How to Recycle Practically Anything

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How to Recycle Practically Anything
By Sally Deneen
Emagazine.com

May/June 2006 Issue

Old myths are shattering and new options come online.

Don't throw away those exercise videos and ubiquitous AOL CDs. Jim Williams wants you to mail old videotapes and CDs to him, so that more than 40 disabled staffers at his ACT Recycling in Columbia, Missouri can recycle them. And, oh, don't toss out those used Fed-Ex envelopes or broken smoke detectors; their manufacturers take them back for recycling.

Indeed, these days, it seems that more cast-offs than ever can be recycled. No matter where you live, you can recycle a wide range of discards - aseptic juice packages, printer cartridges, ordinary batteries, iPods, PDAs, and even cell phones.

Surprised? Recycling has leap-frogged ahead, meaning if you haven't checked the recycling scene since the mid-1990s, it's possible that much of what you thought you knew is wrong. Not only can you recycle more things, but your discards are very much in demand, perhaps more than you realize.

Congress May Bestow Unchecked Spying Powers on President

By Catherine Komp
The NewStandard

Friday 23 June 2006

While dozens of lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance of Americans slowly move through the courts, the Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to consider legislation that would effectively legalize the practice.

Civil-rights advocates and constitutional-law experts say several proposed bills attempt to "whitewash" executive wrongdoing before Congress has the opportunity to conduct hearings and gather the facts surrounding the National Security Agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping and telecommunications data mining.

"Congress has the power to ensure that the president follows the law; they just have chosen not to use it," said Brittany Benowitz, staff attorney for the Center for National Security Studies, a government watchdog group.

House Bill Would Discourage Church-and-State Suits

Maybe they're planning violations of the existing law...--Dictynna

The NewStandard

Friday 23 June 2006

A bill that supporters say is targeted at the American Civil Liberties Union may undo a law that forces losing defendants to pay plaintiffs' legal fees in cases involving some rights issues.

The Public Expression of Religion Act, introduced last year in the House by Representative John Hostettler (R-Indiana), would amend a law passed in the 1970s aimed at making it easier for Americans to sue the government over civil-rights violations. The law is meant to encourage attorneys to take on cases, providing them guaranteed payment if they win.

Hostettler's bill would do away with the provision granting attorney's fees and reimbursement in cases involving violations of the prohibition against government establishment of religion.

The Agonist: They're Gonna Swiftboat Murtha

Let the swiftboating begin. Check this out: www.murthalied.com

Here is the DNS info (here and here and here)if anyone cares to track this stuff down.

More as it comes.

Update: Here is what we know so far, but we could use your help.

There person who set up the site is one Amanda P. Doss, and a quick google search turns up this site: www.operationstreetcorner.com, which is a wonderful site, as Billy found out, dedicated to: "The Vietnam Veterans' Grassroots Campaign Against John Kerry and Jane Fonda, traitors to our country." She may be tied to Jerome Corsi and some of the Swiftboaters, themselves, but we need your help. Please google around and look for associations and links. It is important and essential to pre-emp this crap before they get it out. Doss' email: amandapdoss@yahoo.com Add any new info to the comments of shoot me an email: seanpaul-at-agonist.dot.org

Mpls Star Tribune debases itself with Republican "columnist"

Katherine Kersten's digs at the United Methodist Church are in line with those made by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, where she sits on the board of advisors

As retired United Methodist clergy, we are extremely disturbed by the comments of columnist Katherine Kersten about our church ("Methodists' focus on activism may be clearing out pews," June 5). They distort facts and disparage the work of our faith communities.

'Wal-Mart Bill' Assailed Before Judge

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 24, 2006; D01

A U.S. district judge in Baltimore yesterday heard arguments over the validity of Maryland's controversial law requiring large companies -- namely Wal-Mart -- to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits.

At issue was whether the state legislation is preempted by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which sets minimum standards for private companies' voluntary pension and health plans. The state law was enacted earlier this year despite a veto attempt by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

The Cocktail That Saved Karl Rove's Ass

It's been a week since Patrick Fitzgerald decided that he couldn't make the case against Karl Rove, and I'm amazed that more hasn't been made of the role Viveca Novak played in Rove's narrow escape from indictment. She was his human stay-out-of-jail-free card.

