Digby: Acid, Amnesty, Abortion and Amnesia

Maha discusses "The Story of 1972" today and does something quite innovative. She pulls up Richard Nixon's acceptance speech and reminds everyone what he was really running against that year: acid, amnesty and abortion --- as well as "law and order" which was George Wallace's racist war cry in 1968 and stood the Republicans in good stead for a generation of race baiting.

The first issue Nixon launched into was not Vietnam, but quotas. He was speaking out against Affirmative Action. He spoke of “millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic Party” — this was a nod to the old white supremacist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party because of its stand in favor of civil rights (the famous Southern Strategy). McGovern had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for the nation’s poor that was widely regarded as radical and flaky and (in popular lore) amounted to taking tax money away from white people and giving it to blacks. Nixon warned that McGovern’s policies would raise taxes and also add millions of people to welfare roles — another racially charged issue. Then Nixon took on one of his favorite issues, crime. If you remember those years you’ll remember that Nixon was always going on about “lawnorder.” This was another issue with racial overtones, but it was also a swipe at the “permissiveness” of the counterculture and the more violent segments of the antiwar and Black Power movements.

Digby: "Help me Out, Sama"

I know it's absurd to think that the Bush administration cynically uses the threat of terrorism for political gain and that by being suspicious of such a thing I'm unserious about national security. But this is getting ridiculous ...

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

Digby: Depending On The Breaks

Newtie's got a stomach churning op-ed today called "The Only Option Is To Win" in the Washington Post. I would suggest that everyone take him quite seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the right to conform with this line of thinking and these ginned up crises tend to force their acceptance for a long enough time that there's no turning back. Lest we forget their boy still has his finger on the button:

Holbrooke has set the stage for an important national debate that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as Sept. 11-style airliner plots. It's a debate about whether we are in danger of losing one or more U.S. cities, whether the world faces the possibility of a second Holocaust should Iran use nuclear or biological weapons against Israel, and whether a nuclear Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf and the world's energy supplies. This is the most important debate of our time. It rivals both Winston Churchill's argument in the 1930s over the nature of Hitler and the Nazis and Harry Truman's argument in the 1940s about the emerging Soviet empire.

Digby: With Us Or Agin Us

I guess the wingnuts are finally doing what they have been wanting to do since 9/11: demonize all muslims, especially Americans, who disagree in any way with Bush. (Welcome to our world!) Yglesias points out that this is a very stupid thing to do since you can't deal with Islamic fundamentalism without the help of Islamic moderates.

This other thing where "Muslim moderate" means something like "agrees with the National Review's take on American national security policy" is just to generate a world where you could fit all the world's Muslim moderates into Fuad Ajami's living room and have a nice party. There's no reason to look at the world like that, but doing it seriously does risk transforming a manageable terror problem into an overwhelming one.

Digby: Let The Ego Soar

So Bob Kerrey is going to campaign for Lieberman. This is not surprising. He was Lieberman before Lieberman was Lieberman --- a grandstanding, narcissistic pain in the ass.

Clinton had to twist a lot of Democratic arms and bow and scrape before a lot of inflated Democratic egos, but Kerrey was in a class by himself:

August 7, 1993

With Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate gave final Congressional approval tonight to President Clinton's five-year economic program

Criminal Administration

Jennifer Van Bergen

August 11, 2006

Jennifer Van Bergen is a journalist with a law degree. Her book, The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America has been called a “primer for citizenship.” She can be reached at jvbxyz@earthlink.net.

A few months from now, after midterm elections, if Democrats regain a majority in Congress—or if Democrats regain the Executive office in three years—almost the entire Bush administration could be standing trial.

That’s if Michigan Congressman John Conyers has his way. Conyers issued a scathing, nearly 400-page report detailing crimes that Conyers’ staff found were committed by members of the Bush administration.

Recently I wrote on TomPaine.com about White House liability for war crimes. The Conyers report is both a larger inquiry—looking into crimes committed other than only war crimes—and a smaller one, because it considers largely crimes related to the invasion of Iraq.

