Bush living LBJ's lesson

By Ron Hutcheson
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1964, an anguished President Lyndon Johnson vented his frustration over the war in Vietnam.

"I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damned mess I ever saw," he told a top aide in a tape-recorded conversation. "It's damned easy to get in a war, but it's gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in."

Now President Bush is living that lesson in Iraq, stuck in a box with no clear path to victory and no easy exit from an unpopular war. While Bush remains committed to his goal of a stable democracy, even he acknowledges that the current policy isn't working.

Exxon Spends Millions to Cast Doubt on Warming

by Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Stephen Castle in Brussels

The world's largest energy company is still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund European organisations that seek to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming and undermine support for legislation to curb emission of greenhouse gases.

Data collated by a Brussels-based watchdog reveals that ExxonMobil has put money into projects that criticise the Kyoto treaty and question the findings of scientific groups. Environmental campaigners say Texas-based Exxon is trying to influence opinion-makers in Brussels because Europe - rather than the US - is the driving force for action on climate change.

"ExxonMobil invests significant amounts in letting think-tanks, seemingly respectable sources, sow doubts about the need for EU governments to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Olivier Hoedeman, of the Corporate Europe Observatory. "Covert funding for climate sceptics is deeply hypocritical because ExxonMobil spends major sums on advertising to present itself as an environmentally responsible company."

An Exit Strategy for the War on Christmas

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted December 9, 2006.

Let's face it: Christmas is not the exclusive property of those who think God came to earth 2000 years ago as a baby in Bethlehem.

As a dedicated secular humanist, I must regretfully acknowledge that the War on Christmas has not been going well. Some would use the word "quagmire," and urge a phased redeployment to other fronts, like Easter and Mardi Gras.

Others argue that we simply need more boots on the ground, and that our allies, such as the ACLU, have not been fielding sufficient troops. I say we have only ourselves to blame, and that -- however noble our intentions -- we haven't been putting up much of a fight.

Six Ways That Changing Your Life Can Prevent Global Warming

By Peter Michaelson, BuzzFlash. Posted December 9, 2006.

American society isn't doing much about global warming -- are we waiting for Al Gore? Here are six things we can do to prevent it.

All of the reasons for our failure to address global warming are known. But they are not known widely and deeply enough to send us rushing down the street on bicycles or even in four-cylinder cars.

Still, we want something to be done. Are we waiting for Al Gore? Is it possible it all depends on our own little selves?

A very simple axiom is at play: The better we understand our own contribution to the paralysis, the freer we become to act effectively.

GOP pushes tax bill through Congress

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 8 minutes ago

In its last hours of GOP control, Congress passed a raft of bills big and small, most significantly a sweeping bill reviving expired tax breaks, extending trade benefits for developing countries and protecting doctors from a big cut in Medicare payments.

The Senate cleared the bill for President Bush's signature early Saturday by a 79-9 vote. Final adjournment followed after the House and Senate cleared away a bevy of other legislation, including bills reauthorizing health research programs at the National Institutes of Health and an overhaul of fisheries management.

Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., gaveled the House to a close for the last time about 3:15 a.m.; the Senate limped to a close about 4:40 a.m.

Republicans dumped an unfinished budget on the Democrats about to take power, with the Senate barely meeting a midnight deadline to pass a stopgap spending bill putting the government on autopilot until Feb. 15.

Senator Calls for an Easing of Corporate-Wrongdoing Rules

By LYNNLEY BROWNING

The departing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee proposed legislation yesterday calling for a rollback of the tactics adopted by federal prosecutors to combat corporate wrongdoing after the Enron collapse.

The bill from Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, is the latest challenge to the tactics, which have come under scrutiny from trade groups, former United States attorneys general and a prominent federal judge. Mr. Specter said he would reintroduce the bill next month when Congress convenes.