For those of you who don't remember this blip on the Plamegate radar, Novak was the Time magazine reporter who, over drinks with her old pal attorney Robert Luskin in the summer or early fall of 2004 at Washington's Café Deluxe, let it slip that his client Rove had been one of the sources who'd leaked the lowdown on Valerie Plame to Matt Cooper.

Sailors' Social Security Nos. on Web Site

By LOLITA C. BALDOR Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Navy has begun a criminal investigation after Social Security numbers and other personal data for 28,000 sailors and family members were found on a civilian Web site.

The Navy said Friday the information was in five documents and included people's names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Navy spokesman Lt. Justin Cole would not identify the Web site or its owner, but said the information had been removed. He would not provide any details about how the information ended up on the site.

Fox Gets ‘Fair And Balanced’ Access to Guantanamo

Last week, the Pentagon “shut down access entirely” to the Guantanamo Bay prison after the suicide deaths of three detainees. Journalists covering the suicides had their clearances revoked and were immediately flown back to the United States, and regular visits between detainees and their lawyers were cancelled. Human rights groups protested:

This press crackdown is the administration’s latest betrayal of fundamental American values. The Bush Administration is afraid of American reporters, afraid of American attorneys and afraid of American laws.

Afraid of American journalists, that is, as long as they’re not from Fox.

The New American Cold War

by STEPHEN F. COHEN

[from the July 10, 2006 issue]

Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.

As a result of the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia, a state bearing every nuclear and other device of mass destruction, virtually collapsed. During the 1990s its essential infrastructures--political, economic and social--disintegrated. Moscow's hold on its vast territories was weakened by separatism, official corruption and Mafia-like crime. The worst peacetime depression in modern history brought economic losses more than twice those suffered in World War II. GDP plummeted by nearly half and capital investment by 80 percent. Most Russians were thrown into poverty. Death rates soared and the population shrank. And in August 1998, the financial system imploded.

Panda Slugger

The dubious scholarship of Michael Pillsbury, the China hawk with Rumsfeld's ear.

By Soyoung Ho

In May 2002, ten months before he became president of China, Hu Jintao visited Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. The meeting, as then-Vice President Hu saw it, had gone well. Routine U.S.-Chinese military-to-military contacts, which had been suspended since 2001 after a tense standoff over a damaged U.S. spy plane, were to be renewed. China's Xinhua news agency quickly put out a headline announcing the thaw: "Chinese vice-president, U.S. defense secretary agree to resume military exchanges."

But there was a problem. According to the Pentagon, no such consensus had been reached. Instead, the two sides had merely agreed that the possibility of such exchanges would be "revisited."

Cold Comfort

Liberalism's hawkish past is less useful as a guide to confronting future threats than Peter Beinart would like to believe.

By Fred Kaplan

John Kerry lost the 2004 election, it can reasonably be argued, not because of abortion or gay marriage but because of his own indecisiveness. Too few citizens trusted him with the nation's security in a time of terror (and, face it, many of us who voted for him did so with qualms). In the subsequent year-and-a-half, George W. Bush has squandered the advantage he held on that score--and wrecked the Republican Party's broad lead on military matters, to boot--but the Democrats have yet to devise an alternative vision. Peter Beinart, former editor and now editor-at-large of The New Republic, lays out his version of one in The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

Bush-Hating Nation: Anatomy of an epithet

By Steve Rendall

Appearing on MSNBC’s Situation with Tucker Carlson (2/14/06), conservative talkshow host and film critic Michael Medved linked an Oscar nomination he disapproved of to a mental illness he called “Bush hatred”:

This Bush hatred is a disease, and it’s completely obsessive. And it’s reached the extent that if you take a look at movies that are nominated for the Oscar this year, one of the frontrunners, in fact the frontrunner for best foreign language film, is a film made in the Palestinian Authority.

