How Jesus Endorsed Bush's Invasion of Iraq

By Damon Linker, Doubleday. Posted October 28, 2006.

In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush needed the approval of religious leaders to shore up his religious base and a group of Catholic theoconservatives were happy to help him do just that.

The following is an excerpt from Damon Linker's new book The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday, 2006).

For much of the past 25 years, a small group of Catholic intellectuals has worked to inject its radical religious ideas into the nation's politics. The leader of this theoconservative movement is Father Richard John Neuhaus. In the pages of his monthly magazine First Things, Neuhaus and his ideological allies set the theocon agenda on a range of policies. Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the American founders were orthodox religious believers who thought of the United States as a Christian nation -- and that American-style capitalism perfectly conforms to Catholic social teaching. Robert P. George of Princeton University insists that abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage (and perhaps even contraception and masturbation) should be outlawed. And George Weigel of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center uses Catholic just-war reasoning to justify neoconservative foreign policy. As the U.S. began to prepare for war in Iraq in 2002, the theocons set out to provide theological justification for the coming conflagration.

Not the President's Men: Frank Rich and I.F. Stone's Fight Against Propaganda

By John Powers, The Nation. Posted October 28, 2006.

A review of Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold and two books on I.F. Stone show how media politics have become about repeating the same few things until they seem inevitable, especially if they aren't true.

Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was pushing some California ballot initiatives that even he didn't really give a damn about, the New York Times ran a story about how he promoted his political agenda the same way he always sold the latest Terminator. While the piece itself was old hat, Duh Gubna was in beaming good humor, delighted to share his tricks -- how he trained himself to appear "real" in public, always stayed on message and wasn't afraid to repeat the exact same phrases every time. "I come from the world of reps," he explained with the sinewy assurance one expects of the Austrian Oak. "Remember that. It is all reps."

The End of the World As We Know It?

By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted October 28, 2006.

There aren't many tyrants in history who can truthfully say they put the entire future of civilization at risk just to make a buck -- but Dick Cheney can.

In a week or so, the New York Review of Books is going to publish an article by James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis (in which the Earth is viewed as more than an ecosystem, closer to a living being, that can be healthy or diseased, and can change, through evolution, from one state to the other). Lovelock will declare that the Earth's temperature is about to rise five to eight degrees centigrade (depending on where you are -- more at the poles, less in the tropics), and that this temperature rise will have disasterous consequences for all life, eventually, for example, reducing the human population from six billion to two hundred million, mostly living in the far north, and, as another example, submerging the British Isles, creating out of the highest points of land an archipelago, where some, but not much, habitation will be possible. As for the western United States, done for, along with much of the rest of the world, and civilization as we know it, of course.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 10/27/06

In an interview with Spiegel, Ron Suskind says that U.S. foreign policy is "running like a headless chicken" in its war against al-Qaida, and in a combative interview with the Montreal Mirror, Seymour Hersh 'discusses civilian casualties, American ignorance and leading questions.'

Tom Engelhardt observes that, echoing Vietnam, the specter of a bloodbath-to-come is being used to justify the bloodbath in progress, it's argued that "stability first" is 'Newspeak for the rape of Iraq,' and the "Biden plan" for a tripartite division of Iraq is taken apart.

As another poll indicates that Democrats may take control of the House, the Los Angeles Times finds corporations have "developed a sudden enthusiasm for contributing to Democrats."

CBS News reports that 'Rove Protege' Scott Howell produced the RNC ad that targeted Rep. Harold Ford Jr. and kept professor John Geer busy. Howell also does ads for Sens. Jim Talent and George Allen, who told the Washington Times that he picked Howell because "I like to keep it positive."

As 'Corker pushes back on "Jungle Drums" ad,' Ford pushes back on attack ads for Corker and 'goes after the GOP's faithful base.'

The IRS announces a delay in collecting back taxes from Katrina victims until after the election, a move former IRS commissioners call "improper and indefensible," while Mother Jones provides 'Tales of a Push Pollster' as a sample of 'what's in the Swift Boat crowd's last minute bag of tricks.'

In addition to being the target of an FBI influence peddling probe, Rep. Curt Weldon is now accused of violating House ethics guidelines by calling Navy employees seeking statements that might impugn his Democratic opponent, retired Rear Admiral Joe Sestak.

Confession that formed base of Iraq war was acquired under torture: journalist

Thu Oct 26, 8:37 PM ET

An Al-Qaeda terror suspect captured by the United States, who gave evidence of links between Iraq and the terror network, confessed after being tortured, a journalist told the BBC.

Iban al Shakh al Libby told intelligence agents that he was close to Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and "understood an awful lot about the inner workings of Al-Qaeda," former FBI agent Jack Clonan told the broadcaster.

Libby was tortured in an Egyptian prison, according to Stephen Grey, the author of the newly-released book "Ghost Plane" who investigated the secret US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisons that housed terror suspects around the world.

Damage Control: The road to undoing the deeply disturbing Military Commissions Act.

Jennifer Van Bergen

October 27, 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.

After President George W. Bush signed the controversial Military Commissions Act last week, the Justice Department wasted no time in using its new power to deny due process to the detainees swept up in the “war on terror.” Now that the bill which Sen. Patrick Leahy called “un-American” has become law, countless hours and dollars will be spent by public interest law organizations trying to undo its damage. In addition to challenges of the provisions that strip habeas corpus rights, we can expect constitutional challenges to the military commission procedures and amendments to the War Crimes Act.