The Justice Department is now weighing how much to revise the guidelines, which are used as a playbook by prosecutors when conducting investigations of companies and employees. But the white-collar-crime group of an advisory council to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the body that is redrafting the guidelines, is mired in internal debate over how much to scale them back, according to a person close to the matter.

Dubai Ports participating in U.S. security plan

Thu Dec 7, 2006 2:05 PM ET

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dubai Ports World, the Arab-owned firm whose purchase of American port facilities caused a U.S. political uproar, will join a program aimed at stopping nuclear weapons being smuggled into the United States, sources familiar with the agreement said on Thursday.

The program would involve screening U.S.-bound cargo for radiation at more than half a dozen ports including in Britain, Honduras, Oman and South Korea, sources said.

EPA May Drop Lead Air Pollution Limits

by John Heilprin

The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.

A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.

The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ex-Ambassador, Dies

Friday December 8, 2006 4:46 PM

AP Photo NY118

By MERRILL HARTSON

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an unabashed apostle of Reagan era conservatism and the first woman U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has died.

The death of the 80-year-old Kirkpatrick, who began her public life as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat, was announced Friday at the senior staff meeting of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, where she had been a senior fellow.

End Times for the Christian Coalition?

On September 19, 2005, Jason Christy, the head of Christy Media and the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Church Report, a national news and business journal for pastors and Christian leaders, was named executive director of the Christian Coalition by the organization's president, Roberta Combs. "I am honored and humbled to be chosen by the Christian Coalition's Board of Directors for this key position," Christy said. "It is crucial at this time in our nation for people of faith to engage the culture, and to realize that at the grassroots level they can make a difference."

Less than a month later, Christy changed his mind, deciding not to take the position. According to Word News, Christy intimated that it would be difficult to work with the Christian Coalition and continue running his various businesses.

They Told You So.

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.

Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis

By SALAH NASRAWI, Associated Press Writer
Fri Dec 8, 6:03 AM ET

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

Digby: Grown-ups

Via Atrios and TPM I see that John McCain is sharing his sophisticated foreign policy views again:

"Well in war, my dear friends, there is no such thing as compromise; you either win or you lose."

Heavy duty. And how would we win the war if John McCain were in charge?

Digby: Bitchin' Bolton

tristero got to it before I did, but I did want to comment on the petulant, immature president we are forced to put up with for two more years. Not only did he send out the snotty statement about Bolton's resignation that tristero quotes below, he held a photo-op and talked to the press slumped down in his chair, lip curled, obviously pissed off. He said this:

"I'm not happy about it. I think he deserved to be confirmed. And the reason why I think he deserved to be confirmed is because I know he did a fabulous job for the country."

You'd think he'd be used to failure after experiencing it his entire life but he doesn't seem to he handling it well.

Digby: "It's Wrong To Say It"

So I see that Joe Klein is going on television and regurgitating halfway digested cocktail party chatter again. He doesn't seem to have a basic understanding of what kinds of things you can "say outloud" and what kinds of things you can't. It's a continuing problem for him.

From ThinkProgress:

On the Chris Matthews Show yesterday, Time magazine senior writer Joe Klein said of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) support for setting a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq: “That may well be true, but it’s wrong to say it.”

Apparently Klein overlearned his lesson from earlier this year when he blurted out that a nuclear first strike should be on the table.

Digby: Breaking The Furniture

This is going to keep me up tonight:

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston,South Carolina.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

Digby: Hey, Hey, Joe and J

So Holy Joe backed St John McCain's call for more troops this morning. If Bush agrees, which I think is possible considering his temperament and history, then they can be the Johnson and McNamara of 2008.

Newsweek reports:

Since the election, the Arizona senator has pushed for more, not fewer, troops in the Iraq conflict, claiming "without additional ground forces we will not win this war." It's a striking stance for a man considered to be the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, considering the American public's growing impatience for the end of the war. Even in conservative New Hampshire, 38 percent of voters now support bringing troops "home ASAP," according to the most recent Granite State poll. South Carolina, where a tough defeat ended McCain's 2000 campaign, will play an even more influential role in 2008 thanks to early placement in the primary calendar. There, too, Republican voters are growing unhappy with the war. "People are wondering how long this is going to go on," says Buddy Witherspoon, a Republican National Committeeman from Columbia. "I don't think a proposal like that is going to get McCain any votes down here."