“Bush-hater” has been a favorite epithet of Republican partisans since 2003. A Nexis search shows the term appearing 45 times in 2001 and 38 times in 2002, before burgeoning to 493 mentions in 2003, mostly near the end of the year as discussion of the 2004 presidential campaign began in earnest. The term went stratospheric during the election year, with 1,340 mentions, before settling down to 621 in 2005.

The False Debate Over 'Broken Borders'

When pro-business passes as pro-immigrant

By Saurav Sarkar

Since 2005, much of the mainstream media has been rife with coverage of what has been called “immigration reform”—a policy debate over what kind of immigration legislation would be passed among a narrow range of options. One pole of the legislative debate was the McCain-Kennedy proposal, which would have created a temporary or “guest” worker program, followed by conditional and heavily delayed legalization of workers. The other was the Sensenbrenner Bill, passed by the House in December 2005, which would, among other harsh provisions, turn undocumented immigrants into felons and massively increase detentions and deportations.

Either measure by itself would be the biggest change in U.S. immigration law since 1996, when Congress restricted economic and legal benefits for immigrants, and vastly expanded grounds for deportation and detention of immigrants. There has not been an amnesty or other large-scale legalization of the millions of undocumented people in the United States since 1986. The information that the American public is receiving is therefore of enormous and direct consequence to tens of millions of people and indirectly to billions.

The Selling of Evangelical Christianity

Larry Ross' A. Larry Ross Communications brings Christian marketing into the twenty-first century

You've probably never heard of him or his public relations company, but you've certainly heard of many of his clients. Over the years, he has represented such heavy hitters as the Rev. Billy Graham, Pastor Rick Warren of Lake Forest, California's Saddleback Church, Texas's African American MegaChurch Pastor T.D. Jakes, and the up-and-coming Ohio Pastor, Rod Parsley, the head of Ohio's Center for Moral Clarity.

He has worked with the Promise Keepers, the international men's ministry, as well as such movies as "Left Behind," a film based on the popular series of apocalyptic novels of the same name, "The Prince of Egypt," and actor/director Mel Gibson's blockbuster, "The Passion of the Christ."

Washington tax-cut advocate aided Abramoff

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 23, 8:16 PM ET

In Jack Abramoff's world, prominent Washington tax-cut advocate Grover Norquist was a godsend.

Moving money from a casino-operating Indian tribe to Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition founder and professed gambling opponent, was a problem. Lobbyist Abramoff turned to his longtime friend Norquist, apparently to provide a buffer for Reed.

The result, according to evidence gathered by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, was that Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform became a conduit for more than a million dollars from the Mississippi Choctaw to Reed's operation, while Norquist, a close White House ally, took a cut.

Without citing any specific group, the Senate panel found numerous instances of nonprofit organizations that appeared to be involved in activities unrelated to their mission as described to the Internal Revenue Service.

Analysis: CIA program expands Bush's power

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press WriterFri Jun 23, 8:29 PM ET

A secret CIA-Treasury program to track financial records of millions of Americans is the latest installment in an expansion of executive authority in the name of fighting terrorism. The administration doesn't apologize for President Bush's aggressive take on presidential powers. Vice President Dick Cheney even boasts about it.

Bush has made broad use of his powers, authorizing warrantless wiretaps, possibly collecting telephone records on millions of Americans, holding suspected terrorists overseas without legal protections and using up to 6,000 National Guard members to help patrol the border with Mexico.

That's in addition to the vast anti-terrorism powers Congress granted him in the recently extended Patriot Act.

Shushing Big Money

Citizens deal a blow to 'corporate personhood'

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

June 22, 2006

In the old monarchies of Europe, the resident populace were known as subjects. Here in the New World, where mankind started over, we're citizens, a word that pulses with self-governing power.

This is pretty scary, and there's plenty of pressure on us not to take this role literally. Democracy is dangerous, after all. It's always a threat to those in power. This is why its expansion over the last 230 years — through abolitionism, trade unionism, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement — has never come without struggle and controversy. But where democracy is healthy, this is what citizens do: expand the terrain.

New Study: Global Warming, Not ‘Natural Cycles,’ Played Major Role in 2005 Hurricane Season

The 2005 North Atlantic hurricane season was the most active in recorded history, and caused an unprecedented level of damage.