The MCA is an unprecedented power grab by the executive branch. Among the Act’s worst features, it authorizes the president to detain, without charges, anyone whom he deems an unlawful enemy combatant. This includes U.S. citizens. It eliminates habeas corpus review for aliens. It also makes providing “material support” to terrorists punishable by military commission. And the military commissions' procedures allow for coerced testimony, the use of “sanitized classified information”—where the source is not disclosed—and trial for offenses not historically subject to trial by military commissions. (Terrorism is not historically a military offense; it's a crime.) Finally, by amending the War Crimes Act, it allows the president to authorize interrogation techniques that may nonetheless violate the Geneva Conventions and provides future and retroactive “defenses” for those who engage in or authorize those acts.

How Now, Grown Dow?

Republicans say the stock market is at a record high. Eh, not really.

By Daniel Gross
Updated Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, at 4:53 PM ET

The Dow Jones industrial average first closed above 12,000 on Oct. 19, and has remained above that lofty benchmark ever since. The breaching of 12,000 produced much joy at CNBC, whose ratings spiked last Thursday. Only 24,000 points more to Dow 36,000!

Dow 12,000 quickly became a Republican talking point. On Oct. 19, Dick Cheney boasted that "we've got all-time record highs on the Dow Jones Industrials again today." Earlier this week, White House flack Tony Fratto noted that "we're seeing record highs in some of the markets, and that tells us, and we think it tells Americans, that there is a great deal of confidence in our economic future."

A Record Drop In Home Prices

By Kirstin Downey

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 26, 2006; Page D01

The price of existing homes last month fell 2.2 percent, the largest monthly decline in the almost four decades the number has been tracked, according to an industry report released yesterday.

Nationwide, the number of existing single-family homes sold fell 14.2 percent in September compared with September 2005, according to the report from the National Association of Realtors. The number of sales has fallen each month since March.

Alliance for Justice: Quiet Revolution

Over the past quarter century, an increasingly influential movement on the far right has waged a sustained war on the Constitution as we know it. Ultra-conservative politicians, judges, professors and activists would overturn decades of precedent to shred the fabric of popular laws protecting workers, consumers and public health, expand executive power at the expense of basic civil liberties, and impose a narrow social agenda on the rest of the body politic.

“If they succeed,” says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, “we will, without really seeing it happen, end up with a very different country—one that’s both less free and less equal.”

Reed now blames Indians for the mess he's in

Ralph Reed, realizing that he was getting nowhere fast with his "I don't know what you're talking about" defense against charges that he plotted and successfully carried out a money-laundering scheme, has now changed that defense to "It was the Indians' fault."

Reed, you will recall, has been accused of using Jack Abramoff's Indian casino money to pay for Christian anti-gambling campaigns.

Secret deal in Corker lawsuit raises questions

By Associated Press

October 26, 2006 CHATTANOOGA — A secret settlement in an environmental lawsuit that Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bob Corker has tried to avoid talking about before Election Day possibly involves a $775,000 land purchase for an environmental group, county records indicate.

Attorneys in the case and Corker campaign spokesman Todd Womack did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment Thursday.

Why Bush Thinks We're Winning

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 26, 2006; 12:50 PM

One of the more reality-defying aspects of President Bush's position on the war in Iraq is his insistence that we're winning.

That was a central theme at yesterday's press conference. Here's the transcript .

"Absolutely, we're winning," Bush said. "As a matter of fact, my view is the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done."

In the Libby Case, A Grilling to Remember

Friday, October 27, 2006; Page A21

With withering and methodical dispatch, White House nemesis and prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald yesterday sliced up the first person called to the stand on behalf of the vice president's former chief of staff.

If I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was not afraid of the special counsel before, the former Cheney aide, who will face Fitzgerald in a trial beginning Jan. 11, had ample reason to start quaking after yesterday's Ginsu-like legal performance.

Economic Growth Slows To The Weakest Pace In More Than Three Years...

Posted on October 27, 2006 at 7:50 AM.

Economic growth slowed to the weakest pace in more than three years in the third quarter, as the government's main gauge of the strength of the U.S. economy came in much lower than analysts had forecast.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy, grew at a annual 1.6 percent rate in the quarter, the Commerce Department said, down from the 2.6 percent rate in the second quarter.

Rush Limbaugh's Sleaze Campaign

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted October 26, 2006.

For misinformation and cruelty, not to mention plain bad manners, it is so hard to beat Rush Limbaugh.

It's a race to the bottom. For misinformation and cruelty, not to mention plain old dreadful manners, it is so hard to beat Rush Limbaugh. We can only measure the Great Blowhard against himself.

Even by Limbaugh standards, his recent attack on Michael J. Fox, the actor [VIDEO], is several levels lower than tacky. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, has done some political ads favoring candidates who in turn support stem cell research.

Learning global solutions to local problems

Seven scientists were selected to participate in a year-long global awareness program which would end with an international immersion trip to Mexico. They're back and believe the culminating trip is just the beginning of their international journey.

Laurie Garrett on health workers sentenced to die in Libya

In an essay published urgently in the international open access journal PloS Medicine, Pulitzer Prize winning author Laurie Garrett warns that if Libya proceeds with the executions of six foreign health workers accused of infecting children with HIV, the appalling injustice will threaten health workers worldwide and endanger their patients in the poorest parts of the world.