Cutting Through Right-Wing Spin on Public Education

When the Going Gets Tough, Privatization Proponents Get Paul Peterson

Monday, August 7, 2006
People For the American Way
By Kevin Franck

Let's say that someone invented a pill that supposedly makes children grow faster. To measure its effectiveness on children from two different countries, you would assemble a sample group of each and measure their growth over time. But what if the children in one of the countries already tended to grow at a faster rate? This would certainly skew your results. The question would be how to isolate the effects of the pill by accounting for pre-existsing differences in growth rate.

The authors of a recent education study faced this very question when they tried to compare the effectiveness of public schools and private schools. Conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, the study compared the test scores of students in different schools and initially found that private school students scored higher. But they had not yet accounted for demographic characteristics – e.g. parental income and education level, the number and quality of books found in the home, etc. – that affect student test scores irrespective of the quality of school attended. For instance, children in private schools tend to come from wealthier and more educated families and therefore tend to score higher.

Where economics meets religious fundamentalism

David Sirota

Friday, August 11, 2006

SINCE the Sept. 11,2001, terrorist attacks, the world has learned a lot about the dangers of religious fundamentalists. They cannot be reasoned with, bargained with or talked sense to no matter how destructive their actions are. Why? Because they are governed not by fact, but entirely by faith -- a concept the American Heritage dictionary defines as "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."

Unfortunately, faith-based fundamentalism is not the exclusive domain of terrorists. Some fundamentalists operate in the legitimate, nonviolent world of American politics where they wear suits, appear on television and are venerated as geniuses. Their religion is called "free" trade, which they zealously insist will lead America to economic nirvana. Yet, like other fundamentalists, their proselytizing does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, and their vision is apocalyptic, at least for most Americans' economic future.

War Critics Are Mainstream, Not Fringe

Posted on Aug 10, 2006

By Joe Conason

As Connecticut Democrats went to their polling places to choose a Senate nominee, waves of rhetorical hysteria burst forth from the mouths of excitable conservatives. At stake in the primary was not only the fate of a single politician but the “soul of the Democratic Party” and perhaps even the fate of the West.

Old terms like “appeasement” and “Stalinist” have been brandished to insinuate that anyone who dares to dissent from the failed policies adopted by Joe Lieberman and the Bush administration is at best a fool and at worst a traitor.

Such overwrought commentary, often phrased in terms of deep concern for the future of the party of FDR, JFK and Harry S. Truman, usually emanates from commentators whose political objective is continued Republican domination of all branches of government. Democrats should reject this propaganda barrage—which reveals an extraordinary capacity for self-deception on the right.

Don't Let Hillary's Dems Cash In on Iraq

A bit over the top, but that is part of Taibbi's 'charm'...--Dictynna

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted August 10, 2006.

Hillary Clinton's carefully scripted display of canned anger at Donald Rumsfeld was for his screwing up the 'execution' of the Iraq war, not because he thought invading Iraq was a good idea.

"Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively … I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past." -- Richard Nixon, 1968

"We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders -- and frankly the record of incompetence in executing -- you are presiding over a failed policy." --Hillary Clinton, addressing Donald Rumsfeld, August 2006

Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she's deserved all of it.

It never should have happened this way. Hillary's real destiny was to destroy American progressivism forever, taking the Democratic Party down with her, but an unlikely alliance of unwitting male conspirators screwed things up along the way by making her into the first great martyr of the mass-media age.

Economy Often Defies Soft Landing

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: August 11, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — In the cool and quiet marble corridors of the Federal Reserve, the strategy for taming inflation sounds painless, even soothing: a “soft landing” for the economy after several years of flying high.

As the central bank contended on Tuesday, when it decided to pause in its two-year effort to raise interest rates, inflation is “elevated” right now but will begin to decline because economic growth is poised for a modest slowdown.

