Digby: The Fall Of St John

Kos has posted an interesting item by Bob Novak, which, if true, would be good news:

1. The debate inside the Republican Party is whether the mid-term election defeat was solely the result of unhappiness over Iraq or constituted deeper concern with the drift of the GOP, under both presidential and Congressional leadership. Defeated Republicans who put all of the blame on Iraq are infuriated by White House denials of this argument. In any event, we find widespread agreement among Republicans that U.S. troops must be leaving Iraq at the end of 2007 to avoid catastrophe in 2008.

Digby: No Law Professor Left Behind

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money reads the wingnuts so you don't have to and finds that they are just as idiotic as ever:

After pointing out that more Americans have died in the Iraq war than in 9/11, Althouse--quite remarkably at this late date--asks:

A key question -- with an unknowable answer -- is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?

Digby: Gerald Ford

The first vote I ever cast was for Jerry Brown for governor. The first vote I ever cast for president was for Gerald Ford. (That was the last time I ever voted for a Republican, btw.)I have become a little bit more coherent since then.

I was not, at the time, a fan of Jimmy Carter; I thought he was sanctimonious. I was 20. (Little could I have imagined what was to come.) And I thought Ford had done the right thing by pardoning Nixon. Yes I really did.

Digby: Pot, Meet The Kettle Of Darkness

I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying watching Bob Dole drone on about how civility is broken down in Washington since the good old days when he and Jer were on the campaign trail. This is the same Bob Dole who was known as "the Prince of Darkness" back in the day --- the guy who was chosen for the GOP ticket in 1976 to pander to the rabid right and who said in the VP debate, "I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans-enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Digby: Converting The Heathens

People can say I'm being hysterical all they want, but I honestly feel that a woman's right to choose is about to go the way of the death penalty as a fundamental liberal value. The party is dying to find a reason to throw in the towel. And people like this are helping them do it:

Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her 2-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Saddam: The death of a dictator

Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr.

By Juan Cole

Dec. 30, 2006 | The body of Saddam, as it swung from the gallows at 6 a.m. Saturday Baghdad time, cast an ominous shadow over Iraq. The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare.

Saddam Hussein was tried under the shadow of a foreign military occupation, by a government full of his personal enemies. The first judge, an ethnic Kurd, resigned because of government interference in the trial; the judge who took his place was also Kurdish and had grievances against the accused. Three of Saddam's defense lawyers were shot down in cold blood. The surviving members of his defense team went on strike to protest the lack of protection afforded them. The court then appointed new lawyers who had no expertise in international law. Most of the witnesses against Saddam gave hearsay evidence. The trial ground slowly but certainly toward the inevitable death verdict.

Review of the Year: Global Warming

By Steve Connor
The Independent UK
Friday 29 December 2006

Our worst fears are exceeded by reality.

It has been a hot year. The average temperature in Britain for 2006 was higher than at any time since records began in 1659. Globally, it looks set to be the sixth hottest year on record. The signs during the past 12 months have been all around us. Little winter snow in the Alpine ski resorts, continuing droughts in Africa, mountain glaciers melting faster than at any time in the past 5,000 years, disappearing Arctic sea ice, Greenland's ice sheet sliding into the sea. Oh, and a hosepipe ban in southern England.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you've heard it all before. You may think it's time to turn the page and read something else. But you'd be wrong. 2006 will be remembered by climatologists as the year in which the potential scale of global warming came into focus. And the problem can be summarised in one word: feedback.

Saddam Hussein: A Dictator Created Then Destroyed By America

By Robert Fisk, The Independent UK. Posted December 30, 2006.

Hussein's execution will be remembered as a case of America destroying an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington.

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold -- that crack of the neck at the end of a rope -- than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed -- by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans -- on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

Reporter returns to Baghdad to find it far different - and worse off

By Hannah Allam
McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The tiny, dusty shops of Kadhemiya are treasure chests filled with agate, turquoise, coral and amber. I used to spend hours in this colorful Baghdad market district, haggling over prices for semi-precious stones etched with prayers in Arabic calligraphy.