Digby: Corruption, Cronyism and Incompetence

I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the House and Senate, no matter how much pressure they get to do otherwise from the "centrist" Mandarins and callow Kewl Kidz, go hard after the Bush administration on war profiteering, cronyism, corruption and waste. This is a rare opportunity for the Democrats to properly expose the Republicans for the crooks they are --- and dispell the myth once and for all that they are the wise stewards of the taxpayers money.

Digby: Killing The Bear

Since Hullabaloo seems to be obsessed with Josh Marshall's posts of yesterday, I will continue with this observation from one of our readers on the subject of Stanley Kurtz's offensive proposition that poor little Bushie was unduly constrained by the cowardly American public from doingwhatneededtobedone:

The other side of this stupidity is that Bush is under no real constraint to care what the American on the street thinks of his war, and in fact has not really given any indication of doing so.

Exactly. How many times have we heard this?

Digby: Understanding The Moment

Chris Bowers wrote a very poignant post about Barack Obama that expresses the bewildered dismay I think I lot of us feel when we read or hear our leaders still using us as a foil to distance themselves from their own base. It's so disheartening to see someone we hope will be a brilliant leader make the mistake of running against the Party just when it is finding a new sense of unity --- and the other side is having an identity crisis.

Toxic trade-off

Products made with dangerous chemicals are making our lives more convenient but at what cost to our bodies?

By SCOTT STREATER

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

FIRST OF THREE PARTS

Kyle Counts slides in his socks across the new hardwood floors of his North Richland Hills home and jumps into his mom's lap. Kyle, 10, has a blond Labrador named Titan and a handwritten sign on his bedroom door: "Keep Out. No girls allowed."

He also has at least 39 toxic chemicals in his body.

Legislators may reconsider suspending habeas corpus for detainees

By Lesley Clark and Margaret Talev

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - President Bush's victory in getting the rules he wanted to try suspected terrorists could be diminished.

The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled this week that he'll join prominent Democrats in seeking to restore legal rights to hundreds of suspected terrorists confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

While the measure to restore the right of habeas corpus has almost no chance of passing before Congress adjourns later this week, the message is clear: When Democrats take over in early January, the issue could resurface.

Dudley nomination to regulatory post in doubt

By M.Z. HEMINGWAY

December 05, 2006

The Senate will not vote on President Bush’s pick to head regulatory policy before the end of this Congress, casting the nomination into doubt.

Because of a lack of time and opposition from Democrats, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the committee considering the nomination, decided not to bring the nomination to a vote this month by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, according to press secretary Jen Burita.

Susan Dudley, who was nominated to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the Office of Management and Budget, drew intense scorn from environmental and public safety groups who say she is an anti-regulatory extremist. Dudley’s critics have lambasted her over comments she made against increased energy standards for consumer appliances, more stringent fuel economy regulations and limiting the sale of genetically modified foods.

PM Carpenter: A Splendid Spanking

Quite aside from the wisdom or folly of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, and quite aside from how much, if at all, those recommendations are executed by the White House, I must admit the ISG did a bang-up job of first lowering expectations and then impressing a resigned public with its sweeping breadth -- and severity.

Watching the panel's televised Q&A session after the report's release, I was stunned -- and not alone, I'm sure -- to hear its bipartisan membership publicly condemn Mr. Bush's war management as "a nightmare" equivalent to Saddam Hussein's atrociousness.

Study says violence in Iraq has been underreported

By Jonathan S. Landay

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration routinely has underreported the level of violence in Iraq in order to disguise its policy failings, the Iraq Study Group report said Wednesday.