Neocon Catholics target mainline Protestants

Institute on Religion and Democracy leads serious breach of ecumenical good will

When President George W. Bush met with religious journalists in May of 2004, the religious authority he cited most often was not a fellow United Methodist or even another Protestant. It was a man the president affectionately calls "Father Richard." He is Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, who, the President explained, "helps me articulate these [religious] things". A senior administration official confirmed to Time magazine that Neuhaus "‘does have a fair amount of under-the-radar influence' on such policies as abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and the defense-of-marriage amendment"

Father Neuhaus, 69, has been a leading culture warrior in the Neoconservative camp. Although his ideological positions have been challenged by fellow Catholics as inconsistent with church teachings, few mainline Protestants are aware of his activities or those of other influential Neocon Catholics such as Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Robert P. George. Fewer still realize that these Catholics direct a group of paid political operatives who work ceaselessly to discredit mainline Protestant leaders and their Christian communions.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 08/11/06

"Democracy Now!" looks at why many British Muslims are skeptical of the alleged airline bomb plot, and Homeland Security Director Chertoff's 'new math' comes into question, as does MSNBC's sense of context.

Billmon predicts that "today's hysteria probably is an authentic glimpse at the shape of things to come," given how much U.S. actions in the Middle East seem have increased "the jihadi recruiting pool."

"Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq," Bush and his aides are reported to be seeking 'political gains from the foiled plot,' as the Wall Street Journal reports that it 'puts terrorism back in U.S. political campaigns,' just in time for the Fall elections.

Bill O'Reilly insinuates that anti-semitic attacks on Lieberman "spread like lice," while the timing of Ann Coulter's and Joseph Lieberman's attacks on Maxine Waters raise questions of coordination, and it's suggested that 'Lamont needs to assume he's running against Rove.'

The Business of Fox Appearing with Coulter, Tom Delay claims that the liberal view of terrorists is that "you can't go after these wonderful people that just killed a bunch of Americans," and declares that "The Democrats are the party of Europe."

Barbara Ehrenreich presents a 'class analysis' of the new "Miami Vice," in which "the poor serve largely as scenery," Wal-mart opens up to unions in China, but not at home, "to build a harmonious society," and an AP reporter is nominated for a job at the big box retailer.

Digby: Don't Make Trouble Part XXIV

Jacob Weisberg was only four years old in 1968 and yet he is manifesting a severe case of hippieitis. Apparently the trauma runs deep even for those who were little children at the time.

I wonder if it has occurred to any of these people that their obsession with events of 38 years ago logically requires that Democrats go along with any war the Republicans ever propose? I had assumed the party would be bleached of the horrible stain of New Left counterculture when we boomers shuffled off our mortal coil but I fear there is no statute of limitations on this. If people who were practically still in diapers at the time can't let go of it, we're in for at least a few decades of craven warmongering.

Digby: Like Clockwork

And so the borg begins the eradication of the disease in its ranks:

RedState Radio: A Conversation with Rush Limbaugh

“The Republican Congress has a problem. It is working without the presence of an elected conservative leader. George W. Bush is conservative but he is not a conservative. He's Republican, but he's not a conservative. He is not leading the conservative movement.” -- Rush Limbaugh

Digby: Purging The Moderates

There they go again:

DETROIT (AP) -- Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz lost his party's nomination Tuesday, falling to a staunchly conservative challenger in a primary race dominated by a struggle over GOP principles that attracted more than $1 million in spending by outside groups.

Schwarz, a moderate who supported abortion rights, was defeated by former state lawmaker Tim Walberg. With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Walberg had 53 percent, or 31,869 votes, to 47 percent for Schwarz, or 28,168 votes.

Digby: "Licking Their Chops"

I think it might be time to really hit journalists with some poll numbers. they clearly do not have a clue where the American people really stand and are reflexively reporting the tired, outmoded (and increasingly absurd) GOP narrative about the election.

Media matters caught CNN's Dana Bash at it this morning, a segment that made my eyes roll when I saw it. It's not just the words she mindlessly repeats, it's an attitude and a tone. (You can see the video at the link too.)

Digby: The Decider vs The Extreme Left

Tony Snow just said:

This is a defining moment in some ways for the Democratic Party. I know a lot of people have tried to make it a referendum on the president. I would flip it. Indeed it is a defining moment for the Democratic party whose national leaders have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they're going to come after you.

Digby: Refocus

It feels great to win one and I'm very enthusiastic about the fall. But let's keep one thing in mind: the Republicans aren't Joe Lieberman even if Joe Lieberman is a Republican. They run really good campaigns. Indeed, it's the only thing they do well. It is not going to be easy.

As for Joe, it looks like he might be getting some of that very special help:

Can Karl help Joe?

