Katha Pollitt: The Trouble with Bush's 'Islamofascism'

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted August 26, 2006.

If you thought the War on Terror was bad, get ready for the international disasters that the "war on Islamic fascism" will produce.

If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the "war on terror" has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It's becoming the "war on Islamic fascism." The term has been around for a while -- Nexis takes it back to 1990, when the writer and historian Malise Ruthven used "Islamo-fascism" in the London Independent to describe the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world; after 9/11 it was picked up by neocons and prowar pundits, including Stephen Schwartz in the Spectator and Christopher Hitchens in this magazine, to describe a broad swath of Muslim bad guys from Osama to the mullahs of Iran.

But the term moved into the mainstream this August when Bush referred to the recently thwarted Britain-based suicide attack plot on airplanes as "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." Joe Lieberman compares Iraq to "the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of what was to come." The move away from "war on terrorism" arrives not a moment too soon for language fussbudgets who had problems with the idea of making war on a tactic. To say nothing of those who wondered why, if terrorism was the problem, invading Iraq was the solution. (From the President's August 21 press conference: Q: "But what did Iraq have to do with September 11?" A: "Nothing." Now he tells us!)

Ice Age gives clues to global warming: study

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
Fri Aug 25, 1:23 PM ET

Ice Age evidence confirms that a doubling of greenhouse gases could drive up world temperatures by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), causing havoc with the climate, a study showed on Friday.

The researchers made a novel check of computer climate forecasts about the modern impact of heat-trapping gases, widely blamed on use of fossil fuels, against ice cores and marine sediments from the last Ice Age which ended 10,000 years ago.

Digby: The Stupids: Episode 4,577

A geography teacher put on paid leave for refusing to remove Mexican, Chinese and United Nations flags from his classroom will be allowed to return to school today after district officials backed down.

But Eric Hamlin, who teaches seventh-graders in Jefferson County, hopes his experience will inspire a backlash against a Colorado law that restricts display of other nations' flags.

Digby: Re-Runs

I am getting so tired of this nonsense. I read today from Avedon Carol that the wingnuts are attacking feminists again for not being sufficiently exercized by the plight of women under Islamic theocratic regimes:

Another re-run being linked by right-wingers is this crap about how western feminists are uninterested in condemning Islamic extremism. Of course, we do - all the time - but no one listens. We condemned Bush for leaving Afghan women high and dry after bombing Kabul, where the Taliban is now having a resurgence. We condemned the neocon plan to invade Iraq, thus unleashing extremist Islam in what had been a secular country. And we don't like the way Bush's policies have interrupted what had been a gradual weakening of extremism in Iran. Not one thing Bush-Cheney has done in the Middle-East has improved the lot of women, and in Iraq they have made things dramatically worse. The last thing the Islamic world's women need is more of this kind of help.

Digby: Blind Cruelty

Glenn Beck is "driven out of his mind" by little signs in braille outside offices that tell blind people which office they're entering. Apparently, this "political correctness" interferes with wingnut freedom to not have to look at little plaques they dislike ... or something:

MILANO: Well, "Dare to Ask," Glenn, like my book, I Can't Believe You Asked That!, is -- it's a chance for people to ask those kinds of taboo cultural questions that we all wish we could ask but we're so afraid of offending in this P.C. world that, you know, we -- we dance around it, as you were saying earlier.

Digby: Here We Go

When I wrote about the Duelling Pageants I never imagined that it would come to pass so literally. The cable nets are hammering Ray Nagin for his foot in mouth comment that it took New York five years to rebuild a hole in the ground so a reporter from NY ought to cut New Orleans some slack. Typical Nagin nonsense.

But it has provoked a case of the vapors among certain excitable folks that seems just a tad out of place considering the horrors that both cities underwent.

Digby: CNN Political Analyst

Just shoot me and put me out of my misery. I can't take it any more:

BLITZER: Joining us now in our "Strategy Session," radio talk show host Bill Press and CNN political analyst, former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts.

In this Plan B decision, the morning-after contraception pill, in effect, Hillary Clinton came out with a strong statement: "While we urge the FDA to revisit placing age restrictions on the sale of Plan B, it is real progress that millions of American women will now have increased access to emergency contraception."

Vo Nguyen Giap: 'We were waiting for them'

Vo Nguyen Giap is the Vietnamese general who planned the Ho Chi Minh trail and defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. In a rare interview with the author of a book about the trail, he recalls his part in defying the might of the US military

Virginia Morris
Friday August 25, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The teacher turned military genius Vo Nguyen Giap, who celebrated his 95th birthday today, is one of the last connections with the days of Ho Chi Minh and the start of the fight against colonial rule.