Now, in the second major global warming study released today, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has found:

Global warming accounted for around half of the extra hurricane-fueling warmth in the waters of the tropical North Atlantic in 2005, while natural cycles were only a minor factor.

… The study contradicts recent claims that natural cycles are responsible for the upturn in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995. It also adds support to the premise that hurricane seasons will become more active as global temperatures rise.

Capitalism That Works For All

By Frances Moore Lappé, AlterNet. Posted June 23, 2006.

In a region of northern Italy, the author of 'Diet For a Small Planet' discovered a cooperative approach to living that actually enhances human dignity.

A market economy and capitalism are synonymous --- or at least joined at the hip. That's what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism -- control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders -- is only one way to drive a market.

Granted, it is hard to imagine another possibility for how an economy could work in the abstract. It helps to have a real-life example.

And now I do.

Radical Right's Reed Took $5.3M In Payments As Central Figure In Abramoff Lobbying Operation...

Posted on June 23, 2006 at 8:37 AM.

A bipartisan Senate report released on Thursday documented more than $5.3 million in payments to Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and a leading Republican Party strategist, from an influence-peddling operation run by the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff on behalf of Indian tribe casinos.

The report by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee portrayed Mr. Reed, now a candidate for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in his home state of Georgia, as a central figure in Mr. Abramoff's lobbying operation, the focus of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

Digby: I Beg Your Pardon

I think it's fairly obvious that this trial balloon over the week-end to pardon Scooter Libby is for real and we should all take it quite seriously. It wasn't just Mr Joe DiToensing who said it, it was none other than William Kristol on Fox news:

[Fitzgerald] indicted one person, not for any underlying crime, but for allegedly mis-remembering a couple of conversations with reporters when talking about them to the grand jury — these were conversations that went nowhere. No one thinks Scooter Libby actually leaked Valerie Plame’s name, even if that were a crime, which is isn’t.

Digby: Good Argument For Gun Control

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 -- U.S. Independence Day -- are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

[...]

"That is a total misconception as far as we are concerned," Kariyawasam told reporters ahead of the two-week meeting opening on Monday.

For one, July 4 is a holiday at U.N. headquarters and the world body's staff will be watching a fireworks display from the U.N. lawn rather than attending any meetings, he said.

For another, the U.N. conference will look only at illegal arms and "does not in any way address legal possession," a matter left to national governments to regulate rather than the United Nations, he added.

Digby: We're Not That Innocent

... at least I hope not.

This is a psych-out, Democrats. You know that don't you?

... people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

Digby: Get It Out There

I've told this story before, but those of you who've heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn't matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn't know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn't she?"

Digby: "Personal Psychodrama Seems To be Involved"

Gene Lyons has a great column up this week about Murtha and Karl Rove. You'll enjoy it. I particularly liked this line:

Murtha didn’t say so, but there’s no chance of an Iraqi democracy friendly to the U. S. That’s a delusion. Bush’s photo-op visit merely underscored the point. Three years after “Mission accomplished,” and the mighty conqueror flies into the fortified “Green Zone” unannounced and can’t trust Iraq’s prime minister enough to give him, oh, an hour’s notice ? That’s not how Alexander the Great did it.

Bank Data Secretly Reviewed By Bush Admin. Without Warrants Or Subpoenas...

The New York Times | Eric Lichtblau And James Risen | June 22, 2006 at 08:36 PM

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions.

David Corn: The Perfect Stonewall

June 21, 2006

After a brief hiatus to work on a book about the selling of the Iraq war and the CIA leak case, David Corn is back writing his twice-monthly column, "The Loyal Opposition" for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Future presidents and press secretaries will owe much to George W. Bush and Scott McClellan—that is, if they ever want to mount a cover up. A week after Karl Rove's lawyer announced he was no longer under investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, it's rather clear that Rove and the White House pulled perfected the art of stonewalling. They—and this caper—will be an inspiration to spinners everywhere.