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

Digby: Whew!

We won. I forgot what that feels like. It feels good.

The Republicans are happy too:

Following up: A senior Republican official in Washington confirms that the party might encourage Republicans and others to support Sen. Lieberman if he runs as an independent.

Digby: Blowing In The Wind

Lanny Davis, the latest "Democrat" to take to op-ed swamp of the Wall Street Journal quotes a handful of obscure anti-semitic blog commenters and indicts the whole blogosphere for McCarthyism. Par for the course. But this is beyond ironic:

A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event--where he asked the candidate some critical questions--some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.

Digby: Bingeing and Purging

I know the chatterers are all atwitter at the prospect of Democratic voters "purging" a Senator who doesn't represent their views by voting against him in an election. Many seem particularly upset at what they perceive as a doctrinaire leftist demand for ideological purity and a rigid view about the Iraq war.

And yet:

The Heritage Foundation has never been known as an intellectually adventurous place. For decades, its policy briefs and studies have closely tracked Republican talking points. So did the opinions of the think tank's senior foreign policy analyst, John Hulsman. In his Washington Times op-eds and Fox News appearances, he cheerfully whacked Howard Dean, John Kerry, the French, and other enemies of the cause.

Digby: Fighting For Your Life

Ezra has an original take on the blogosphere's role in the Connecticut race:

The phase of this race bearing significant implications for the Democratic Party already happened, and whether Lamont wins or loses tomorrow is almost entirely immaterial to the political triumph of the netroots. Their scalp was claimed, mounted, and hung on July 7th, the day Joe Lieberman, an affable, popular incumbent who’d been his party’s celebrated vice-presidential candidate only six years earlier, was forced to mount a stage against some nobody named Ned Lamont and defensively debate his right to call himself a Democrat. Or maybe the seminal instant occurred four days earlier, on July 3rd, when Lieberman admitted that he would gather signatures to enable an independent run, a sign he feared defeat in the primary. Either way, the point is the same: The netroots won the moment Joe Lieberman felt fear.

Digby: Emotional Tidal Wave

Glenn Greenwald wrote an interesting piece yesterday about neoconservaitsm in which he posits that a real political realignment is taking place. And he asks an important question:

The idea that Lieberman is some sort of "centrist Democrat" and that the effort to defeat him is driven by radical leftists who hate bipartisanship is nothing short of inane. Why would Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol be so eager to keep a "centrist Democrat" in the Senate? Lincoln Chafee is a "centrist Republican." Are there any Democrats or liberals who care if Lincoln Chafee wins his primary? Do leftist ideologues run around praising and defending and working for the re-election of Olympia Snowe or Chris Shays or other Republican "centrists"? Do Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity love other Democratic "centrists," such as, say, Mary Landrieu or Joe Biden? The answer to all of those questions is plainly "no".

Digby: Teenage Weltanschauung

Wolcott currently has two great posts up. ("Here's Gagdad Bob, whom I believe studied psychoanalysis under Jung's cousin, Milt")

He quotes from Gore Vidal's new book in which the great old man says:
"A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those 'liberals' who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume."

I have two words of explanation: Ayn Rand

Digby: Date Rape

David Gergen says:

Yes, I am biased in favor of my friend, but I also fear that if Joe Lieberman - a man, let's remember, who was the vice presidential nominee of his party only six years ago - is purged from national leadership, that would send a message rippling through both parties: that in our new politics, working too closely with leaders across the aisle can be political suicide. It's hard to believe that, despite all their frustration, that's what Connecticut Democrats really want to say.

Juan Cole: One Ring to Rule Them

The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? And, why was Hizbullah's rocket capability so crucial that it provoked Israel to this orgy of destruction? Most of the rockets were small katyushas with limited range and were highly inaccurate. They were an annoyance in the Occupied Golan Heights, especially the Lebanese-owned Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

It doesn't make any sense.

Digby: They Were Only Following Orders

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about this article in the Washington Post this morning. It's filled with interesting quotes (and analysis) but there is only one that I think is really important because it signals that at least some members of the Democratic establishment have figured out the right way to frame this race. And it's very simple:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Friday he is not worried about the fallout from the Senate primary on House races, arguing that the message from Connecticut is that anyone supporting Bush's war policies is in deep trouble. "What's playing out here is that being a rubber stamp for George Bush is politically dangerous to life-threatening," he said.