Remarkably, his army originally consisted of 34 people. By the time of the ultimate battle against the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, it was a conventional force of thousands with weapons supplied by China and the USSR. His army would eventually rise to be over a million-strong against the Americans.

General Giap still lives in the former French colonial villa in the capital, Hanoi, that has been his home for the past 60 years and where key decisions were made throughout the war. In the light and airy living room hangs just one photograph of Ho Chi Minh and Gen Giap in the early days of their guerrilla campaign against the French.

Thomas Frank: The Spoils of Victimhood

The New York Times

“President Bush operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of insurgents,” the pundit Fred Barnes writes in his recent book, “Rebel-in-Chief.” “He’s an alien in the realm of the governing class, given a green card by voters.”

Let’s see: These insurgents today control all three branches of government; they are underwritten by the biggest of businesses; they are backed by a robust social movement with chapters across the radio dial. The insurgency spreads before its talented young recruits all the appurtenances of power — a view from the upper stories of the Heritage Foundation, a few years at a conquered government agency where expertise is not an issue, then a quick transition to K Street, to a chateau in Rehoboth and a suite at the Ritz. For the truly rebellious, princely tribute waits to be extracted from a long queue of defense contractors, sweatshop owners and Indian casinos eager to remain in the good graces of the party of values.

Thomas Frank: What Is K Street’s Project?

Representative Bob Ney, the Ohio Republican who did such generous favors for the casino clients of Jack Abramoff, announced his retirement from Congress on Aug. 7; the next morning The Washington Post reported that he had acted under pressure from his fellow Ohioan John Boehner, who is said to have told Ney that, if he stood for re-election and lost, he “could not expect a lucrative career on K Street.”

This is one of those remarkable moments when the rhetoric falls away and the mysteries of conservative government are briefly revealed: K Street, synonymous with the corporate lobbying industry, will not abide a man whose reputation imperils the Republican majority, even though he has earned that reputation in the service of K Street’s leading personality. Irredeemably tainted by his work for K Street (pronounces K Street, via the trusty Boehner), Bob Ney is now ineligible for public office. The corporate lobbying industry demands that the voters of southeastern Ohio submit a different Republican to Washington.

Thomas Frank: Thus Spake Zinsmeister

In their more grandiloquent moments, conservative publicists will say that the decades-long Republican ascendancy in American government has been an intellectual achievement, that the G.O.P. prevails because it is the “party of ideas.” And, indeed, during the last three decades a cottage industry of conservative institutes and foundations has grown into a powerful quasi-academy with seven-figure budgets and phalanxes of “senior fellows” and “distinguished chairs.”

While real academics dither and fret over bugbears like certainty and balance, the scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute act boldly in the knowledge, to quote a seminal conservative text, that ideas have consequences. Luckily, the consequences are for other people.

Thomas Frank: GOP Corruption? Bring in the Conservatives

22 AUGUST 2006

In the lexicon of American business, ‘’cynicism'’ means doubt about the benevolence of market forces, and it is a vice of special destructiveness. Those who live or work in Washington, however, know another variant of cynicism, a fruitful one, a munificent one, a cynicism that is, in fact, the health of the conservative state. The object of this form of cynicism is ‘’government,'’ whose helpful or liberating possibilities are to be derided whenever the opportunity presents.

Remember how President Reagan claimed to find terror in the phrase, ‘’I'm from the government and I’m here to help'’? Or how the humorist P. J. O’Rourke won fame by declaring that even the proceedings of a New England town meeting were a form of thievery?

Paul Krugman: Housing Gets Ugly

August 25, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Bubble, bubble, Toll’s in trouble. This week, Toll Brothers, the nation’s premier builder of McMansions, announced that sales were way off, profits were down, and the company was walking away from already-purchased options on land for future development.

Toll’s announcement was one of many indications that the long-feared housing bust has arrived. Home sales are down sharply; home prices, which rose 57 percent over the past five years (and much more than that along the coasts), are now falling in much of the country. The inventory of unsold existing homes is at a 13-year high; builders’ confidence is at a 15-year low.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 08/25/06

"Riddled with errors" says Juan Cole of the Republican Congressional report on Iran, and Gary Sick detects in it suspicious signs of a hurry, while some on the right get tired of being coy about the "pre-emptive nuclear annihilation of entire countries." Plus: 'When could Iran get the bomb?'

Reviewing the history of U.S. nuclear threats, an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists observes that "Bush's statements regarding Iran are particularly reminiscent of a diplomatic strategy ... known as the 'madman theory,'" but Needlenose proposes a "common sense" reply to proponents of war.