Digby: Good Morning, Creep

This Michael J. Fox controversy is making me more angry than I can remember being in a long time. There is something wrong with people who think like this:

LAUER: And you brought up Michael J. Fox. Let me just ask you: You know, Rush Limbaugh started a lot of controversy when he said perhaps Michael J. Fox was exaggerating or faking these effects of Parkinson's disease in that ad promoting stem cell research. Didn't Rush Limbaugh just say what a lot of people were privately thinking?

Digby: The Crucible

The stakes in the Connecticut race seem to be getting higher among the chattering classes than among the grassroots. For the second time this week, I'm seeing one of the courtiers -- in this case the Dean --- saying that the race is the referendum on the Iraq war:

The outcome of their fight is important nationally for the meaning that will be attached. While other states such as Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio and Virginia will decide whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate, this Connecticut race constitutes perhaps the nation's clearest test on the Iraq war.

Digby: We're All For It!

The Republicans are taking a new tack on stem cells. In response to the Michael J. Fox "backlash" Ken Mehlman just said on CNN that Jim Talent supports stem cell research but he just doesn't think the government should pay for it. He pointed out that nobody says that the private sector shouldn't pursue stem cell research. What's the problem? (It's a lie, of course. Talent's position is actually much more complicated than that and just as ridiculous.)

Digby: I Don't Think We Should Deny People Rights To A Civil Union

The New Jersey Supreme Court has just held that gay Americans should be accorded the same legal rights as other Americans in a ruling that George W. Bush will support.

"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so," Bush said in an interview aired Tuesday on ABC. Bush acknowledged that his position put him at odds with the Republican platform, which opposes civil unions.

Digby: Backlash

This is really starting to piss me off. The press continues to insinuate that Michael J. Fox is "raising eyebrows" and causing a "backlash" with his ads supporting stem cell research and there is no evidence that there is any backlash except in right wing talk show pig circles.

Digby: JoeNixon

The NY Times blog "The Empire Zone" doesn't seem to think it's even possible that Joe Lieberman could have done anything unethical with his 387,000 slush fund. They have relegated the story to its blog that nobody reads.

The truth is that $387,000 in petty cash expenses in a primary race is an enormous sum and it should set off all kinds of bells in the minds of journalists and, as Matt Stoller discusses here, the good government campaign finance groups:

If a Senator put $387,000 in cash out on the streets in the final two weeks before the election - we're talking cash here - and then failed to disclose where it went to reporters or anyone else by using the petty cash account, wouldn't you think that good government groups who care about campaign finance laws and disclosure would be slightly interested? I would. Yet since Lieberman revealed this on his FEC forms late last week, only the Lamont campaign has been willing to file an FEC complaint.

Digby: CW ON CT

In case anybody's wondering what the conventional wisdom on the Lamont-Lieberman race is, check out this TV report from Chris Matthews on MSNBC:

Chris Matthews: The Connecticut senate race was called a political weathervane suggesting that Ned Lamont's anti-war win would blow away suporters of the president's tactics in Iraq. So why is Lieberman running ahead in the polls right now? NBC's Chris Jansing is following the race up in West Hartford.

Chris, so what's wrong? Can't Lamont get the Democratic vote?

CJ: He can't get any votes right now. And this is a surprise, most people thought that he was going to be the golden boy, but there's a couple of reasons this whole Iraq referendum isn't working. It was the number one issue for voters in the primary, now only 35%. For those for whom the war is the number one issue, they go Lamont. Every other area, voters are going for Lieberman.

Billmon: Road Kill

I have no idea if the Rovians will somehow manage to slash and bite their way to "victory" (i.e. continued GOP control of Congress) next month, but the sheer lunacy of some of their ads -- like this one insisting that an Ohio Democrat wants to zap little pig-tailed school girls with a taser -- has a distinct aura of death about it.

The collective sound of all those attack ads is starting to remind me of the one of my uglier childhood memories. I must have been about 10 or 11, and I was walking across a highway overpass not far from my house when I saw a dog on the road down below. It was a big yellow dog, some kind of shepherd mix, and it must have just been hit by a car, because its hindquarters were all smashed up and it was writhing around on the pavement in torment. The traffic wasn't that heavy, and cars were swerving around it, but it was obviously only a matter of seconds before another car or truck came along and mashed it to a pulp. The dog might even have been able to see the vehicle bearing down on it -- that is, if it wasn't already out of its mind with pain.

Billmon: Some Like It Hot

When it comes to elections in this country, we definitely have an ample selection of paranoia levels to choose from, starting with: "Isn't it funny how so many computer glitches seem to favor the party in power?" and ending, or at least I hope, with: "Mr. Diebold's fleet of black helicopters is going to elect Elvis the king of the universe!"

I tend towards the mild, not the habanero, variety myself -- I'm always suspicious about hanky panky, particularly at the county and city level, and definitely worried about the accuracy and reliability of paperless black boxes, but I'm very skeptical of massive, national conspiracies designed to keep Karl Rove in power until doomsday. (Although if he stays in power much longer, doomsday may not be that far away.)