Digby: Dupes

More insider Democrats helping their "friends" across party lines.

Some of Hollywood's most reliable and generous donors to the Democratic Party — Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and media mogul Haim Saban — are endorsing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's bid for reelection.

Digby: Order The Pink Slips

Jane has an interesting post up today about the odd choice of the Lieberman campaign to run against the "crazies" and the blogs instead of Ned Lamont. It ended up creating a thoroughly incomprehensible caricature of him as a wealthy, country club, angry hippie, which I don't think makes much sense to the voters of Connecticut.

What has struck me the most as I watched this campaign unfold from afar, is just how inept the Lieberman campaign has been on almost all levels. He had the money and the incumbency and the professional big time advisors and he ran a campaign that was almost laughably lame. I think it just shows, once again, that the tired, uncreative, tone deaf Democratic consultants are a big part of the problem for the national Democrats. If this is what the establishment produces you can see why we have lost everything.

Digby: Shakedown

Wow. If anyone has ever wondered exactly how the K Street scams work, Brent Wilkes, Duke Cunningham's pal (along with a bunch of other greedy Republican bastards) spills his guts to the NY Times:

Offering a rare insider’s view, Mr. Wilkes described the appropriations process as little more than a shakedown. He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.

Digby: Who's The Boss?

Roy at Alicublog made me depressed. I guess we citizen journalists aren't taking over the planet next February as planned. Damn. There was supposed to be money in it.

In the course of bursting my little bubble, he mentions a New Yorker profile(pdf) of Hugh Hewitt written by Nicholas Lemann, well known journalist and current Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. I missed this article when it came out and couldn't quite believe what I was reading.

Digby: Slacker In Chief

Ok, so I'm reading a story in the Washington Post about George W. Bush's annual August vacation and the fact that he's only taking ten days (like most American working stiffs) instead of the usual month or more:

Bush's scheduled week and a half in Texas is a far cry from last year's working vacation, which was shaping up as the longest presidential retreat in more than three decades before it was rudely cut short by Hurricane Katrina after nearly a month.

Digby: Small-d Fever

Harold Meyerson writes:

Many of my fellow pundits read all kinds of sinister meanings into Lieberman's pending defeat, including a purge of moderates from Democratic ranks. But, as Michael Tomasky demonstrated a couple of days ago, the moderate forces within the Democrats' Senate delegation are still very much alive and well. Next Tuesday, in fact, Connecticut Democrats will be doing exactly what small-d democratic theorists would have them do: decide an election by opting for one clear policy alternative, as personified by one candidate, over another personified by the incumbent.

From a big-D Democratic perspective, Connecticut's Democrats are doing what Democrats are hoping a clear majority of voters everywhere will do this November: reject incumbents who have supported the failed policies of this administration, the war most particularly. Far from being some kind of martyr to the fickleness of Democratic voters, Joe Lieberman has actually turned himself into one of the first victims of the popular groundswell against Bush and his war.

Digby: 2+2=Dittohead

Greg Sargent takes Rush to task:

Rush's website links to this story about an Ohio University poll which found that over a third of Americans suspect that the Feds helped the 9/11 terrorist attacks or didn't act to stop them. Rush's site then blares:

[T]he Hearts & Minds Crowd Can't Bring Themselves to Confront Enemy Hate...Poll: 1/3 of Americans Say 9/11 Was Inside Job, 1/3 of Americans are Democrats -- Do the Math

Digby: Making The Case

Scott Winship has written a much discussed article about the netroots which I will let you all read for yourself rather than expound on it at length tonight. I would just say that I think the central problem with this entire conversation about whether the netroots are too liberal or whether the country will recoil in horror at the sight of impassioned progressive activists is that there is an assumption that the body politic holds a rigid set of beliefs to which the parties must adapt. I think that is a wrong assumption --- or incomplete anyway.

Winship believes the netroots are more liberal than the party as a whole. Setting aside all the reasons why this may or may not be true (and there are plenty of reasons to believe it's not) let's assume for the sake of argument that he's right. But let's also agree for the sake of argument to take bloggers at their word that they want to unseat the Republicans and win elections. If both those assumptions are correct, how would one reconcile them?