The bipartisan group called on the Pentagon and the director of the U.S. intelligence community to immediately institute a new reporting system that provides "a more accurate picture of events on the ground."

Baker-Hamilton Won't Solve Iraq, Just DC's Iraq Hangover

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted December 5, 2006.

For the Iraq disaster to end, someone in DC is actually going to have to make a difficult decision -- admit defeat, invite a bloody civil war, lose face before a pair of rogue terror-supporting states -- and it's obvious that no one's ever going to do that, not until there's absolutely no choice.

In private, some members of the Iraq Study Group have expressed concern that they could find themselves in not-quite-open confrontation with Mr. Bush. "He's a true believer," one participant in the group's debates said. "Finessing the differences is not going to be easy." -- David Sanger, New York Times, "Idea of Rapid Withdrawal From Iraq Seems to Fade," Dec. 1.

What a fiasco this whole Baker-Hamilton episode is, with all its attendant leaks and media manipulations -- a veritable symphony of Typical Washington Bullshit. It has all the hallmarks of the pusillanimous, cover-your-ass mentality that rules our nation's capital, where all problems are political problems and actual real emergencies never make it to the desk of anyone who matters.

Consumption Has Finally Caught Up With Us

By Michael T. Klare, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted December 7, 2006.

We're closer than we think to an age when gasoline becomes a luxury and restaurant meals become unattainable.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign policy analysts have struggled to find a term to characterize the epoch we now inhabit. Although the "Post-Cold War Era" has been the reigning expression, this label now sounds dated and no longer does justice to the particular characteristics of the current period. Others have spoken of the "Post-9/11 Era," as if the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were defining moments for the entire world. But this image no longer possesses the power it once wielded -- even in the United States.

I propose instead another term that better captures the defining characteristics of the current period: the Post-Abundance Era.

Oil for Sale: Iraq Study Group Recommends Privatization

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted December 7, 2006.

The Iraq Study Group may not have a solution for how to end the war, but it does have a way for its corporate friends to make money.

In its heavily anticipated report released on Wednesday, the Iraq Study Group made at least four truly radical proposals.

The report calls for the United States to assist in privatizing Iraq's national oil industry, opening Iraq to private foreign oil and energy companies, providing direct technical assistance for the "drafting" of a new national oil law for Iraq, and assuring that all of Iraq's oil revenues accrue to the central government.

Global warming is reducing ocean life, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, say scientists

Alarming new satellite data show that the warming of the world's oceans is reducing ocean life while contributing to increased global warming.

Can You Hear Me Now?

December 05, 2006 3:38 PM

Vic Walter and Krista Kjellman Report:

Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off.

A recent court ruling in a case against the Genovese crime family revealed that the FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a "roving bug." Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.

"The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them," James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News. "Any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device, which can allow eavesdroppers to pinpoint someone's location to within just a few feet," he added.

Say Hello to the Goodbye Weapon

By David Hambling
02:00 AM Dec, 05, 2006

The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you've been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards -- and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty.

You've just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq -- even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects.

Newshounds: One Story, Two Very Different Slants

If there are any doubts that Fox News sells fear, a look at how Fox News and another network covered the same story should dispell them. With video.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., gave a speech in New Hampshire the other night at which he proposed limiting Americans' constitutional right of free speech in order to fight terrorism. Both Keith Olbermann, anchor of MSNBC's "Countdown," and Martha MacCallum, anchor of Fox News' "Live Desk" did stories on the event, which aired less than 24 hours apart. The two stories were as different as night and day.

TPM Muckraker: Our Great List of Scandalized Administration Officials

By Justin Rood - December 4, 2006, 7:11 PM

A number of readers have sent in tips to help the folks at Powerline, who recently admitted to having trouble remembering administration officials (beyond Scooter Libby) who had been accused of corruption or resigned in the face of scandal.