Digby: Gutter Politics

I knew the Republicans would react like animals if they ever found themselves on the losing end of an election. I knew they would engage in rampant lying, race baiting and sexist stereotyping. I was a tiny bit surprised that they would support 52-year-old-man on teenager sex, but it didn't shock me.

But I honestly didn't think they'd go after the physically disabled. First Tammy Duckworth's opponent accuses the multi amputee Iraq veteran of "cutting and running." Then Rush takes a shot at Michael J. Fox. Now the GOP congresswoman who holds Dick Cheney's old seat says to her opponent, a wheelchair bound MS sufferer, "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face."

Billmon: The Mr. Magoo of Journalism

The really bad thing about Howie Kurtz is that even when he's trying to be good, he's still fucking awful.

Latest case in point: After poking fun -- in a gentle, "gosh, aren't those kids just the dickens" kind of way -- at the latest wing nut conspiracy theory, Kurtz totally misses (or ignores) the fact that one of his favorite wing nuts is doing precisely what he has accused the dreaded liberal media of doing.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Is It Safe to Go Back to Church?

What is this strange fragrance in the air? Could it be Christian spirit? The president of the Christian Coalition is calling on his co-religionists to make environmental protection a foremost consideration in their election choices. Last February, 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement challenging Bush to do something about global warming. In the U.K., evangelicals are spearheading a campaign to “Make Poverty History.” Just last week, right-winger and self-professed evangelical Dick Armey observed that:

Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?

Could it be that the erstwhile Christian right has found Jesus?

The Poor Man: Trick or treat

Reason’s David Weigel also notes the intellectual vapidity of the right-wing Ascendancy:

Hewitt, and many of the pro-Republican bloggers/pundits/radio jabberers that he cites, have taken such a long breather from justifying their party’s policies that they’ve forgotten how to. It’s easy to sniggle at liberals like Markos Moulitsas but his “libertarian Democrat” manifestos are the kind of inward, searching reflections on the state of the political parties that simply aren’t coming from Republican polemicists any more. Josh Trevino, a co-founder of the pre-eminent Republican-boosting blog, RedState, confronted Moultisas’ arguments not by arguing that the GOP had more to offer libertarians, but that the Democrats offered less: the libertarian who joined The Enemy would “find himself in the company of people who do not grasp the connection between capitalism and freedom; he will find himself attending party meetings with neighbors who wish nothing more than to seize his household income for their own civic purposes,” and so on. [What, nothing about Margret Cho’s treasonous puppy dog? -Ed.] All boilerplate that didn’t address the concerns libertarians loudly voice about the GOP. […]

Social Security Enters Elections

By Lori Montgomery
The Washington Post

Wednesday 25 October 2006

Bush remarks please Democrats, perplex Republicans.

More than a year after Social Security reform faded from the political radar screen, the debate erupted anew yesterday, as Democrats seized on news that President Bush hopes to revive an unpopular proposal to make changes in the national retirement program.

In recent days, Bush has said Social Security remains one of the "big items" he wants to tackle next year and he continues to "believe that a worker, at his or her option, ought to be allowed to put some of their own money ... in a private savings account, an account that they call their own."

Enron’s Enablers Go Unpunished

Robert Scheer —

"Kenny Boy” Lay and Jeffrey Skilling would have remained small-time crooks were it not for the energy industry deregulation measures they effectively purchased from Bush I and II.

Space War

Frida Berrigan

October 26, 2006

Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate at the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center.

Lately, the Bush administration has been trying to play nice on the global stage—emphasizing collaboration with other countries on issues like nuclear proliferation and the “war on terror.” But the Bush administration’s obsession with domination and control keeps cropping up—most recently in its new space policy, the first new statement of U.S. objectives in outer space to be issued in 10 years. Released quietly on the Friday before Columbus Day, in a move designed to generate little or no media attention, the Bush administration’s new space policy can be summed up in three words: mine, mine, mine.

The 10-page document lays out a policy focused on establishing, defending and enlarging U.S. control over space resources, arguing for “unhindered” U.S. rights in space that is actively hostile to the concept of collective security enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The opening asserts that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.” Alongside earlier documents like the U.S. Space Command’s Vision for 2020 —which articulated a vision of “full spectrum dominance: and insisted that “space superiority is emerging as an essential element of battlefield success and future warfare”—this new policy can been interpreted as an opening shot in the race to militarize space.

'All Over the Place'

It's the GOP That's Come Unglued Over Iraq

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page A17

The president has fled the field from "stay the course," signaling not just the unwinnability of his war but the bankruptcy of his political strategy. For as the president and his party grope for an alternative plan of action in Iraq, Karl Rove's bright line between Republican resolve and Democratic defeatism has become irreversibly fuzzed.

"Stay the course," after all, was never intended to have a free-standing existence. Republicans invoked it only in dialectical contrast to "cut and run," their caricature of the Democrats' preference for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, or for partitioning it into three separate quasi-nations, or for redeploying our troops to neighboring states -- or, more simply, of the Democrats' mounting conviction that our presence in Iraq was growing more pointless each day.

CREW Files Appeal To Force Agency To Release Communications Regarding Destruction Of Abramoff Secret Service Visitor Records

National Archives and Records Administration Appears to be Under Direct Orders from Bush Admin. to Keep Records Private

Washington, DC – Today Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an administrative appeal with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for failing to disclose communications regarding the handling of Secret Service visitor records. CREW is seeking records of communications NARA had with the Secret Service regarding the agency’s practice of destroying visitor records to the White House. According to the Secret Service, it stopped destroying records in October 2004 at NARA’s direction. NARA has refused to disclose the documents, claiming they are protected by the deliberative process privilege and exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

CREW is already in litigation with the Secret Service over its refusal to produce all records of White House visits made by Jack Abramoff and his associates.

Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Child Rape Photos

By Greg Mitchell, http://www.editorandpublisher.com

NEW YORK A federal judge ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America's image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of "rape and murder" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were "blatantly sadistic."

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered the release of certain pictures in a 50-page decision that said terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven they "do not need pretexts for their barbarism."

Hill Holliday Founder With Former GE CEO to Bid on 'Globe'

Boston-Based Jack Welch and Jack Connors Value Paper at $600 Million

By Jeremy Mullman

Published: October 25, 2006

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- A group of Boston businessmen led by former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch and Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos ad agency founder Jack Connors is weighing a bid for the Boston Globe, the newspaper reported this morning.

According to the report, the group values the Globe at between $550 million and $600 million, barely half of what the paper's current owner, the New York Times Co., paid for it in 1993. The group has not yet approached the Times Co. with an offer for the paper.

Asian Workers Trafficked to Build U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

By David Phinney, CorpWatch. Posted October 26, 2006.

The State Department quietly awarded a corrupt Kuwaiti company a $592-million contract to build the embassy in Iraq.

Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R’n’R in Kuwait city.

Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai -- not to Baghdad.

The Bottled Water Lie

By Michael Blanding, AlterNet. Posted October 26, 2006.

The corporations that sell bottled water are depleting natural resources, jacking up prices, and lying when they tell you their water is purer and tastes better than the stuff that comes out of the tap.

When Antonia Mahoney moved to Boston from her native Puerto Rico 35 years ago, the first thing she noticed was how much better the water tasted. Over the years, however, the water she was receiving from her tap began to lose its appeal. "Little by little, the taste changed," says the retired schoolteacher, who eventually gave up tap water altogether and began paying over $30 a month to get bottles of Poland Spring water delivered to her house.

Walking through Boston's Copley Square on a sunny day last month, however, she was intrigued by a banner advertising something called the "Tap Water Challenge." As she approached the table, a fresh-faced activist behind it told her the "challenge" was a blind taste test to see if passersby could tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. Mahoney turned her back while four water samples were poured into small paper cups -- two of tap water from Boston and a nearby suburb, and one each of Poland Spring and Aquafina.

Welcome to the Slate Green Challenge: Your eight-week carbon diet.

By Meaghan O'Neill and treehugger.com
Posted Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, at 11:56 AM ET

There's no longer any real doubt about it: Global warming is happening. The average temperature of the Earth's surface has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past hundred years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that most of the increase is due to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide released by humans. Though a 1-degree increase might not seem like much, even a small rise in global temperature significantly changes the climate, potentially resulting in major storms and droughts, disruption of the food supply, and the catastrophic spread of disease.

Human carbon-dioxide emissions come mainly from two sources: burning fossil fuels and changes in land use, such as deforestation. Americans are the climate's worst enemy. On average, each of us is responsible for about 22 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions every year, according to the United Nations, compared with an average of six tons per person throughout the rest of the world. That means the typical U.S citizen emits the equivalent of four cars.

Global ecosystems 'face collapse'

Current global consumption levels could result in a large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century, environmental group WWF has warned.

The group's biannual Living Planet Report said the natural world was being degraded "at a rate unprecedented in human history".

Online, the shadow of Auschwitz

Christopher Wolf International Herald Tribune

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2006

WASHINGTON Hate videos

Human rights experts from around the world gathered in Poland recently in a bid to counter the misuse of the Internet by hate groups. Sitting in a Warsaw conference room, the group viewed the latest online content produced by neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic hate groups, all reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda seen in that city more than 60 years ago.

Gone are the days when hate groups met in dingy rooms. Now, the Internet is the platform of choice for fringe groups that want to look mainstream. And as the promoters of intolerance and hate well know, on the Internet, video is king.

In Poland, the experts on Internet hate speech viewed a kind of "hate film festival" - slickly produced videos promoting white power and demonizing Jews, blacks, gays and other minorities, all available online. The music videos and film were Hollywood quality. A kid looking at what effectively are recruitment ads to join the intolerance movement would be impressed with the production values.

Americablog: Breaking scandal in Nevada involving, of course, a Republican

by John in DC - 10/24/2006 11:23:00 PM

BIG UPDATE: Did Gibbons' wife, the possible next First Lady of Nevada, commit perjury?

The local news coverage, in the video below, makes clear that Gibbons' wife Dawn signed federal legal documents in 1988, under the penalty of perjury, stating that everyone knew the woman, Patricia, was undocumented and that she'd worked for the family since 1987, cooking, cleaning and babysitting, and even had an employment contract for $800/month. The employee, Patricia, says she was paid every two weeks, and worked ten hours days, 50 hours a week. But then, at the end of the broadcast we learn that the TV news team has just received a statement from Dawn Gibbons claiming that she tried to help Patricia for a time, but only with occasional odd jobs, and not as a full time employee. The news broadcaster said that this statement contradicts what Dawn Gibbons said under oath in the federal documents.