That was just before I left Iraq in 2005, when rings from Kadhemiya were simply sentimental reminders of a two-year assignment here. When I returned to Baghdad last month, however, I found a city so dramatically polarized that sectarian identity now extends to your fingers. Slipping on a turquoise ring is no longer an afterthought, but a carefully deliberated security precaution.

New Book Reveals Long-Suppressed First Dispatches from A-bombed Nagasaki

By Greg Mitchell
Published: December 29, 2006 11:00 AM ET

NEW YORK Last year, just before the 60th anniversary of the atomic attacks on Japan, E&P broke the story in the U.S. that the dispatches filed by a famed American reporter from Nagasaki -- but suppressed in 1945 -- were about to be published abroad. Now a book that contains all of the dispatches, and a lot more, has been published here this week.

The book is "First Into Nagasaki," published by Crown, edited by the man who found the original suppressed stories, Anthony Weller. It was his late father, George Weller, who had written the historic dispatches for the Chicago Daily News -- where they never appeared, thanks to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's censorship office.

Why Is HUD Bulldozing Public Housing Apts in New Orleans When It's Cheaper to Fix Them?

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 12/28/2006 - 3:14pm.

Guest Contribution

Tale of Two Sisters: Why Is HUD Using Tens of Millions of Katrina Money to Bulldoze 4534 Public Housing Apartments in New Orleans When It Costs Less to Repair and Open Them Up?

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bill Quigley

Gloria Williams and her twin sister Bobbie Jennings are 60 years old. They are two of the over 4000 families who lived in public housing in New Orleans before Katrina struck who are still locked out of their apartments since Katrina. Their apartments are two of 4534 apartments that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced plans to demolish. Demolition is planned even though it will cost more to demolish and rebuild many fewer units than it does to fix them up and open them. Ms. Williams and Ms. Jennings, and thousands of families like them, are fighting HUD, they want to return.

Paul Krugman: A Failed Revolution

--The New York Times, December 29, 2006

After first attempting to deny the scale of last month’s defeat, the apologists have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist explanations for the failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you see, was that the noble ideals of the Republican revolution of 1994 were undermined by Washington’s corrupting ways. And the recent defeat was a good thing, because it will force a return to the true conservative path.

But the truth is that the movement that took power in 1994 — a movement that had little to do with true conservatism — was always based on a lie.

MoveOn: AT&T Concession Thoroughly Debunks Key Anti-Net Neutrality Myth

Debunks Key Anti-Net Neutrality Myth

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 12/29/2006 - 1:46pm.

AT&T’s agreement to Net Neutrality as a condition of their merger with Bell South was a huge victory for Internet freedom. It also debunks a top myth told to the public by Internet freedom opponents like AT&T: that Net Neutrality can’t be defined. It can be – AT&T just did it.

Making Carbon Trading a Fair Trade

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org. Posted December 29, 2006.

When industrialized countries use monoculture tree plantations in the developing world to offset carbon pollution they are doing more harm than good. Fortunately, there is a more sustainable alternative.

A recent issue of New Scientist magazine carried an article with this disturbing headline: "Africa Barred From Carbon Trading." Advocates for African farmers were claiming that European Union policies on carbon credits amounted to a carbon trade embargo on Africa.

Louis Verchon of the World Agroforestry Centre said that if the EU would implement a new scheme to credit farmers who capture carbon on their land, "millions of dollars in carbon credits could begin flowing to the world's rural poor."

Bush Could Usher in a Very Dangerous New Year

By Robert Parry,Consortium News. Posted December 26, 2006.

Intelligence sources say President Bush -- along with Israel's Ehud Olmert and the UK's Tony Blair -- are weighing the possibility of Israeli-led attacks on Syria and Iran in early 2007, with the United States providing logistical back-up.

The first two or three months of 2007 represent a dangerous opening for an escalation of war in the Middle East, as George W. Bush will be tempted to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to strike at Syria and Iran, intelligence sources say.

President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Living in America’s Fringe Economy

By Howard Karger, Dollars and Sense. Posted December 29, 2006.