Billmon: The Lieberman Principles

Pay any price, bear any burden, sling any bullshit:

Sen. Joe Lieberman filed to run for re-election in November as an independent, saying Wednesday it would be "irresponsible and inconsistent with my principles" to quit.

So since when did being a sore loser constitute a "principle"?

Or is the "principle" at stake the divine right of Joe Lieberman to be a U.S. Senator?

TPM: I just don't see it

(August 10, 2006 -- 12:18 AM EDT)

I'm sorry. I just don't see it.

Mike Allen has a piece in Time arguing that Republicans are thanking their lucky stars and Democrats are shaking in their boots because of the cudgel Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut has given them for November.

The piece runs down each of the key GOP players -- Mehlman, Cheney, Snow -- each bellowing out RNC talking points claiming that Lieberman's defeat means the Democratic party is beholden to the hard-left and ostrich-like isolationists.

Lieberman Lost the Old-Fashioned Way

He was out of touch with voters. And he's not alone. His defeat foreshadows an upheaval to come in November

By JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 09, 2006

So who brought Joe Lieberman down? Was it the liberal blogs? Was Lieberman the first political casualty of the Iraq War?

Both. But neither.

Yes, Iraq was the issue that crushed Lieberman in the Democratic party. And the blogs were the vehicle that helped that latent but pervasive disgruntlement among Connecticut Democrats become aware of itself. But Joe Lieberman succumbed to a political ailment (common to long-serving senators) that would have been as recognizable to Daniel Webster and Henry Clay as it was to so many 21st century bloggers: He got his head lost in the clouds of national politics and lost touch with his constituents.

Back From The Dead: Privatization

Roger Hickey and Jeff Cruz

August 10, 2006

Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future and Jeff Cruz is a senior policy analyst, directing CAF's Social Security and Medicare Project.

It is hard to believe, but the idea of privatizing Social Security, which most observers thought had been killed and buried, could return, Dracula-like, from the dead after the 2006 elections.

You won’t hear many candidates for Congress talking about their support for diverting Social Security taxes to fund private accounts—certainly not before the election if they can help it. But most Republicans quietly remain true believers. President Bush, his leading cabinet figures and key Republican leaders in both the House and Senate have been very clear about their plans to again push privatization—despite what the public backlash against Bush’s “big idea” did to them in 2005.

Mary Anderson Bain

My favorite old New Dealer.

By Cliff Sloan
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006, at 4:47 PM ET

"You don't need many heroes," legal scholar John Hart Ely once wrote, "if you choose carefully." Mary Anderson Bain, who died Monday at the age of 94, was one of mine, though she surely would have scoffed at the label.

I first met Mary in 1979, when she was only in her late 60s. "You should talk to Sid Yates," an old Chicago political hand suggested as I, fresh out of college, searched for a congressional staff job. "And that means you should talk to Mary Bain." Sid and Mary, I soon came to appreciate, were that rarity on Capitol Hill, a congressman and a top aide who worked together as equals, and who were committed to getting things done rather than getting attention. I later would learn also that Mary had already lived out several careers, including as a high-level New Dealer, an insider on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns, and the founder of a successful advertising agency.

Congress to Probe Policies at NIH

A bipartisan group asks the health agency for details of a researcher's ties to drug companies to assess its conflict-of-interest guidelines.

By David Willman, Times Staff Writer
August 10, 2006

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has asked the director of the National Institutes of Health to provide details of a senior researcher's ties to several pharmaceutical companies.

The congressional leaders, including the Republican chairman and the ranking Democrat of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in their letter that they wanted the details in order to evaluate conflict-of-interest policies at the NIH. They requested a response by week's end.

So What's Our Role in Iraq's Civil War?

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, August 9, 2006; Page A17

Of all the signs that the American people are fed up with the war in Iraq, the one that the administration should fear most was put forth last week by a longtime supporter of both the president and the war, Virginia Republican John Warner.

While chairing a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Warner suggested that the president might need a new congressional resolution authorizing our presence in Iraq, since the conflict there has become (or, best case, may yet become) a civil war.