In July 2003, when columnist Bob Novak (first) and Time magazine (second) published stories disclosing that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer—and cited administration officials as their sources—the White House responded with a simple denial. McClellan, who had just inherited the White House press secretary position from Ari Fleischer, said of this leak, "That is not the way this president or this White House operates." There was no wiggle room in that statement.

Defense Department Disavows Santorum’s WMD Claims

Today, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) held a press conference and announced “we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Santorum and Hoekstra are hyping a document that describes degraded, pre-1991 munitions that were already acknowledged by the White House’s Iraq Survey Group and dismissed.

Fox News’ Jim Angle contacted the Defense Department who quickly disavowed Santorum and Hoekstra’s claims. A Defense Department official told Angle flatly that the munitions hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra are “not the WMD’s for which this country went to war.”

White House Briefing: Where Did Safavian Work Again?

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 21, 2006; 11:10 AM

You wouldn't know it from the coverage of David H. Safavian's conviction yesterday for lying and obstructing justice, but some of his criminal activity actually took place while he was working at the White House.

Safavian managed to avoid being frog-marched out of the White House by resigning three days before his arrest.

Attytood: Politicizing the Pentagon

Tomorrow's New York Times has an article on how the GOP is trying to squeeze lemonade out of the situation in Iraq, led by what they insist is a "reinvigorated" Karl Rove. Indeed, as we (and others) have written, the legislative debate on Iraq is Klassic Karl in the sense of turning a weakness into a strength, just as he did successfully in 2004 by attacking John Kerry's Vietnam record -- to aid his candidate who got out of serving there entirely.

That's all fine and good, but we were struck by this passage:

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Republicans say the cumulative effect would be to send a message of weakness to the world at a time of new threats from Iran and North Korea and would leave enemies controlling Iraq's vast oil reserves, the third largest in the world. (The book, including a chapter entitled "Rapid Response" with answers to frequent Democratic charges, was sent via e-mail to Republican lawmakers but, in an apparent mistake, also to some Democrats.)

U.S. Losing Its Middle-Class Neighborhoods

From 1970 to 2000, Metro Areas Showed Widening Gap Between Rich, Poor Sections

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 22, 2006; A03

INDIANAPOLIS -- Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the country, shrinking at more than twice the rate of the middle class itself.

In their place, poor and rich neighborhoods are both on the rise, as cities and suburbs have become increasingly segregated by income, according to a Brookings Institution study released Thursday. It found that as a share of all urban and suburban neighborhoods, middle-income neighborhoods in the nation's 100 largest metro areas have declined from 58 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000.

Finding My Religion

I have a hard time understanding why those of a fundamentalist bent don't find meaning in helping their fellow beings...plenty of meaning there!--Dictynna

Bill Moyers talks about faith, reason and his new PBS special

David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate

Monday, June 19, 2006

Can religion and reason peacefully coexist? From a scan of the headlines it doesn't seem so. The world appears polarized, incapable of even agreeing to disagree on matters of faith.

Journalist Bill Moyers believes that conversation can lead to a cure for what ails us -- but not conversation in which people simply shriek at each other. Moyers, who describes himself as "neither wholly a believer nor wholly a skeptic," thinks we can move away from pitting reason against faith and give equal weight to both in our discussions. Science can illuminate faith, and faith can inform science.

Firedoglake: Off The Charts

By Ian Welsh @ 7:40 pm

I first became interested in how governments measure unemployment back in the early 90’s recession. I was unemployed and I couldn’t find a job and the same was true of many of my friends. Those who were able to find jobs were generally working farm below the level they had been in the past. And I’d read the unemployment rate numbers and it seemed to me they didn’t really reflect what I was seeing around me. So I decided to investigate. What I found out was that the unemployment rate didn’t measure exactly what I had thought it did.

Digby: When The Troops Come Home And Not before

There has been quite a debate in blogging circles about the "amnesty for insurgents" bill that was defeated in the Senate yesterday and I'm a little surprised that there is even a discussion about it. As you probably know, the administration has been supportive of an idea by the fragile Iraqi government to give amnesty to killers of American troops in exchange for their laying down their weapons. A lot of people think this is a good idea.

I don't. I really, really don't. Amnesty is something you grant when hostilities are over as part of a settlement. Until troops are off the ground, or a very serious cease fire has been called at the least, the mere idea of this is just nuts in my book.

