Tens of Thousands in D.C. Protest War

Saturday January 27, 2007 6:16 PM

By LARRY MARGASAK

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Protesters energized by fresh congressional skepticism about the Iraq war demanded a withdrawal of U.S. troops in a demonstration Saturday that drew tens of thousands and brought Jane Fonda back to the streets.

A sampling of celebrities, a half dozen members of Congress and busloads of demonstrators from distant states joined in a spirited rally under a sunny sky, seeing opportunity to press their cause in a country that has turned against the war.

The myth of McCain

Once the presumptive next US president, the Republican frontrunner's popularity has nose dived

Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday January 27, 2007
The Guardian

When Senator John McCain appeared at the Conservative party conference in Bournemouth last October as the presumptive next president of the US, the stars seemed fixed in the firmament for him. The myth of McCain appeared as invincible as ever.

His war story - a bomber pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, held prisoner for five years and tortured - is the basis of his legend as morally courageous, authentic, unwavering in his convictions, an independent reformer willing to take on the reactionaries of his own party, an "American maverick" as he calls himself in his campaign autobiography.

Manipulating The Oil Reserve

Thomas I. Palley

January 26, 2007

Thomas Palley runs the Economics for Democratic and Open Societies Project. He is the author of Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism. His weekly economic policy blog is at www.thomaspalley.com.

2006 was the year that oil prices came close to breaching $80 per barrel. This was despite the fact that there were no significant supply interruptions and oil demand actually fell in industrialized countries. That raises the question of what caused the spike.

It turns out there is good reason to believe that record oil prices may be due to our own strategic oil reserve, which the Bush administration may have been manipulating to drive up prices for the benefit of its clients. This is something Congress must investigate, and here is some preliminary evidence.

Tom Tancredo's mission

Bill Berkowitz
January 26, 2007

The Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics

These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.

Now, Tancredo, who has represented the state's Sixth District since 1999, has joined the long list of candidates contending for the GOP's 2008 presidential nomination. In mid-January Tancredo announced the formation of an exploratory committee -- Tom Tancredo for a Secure America -- the first step to formally declaring his candidacy. While his announcement didn't cause quite the stir as the announcement by Illinois Democratic Senator Barak Obama that he too was forming an exploratory committee, nevertheless Tancredo's move did not go completely unnoticed.

Blackwater, Inc. and the Privatization of the Bush War Machine

Our Mercenaries in Iraq

By JEREMY SCAHILL

As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina - Blackwater USA.

The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja - two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.

Gonzales appoints political loyalists into vacant U.S. attorneys slots

By Marisa Taylor and Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is transforming the ranks of the nation's top federal prosecutors by firing some and appointing conservative loyalists from the Bush administration's inner circle who critics say are unlikely to buck Washington.

The newly appointed U.S. attorneys all have impressive legal credentials, but most of them have few, if any, ties to the communities they've been appointed to serve, and some have had little experience as prosecutors.

The nine recent appointees identified by McClatchy Newspapers held high-level White House or Justice Department jobs, and most of them were handpicked by Gonzales under a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act that became law in March.

Top 10 Solutions for a More Perfect Union

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted January 27, 2007.

There are ten good bills awaiting passage in Congress that could make a real difference.

The "thumping" taken by the Republican Congress on election day was not just a rejection of K Street corruption and the catastrophe in Iraq. It was a call to action on issues that are more immediately relevant to people's lives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will begin to answer that call by pushing a "100 Hours" agenda -- including common-sense legislation to increase the minimum wage, cut interest on student loans and open the way for Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

That's a good beginning, but it's only a down payment on a broader agenda. Progressives now have the opportunity to develop a new vision that returns power to the American people for the first time in generations. But to-do lists don't add up to a vision. But Democrats must show they are serious by passing bold measures that define a new "people's agenda." With that in mind, here are ten existing pieces of legislation that deserve to be passed by our new Congress. Some of these bills are eminently passable, a few are related to the "100 Hours" agenda and others can be seen as long-term goals. But all would help return our nation to the path to a more perfect union (note: Bill numbers may change in the new Congress).

Libby Trial: No Swans Swimming In Sewers

Is it really the intent of the Libby legal team to reintroduce the entire argument over the Bush Administration's flawed case for war in Iraq? Especially after we just completed the tedious slog through jury selection, with the endless string of questions about the potential jurors feelings about Vice President Cheney and the mess that is Iraq?

Because if that truly is their intent -- to bring up the Niger document forgeries, as they did with the Government's witnesses Marc Grossman and Robert Grenier this morning; to bring up the war of words between the CIA and the White House/Vice President's office on who would take the blame for the mess that is Iraq; to bring up an endless string of innuendos that the CIA was out to make Scooter Libby into their fall guy? I'm sorry, but I do not see this jury buying that failure to accept responsibility. It's just a feeling from watching the jurors and the reactions of the folks in the gallery watching the trial...among which, there was a sense of confusion as to what, exactly, defense counsel was trying to get at today, other than to point out that people do, inherently, have memory questions over time.