With 180 professors killed since February, and 3,250 having already fled Iraq, Reuters reports that students are now attacking teachers, but top U.S. generals reassure that "there's been great progress in the security front here recently in Baghdad."

An AP-Ispos poll finds that "60 percent of Americans believe that in the long run there will be more terrorism in the United States because of the war in Iraq," and a CNN poll found similar results, but USA Today is accused of cherry picking its own poll to show GOP gains.

The conclusion that democracy in the Middle East is impossible, Matthew Yglesias writes, "only makes sense if you assume a perfect congruence between the idea of democracy and support for U.S.-Israeli regional security priorities."

Marc Cooper finds Anderson Cooper's inability to focus on real news "simply indefensible," Eugene Robinson can't resist the temptation to "wallow in tabloid news," instead of worrying about "the ritual beating of the tom-toms for another war," and Pat Robertson inquires about "a shadowy group called Media Matters."

"All I have to say is: pop!" writes Paul Krugman, finding that "the speculative demand for houses has gone into reverse" with the real possibility of "both a deep and a prolonged bust."

Glenn Greenwald: Those opposed to nuclear annihilation are appeasers and guilty of "handwringing"

I read numerous pro-Bush blogs on a daily basis, including many war mongerers who routinely imply that we ought to be eradicating large numbers of Middle Eastern civilians as the solution to all of our woes, so it takes a lot in the extremism department to really surprise me. But this column from Walter Williams -- highly recommended today by National Review's Mark Levin -- did so with plenty of room to spare.

Digby: Slippery Flyboy

I understand that some alleged liberals are getting all tingly at the notion of John McCain as the next president. As Yglesias said, "And why shouldn't he? A handful of additional wars and steep cuts in vital retirement security programs would be a small price to pay for minor alterations to the campaign finance system." Not to mention that JJ, the manly fighter pilot, is just soooo dreamy.

The truth is that McCain is actually more hawkish and deceitful than Bush. The only difference in their rhetoric on national security is that McCain pretends he didn't cheer every single move Bush made until it started to go wrong. Senator Straight Talk is very, very slick, I'll give him that.

Digby: Club Mad

The governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski, came in 3rd in the Republican primary on Tuesday, and although it has widely been interpreted as a revolt over local issues, there can be no doubt that it sent a chill down the spines of DC incumbents, particularly the Senate majority.

Frank Murkowski isn't just some obscure Alaskan nobody --- he was a US Senator for 22 years, a member of the most exclusive club in the world, from one of the most reliable red states.

Digby: Oh Daddy

Echidne has posted a piece about a professor who claims that liberals are being outbred by conservatives and are therefore, going to eventually go the way of the dodo bird. The professor writes:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Digby: Remedial Democracy

Scott Winship has an interesting article in The Democratic Strategist today in which he dissects one of those polls that measures how stupid Americans are about politics. And boy are they stupid about politics --- only one in ten knows who Denny Hastert is. But the good news is that they aren't measurably more stupid than they were in the 40's and 50's when there was a lot more illiteracy and many people didn't graduate from High School. I suppose that's good news.

Digby: BFF's

The RNC has put out an amazing hit piece today on our glorious overlord Kos. Apparently, Democrats who associate themselves with our Dear Leader are to be shunned for such extremist associations.

But, it's funny, as I was over on the site reading through their various press releases, I saw that they have issued many in support of John Bolton. And yet John Bolton's most important and passionate online operative is none other than Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, surely one of the most shocking extremists in the right blogosphere. Why he was being "interviewed" one-on-one by the wingnut-gone-wild while he was supposedly right in the middle of brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon a couple of weeks ago. They are practically joined at the hip ... or something.

Digby: Massaging Katrina

I wrote a few days ago about the "Duelling Pageants" of 9/11 and Katrina. It appears that the Bush administration is going to go into the belly of the beast on the day and try to squeeze out some good publicity from the stagnant floodwaters.

As next week's anniversary of Hurricane Katrina triggers recollections of rooftop refugees and massive devastation along the Gulf Coast, the White House has begun a public relations blitz to counteract Democrats' plans to use the government's tardy response and the region's slow recovery in the coming congressional elections.

Paul Krugman: King George's Crumbling Monarchy

The New York Times

Monday 21 August 2006

Paul Krugman responds to readers' comments on his August 21 column, "Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys."

Peter Durantine, Hummelstown, Pa.: All of this - the administration's incompetence on domestic and foreign policy, the privatization of tax collectors and soldiers - reflects a fading superpower, an empire in twilight. It's almost as if the administration, unable to find constructive ways for world progress, decided just to dismantle hundreds of years of progressive achievements.