How could you foresake us! cry our old pals Claude Allen, David Safavian, Brian Doyle. Who could forget former FDA commissioner, Lester Crawford? After the jump, you'll find our partial (but fast-growing) list. If we're missing a name, please send it along!

Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.

Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.

Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.

Democrats inspect faith-based initiative

2 call for probe to determine use of taxes

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | December 4, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Two leading Democrats on the House International Relations Committee said they want to investigate President Bush's faith-based initiative to determine whether taxpayer funds are being used to reward Bush's Christian conservative supporters and whether the faith-based groups are using the funds to help gain converts.

In addition, Democrats on the panel said they could be in a strong position to try to overturn a measure that requires one-third of AIDS prevention money overseas to be spent on "abstinence-until-marriage" programs.

Boxer says no more environment rollbacks

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
7 minutes ago

Environmental rollbacks from the Bush administration "in the dead of the night" are history, the incoming head of the Senate environment committee declared Tuesday.

"That's over. We are going to bring these things into the light," Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said in a wide-ranging interview laying out her agenda with The Associated Press. She cited concerns about a host of new Bush administration rules on air, land and water quality.

Boxer expressed optimism that Congress could reach agreement with President Bush on a global warming bill, but acknowledged she might not get all she hopes for. Bush has opposed mandatory regulation of industrial carbon dioxide.

The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War

by R.W. Behan

George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of “war president,” was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war—a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation’s history.

Two elements of the repudiation seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length of its gestation period—those six years—and how tepid it was. Given the documented record of the Bush Administration—lying us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid contracts, spying secretly on the nation’s citizens, selling public policy to Jack Abramoff’s clients, stating even their intent to ignore laws with dozens of “signing statements”—one would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner, and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress (and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en masse two years ago.

Saving the rainforest: At last, action on the Amazon

A new generation of state politicians in Brazil is tackling the destruction of the rainforest by creating a conservation area 10,000 square miles bigger than England. Steve Connor reports

Published: 04 December 2006

Good news does not often emerge from the Amazon rainforest, a part of the world that has become synonymous with man's rapacious desire to turn verdant wilderness into the greenery of dollar bills.

But that could change later today when a Brazilian politician announces the birth of the world's largest tract of tropical rainforest that is protected by law and policed by satellite.

The Dollar Melts as Iraq Burn

by James K. Galbraith

The melting away of the dollar is like global warming: you can't say that any one heat wave proves the trend, and there might be a cold snap next week. Still, over time, evidence builds up. And so, as the greenback approaches two to the pound, old-timers will remember the fall of sterling, under similar conditions of deficits and imperial retreat, a generation back. We have to ask: is the American financial empire on the brink? Let's take stock.

It's clear that Ben Bernanke got buffaloed, early on, by the tripe about his need to "establish credibility with the markets." There never was an inflation threat, apart from an oil-price bubble that popped last summer. Long-term interest rates would have reflected the threat if it existed, but they never did. So the Fed overshot, and raised rates too much. Now long rates are falling; Bernanke faces an inverting yield curve and even bank economists are starting to call his next move. That will be to start cutting rates, after a decent interval, sometime next year.

John Bolton's Greatest Hits

by IAN WILLIAMS

[posted online on December 4, 2006]

In a rare midterm election in which foreign policy was a major issue, it is not too much of a stretch to say that American voters put UN Ambassador John Bolton out of office. Bolton's resignation from his unconfirmed recess appointment at the UN removes the residual fear that the Bush team had something up its sleeve to bypass senatorial resistance to his confirmation. The White House had claimed the support of a bipartisan silent majority for his appointment--even though it was vociferous defections from GOP ranks that helped thwart his confirmation.

In fact, Bolton's determination to hang on up to this point suggests that his obsession with the United Nations is as serious as Ted Haggard's with sin: He just can't keep away from it. For three decades of work at conservative think tanks and at the State Department, Bolton has angled for appointments that would in some way keep him grappling at close quarters with the organization even if they sometimes involved him in contradictory positions.