Digby: The Good Husbands

Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report has an interesting piece in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly, noting that three of the top potential Republican candidates are admitted adulterers.

Until relatively recently, a self-confessed adulterer had never sought the presidency. Certainly, other candidates have been dogged by sex scandals. In the 1828 presidential election, John Quincy Adams questioned whether Andrew Jackson's wife was legitimately divorced from her first husband before she married Old Hickory. Grover Cleveland, who was single, fathered a child out of wedlock, a fact that sparked national headlines during the 1884 election (though he managed to win anyway). There have been presidential candidates who had affairs that the press decided not to write about, like Wendell Wilkie, FDR, and John F. Kennedy. And there have been candidates whose infidelities have been uncovered during the course of a campaign: Gary Hart's indiscretions ultimately derailed his 1988 bid, and in 1992, during the course of his campaign, Bill Clinton was forced to make the euphemistic admission that he "caused pain" in his marriage.

Digby: Frothy Junior

Yee Haw! The Codpiece is back with a vengeance! And guess who can’t keep his grubby little hands away from it. You guessed it: Joe Klein.

Via John Amato:

"I was up there in the cockpit of that airplane coming into Baghdad," the President told the press corps assembled on the White House lawn after his dash into and out of the war zone last week.

Digby: Fogies and Hippies

Atrios wonders today why everybody is so derisive about the (incorrect) idea that the left blogosphere (or Jon Stewart's audience) consists of a bunch of college kids when it would be a benefit to have college kids reading papers and being informed etc.

I'm pretty sure it's because the right's narrative hasn't changed since the 1960's --- the Democrats are held hostage a bunch of radical students who know nothing of how the world really works but are dangerously trying to destroy capitalism and civilized society. Listen to Rush. You can't tell much difference between what he says and what my Dad used to blather on about at the dinner table in 1970's on the subject. The "crazy teenagers vs the grown-ups" paradigm still persists.

Billmon: The Wages of Sin

Despite record low approval ratings, House lawmakers Tuesday accepted a $3,300 pay raise that will increase their salaries to $168,500.

The 2 percent cost-of-living raise would be the seventh straight for members of the House and Senate.

Associated Press
House says yes to $3,300 pay raise
June 14, 2006

____________________________

A bid to boost the U.S. minimum wage failed Tuesday as Republicans in the House of Representatives pushed back an effort by Democrats to force a vote on the measure.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, said last week that he wanted to hold off on debating minimum wage legislation until possibly after the November elections. House Majority Leader John Boehner also said he probably wouldn't allow the legislation to reach the House floor this week.

Bloomberg News
Bid to boost minimum wage suffers setback
June 20, 2006

I have to admit, even I didn't think the political pimps in control of our national whorehouse would have the gall to sneak through a pay raise for themselves, then turn around a week later and kill the first increase in the minimum wage in almost ten years.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 06/21/06

As Maureen Dowd warns that "big ideas can backfire," The BAG observes that "a large cross section of the MSM swallowed last week's administration propaganda and is now using it as 'lining paper' to neatly package the story of these murders."

The Booman Tribune fact-checks Rush Limbaugh's claim that "the cut and run liberals" are "happy these two soldiers got tortured," as "the 'leftist' version of Ann Coulter" provokes 'Selective Media Moral Outrage.'

Tom Engelhardt discusses how best to read 'The Imperial Press,' among whom the WSWS finds "remarkable unanimity" as 'Washington escalates slaughter in Iraq.'

As it's reported that the U.S. Army Reserve faces an "involuntary call-up" crunch, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage offered a "gloomy assessment of the situation" in Iraq and Afghanistan in an Australian interview.

Although "The One Percent Doctrine" is being hailed as "the next 'must read' book," with revelations that "might be spot on," Eric Umansky finds himself 'Doubting Suskind.'

Intelligence experts tell Salon that a "secret, highly secure room" maintained by AT&T in St. Louis since 2002 "bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation" for "spying on U.S. Internet traffic." Plus: "Quicker and Easier Than Subpoenas."