Grass-Roots Group of Troops Petitions Congress for Pullout From Iraq

By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page A13

More than 100 U.S. service members have signed a rare appeal urging Congress to support the "prompt withdrawal" of all American troops and bases from Iraq, organizers said yesterday.

"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home," reads the statement of a small grass-roots group of active-duty military personnel and reservists that says it aims to give U.S. military members a voice in Iraq war policy.

Before the 9/11 Conspiracies, There Was the Oklahoma Bombing

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted October 24, 2006.

Much of the faulty logic and circumstancial evidence that justifies the 9/11 conspiracies are repeats of the theories that abounded in Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing.

Over a month after I first wrote a column slamming the 9/11 Truth movement, I continue to get hate mail in massive quantities. A group of Truthers even picketed my office, and I'm still picking food particles out of my scarf after an incident in which the movement's house lunatic, a wild-eyed German blogger named Nico Haupt, tried to goad me into slugging him in a West Side diner.

"Go ahead, heet me, then I haf beeg story!" he roared, scream-spitting half-digested detritus in my face.

The Permanent Middle Class

By Caryl Rivers, AlterNet. Posted October 25, 2006.

America has always welcomed and used cheap labor. But at least during the industrial economy, people hoped their kids could do better. Today, they're not so sure.

Toss in heaping tablespoons of the philosophy outlined in a leaked Wal-Mart memo, then add more than a pinch of globalization. Fold in a few teaspoons of American hyperindividualism, and you have a recipe for something that is both very old and very new in American life: the Permanent Proletariat.

On whose shoulders will this state of affairs rest most heavily? On those of the American family, especially children.

Yale journal identifies products that cause greatest environmental damage

Cutting-edge research identifying the types of products that cause the greatest environmental damage is the focus of a special issue of Yale's Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Sales of existing homes fall

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

1 hour, 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Sales of existing homes fell for a sixth straight month in September and the median sales price dropped on an annual basis by the largest amount on record, further documenting a lukewarm housing market.

The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of previously owned homes fell by 1.9 percent in September to a seasonally adjusted sales pace of 6.18 million units, the slowest sales rate since January 2004.

Cities of the Future Won't Look Like Ours

By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted October 23, 2006.

The era of cheap oil is over, and lost with it an energy-rich way of life that billions of city dwellers have come to take for granted.

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month -- cars, radio, movies, airplanes -- there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 -- 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next 40 years -- and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post WWII American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Cities of the Future Won't Look Like Ours

By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted October 23, 2006.

The era of cheap oil is over, and lost with it an energy-rich way of life that billions of city dwellers have come to take for granted.

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month -- cars, radio, movies, airplanes -- there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 -- 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next 40 years -- and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post WWII American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Soot from wood stoves in developing world impacts global warming more than expected

New measurements of soot produced by traditional cook stoves used in developing countries suggest that these stoves emit more harmful smoke particles and could have a much greater impact on global climate change than previously thought, according to a study scheduled to appear in the Nov. 1 issue of the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Bush Opposes Plan To Accurately Reflect Fiscal Deficit Due To Entitlement Benefits

US welfare system faces accounting overhaul

By Krishna Guha in Washington

Published: October 22 2006 22:17 | Last updated: October 22 2006 22:17

A radical new approach to government accounting that would require the US administration to account for the cost of future social security payments year by year as people build up entitlements will be proposed on Monday.

The proposal by the federal accounting standards advisory board (FASAB) – which would also require the government to account for benefits accrued under Medicare and other social insurance programmes in the same way – is unprecedented internationally. It would radically change the presentation of US government finances, in effect bringing forward the cost of rapidly increasing social security and Medicare obligations and greatly increasing the reported fiscal deficit.

George W. Bush’s administration is firmly opposed to the proposal, which officials believe wrongly implies that the government is contractually obliged to make future payments based on current benefit rules.

Too Conservative for America

Robert L. Borosage

October 23, 2006

Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America's Future.

The election is still two weeks off but the recriminations have already begun. Former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey, a free-market ideologue, trashes James Dobson and the Christian Right as “thugs.” Dobson warns Republicans that the religious right may not turn out, dismayed by the Foley scandals and the lack of progress on their social agenda. Richard Viguerie, the mass mail guru of the far right, suggests that it might be a good thing for these “Big Government Republicans” to lose control and learn once more the power of the movement right.

Democrats tend to the giddy these days, but already signs of preemptive dissatisfaction are murmured on the left, as progressives bemoan the absence of any visible agenda, any big ideas, or any bold leader. And Senate leaders are already lining up to chastise progressives for demanding too much, for challenging Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and pushing too hard on the war, on health care, on cleaning up Congress.

Wonkette: We Hate To Bring Up the Nazis, But They Fled To South America, Too

Our paranoid friends over at Bring It On have put together a story that hasn’t exactly made Washington Whispers. It’s real short and real simple:

• The Cuban news service reports that George W. Bush has purchased 98,840 acres in Paraguay, near the Bolivian/Brazilian border.

• Jenna Bush paid a secret diplomatic visit to Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and U.S. Ambassador James Cason. There were no press conferences, no public sightings and no official confirmation of her 10-day trip which apparently ended this week.

The Mother Of All Heists

(CBS) More than half a billion dollars earmarked to fight the insurgency in Iraq was stolen by people the U.S. had entrusted to run the country's Ministry of Defense before the 2005 elections, according to Iraqi investigators.