No one strategy is best for teaching reading, FSU professor shows

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- For decades, a debate has simmered in the educational community over the best way to teach children how to read. Proponents of phonics, the "whole language and meaning" approach and other teaching methods long have battled for dominance, each insisting that theirs is the superior strategy.

Now, a Florida State University researcher has entered the fray with a paper in the prestigious journal Science that says there is no one "best" method for teaching children to read.

Digby: Can We Win This Time?

Rick Perlstein has two very important articles running right now that everyone should read. I would really love it if our Democratic representatives, especially, would read them, so if any of you have some extra time on your hands and would like to forward the articles to your Democratic congressperson and Senators, you would be doing a public service.

Democrats do not understand their own history and because of that they are allowing certain GOP myths to govern their decisions about Iraq. Perlstein's articles vividly describe how the history of Vietnam has been distorted, how it was done, who did it and why the Democrats find themselves battling fake ghosts instead of riding on the backs of real ones.

Digby: DLC Dance

Harold Ford has never been my favorite Democrat and now that he's running the DLC I assumed he would set my blood boiling even more than in the past. But I just saw him interviewed by Blitzer and he did not succumb to the temptation to use liberals as his foil --- indeed, he argued with Blitzer's entire premise which was that the party was divided along crazies vs centrist lines. He even interrupted to point out that the DLC had strongly backed "progressive" legislation during the 90's like family and medical leave.

Digby: Wonder Working Hack

Bush's former speechwriter Michael Gerson, (purveyor of the evangelical dog-whistle crapola that permeated every presidential speech for years)praised his former employer's SOTU address on Tuesday to high heaven (ahem) and took Jim Webb to task for his lousy writing skills, incoherence and all around terrible speech. Yes he did.

Digby: Crazy Man

Cheney went on Wolf Blitzer and demonstrated that he has totally lost touch with reality:

BLITZER: Here is what the president said last night. "We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence would spill out across the country and, in time, the entire region would be drawn into the conflict. For America, this is a nightmare scenario." He was talking about the consequences of failure in Iraq. How much responsibility do you have, though -- you and the administration -- for this potential scenario?

Digby: "Well, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard..."

Via TBOGG. As hard it is to believe, after being roundly ridiculed for his embarrassing "Shane" metaphor from four years ago, Howard Fineman is using those cowboy metaphors again:

Digby: Up To Here

Joe McCarthy Lieberman and Richard Lugar have been braying once again about how Iraq war dissenters are helping the enemy and upsetting our allies by showing that we are in "disarray."

Digby: The Geico Supreme Court

I think Matt Yglesias should get the Nobel prize for this idea. Product placement (as we saw with the "Baby Einstein" colloquey in last night's SOTU) as a way to close the deficit is brilliant. Why shouldn't Disney pay for that effusive mention from the president of the United States on national television?

Digby: Webb Writer

It has come to my attention from several readers that I failed to properly praise Jim Webb's speech last night. So, let me put on the record right now that I thought it was the best SOTU rebuttal I've ever heard and, moreover, it was the perfect speech at the perfect time by the perfect person. (How's that?)

Digby: Grown-ups

I've got to agree with Atrios Thers about this (and not just because he mentioned me in the post.) This new found ardor among the cognoscenti for macho Democrats is predictably shallow, but it's also the only way to get the codpiece obsessed pundits to notice that the Democrats have something important to say.

Digby: He's Always Been Naked

As we await the magic moment when the Codpiece enters the capitol and wades through the adoring crowd to take to the podium and tell us what the state of our union is, I can't help but be reminded of what it used to be like when Bush made a speech or held a press conference and people like Howard Fineman said things like this:

Digby: "He Is An Innocent Man And He Has Been Wrongly And Unfairly Accused"

Here's Fox News' Libby trial story on Brit Hume's show tonight. It starts off with the right lede, but goes downhill from there:

• Hume: An attorney for former white house aide Scooter Libby said Libby feared the whtie house was trying to use him as a scapegoat in the investigation into the leaking of a cia employees name. That contention was a key point during opening statements in Libby's perjury trial. Chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle has the story:

Digby: Partial Meme Abortion

Ezra demolishes the laughable new "health care" plan that Bush reportedly plans to unveil tonight, so nobody has to spend any time even thinking about whether it might be worth meeting him "halfway" (so that he can pull the ball away, anyway.)

Digby: An Inconvenient Oscar

Can I just say how thrilled I am that Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and the Melissa Etheridge song "I Need To Wake Up" from the same film are both nominated for Oscars?