Iraq Study Group Offers No Real Plan for Withdrawal

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com . Posted December 5, 2006.

If we were to follow the recommendations of James Baker's Iraq Study Group, we'd be embedded in Iraq for at least another three to five years.

Finally, the President and the New York Times agree. In a news conference with the Iraqi Prime Minister last week, George W. Bush insisted that there would be no "graceful exit" or withdrawal from Iraq; that this was not "realism." The next day the Times, in a front page piece (as well as "analysis" inside the paper) pointed out that, "despite a Democratic election victory this month that was strongly based on antiwar sentiment, the idea of a major and rapid withdrawal seems to be fading as a viable option."

In fact, in the media, as in the counsels of James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, withdrawal without an adjective or qualifying descriptor never arrived as a "viable option." In fact, withdrawal, aka "cut and run," has never been more than a passing foil, one useful "extreme" guaranteed to make the consensus-to-come more comforting.

Emergency Contraception: No Help if Women Still Can't Get It

By Jeanine Plant, Women's eNews. Posted December 5, 2006.

Although Plan B, the 'morning after pill,' became available without prescription in November, women still face high costs, age restrictions, and limited availability in some places.

Barr Laboratories began shipping Plan B to pharmacies nationwide on Nov. 6 on the non-prescription basis recently approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

That puts the pill within much easier reach.

But while access is now enhanced to the time-sensitive drug, barriers -- including some prices nearing $45 -- remain.

Because of its new non-prescription status, Carol Cox, a spokeswoman for Barr Labs, told Women's eNews that the distributor does not expect insurance companies to provide coverage for it and that Medicaid does not cover Plan B in all states.

Scientist Fights Church Effort to Hide Museum's Pre-Human Fossils

By Kendrick Frazier
posted: 03 December 2006
10:46 am ET

Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is giving no quarter to powerful evangelical church leaders who are pressing Kenya's national museum to relegate to a back room its world-famous collection of hominid fossils showing the evolution of humans' early ancestors.

Leakey called the churches' plans "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard."

Frank Rich: Has He Started Talking to the Walls?

--The New York Times, November 3, 2006

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

Gates Hearing Has New Urgency

By Robert Parry
December 3, 2006

George W. Bush’s back-of-the-hand to the Baker-Hamilton commission’s Iraq War troop drawdown plan – and the disclosure that Bush ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he sought a major shift in war policy – has given new urgency to the Dec. 5 hearings on Robert M. Gates to be Bush’s new Pentagon chief.

Senators, who were inclined to rubber-stamp Gates’s nomination, may have reason to think twice. Indeed, the evidence now suggests that Washington’s conventional wisdom about Gates as “a realist” clambering onboard to put Bush’s war strategy on a new course was dead wrong. Rather than a sign of a new direction, Bush may have picked Gates as a yes man who will continue the war pretty much as is.

The Morning Story of Stephen Hadley

By Todd Gitlin | bio

As Stephen Hadley squared his shoulders, smiled fixedly, condescendingly, during his morning appearance on Meet the Press, signaling firmness as he cut and ran from the latterly censorious wisdom of Tim Russert, as he explained unhesitatingly that his employer is always on top of things, I found myself thinking of Elizabeth Kolbert’s nice piece in the current New Yorker about bedtime stories. The typical bedtime story, she writes, invites the child to take a flight of fancy and then, in the end, to sell out—to go to bed.

Hadley has the smooth middle-management, upwardly mobile manner of a man who sounds as though every question you might pose is a symptom of incomprehension. Little girl, I know what’s good for you. You may think you know what’s good for you but that is because you are a little girl. I am not. You should know your place. Observe as I tuck you in.