Victoria Dahlgren, Bellingham, Wash. : Your sentence "... privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage" is right on the money. By reducing the ranks of civil servants, it also excludes people who may have more progressive/liberal values.

Molly Ivins: The New Activist Judges

Posted on Aug 24, 2006

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas—Another bee-you-ti-ful example of the right-wing media getting it all wrong. Here they are having the nerve to mutter in public about “activist judges” because Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has pointed out that spying without a warrant is illegal in this country—so warrantless telephone tapping is illegal in this country.

Improbably enough, the first complaint of many of these soi-disant legal scholars is that Taylor’s decision is not well written. No judicial masterpiece, they sneer. Nevertheless, warrantless spying is illegal. Did it ever occur to these literary critics that Taylor has a lay-down hand? The National Security Agency program is flat unconstitutional, and for those who insist this means Osama bin Laden wins, it’s also ridiculously easy to fix so that it is constitutional.

Recession will be nasty and deep, economist says

Housing is in free fall, pulling the economy down with it, Roubini argues

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

Last Update: 4:59 PM ET Aug 23, 2006

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The United States is headed for a recession that will be "much nastier, deeper and more protracted" than the 2001 recession, says Nouriel Roubini, president of Roubini Global Economics.

Writing on his blog Wednesday, Roubini repeated his call that the U.S. would be in recession in 2007, arguing that the collapse of housing would bring down the rest of the economy.

Roubini wrote after the National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday that sales of existing homes fell 4.1% in July, while inventories soared to a 13-year high and prices flattened out on a year-over-year basis.

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: August 24, 2006

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Glenn Greenwald: Bush supporters develop sudden interest, expertise in judicial ethical rules

Bush supporters have suddenly developed -- literally overnight -- a profound and noble interest in the judicial ethical rules governing conflicts of interest. They're all experts on these rules now and most (though not all) have shockingly decided that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor acted improperly by ruling on the NSA case even though she is a Trustee of an organization that donated money to the ACLU (which means she is a corrupt person, which means that her ruling was wrong, which shows that the Commander-in-Chief did nothing wrong). Experts in judicial ethics are making clear that this was hardly an arrangement requiring recusal, but at worst, should have been disclosed.

Glenn Greenwald: Ann Althouse - NYT legal expert on a case she knows nothing about

This Op-Ed in today's New York Times by Ann Althouse purports to criticize Judge Taylor's ruling in the NSA case on the ground that Taylor "didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us" from suspicions that a court is motivated by the result, not the law, and because what Althouse calls "immensely difficult matters" surrounding Bush's violations of FISA were "disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality."

Digby: Wingnut Fun House Mirror

Sen. James Inhofe" U.S. involvement in Iraq has been incredibly successful and developments there have been "nothing short of a miracle,"

LIEBERMAN: The situation in Iraq is a lot better, different than it was a year ago. The Iraqis held three elections. They formed a unity government. They are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Their military -- two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That's progress.

Digby: Cooties

Everybody's talking about this blurb today, and it is kind of amazing. The president who claimed he would bring honor and dignity to the white house is apparently known for puerile fart jokes --- and even emits them in the office to play jokes on his aides. Me, I much prefer a grown up president who privately has sex in the oval office than one who farts publicly. But that's just me.

Digby: Oversold

So Holy Joe agrees with the far right neocon nutballs that the real reason we went into Iraq was to "pop the head of the snake in Iran" and himself says, "if I fault the administration for anything before the war -- 'cause I think we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam -- it's that they oversold the WMD part of the argument...."

Digby: Conservative Crack-Up Watch

So we know that king neocon Norman Podhoretz is sticking with Bush to the bitter end, which is kind of sweet when you think about it. But the movement conservatives are bailing. Here's a blurb from Richard Viguerie's new book:

This is the first book that deals with the disappointment and even anger that most conservatives have with President Bush and the GOP-led Congress on major public policy issues. In this conservative manifesto, Viguerie applies conservative principles to 21st Century problems and issues. He also presents a detailed strategy for conservatives to take back control of the Republican Party and govern America.

Daily Kos: Matthews, Hackett TAKE APART Repub House hopeful on Hardball

by dday
Tue Aug 22, 2006 at 02:13:22 PM PDT

This is an amazing performance on Hardball right now. Chris Matthews just pummeled, PUMMELED Van Taylor (only Republican Iraq War vet running for Congress on the Republican side, in Texas), and Paul Hackett piled on, calling out Taylor as nothing but an apologist.