Digby: Holy Moly

Norah O'Donnell is asking Andy Card and Leon Panetta if the president is going to have to ask Dick Cheney to resign as a result of what's being alleged at the Libby Trial. (They both punted.)

Digby: Boot Scooter Boogie

I've been riveted to the FDL Libby liveblogging all morning, and if you have an interest in this case you should go over and check it out. Fascinating stuff. The prosecution is pretty much saying that Cheney directed Libby to do whatever he did. It's pretty amazing. (Atrios has the transcript of David Shuster's MSNBC report here.)

Digby: Choice Quotes

Due to unavoidable problems I was unable to "blog for choice" today as I would have liked. But I have written reams about the issue over the years I've been doing this blog and my views are well known.

Digby: Electability

Everyone's already said what needs to be said about this, but I'd just like to add one other thing. Talking about "electability" is advanced process talk and process talk is cheap and it's a way of distancing candidates from voters. I'm against it. But I'm not sure, having read the article this post was based upon, that it really was about electability.

Digby: Big Babies

Via TBOGG, this is the funniest thing I've read in weeks:

I yield to no-one in my respect for the Clintons’ ruthless brutal demolition of Newt, and that guy who succeeded Newt for 20 minutes, and Gennifer and Kathleen and all the rest.

Digby: Stonewall

This is outrageous and it's probably an excellent example of how the administration is going to handle oversight. They will just drag things out until they are safely out of office unless the Democrats get very, very nasty:

Back in July, I reported that, in spite of pressure from CIA analysts, intelligence czar John Negroponte was blocking a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The CIA describes an NIE as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue,” and a fresh one was badly needed because the last one on Iraq, which was compiled between 2004 and 2006 and leaked to the New York Times last September, had become outdated. Negroponte was said to fear that given the worsening situation in Iraq a new NIE would, of necessity, be deeply pessimistic, and that such an assessment might get leaked and embarrass the Bush Administration during last fall's elections.

Digby: Elevator Pitch

Chuck Shumer says:

I know what you're thinking. "Hurry up, Schumer! What are the eight words that will save the Democratic Party?"

The truth is, the eight words are far more elusive than you might imagine.

The Twisted Scooter Trail

David Corn

January 25, 2007

David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and the co-author, along with Michael Isikoff, of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. He is covering the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial for The Nation.

Here’s a primer for those of you who have not obsessively followed the CIA leak case of Scooter Libby now underway.

Who is I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

He is the former chief of staff and national security adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney. A neocon in fine standing, he was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq. He helped assemble the first draft of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s U.N. speech laying out the case for war. That draft contained allegations about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs that were so flimsy that Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, tossed it aside. Before serving as Cheney’s top aide, Libby was a corporate lawyer. His most prominent client was fugitive financier Marc Rich (who was pardoned by outgoing President Clinton). Libby has written one novel, which contains graphic scenes of sexual bestiality. He is married to a former Democratic congressional aide.

Scalia on Bush v. Gore: 'It's water over the deck... get over it'

01/25/2007 @ 9:38 am

Filed by Michael Roston

Several Supreme Court Justices have recently defended their intervention in the Bush v. Gore case that handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. Sitting Justice Antonin Scalia responded to critics of the decision by telling them to 'get over it,' according to the report in the Associated Press.

AP reporter Mark Sherman brought together comments from two current and one retired Supreme Court Justice on the highly controversial 2000 case. In a recent address at Iona College, Justice Scalia told an audience that it was time for people to stop complaining about the case. "It's water over the deck — get over it," Scalia said to laughs in the audience.

Bush's War on the Republic

By Robert Parry

Consortium News

Wednesday 24 January 2007

From the beginning of the "war on terror," George W. Bush has lied to the American people about the goals, motivation and even the identity of the enemy - a propaganda exercise that continued through his 2007 State of the Union Address and that is sounding the death knell for the Republic.

Since 2001, rather than focusing on the al-Qaeda Sunni fundamentalist terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, Bush has expanded the conflict exponentially - tossing in unrelated enemies such as Iraq's secular dictator Saddam Hussein, Shiite-led Iran, Syria and Islamic militants opposed to Israel, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Harold Meyerson: Our Delusional Hedgehog

Wednesday, January 24, 2007; A23

In the beginning, George W. Bush sent American forces into Iraq with no apparent thought about the sectarian tensions that could explode once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Now, nearing the end of his presidency, Bush is sending more American forces into Iraq with no apparent regard for the verdict of the American people, rendered in November's election, that they've had it with his war. And, by the evidence of all available polling, with Bush himself.