Killing Habeas Corpus

Arlen Specter’s about-face.

by JEFFREY TOOBIN

Issue of 2006-12-04
Posted 2006-11-27

President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland on April 27, 1861, two weeks after the Confederate attack on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. “Lincoln could look out his window at the White House and see Robert E. Lee’s plantation in Virginia,” Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of “America’s Constitution,” said. “He was also facing a rebellion of so-called Peace Democrats in Maryland, meaning there was a real chance that Washington would be surrounded and a real threat that the White House would be captured.” On Lincoln’s order, federal troops arrested Baltimore’s mayor and chief of police, as well as several members of the Maryland legislature, who were jailed so that they couldn’t vote to secede from the Union.

Paul Krugman: Two More Years

At a reception following the midterm election, President Bush approached Senator-elect James Webb.

“How’s your boy?” asked Mr. Bush.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” replied Mr. Webb, whose son, a Marine lance corporal, is risking his life in Mr. Bush’s war of choice.

“That’s not what I asked you,” the president snapped. “How’s your boy?”

People Party vs. Money Party: Who's Who Among the Democrats

By David Sirota, AlterNet. Posted December 4, 2006.

A list of the Democrats who are going to lead the fight for health care, fair trade and labor issues in the New Congress and the Democrats who will fight them.

The fact that our nation's politics is divided not between Democrats and Republicans but between the People Party and the Money Party is obvious to anyone who looks at the political system honestly (which is to say, not most journalists or Washington political hacks). Calls for "bipartisanship" and faux "centrism" that has nothing to do with the actual center of American public opinion are most often moves to prevent the political debate from analyzing the People vs. Money divide that actually fuels our politics. We already have plenty of "bipartisanship" -- Republicans and a faction of Democrats who regularly join hands to screw over the vast majority of Americans.

The Christian Right Goes Back to Bible Boot Camp

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted December 4, 2006.

After a study revealed that less than 10% of evangelicals were bible literate, James Dobson's Focus on the Family is desperately taking a two-day multi-media Bible boot camp on the road, selling "truth" for $179 a seat.

It's been a rough season for the Christian right. Even for an eschatological movement, these are dark days. First came former Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives David Kuo's public admission that evangelicals were often derided as "nuts" and "goofy" within the inner sanctums of the Bush administration. Then, weeks before losing their shotgun seat in the 109th Congress, the booming voice of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, was silenced in a scandal involving a gay hooker, massage oils, methamphetamine, and a string of Denver hotel rooms booked under false names.

But even before all that hit the fundamentalist fan, the movement was contending with a quieter, more systemic crisis: functional Biblical illiteracy among the flock. That's right, religious conservatives aren't so religious, after all.

Intensified research effort yields climate-resilient agriculture to blunt impact of global warming

In reporting new forecasts of the devastating impact of climate change on food production in some of the globe's poorest regions, the world's largest alliance of international agricultural research centers today announced it is embarking on a new effort to intensify and streamline research to reduce developing countries' vulnerability to climate change caused by global warming.

Invention could solve “bottleneck” in developing pollution-free cars

Hydrogen-powered cars that do not pollute the environment are a step closer thanks to a new discovery which promises to solve the main problem holding back the technology.

Whilst hydrogen is thought to be an ideal fuel for vehicles, producing only water on combustion, its widespread use has been limited by the lack of a safe, efficient system for onboard storage.

Scientists have experimented with ways of storing hydrogen by locking the gas into metal lattices, but metal hydrides only work at temperatures above 300°C and metal organic framework materials only work at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-198°C).

Controversial U.N. ambassador to step down

POSTED: 10:49 a.m. EST, December 4, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Unable to win Senate confirmation, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton will step down when his temporary appointment expires within weeks, the White House said Monday.

Bolton's nomination has languished in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a year, blocked by Democrats and several Republicans. Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican who lost in the midterm elections November 7 that swept Democrats to power in both houses of Congress, was adamantly opposed to Bolton.

Critics have questioned Bolton's brusque style and whether he could be an effective public servant who could help bring reform to the U.N.