Iraq's former minister of finance says coalition members like the U.S. and Britain are doing little to help recover the money or catch suspects, most of whom fled the country. The 60 Minutes investigation also turned up audio recordings of a suspect who seems to be discussing the transfer of $45 million to the account of a top political adviser to the interim defense minister.

A Nadir of U.S. Power

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, October 23, 2006; Page A21

It's not exactly morning in America.

In Iraq, things get ever uglier, and the old remedy of extra troops now seems tragically futile. The Bush team has recently tried putting thousands of additional soldiers into Baghdad, and the result after two months is that violence there has increased.

A.C.L.U. Allies Start Web Site to Rebut Critics of Leadership

By STEPHANIE STROM

Published: October 22, 2006

Supporters of the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union have created a Web site in response to one started last month by critics of that leadership.

“This Web site came about because those of us who know the A.C.L.U. very well were very disturbed that a few unhappy people were attacking the organization at a time when the A.C.L.U. is doing such a great job — and is greatly needed,” said Laura W. Murphy, a former director of the organization’s Washington office and a leader behind the new Web site, voicesfortheaclu.org.

US News: Abramoff Has Own Desk At FBI So He Can Spend Up To Four Hours A Day Detailing Corruption...

Posted on October 23, 2006 at 8:24 AM.

Jack Abramoff, the lobbying scandal figure, has become such a chatty rat that probe insiders say he's been given a desk to work at in the FBI. We're told he spends up to four hours a day detailing his shady business to agents eager to nail more congressmen in the scandal. And when cooperative witnesses spend that much time inside, they get a desk. As a result of his help in the ever expanding investigation, we hear that the Feds hope to keep him in a nearby prison after he's sentenced on his conspiracy admission.

Plutonium or greenhouse gases? Weighing the energy options

Can nuclear energy save us from global warming? Perhaps, but the tradeoffs involved are sobering: thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste generated each year and a greatly increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation or diversion of nuclear material into terrorists' hands.

Billmon: Tickling the Limbic System

The limbic system is highly interconnected with a structure known as the nucleus accumbens, commonly called the brain's pleasure center . . . Rats with metal electrodes implanted into their nucleus accumbens will repeatedly press a lever which activates this region, and will do so in preference over food and water, eventually dying from exhaustion.

Wikipedia
Limbic System

One of the more pronounced features of this election cycle, at least since the Mark Foley story broke, has been the sublimination of actual news -- on Iraq, the economy, even old-fashioned graft and corruption -- by sex talk, and the raunchier the better.

I'm talking mainly about what's on the boob tube (a doubly accurate description these days), both on the "news programs" and the ads, which increasingly seem to be fusing into a kind of soft-core peep show, in which the periodic doses of smut are interrupted by bursts of puritanical outrage -- most of them as fraudulent as the female orgasms in a porno movie. These days it seems the entire political-media-industrial complex can spend days a state of high sexual excitement waiting to see who's going to get nailed (so to speak) next.

Digby: Colossal Failure

What Kevin sez:

I wonder how long it will take America to recover from George Bush's uniquely blinkered and self-righteous brand of ineptitude? In the past five years he's demonstrated to the world that we don't know how to win a modern guerrilla war. He's demonstrated that we don't understand even the basics of waging a propaganda war. He's demonstrated that other countries don't need to pay any attention to our threats. He's demonstrated that we're good at talking tough and sending troops into battle, but otherwise clueless about using the levers of statecraft in the service of our own interests. If he had set out to willfully and deliberately expose our weaknesses to the world and undermine our strengths, he couldn't have done more to cripple America's power and influence in the world. Beneath the bluster, he's done more to weaken our national security than any president since World War II.

This is the argument.

The Next War

Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2006.
By Daniel Ellsberg.

Sources

A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.

Bottle of Blog: Winning The Greatest Disaster In The History Of Catastrophes

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — President Bush’s chief spokesman drew a parallel today between the latest carnage in Iraq and the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, declaring that Iraqi terrorists are trying to turn American public opinion as the Communists did in Southeast Asia nearly four decades ago.

And that, in itself, should be enough to make every decent, honest, thinking and reasonable person in the country never, ever, ever take a single, solitary thing anyone who's in the Bush administration or who supports the Bush administration seriously for as long as we have to endure this national catastrophe.

Graham predicts Supreme Court will uphold military tribunal law

By JAMES ROSEN, McClatchy Newspapers

For weeks, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the Supreme Court would reject Bush's new law on military tribunals. Now, Graham is predicting that the high court will accept the compromise law. "Everything we've done is consistent with the law of armed conflict, and the detainees have more rights than any other enemy prisoners have had in any other war."

How Iraq came home to haunt America

For months doubts over Iraq have risen along with the death toll. Last week a tipping point was reached as political leaders in Washington and London began openly to think the unthinkable: that the war was lost

Peter Beaumont, Edward Helmore and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday October 22, 2006
The Observer

Colonel Tom Vail is planning a road trip around the United States. It is his last, sad duty before returning to his family from eastern Baghdad. For when the commander of the 4th Brigade of the 101st Airborne arrives back in the States, it will be with videos of the memorial services held in Baghdad for each of his fallen soldiers to give to the families of the dead men.