I'm going to put this up as an open thread and add to it. Get thee to a television set right now.

Digby: White Underbelly

I was reading about the latest outrage from Felix "Macaca" Allen's campaign over at Gilliard's place and something about his comment tickled my memory. Steve wrote:

They're clearly worried about the impact of the racist words coming from Allen's mouth. And even if he didn't say Macaca/Sand Nigger/Dune Coon/Haji what came after is worse. "Welcome to America".

The Catch-Up Economy

Jared Bernstein

August 22, 2006

Jared Bernstein is senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. and author of the book, All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy.

As summer draws to a close, the mind inevitably turns to … benchmarks.

A benchmark is a number you use to help put another number in context. It answers the economist’s pesky question: Compared to what? Now is the time to be thinking about benchmarks because on August 29 the government will release findings on household income and poverty for 2005.

In a world where most of our economic information is about broad averages, like gross domestic product, industrial production and so on, these statistics offer important insights into how families of different income classes fared last year. Every five minutes, we’re updated on the latest squiggle in the stock market, but only once a year the Census Bureau tells us how many children are poor in America.

Feds sue to block release of records

Tue Aug 22, 12:57 AM ET

PORTLAND, Maine - Federal prosecutors sued state utility regulators and Verizon Communications Inc. on Monday to block the release of information related to the government's domestic surveillance program.

The Public Utilities Commission on Aug. 9 ordered Verizon to provide a sworn statement about the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program. The PUC was reacting to alleged privacy law violations.

What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference!

It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or …

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET

Among the many flabbergasting answers that President Bush gave at his press conference on Monday, this one—about Democrats who propose pulling out of Iraq—triggered the steepest jaw drop: "I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."

George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world is like … well, it's like George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world. It's sui generis: No parallel quite captures the absurdity so succinctly.

Hoover Gore smear picked up by Fox News

After USA Today Issues Correction, Fox Host Repeats Smears Against Gore

Earlier this month, Peter Schweizer published a hit piece on Al Gore’s environmental habits. (Schweizer works at the Hoover Institute which has received nearly $300,000 from Exxon Mobile since 1998.) It was an obvious attempt to discredit Gore’s efforts to combat the threat of global warming.

The problem was the piece was inaccurate and USA today was forced to print a correction. That didn’t stop Rich Lowry, filling in for Sean Hannity, to repeat Schweizer’s false claims on Fox after the correction was printed. Lowry also took the liberty to add some new smears.

I.R.S. Enlists Help in Collecting Delinquent Taxes

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Published: August 20, 2006

If you owe back taxes to the federal government, the next call asking you to pay may come not from an Internal Revenue Service officer, but from a private debt collector.

Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers — each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes — to three collection agencies. Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller tax debts to private companies over time. Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

Frank Rich: Five Years After 9/11, Fear Finally Strikes Out

Frank Rich is back and he gleefully reports that Karl Rove's favorite campaign theme has finally died a well deserved death.

--The New York Times, August 20, 2006

The results are in for the White House's latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans' fearing fear itself is over.

In each poll released since the foiling of the trans-Atlantic terror plot - Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, Zogby, Pew - George W. Bush's approval rating remains stuck in the 30s, just as it has been with little letup in the year since Katrina stripped the last remaining fig leaf of credibility from his presidency. While the new Middle East promised by Condi Rice remains a delusion, the death rattle of the domestic political order we've lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans' unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians' and pundits' hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman's defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.

Lasting Pain, Minimal Punishment

'Americans don't do things like this,' an officer thought when he learned of three villagers' deaths. His shock grew when the soldier convicted continued to serve.

By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse, Special to The Times
August 20, 2006

BINH DINH PROVINCE, Vietnam — On the morning of Feb. 25, 1969, Platoon Sgt. Roy E. Bumgarner Jr. led a five-man team on a reconnaissance patrol that took them into a rolling landscape of rice fields.

The soldiers crossed paths with an irrigation worker and two teenage boys tending ducklings. The boys carried only bamboo cages and herding sticks, the irrigation worker a hoe.

THE LOW POST: Dead Man Coming

Don't hold your breath waiting for Joe Lieberman to go away.

MATT TAIBBI

Late at night in Hartford's Goodwin Hotel last Tuesday -- I'm not even sure what time it was -- Joe Lieberman made his way to the podium for his much-anticipated "concession" speech.