Millions of Americans live on the margins of the American economy, depending on the likes of payday lenders and pawnshops, who charge excessive interest rates and superhigh fees for their services.

Ron Cook is a department manager at a Wal-Mart store in Atlanta. Maria Guzman is an undocumented worker from Mexico; she lives in Houston with her three children and cleans office buildings at night. Marty Lawson works for a large Minneapolis corporation. (The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.) What do these three people have in common? They are all regular fringe economy customers.

The term "fringe economy" refers to a range of businesses that engage in financially predatory relationships with low-income or heavily indebted consumers by charging excessive interest rates, superhigh fees, or exorbitant prices for goods or services. Some examples of fringe economy businesses include payday lenders, pawnshops, check-cashers, tax refund lenders, rent-to-own stores, and "buy-here/pay-here" used car lots. The fringe economy also includes credit card companies that charge excessive late payment or over-the-creditlimit penalties; cell phone providers that force less creditworthy customers into expensive prepaid plans; and subprime mortgage lenders that gouge prospective homeowners.

Most Outrageous Right Wing Comments of 2006

Media Matters for America. Posted December 28, 2006.

The offensive, the senseless, the bigoted, the inaccurate: a year in right-wing nuttery.

How extreme were conservative commentators in their remarks this year? How about calls to nuke the Middle East and an allegation that a "gay … mafia" used the congressional page program as its own "personal preserve." Right-wing rhetoric documented by Media Matters for America included the nonsensical (including Rush Limbaugh's claim that America's "obesity crisis" is caused by, among other things, our failure to "teach [the poor] how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter"), the offensive (such as right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel's question about "Barack Hussein Obama": Is he "a man we want as president when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?"), and the simply bizarre (such as William A. Donohue's claim that some Hollywood stars would "sodomize their own mother in a movie"). Since there were so many outrageous statements, we included a list of honorable mentions along with the top 11, which, if not for Ann Coulter, we might have limited to 10.

Spitzer Picks Republican as His Chief of Security

Fiendishly clever...--Dictynna

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: December 27, 2006

ALBANY, Dec. 26 — Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer on Tuesday named State Senator Michael A. L. Balboni, a Nassau County Republican, to be his top homeland security official, a move that not only gives his Democratic-dominated cabinet some bipartisan luster but also weakens the Republicans’ control over their last bastion of statewide power, the Senate.

Having lost a Westchester County seat in November, the Republicans now hold 34 of the Senate’s 62 seats, and that will fall to 33 after Mr. Balboni joins Mr. Spitzer’s cabinet. Many political analysts believe it will be difficult for the Republicans to retain his seat because Democrats have surpassed the Republicans in registration in Mr. Balboni’s district in the last half decade while gaining political ascendancy across Nassau County.

Paul Krugman: Helping the Poor, the British Way

It’s the season for charitable giving. And far too many Americans, particularly children, need that charity.

Scenes of a devastated New Orleans reminded us that many of our fellow citizens remain poor, four decades after L.B.J. declared war on poverty. But I’m not sure whether people understand how little progress we’ve made. In 1969, fewer than one in every seven American children lived below the poverty line. Last year, although the country was far wealthier, more than one in every six American children were poor.

The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)

December 27, 2006

The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.

George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.

In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspaper’s first 24 years at “more than $3 billion of cash.”

Robert Scheer: Ike Was Right

Posted on Dec 26, 2006

By Robert Scheer

The public, seeing through the tissue of Bush administration lies told to justify an invasion that never had anything to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 or weapons of mass destruction, now has begun a national questioning: Why are we still in Iraq? The answers posted most widely on the Internet by critics of the war suggest its continuation as a naked imperial grab for the world’s second-largest petroleum source, but that is wrong.

It’s not primarily about the oil; it’s much more about the military-industrial complex, the label employed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago when he warned of the dangers of “a permanent arms industry of vast proportions.”

Digby: What Did It?

Josh Marshall has asked a really fun question over at TPM cafe today: What caused the turnaround from Bush and the GOP being on top of the world and poised to rule for centuries in 2004 to where they sit today in 2006?