Timber Becomes Tool in Effort to Cut Estate Tax

By Edmund L. Andrews
The New York Times

Wednesday 21 June 2006

Washington - In a new attempt to permanently reduce the estate tax on inherited wealth, House Republican leaders moved on Tuesday to win over crucial Democrats with a tax sweetener for timber companies.

Admitting that Congress would not be able to abolish the estate tax this year, House leaders unveiled a compromise that would stop just short of full repeal and would give the Senate another chance to take up the issue.

The latest proposal would eliminate the tax for all estates worth less than $5 million - up to $10 million for couples. That would cover more than 99.5 percent of estates, according to Congressional estimates. In addition, the compromise would reduce the tax rates on the few estates that would still be subject to a tax.

Net Neutrality Diversion

Art Brodsky

June 21, 2006

A couple of days ago in an auditorium at George Washington University here in Washington, former Clinton Administration spokesman Mike McCurry trotted out the hottest talking point in the fight against keeping the Internet open. He accused the pro-openness forces of hypocrisy because search engines play favorites.

What Google does, he said, “looks suspiciously to me like exactly the sort of content-discrimination business model that advocates of the network neutrality are foisting off on the telecoms. What is the difference?”

As a logical argument, the issue is just silly. As a diversionary tactic, it is more valuable. For while this is being argued out, the telecom, cable, movie and recording industries are getting away with one big goodie bag.

Knitting Together an Afghan Strategy

NATO tests the "ink-spot theory."

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, June 20, 2006, at 6:28 PM ET

KABUL—NATO's headquarters in Afghanistan occupy the same plot of land that the British army held in the 19^th century during its two attempts to control the country, which both resulted in humiliating routs. "Third time lucky," said Brig. Nick Pope, with a nervous smile.

Fourth time, actually, since the Soviets laid their stakes on this ground too, until their own empire-shattering retreat.

Dubai Company Still Controlling 22 American Ports...

CNN | Posted June 19, 2006 10:48 PM

DOBBS:...It's been more than three months since Dubai Ports World agreed to sell its port operations at 22 U.S. ports. But as of today, all 22 of these terminal facilities remained under the control of Dubai Ports and the government of Dubai. You thought we weren't watching, didn't you? Bill Tucker reports

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The bottom line of the Dubai Ports World deal is pretty easy to understand.

JOE MULDOON, FULLER & COMPANY: Since March 6th, Dubai Ports World has owned and controlled operations in 22 U.S. ports and that Congress now has dropped the provision that would prohibit their approvals....

House Judiciary Committee passes resolution demanding NSA telecom requests

John Byrne
Published: Wednesday June 21, 2006

The House Judiciary Committee unexpectedly passed a Democratic resolution Wednesday morning calling on the Justice Department to turn over all requests made by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies to telephone service providers to obtain information without a warrant.

The measure was passed by a voice vote Wednesday morning with support of Republican Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It was introduced by Florida Democrat Robert Wexler.

An A-to-Z Book of Conservatism Now Weighs In

It has red states and blond pundits; home schoolers and The Human Life Review; originalists, monetarists, federalists and evangelists; and no shortage of people named Kristol.

Now American conservatism can claim another mark of distinction: an encyclopedia all its own.

Report: Global Warming Pollution Has Doubled in 28 States Since 1960

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group released an analysis of government data today showing that 28 states more than doubled their carbon dioxide emissions between 1960 and 2001.

One major culprit of the spike in emissions: Increased combustion of oil to fuel our cars and trucks, which accounted for 40% of the total rise. “Oil emissions from the transportation sector soared over the period due to a dramatic rise in vehicle travel and the stagnating fuel efficiency of vehicles, while oil emissions from every other sector peaked in the 1970s”:

FCC Votes to Review Media Ownership Rules

Wednesday June 21, 2006 4:46 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Federal Communications Commission voted Wednesday to begin a review of its rules on media ownership over the objections of some members who said the process didn't envision sufficient public comment.

The commission had earlier pressed the controversial issue of limits on the number of radio and television stations that one owner could have and the limits on cross-ownership between newspapers and broadcasters.