I'd been joking with another reporter that en route to his capitulation Joe would leave fingernail tracks in the carpet leading all the way back to his private room upstairs, but surprisingly he did not have to be dragged onstage at all, and his little elfin nails looked unbloodied and intact as he spoke. I was looking over a crowd of reporters and Joe staffers, off to the right and to the rear of the hall, as he announced his determination to press on:

"If the people of Connecticut are good enough to send me back to Washington . . . " he began, "I promise them I will keep fighting for the same progressive new ideas and for stronger national security . . . "

7 Facts Making Sense of Our Iraqi Disaster

By Michael Schwartz

With a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon holding, the ever-hotter war in Iraq is once again creeping back onto newspaper front pages and towards the top of the evening news. Before being fully immersed in daily reports of bomb blasts, sectarian violence, and casualties, however, it might be worth considering some of the just-under-the-radar-screen realities of the situation in that country. Here, then, is a little guide to understanding what is likely to be a flood of new Iraqi developments -- a few enduring, but seldom commented upon, patterns central to the dynamics of the Iraq war, as well as to the fate of the American occupation and Iraqi society.

A Tortured Past

Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse.

By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse, Special to The Times
August 20, 2006

In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations.

An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.

A Decade After Welfare Overhaul, a Shift in Policy and Perception

By ROBERT PEAR and ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: August 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 — Ten years after a Republican Congress collaborated with a Democratic president to overhaul the nation’s welfare system, the implications are still rippling through policy and politics.

The law, which reversed six decades of social welfare policy and ended the idea of free cash handouts for the poor, was widely seen as a victory for conservative ideas. When it was passed, some opponents offered dire predictions that the law would make things worse for the poor. But the number of people on welfare has plunged to 4.4 million, down 60 percent. Employment of single mothers is up. Child support collections have nearly doubled.

Congress Poised to Unravel the Internet

by JEFFREY CHESTER

[posted online on August 18, 2006]

Lured by huge checks handed out by the country's top lobbyists, members of Congress could soon strike a blow against Internet freedom as they seek to resolve the hot-button controversy over preserving "network neutrality." The telecommunications reform bill now moving through Congress threatens to be a major setback for those who hope that digital media can foster a more democratic society. The bill not only precludes net neutrality safeguards but also eliminates local community oversight of digital communications provided by cable and phone giants. It sets the stage for the privatized, consolidated and unregulated communications system that is at the core of the phone and cable lobbies' political agenda.

In both the House and Senate versions of the bill, Americans are described as "consumers" and "subscribers," not citizens deserving substantial rights when it comes to the creation and distribution of digital media. A handful of companies stand to gain incredible monopoly power from such legislation, especially AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. They have already used their political clout in Washington to secure for the phone and cable industries a stunning 98 percent control of the US residential market for high-speed Internet.

Bush the villain of Katrina film

Bob Dart
August 21, 2006

Tears marked his 70-year-old cheeks as Arthur Brown, leaning on a walking stick, walked from the film that sought to tell his story.

"I think it's a great movie," said Brown, on Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

"I'm mad," he said. "We lost everything. I've worked all my life - minimum-wage jobs - and raised eight children. Now I've got nothing. My wife is 65. What little savings we had is gone. FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] hasn't been any help. It's just not right."

Digby: Stepping Into The Breach

Back in 2000, I had a standard argument for Naderites who claimed "there's not a dime's worth of difference between them" because they both are beholden to big business. I always said that you had to look at the coalitions that formed both parties and as long as Democrats had unions and women's groups and environmentalists etc in their coalition, their big business ties would be mitigated and there would be better legislation produced. I was wrong.

Matt Stoller has been doing a series of posts over the last few months about how Washington really works and it sobered me up quite a bit. He has a new installment, here. It's not that there's not a dimes worth of difference between them, it's that they are corruptly symbiotic and that symbiosis is mostly enabled by "bipartisan" players like Lieberman and the revolving door of lobbyists.

US facing wave of murders and gun violence

Aug 20, 10:27 AM (ET)

By Jason Szep

ROXBURY, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Analicia Perry was kneeling to light a candle at a makeshift shrine to her brother when she was shot in the face and killed -- four years to the day after her brother was gunned down on the same spot.

The slaying of the 20-year-old mother -- on a narrow street behind a police station in Boston's poor Roxbury district last month -- is one of the shocking examples of a rise in the murder rate across the United States that is raising questions about whether police are fighting terrorism at the expense of crime.

Cracks in the Wall, Part III: Escape Ladders

Wednesday, August 16, 2006
by Sara Robinson

Assorted polls -- usually focused around questions such as belief in evolution, strict opposition to all abortion, self-identified fundamentalism, voting patterns, and so on -- have in recent years put the number of hard-core religious and political conservatives at somewhere between a quarter and a third of American voters. Wherever the number actually falls within that range, there are certainly enough of them in the voting base to dominate our political landscape. (To put it in a historical perspective: in 1932, when Hitler was elected president of the Reichstag, the Nazi party was consistently garnering 31 to 38 percent of the German vote. That's all it takes for an organized, passionate group to take control of a country.)