Counterintelligence Officials Resign

By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 10, 2006; Page A04

David A. Burtt II, director of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Defense Department's newest intelligence agency whose contracts based on congressional earmarks are under investigation by the Pentagon and federal prosecutors, told his staff yesterday that he and his deputy director will resign at the end of the month.

In an internal message, Burtt said, "I do not make this decision without trepidation, but the time is right to move on to the next phase of my career." He said he had been privileged to serve as CIFA director and was "especially proud of all of you and what you have accomplished for the CI [counterintelligence] community and for the overall CI mission."

How Many People Is Too Many?

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted August 10, 2006.

Everyone from anti-contraception Christians to zero-population-growth advocates is using the U.S's looming 300-million mark to advance their agenda.

By mid-October of this year, the world's third most populous nation will hit 300 million inhabitants. And thanks to America's burgeoning fertility rate, we will keep moving briskly onward, hitting 400 million in less than 40 years, by Census Bureau projections.

Is 300 million people too many -- or not enough? Wade into a discussion of population size, and you're soon up to your neck in a host of knotty issues: sex, contraception, immigration, economic justice and ecological crises. To find out who'll be celebrating the big milepost, who'll be deploring it, and why, I got in touch with seven individuals who have especially strong views on the various forces that will decide the eventual size and composition of our nation's population.

Why We Don't Know Our Enemy

By Robert Scheer, AlterNet. Posted August 9, 2006.

A new book by the former co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission tells the inside story of how Bush has tried to squelch examination of our actual enemies.

Hysteria over the barbarians at the gate has destroyed republics from Rome to Germany. Will President Bush's post-Sept. 11 America meet a similar fate?

In the name of stopping the new bogeyman of international terrorism, our government has claimed an unfettered right to torture foreigners, eavesdrop on citizens and reorder the world with our military might. It is a policy that depends for its domestic political success on the specter of an enemy whose power and purpose must never be subject to logical and factual inquiry, lest it lose its power to alarm.

Billmon: Eye of the Beholder

Right Blogistan, which is to say, the pro-war cheerleading section, is currently holding one of its biweekly hate rallies over a pair of doctored Reuters photographs from the war in Lebanon.

This enormous scandal, we are told, is proof positive that the liberal media is up to its usual lying tricks, that the IDF is not bombing and shelling the crap out of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, but rather is fully occupied painting schools and escorting little old Lebanese ladies across the street.

Billmon: Babes in Toyland

This is really quite revealing of the neocon mind set -- and the increasingly large gulf between that mind set and what American power and influence can support:

"The position that we're taking in the UN is just nuts," a former White House official close to the US decision-making process said during the negotiations. "The US wants to put international forces on the ground in the middle of the conflict, before there's a ceasefire. The reasoning at the White House is that the international force could weigh on the side of the Israelis -- could enforce Hezbollah's disarmament" . . .

A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer confirmed this view: "I am under the impression that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were surprised when the Europeans disagreed with the US position -- they were running around saying, 'But how can you disagree, don't you understand? Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.'" (emphasis added)

And a tough and dangerous one to boot. This is supposed to encourage the French to plunk their people down in the middle of a hot LZ?

Billmon: The Boys From Brazil

I guess this is Shrub's idea of "faithfully executing" the laws -- he wants to take the War Crimes Act out and shoot it with Dick Cheney's shotgun.

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments . . .

"People have gotten worried, thinking that it's quite likely they might be under a microscope," said a U.S. official. Foreigners are using accusations of unlawful U.S. behavior as a way to rein in American power, the official said, and the amendments are partly meant to fend this off.

This is like letting John Gotti rewrite the RICO statute.

What is Conservative Culture?

In the long march of the conservative ascendancy, Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals, the 1964 LP by the satirical conservative quartet the Goldwaters, was only a blip. Four Tennessee college students put on "AuH2O" shirts and recorded an album of songs like "Down in Havana," "Barry's Moving In," and "Row Our Own Boat." They dropped out of school to warm up crowds before Goldwater campaign appearances. The record reportedly sold some 200,000 copies. The Goldwaters were never heard from again. I suggest a critical reconsideration.