Most people cite Schiavo, Katrina and the attempt to gut social security, along with a bunch of other interesting moments in the decline of the house of Bush. (There are so many!)

Digby: Political Consumers

Anonymous Liberal pinch hitting over at Glenn Greenwald's place has posted an interesting piece about truth in advertising. He points out that the laws are much more explicit and demanding of honesty in selling consumer goods than it is in politics.

If a company makes a claim which is even slightly misleading, it will quickly find itself up to its eyeballs in litigation, whether in the form of government enforcement actions, lawsuits by competitors, or consumer class actions (often all three). There are also any number of tort and quasi-contractual claims that aggrieved consumers can bring against the individuals and companies who deceived them.

New study links Western wildfires to Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures

Western U.S. wildfires are likely to increase in the coming decades, according to a new tree-ring study led by the University of Comahue in Argentina and involving the University of Colorado at Boulder that links episodic fire outbreaks in the past five centuries with periods of warming sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.

States like Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and South Dakota all had an increased prevalence of wildfires in recent centuries when a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation -- similar but longer in duration than the better known El Nino-Southern Oscillation -- periodically shifted from a cool to a warm mode that lasted roughly 60 years each time, said the study authors.

Steve Benan at Political Animal: All I Want for Christmas Is....

Christmas is a day about giving, so I thought it'd be fun to consider some gift ideas for those on our list.

Karl Rove gets a calculator this year, because his own personal math turned out to be a little unreliable.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves a comfy massage chair, so foreign heads of state don't feel compelled to accost her at G8 meetings.

More so than anyone else in the country, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) needs a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth."

Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears

Size and Scope of the Interagency Investigative Tool Worry Civil Libertarians

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 26, 2006; Page A07

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as "OneDOJ," already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

Digby: Snooker List

Eleanor Clift put together a column in which she outlines a few of the Bush administration lies for the year. (I'm sure we could come up with a list that goes on for days with that one.) But what is more interesting to me is the following:

The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:

• A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.

• 
  

Digby: And Then What Happened...?

Via Steve Gilliard I see that some conservative evangelicals have decided to deal with all the closeted homosexuality in their clergy by starting a homo-rehab program:

Recent gay-sex scandals involving evangelical pastors have prompted much soul-searching among conservative Christian leaders.

No one has proposed rethinking the theology that homosexuality is a sin. Instead, there's a growing consensus that the church must do a better job of helping pastors resist all immoral desires, such as a lust for pornography, an addiction to drugs or a lifelong same-sex attraction.

Digby: We Won't Forget

The problem with letting bygones be bygones for war crimes is that some people who suffered might just rise to prominence and be unwilling to let things go:

Gen. Augusto Pinochet died this month without ever being held legally accountable for human rights abuses that occurred during his dictatorship. But his subordinates are now facing a new threat: President Michelle Bachelet is pushing to invalidate an amnesty law that for nearly 30 years has exempted them from prosecution on murder and torture charges.

Digby: Pastimes

I have to agree with Frank Rich that the Time Magazine person of the year was a little bit absurd --- but then so is his column about it:

This editorial pratfall struck me, once a proud Time staff member, as a sign that my journalistic alma mater might go the way of the old Life... Let’s hope publishing history doesn’t repeat itself. So in Time’s defense, let me say that the more I reflected on its 2006 Person of the Year — or perhaps the more that Mylar cover reflected back at me — the more I realized that the magazine wasn’t as out of touch as it first seemed. Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Paul Krugman: Democrats and the Deficit

Scroll down to see Krugman's article.--Dictynna

Now that the Democrats have regained some power, they have to decide what to do. One of the biggest questions is whether the party should return to Rubinomics--the doctrine, associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that placed a very high priority on reducing the budget deficit.

The answer, I believe, is no. Mr. Rubin was one of the ablest Treasury secretaries in American history. But it's now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of contemporary American politics.

How Free Trade Hurts

By Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown

Saturday, December 23, 2006; Page A21

Fewer and fewer Americans support our government's trade policy. They see a shrinking middle class, lost jobs and exploding trade deficits.