I've looked in vain for hard evidence that these percentages have grown or declined in the past 30 years (and would appreciate a pointer to this kind of data if it exists). However, there's no doubt that this group carries far more clout when it comes to defining our politics, our economics, and our culture than they've had at any point in the past 80 years. Good political organizing, coupled with the fulsome noise of the Mighty Wurlitzer, have indeed added former liberal constituencies -- blue-collar workers, Catholics, and so on -- to the Republican column. Many of these former moderates were drawn into the far-right fold by targeted political messaging that played up their fears and activated (to at least some degree) the fear-and-submission response characteristic of right-wing followers, as well as expansion-oriented conservative religious groups that replaced fraying community, family, social, recreational, and personal support networks.

Daily Kos: throughout history, terror has been a threat. Always.

by agnostic
Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 10:27:11 AM PDT

Any global traveler can describe the beauty of the most famous and beautiful tourist destinations. The most ancient parts of Europe, the muddle east, China, even Africa have monuments to man's inhumanity to man.

The walled city of Vilnius, with its beautiful Ausros Vartai city gate, the moats and city walls surrounding the gorgeous city of Vienna, Strassburg, Budapest, the great wall of China, old Tibetan cities, castles and ancient walled cities near Bangkok, the original Edo of Japan, the walls protecting Aztec and Mayan ruins, moats around British and Scotish castles, - in fact, every single place where man has resided since historical times, you can still see huge monuments of industry, science and labor aimed at self-protection.

Daily Kos: Embracing Our Inner Jackass

by georgia10
Sun Aug 20, 2006 at 04:21:35 AM PDT

Symbols are everything in politics. Whether it's the American flag or a yellow ribbon or a peace symbol, a simple image can connote so much. I've always wondered how and why the donkey came to symbolize our party. I decided to satisfy my curiosity and finally figure out the answer. Courtesy of the Democratic Party, here's some brief history on how the donkey became associated with our party:

When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, his opponents tried to label him a "jackass" for his populist views and his slogan, "Let the people rule." Jackson, however, picked up on their name calling and turned it to his own advantage by using the donkey on his campaign posters. During his presidency, the donkey was used to represent Jackson's stubbornness when he vetoed re-chartering the National Bank.

Beyond Jackson's brilliant use of the symbol, it was this political cartoon by Thomas Nast in 1874 that seemed to solidify the donkey vs. elephant symbolism

An American Turning Point

By Peter Dyer
August 20, 2006

Editor's Note: The new trend among Washington pundits is -- finally -- to admit that the Iraq War hasn't turned out exactly like they had expected. But they are still blaming tactical errors: not enough U.S. troops, not enough realism in the hasty decision to disband the Iraqi army, not enough targeting of Shiite militias, not enough saber-rattling against Iran and Syria.

Under this new "conventional wisdom," the Bush administration's mistakes in Iraq have indeed hurt the "war on terror" by alienating and radicalizing tens of millions of Muslims. But Washington's new "group think" continues to ignore a central reason why the United States is losing the hearts and minds of the Islamic world as well as vast numbers of non-Muslims across the globe: George W. Bush.

The elephant sitting in Official Washington's living room is this intractable reality: President Bush has so thoroughly lost credibility with nearly everyone on the planet and is so widely despised that he himself has become a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. Bush has become Osama bin Laden's perfect foil, yet Bush is incapable of admitting mistakes and changing course.

Thus, no serious discussion can be held about solving Bush's disastrous foreign policy as long as Bush and his team remain in office. In this guest essay, Peter Dyer suggests the first difficult step that the United States must take is to change national leadership and to demonstrate to the world that the American people are determined to reclaim their proud history as the chief defender of international law:

If and when President Bush is impeached and removed from office, the next step should be to arrest him and the other architects of the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq.

If Americans ever find the will to do this, as we once did to German aggressors, history will remember it as a turning point in international relations. It will go down as one of the most spectacular and complete affirmations of the very best of American ideals.

Sex Ed Changes At School With 65 Pregnant Teens

POSTED: 8:17 am EDT August 15, 2006

UPDATED: 10:10 am EDT August 15, 2006

CANTON, Ohio -- An Ohio school board is expanding sex education following the revelation that 13 percent of one high school's female students were pregnant last year.

There were 490 female students at Timken High School in 2005, and 65 were pregnant, WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported.