Ask a conservative activist to explain what anchors and unites their fractious movement, and he will point to ideas: to weighty tomes by Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, Wilhelm Roepke, Edmund Burke; to the development of the philosophy of "fusionism," by which the furrow-browed theorists at National Review cogitated their way past the conflicts between the traditionalist, libertarian, and anti-communist strains of the American right. They will make it sound almost as if the 87 percent of Mississippians who voted for Barry Goldwater did so after a stretch of all-nighters in the library.

Worst Press Conference Ever

Does President Bush understand his own foreign policy?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2006, at 6:08 PM ET

George W. Bush's news conference on Monday was the most dismaying spectacle put on by a top American official since Condoleezza Rice's news conference two and a half weeks earlier.

Both the president and the secretary of state were addressing the Israel-Lebanon conflict and why they favored peace but not right away.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 08/08/06

An AP analysis of why 'Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD,' cites a previous Fox News headline: 'Are Saddam Hussein's WMDs Now In Hezbollah's Hands?'

U.S. diplomacy is said to reveal "a strikingly weak hand" in the Middle East, with U.S. officials seen as having "burnt their bridges. It started with Iraq..." -- where the country's premier apologized for a U.S. raid on Sadr City, during a 'Summer of Goodbyes.'

"Democracy Now!" interviews the author of 'The war the world ignores,' which quotes a human rights campaigner as saying that "when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them."

Amid reports of election glitches, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney is fighting for her political life in a Georgia runoff characterized as "a Middle East proxy fight."

An excerpt from a new book on Katrina is said to focus on "a new character who has escaped much public scrutiny," but who is said to have "left an indelible mark."

According to an official from the National Climatic Data Center, the weather trend experienced over the past seven months "cannot be explained without the influence of greenhouse gases."

As 'Oil prices hit record on Alaska outage,' BP executives are said to "have known about these problems for a long time and promised for many years to fix them, and they haven't done so."

Paul Krugman: Intimations of Recession

Published: August 7, 2006

These are the dog days of summer, but there's a chill in the air. Suddenly — really just in the last few weeks — people have starting talking seriously about a possible recession. And it's not just economists who seem worried. Goldman Sachs recently reported that the confidence of chief executives at major corporations has plunged; a clear majority of C.E.O.'s now say that conditions in the world economy, and the U.S. economy in particular, are worsening rather than improving.

On the face of it, this loss of faith seems strange. Recent growth and jobs numbers have been disappointing, but not disastrous.

But economic numbers don't speak for themselves. They always have to be interpreted as part of a story. And the latest numbers, while not that bad taken out of context, seem inconsistent with the stories optimists were telling about the U.S. economy.

Oh, Those Bad Bosses

By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Progressive. Posted August 5, 2006.

Giving one person power over others is like a giving a three-year-old a hose: not everyone will get soaked, but the chances of coming out dry are slender.

The AFL-CIO's Working America project has launched a "bad boss" contest. Unfortunately, the prize is only a free vacation, rather than the opportunity to see your nominee drawn and quartered after a lengthy and humiliating public trial.

I've heard so many bad boss stories that I'd hate to be one of the judges. The boss who makes you work overtime without pay (which would include Wal-Mart, unless it has cleaned up this practice)

Reversing malnutrition a spoonful at a time

Swollen bellies, orange hair, listlessness and dull eyes -- these are the traits of child malnutrition in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and where roughly one of every three children is chronically malnourished.

To try to change that statistic, Patricia A. Wolff, M.D., associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, founded Meds & Food for Kids (MFK) in 2004, after she saw that medications and small amounts of the local staples rice, beans and corn weren't enough to nourish children back to health.

Neural stem cells derived from human embryonic stem cells carry abnormal gene expression

Study may shed new light on better ways to grow potent stem cell lines

Neural stem cells grown from one of the federally approved human embryonic stem cell lines proved to be inferior to neural stem cells derived from fetal tissue donated for research, a UCLA study has found.

Researchers from the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine at UCLA coaxed cells from the federally approved line to differentiate into neural stem cells, a process that might one day be used to grow replacement cells to treat such debilitating diseases as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. However, the neural stem cells expressed a lower level of a metabolic gene called CPT 1A, a condition that causes hypoglycemia in humans.