Yet supporters of free trade continue to push for more of the same -- more job-killing trade agreements, greater tax breaks for large corporations that export jobs and larger government incentives for outsourcing.

Bill Moyers: A Parable For Our Times

December 22, 2006

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. The center's senior fellow, Lew Daly, was his accomplice in this essay, written exclusively for TomPaine.com.

The Christian story begins simply: A child is given, a son. He grows up to be a teacher, sage, healer and prophet. He gains a large following. To many he is a divine savior; to the rich and powerful he is an enemy. They put him to death in brutal fashion, befitting his humble beginnings in peasant Galilee and his birth in a stall thick with the raw odor of animals.

Toward the end of his life, Jesus preached in the Temple to large crowds, reaching the height of his power. There he told the parable that likely sealed his fate. He said there was a man who created a prosperous vineyard and then rented it to some tenants while he went away on a journey. At harvest time, the owner of vineyard sent a servant to collect a portion from the tenants, but they beat the servant and sent him away empty-handed. Another servant came, and they struck him on the head. Another they killed. Finally, the owner sent his own son to collect the back payments. “They will respect my son,” he thought. But when the tenants saw the son, and knew him to be the heir, they saw their chance to take full possession of the harvest. And so they killed the son, thinking now they would owe nothing from the vineyard to anyone.

Frank Rich: Yes, You Are the Person of the Year!

TIME’S choice for 2006 Person of the Year — “You” — was a bountiful gift of mirth to America, second only to the championship Donald Trump-Rosie O’Donnell bout as a comic kickoff to the holiday season. The magazine’s cover stunt, a computer screen of Mylar reflecting the reader’s own image, was so hokey that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert merely had to display it on camera to score laughs. The magazine’s disingenuous rationale for bestowing its yearly honor on its readers was like a big wet kiss from a distant relative who creeps you out.

US soldier loses 9/11 film claim

A US judge has thrown out a claim by an Iraq war veteran who alleged a TV clip of him was used without his consent in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Sgt Peter Damon, 34, who lost both arms in Iraq, claimed Moore used an interview he did with NBC's Nightly News without asking permission.

Sgt Damon said use of the clip in Moore's documentary made him appear anti-war and against President Bush.

TPM Cafe: That Was Then ...

By Ivo Daalder | bio

I was talking to a reporter the other day, arguing that while Bush inherited a lot of problems from Clinton, in each instance he had done everything possible to make things worse. The reporter told me take a look at the 2000 GOP foreign policy platform, and reread the litany of indictments Bush & Co. had issued with respect to Clinton’s foreign policy. So I did. Sure makes for interesting reading.

Neo Culpa

Please don't call them "architects of the war": Richard (Prince of Darkness) Perle, David (Axis of Evil) Frum, Kenneth (Cakewalk) Adelman, and other elite neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq are beside themselves at the result.

by David Rose
January 2007

A preview of this article was published on VF.com on November 3, 2006.

I: About That Cakewalk …

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding."

An Executive Branch Assault on the Constitution

The Bush Administration's Department of Defense is examining whether it has the power to break a strike at tire plants that supply the military.

The Constitution affords the executive branch no such authority. But, as should be obvious by now, the current Administration has little regard for the founding document.

Ten Things the Democrats Can Do to Hold Corporations Accountable

By Charlie Cray and Phil Mattera,TomPaine.com. Posted December 22, 2006.

After years of lax congressional oversight, most Americans think corporations wield too much power. Only by restoring the balance between government and the private sector can corporate America regain the public's trust.

The midterm election demonstrated a deep dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's handling of the war and with the cornucopia of corruption that infected the Republican-controlled Congress. Yet it was more than a partisan victory for the Democrats. It also represented a popular backlash against business-friendly policies that have left many Americans behind.

The new Congress faces a staggering list of corporate abuses that have been ignored by lawmakers for years -- including executive pay levels that remain out of control, rampant contract fraud and war profiteering in Iraq and at home, widespread corporate tax avoidance, the offshoring of well-paying jobs, and the shredding of health, safety and environmental standards. It's enough to keep many congressional committees working overtime for years.