House Delays Renewal of Voting Rights Act

Wednesday June 21, 2006 4:46 PM

By LAURIE KELLMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - House GOP leaders on Wednesday postponed the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act under objections from Southern Republicans who complained during a private meeting that the legislation unfairly singles out their states for federal oversight, a leadership aide said.

The act, passed to end racist voting practices, had been set for a House vote Wednesday on its renewal, with Republican and Democratic leaders behind it.

The Reviews Are In

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; 1:12 PM

A new book hitting the stores today and a new documentary hitting the airwaves tonight offer detailed and highly unflattering looks at the behind-the-scenes workings of the Bush administration's war on terror.

And they're both getting rave reviews.

Iran war 'could triple oil price'

World oil prices could triple if the West's stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme escalates into conflict, the Saudi Arabian government has warned.

The Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, said such an event could send prices spiralling from their current level of about $70 per barrel.

Device Burns Fuel with Almost Zero Emissions

Simple design makes ultra-low emission combustion more efficient, affordable and stable

ATLANTA (June 21, 2006) — Georgia Tech researchers have created a new combustor (combustion chamber where fuel is burned to power an engine or gas turbine) designed to burn fuel in a wide range of devices ― with next to no emission of nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO), two of the primary causes of air pollution. The device has a simpler design than existing state-of-the-art combustors and could be manufactured and maintained at a much lower cost, making it more affordable in everything from jet engines and power plants to home water heaters.

The Death of News

by MARK CRISPIN MILLER

[from the July 3, 2006 issue]

Ten years ago, when we first focused national attention on the dangers of the US media cartel, the situation was already grim, although in retrospect it may seem better than it really was. In the spring of 1996 Fox News was only a conspiracy (which broke a few months later). CNN belonged to Turner Broadcasting, which hadn't yet been gobbled by Time Warner (although it would be just a few months later); Viacom had not yet bought CBS News (although it would in 1999, before they later parted ways); and, as the Telecommunications Act had been passed only months earlier, local radio had not yet largely disappeared from the United States (although it was obviously vanishing). One could still somewhat plausibly assert, as many did, that warnings of a major civic crisis were unfounded, overblown or premature, as there was little evidence of widespread corporate censorship, and so we were a long way from the sort of journalistic meltdown that The Nation had predicted.

Thus was the growing threat of media concentration treated much like global warming, which, back then, was also slighted as a "controversial" issue ("the experts" being allegedly at odds about it), and one whose consequences, at their worst, were surely centuries away--a catastrophic blunder, as the past decade has made entirely clear to every sane American. Now, as the oceans rise and simmer and the polar bears go under, only theocratic nuts keep quibbling with the inconvenient truth of global warming. And now, likewise, few journalists are quite so willing to defend the Fourth Estate, which under Bush & Co. has fallen to new depths. Although its history is far from glorious, the US press has never been as bad as it is now; and so we rarely hear, from any serious reporters, those blithe claims that all is well (or no worse than it ever was).

'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

By Greg Mitchell
Published: June 18, 2006 6:20 PM ET

NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says shows that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

By Greg Mitchell

Published: June 18, 2006 6:20 PM ET
NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says shows that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

The Hariri Mirage: Lessons Unlearned

By Robert Parry
June 16, 2006

In October 2005, the drumbeat had begun for a confrontation with a rogue Middle East regime based on supposedly strong evidence about its nefarious secret activities. The U.S. news media trumpeted the regime’s guilt and agreed on the need for action, though there was debate whether forcible regime change was the way to go.

A half year later, however, much of that once clear evidence has melted away and what seemed so certain to the TV pundits and the major newspapers looks now to be another case of a rush to judgment against an unpopular target.

A Shift Among the Evangelicals

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25

Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention.

When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group's president at its meeting this week in Greensboro, N.C., the news appeared on the back pages of most secular newspapers -- or it didn't appear at all.

But Page's upset victory could be very significant, both to the nation's religious life and to politics. He defeated candidates supported by the convention's staunchly conservative establishment, which has dominated the organization since the mid-1980s. His triumph is one of many signs that new breezes are blowing through the broader evangelical Christian world.