Snake Eyes

By Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker

21 August 2006 Issue

On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite, the longtime anchorman of the CBS Evening News and the gruff but kindly voice of what was then called Middle America, signed off his broadcast on an unusual note. Freshly returned from Vietnam, where the Tet offensive had just ended, Cronkite offered what he called "an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective." "We have too often been disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said. "To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic yet unsatisfactory conclusion." Like the famous issue of Life devoted to photographs of a week's worth of American dead, Cronkite's polite demurral came to symbolize the long migration of opposition to the war in Vietnam from the fringe - the campus firebrands, the radical clerics, the flowers-in-gun-barrels hippies, the papier-mâché puppeteers - to the wide, upholstered center of American political life.

The center of American politics is no longer as roomy (or as comfy) as it was then. The fringe, now luxuriant only at the rightmost edge of the political prayer rug, has gone online and wired itself for AM radio and cable TV. And nowhere in the cacophonous, atomized "media environment" of today is there anyone capable of deploying the wall-to-wall avuncular authority that was Cronkite's stock-in-trade. Even so, in this August of 2006 a palpable, '68-like shift in sentiment is in the steamy air. Among foreign-policy élites and the broader public alike, it has become the preponderant conviction that George W. Bush's war of choice in Iraq is a catastrophe.

Inquiry Suggests Marines Excised Files on Killings

By David S. Cloud
The New York Times

Friday 18 August 2006

Washington - A high-level military investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha last November has uncovered instances in which American marines involved in the episode appear to have destroyed or withheld evidence, according to two Defense Department officials briefed on the case.

The investigation found that an official company logbook of the unit involved had been tampered with and that an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone the day of the killings was not given to investigators until Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, intervened, the officials said.

Bush Names new Faith-based czar

Jay Hein, an experienced conservative think tanker, will also be deputy assistant to the president

Jay Hein, a long-term conservative think tanker, has been named by President Bush the new director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and a deputy assistant to the president. Hein, who takes over the faith-based office from Jim Towey, will advise the president on domestic policies such as immigration or responses to emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina, the Associate Press reported.

According to the Indianapolis Star, Hein "was not originally on the short list of people being considered" to head up the Office, "but when White House officials -- at the suggestion of former Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind. -- went to Hein for advice on candidates, they soon came to see him as more than an adviser."

The White Palace

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, August 18, 2006; 12:56 PM

It's not just virulent Bush-haters who think the president has been acting like he's the king -- increasingly, it's also the judicial branch.

Yesterday's rebuke of the White House's assertion of nearly unlimited executive power in a time of war came from U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who struck down President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program as both illegal and unconstitutional.

Glenn Greenwald: Ongoing misconceptions about Judge Taylor's opinion

(updated below)

There are still some substantial misconceptions -- and some just outright factual inaccuracies -- regarding Judge Taylor's opinion in the NSA case as well as arguments I and others have made as to why criticisms of her opinion are overblown and ultimately inconsequential. Orin Kerr responded to the post I wrote yesterday about the condescending and misinformed Post editorial criticisms of Judge Taylor. The exchange I had with Kerr in the Comments section to that post (along with other comments there, as well as plenty of posts from overnight pro-Bush legal experts in the blogosphere) highlighted some of the more important and pervasive misconceptions

NYT Editorial: Hokum on Homeland Security

Ever since British intelligence did such a masterly job in rounding up terrorists intent on blowing up airliners, the Bush administration has relentlessly tried to divert attention from the disintegration in Iraq and focus instead on its supposed prowess in protecting our country against terrorist attacks. That ploy ought not to wash. While the administration has been pouring its energies and money into Iraq, it has fallen far behind on steps needed to protect the homeland.

You would not know that from listening to the president or other top officials in recent days. In a tour of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia last week, President Bush declared that “America is safer than it has been” and assured Americans that “we’re doing everything in our power to protect you.”

Read "Toxic Faith: Liberal Cure. A Reasoned and Judeo-Christian Response to the Alarming Assertions of the Religious Right."

BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)

"This book is an answer to those who claim that liberalism is immoral and is somehow destroying the cultural values of the USA. It also seeks to provide a careful and reasoned response, in a specifically Judeo-Christian context, to many of the most vocalized and divisive current issues: patriotism, war, abortion, homosexuality, poverty, and the environment. Using quiet, confident scholarship and reason, the authors seek to restore and energize a more informed response to the Religious Right"

What impressed BuzzFlash about this book is how grounded it is in countering the Biblical arguments of Fundamentalist Authoritarians by returning to Biblical text and pointing out the selective interpretations of the religious right (which is really the "religious wrong").