He knows that some of the families will not want to see him, and he understands. Grief works in different ways, he says. For others, however, it will be an opportunity to talk, to learn something, he hopes, of the inexplicable nature of their children's deaths.

My New Total Information Awareness Technique Will Be Totally Unstoppable

By Justin Rood - October 20, 2006, 3:04 PM

The U.S. government is rebuilding the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, and it's going to be better than ever!

Shane Harris at National Journal tells us today that despite efforts to kill TIA, it has lived on in a quiet corner of the NSA. Now, it's taking form as "Tangram," a program in which former TIA contractors build on existing TIA research to create a new, enhanced form of the program.

Noe's ex-bookkeeper testifies fund transfers were labeled as coin purchases

By MIKE WILKINSON
BLADE STAFF WRITER

A former bookkeeper for Tom Noe testified this morning that he was told to label $2.75 million in transfers from state funds to Noe’s personal business as coin purchases, yet never saw any documentation to verify any coins were bought.

In the first specific evidence yet of financial mismanagement with the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation rare-coin funds managed by Noe, Tom Peters said the transfers were never supported with evidence that Noe’s personal business sold inventory to the state’s two coin funds.

As the Tide Turns

By Eleanor Clift

Newsweek

Updated: 5:06 p.m. ET Oct. 20, 2006

Oct. 20, 2006 - Andrew Duck is an Iraq-war veteran running for Congress in a conservative district in western Maryland. This is his first foray into politics, and when he asked his boss at Northrop Grumman if it was OK, word came back from the legislative-affairs director, “Good luck.” The company obviously thought he needed that luck. Duck says all their campaign donations went to his opponent, Republican Roscoe Bartlett. “They made the same determination as everyone else—[that] I didn’t have a chance,” laughs Duck.

That perception changed with the Mark Foley scandal about sexually explicit e-mails to teenage pages, says Duck, who grew up in the district and was 15th of 17 children in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. Everybody was a Democrat when he was a kid; then they became Reagan Republicans. Now they’re disillusioned with the GOP. The war bothers them along with the growth of government and the size of the deficit. “The only thing that kept them loyal to the Republicans was moral values,” says Duck. ”When Foley came along, that was it. I’m getting inquiries from people I never thought I’d hear from.”

Downsized but Not Out

by BARBARA EHRENREICH & TAMARA DRAUT

[from the November 6, 2006 issue]

A magical glow arises from the land. "Our economy is evolving," Labor Secretary Elaine Chao told CNN in September. "It's transitioning to a knowledge-based economy." Many liberals are dazzled by the light, imagining a new era in which poverty is curable by education and the highly educated know no limits. Those who go to college and work hard are set for life, while the clueless and the unprepared drift down into the working poor. Message to Americans in a competitive, globalized world: Sink or swim. It's up to you.

But wasted knowledge piles up all around us, along with the blighted lives of people who made "all the right choices," got their degrees and have either lost or never found their footing. There's the Atlanta-based IT marketing expert who has alternated between professional jobs and janitorial work, the laid-off chemical engineer who's spent time in shelters, the 50-ish Minneapolis cab driver who offers his business card along with the receipt, because he still harbors some dim hope of returning to a job as a media executive.

Frank Rich: Obama Is Not a Miracle Elixir

The Democrats are so brilliant at yanking defeat from the jaws of victory that it still seems unimaginable that they might win on Nov. 7. But even the most congenital skeptic has to face that possibility now. Things have gotten so bad for the Republicans that were President Bush to unveil Osama bin Laden’s corpse in the Rose Garden, some reporter would instantly check to see if his last meal had been on Jack Abramoff’s tab.

With an approval rating of 16 percent — 16! — in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Congress has matched the Democrats of 1994 or, for that matter, Michael Jackson during his own version of Foleygate. As for Mr. Bush, he is once more hiding behind children in an elementary school, as he did last week when the monthly death toll for Americans in Iraq approached a nearly two-year high. And where else could he go? Some top Republican Congressional candidates in the red state he was visiting, North Carolina, would not appear with him. When the president did find a grateful campaign mate at his next stop, Pennsylvania, it was the married congressman who paid $5.5 million to settle a lawsuit by a mistress who accused him of throttling her.

S.E.C. Inquiry on Hedge Fund Draws Scrutiny

Questions into inside trading probe of Wall Street executive who is big Bush fundraiser--BUZZFLASH

By WALT BOGDANICH and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: October 22, 2006

By the evening of June 20, 2005, the government’s investigation of possible insider trading by Pequot Capital Management, a prominent hedge fund, had reached a critical stage.

Throughout the day, Robert Hanson, a branch chief in the Washington office of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been questioning his lead investigator in the case about taking the testimony of John J. Mack, an influential Wall Street executive.

NYT Editorial: Blowing in the Wind

Published: October 22, 2006

The generals who told President Bush before the war that Donald Rumsfeld’s shock-and-awe fantasy would not work were not enough to persuade him to change his strategy in Iraq. The rise of the insurgency did not do the trick. Nor did month after month of mounting military and civilian casualties on all sides, the emergence of a near civil war, the collapse of reconstruction efforts or the seeming inability of either Iraqi or American forces to secure contested parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, for any significant period.

So what finally, after all this time, caused Mr. Bush to very publicly consult with his generals to consider a change in tactics in Iraq? The president, who says he never reads political polls, is worried that his party could lose some of its iron grip on power in the Congressional elections next month.