be more problems in store for Letitia White, a lobbyist and former staffer to GOP Representative Jerry Lewis of California. And there may be even more problems for Lewis, the head of the House Appropriations Committee who is under federal investigation for his ties to lobbyists and for possibly steering money to well-connected companies.

Shortly after leaving the Hill in early 2003, White became a lobbyist for Copeland Lowery Jacquez Denton & White and retained Trident Systems, Inc. as a client. Copeland Lowery's “name” partners include Bill Lowery, a former congressman who is extremely close to Lewis. Trident has since paid Copeland Lowery hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, and both Trident and Copeland Lowery are major political contributors to Congressman Lewis.

NYT Editorial: Blind Man's Bluff

Published: June 11, 2006

For more than six months, a few senators have been fumbling around in the dark, trying to write laws covering a domestic wiretapping operation that remains a mystery to most of them. Their ideas are far from radical; some just want to bring the White House back under the rule of law by making the spying retroactively legal. But Vice President Dick Cheney, who is in charge of both overseeing the spying and covering it up, has now made it crystal clear that the White House does not intend to let anything happen. It's time for the Senate to stop rolling over and start focusing on uncovering the extent of the spying and enforcing the law.

A good place to start is by compelling the executives of the major telecommunications companies to testify about reports that they have turned over data on the phone calls of millions of Americans without a court order. Those reports were a reminder that this is not a debate about whether the government should spy on terrorists by tapping their phone calls. President Bush wants Americans to believe that critics of the program oppose that, but nobody does. The real issue is that Mr. Bush does not want to bother with legal niceties like getting a warrant or to acknowledge Congress's power by accounting for his actions.