The decline in Bush's support to Watergate-era Nixonian depths since he announced that his new Iraq policy was his old Iraq policy, only more so, stems, I suspect, from three conclusions that the public has reached about the president and his war. The first, simply, is that the war is no longer winnable and, worse, barely comprehensible since it has evolved into a Sunni-Shiite conflict. The second is that Bush, in all matters pertaining to his war, is a one-trick president who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never mind that it hasn't worked. In Isaiah Berlin's typology of leaders, Bush isn't merely a hedgehog who knows one thing rather than many things. He's a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn't so.

Carl Bernstein: Bush Administraton Has Done 'Far Greater Damage' Than Nixon

By E&P Staff

Published: January 24, 2007 4:00 PM ET updated Thursday

NEW YORK In an online chat at washingtonpost.com this afternoon, Carl Bernstein, the famed Watergate reporter at that paper and now writing articles for Vanity Fair, took several hard shots at the current Bush administration -- almost every time he was asked about the Nixon era. It came just as news of the death of former Watergate ringleader E. Howard Hunt was circulating widely.

After a long explanation of how the American system "worked," eventually, with Watergate, Bernstein said:

"In the case George W. Bush, the American system has obviously failed -- tragically -- about which we can talk more in a minute. But imagine the difference in our worldview today, had the institutions -- particularly of government -- done their job to ensure that a mendacious and dangerous president (as has since been proven many times over, beyond mere assertion) be restrained in a war that has killed thousands of American soldiers, brought turmoil to the lives of millions, and constrained the goodwill towards the United States in much of the world."

Appointment called unconstitutional

A lawyer alleges recent U.S. attorney selection violates appointments clause.

By Henry Weinstein, Times Staff Writer
January 25, 2007

A veteran Little Rock, Ark., attorney has lodged the first constitutional challenge to the Bush administration's attempt to appoint a U.S. attorney without seeking Senate approval.

John Wesley Hall alleged in a brief filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Little Rock that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales' Dec. 20 appointment of Tim Griffin as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas violated the presidential appointments clause of the Constitution.

Gene Lyons: Has Bush learned anything yet?

For several reasons, the most salient historical fact of the 20 th century has been lost on most Americans. Oddly, it’s one our revolutionary forebears would have been quicker to recognize: The age of colonial empires is over. Short of a willingness to massacre hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians from the air, better armed and technologically superior foreign powers can no longer dictate terms to any but the most obscure and impoverished Third World countries. It’s no accident that the beginning of the end of European gunboat diplomacy coincided with the invention of radio, spreading news and nationalist propaganda cheaply and fast. Satellite TV and the Internet have made communication universal, instantaneous and “interactive,” enabling leaders as different as Nelson Mandela and Osama bin Laden to influence millions. The advantages of the Internet for fomenting and coordinating rebellions and conspiracies are obvious. The techniques of guerrilla warfare, perfected in nationalistic uprisings from Dublin in 1916 to Baghdad in 2007, pushed the French out of Algeria and Vietnam, the U. S. out of Vietnam, and the Russians out of Afghanistan. Cheap, portable, easily concealed weapons like the AK-47, rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-fired anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles, not to mention remote-controlled IEDs—improvised explosive devices—have made controlling subject populations too brutal and costly for advanced democracies to tolerate.

A Tortured Logic

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate. Posted January 25, 2007.

It is up to the new Democratic majority to investigate the use of torture and demand prosecution for those who engaged in it.

The new head of the Senate Judiciary Committee was angry. Sen. Patrick Leahy was questioning U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about a man named Maher Arar.

Arar is a Canadian citizen who the U.S. detained without charge then sent to Syria in 2002. Leahy fumed: "We knew damn well, if he went to Canada, he wouldn't be tortured. He'd be held. He'd be investigated. We also knew damn well, if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured."

Government Food Safety System a Sham

By Jason Mark, AlterNet. Posted January 25, 2007.

A new federal program for livestock tracking will benefit big corporations, threaten small producers and do nothing to protect consumer health.

Located south of the tiny town of Tarpley, Texas, Debbie Davis's Seco Valley Ranch is something of a model farm. On her 1,800-acre spread, Davis grazes 225 longhorn cattle, every one of which she closely monitors so that she can better manage the herd and its health. Davis' meat is prized in the supermarkets of Austin and San Antonio, where her grass-fed, pastured beef sells for a premium. In many ways, Davis is the very ideal of a local entrepreneur -- profitable and secure, succeeding on her own terms.

Which is why it angers Davis so much when she considers the government's plans to institute a "National Animal Identification System" that will give a 15-digit tracking number to every cow, chicken, pig, turkey, goat, sheep and horse in the United States to trace animals' every move from birth until slaughter. The federal government and large meat producers are promoting the ID system -- usually referred to by its acronym, "NAIS" -- as a way to better control animal disease outbreaks. But the plan has small and organic ranchers in an uproar. They complain that the animal tracking system will place an undue burden on their operations, giving the biggest meat producers additional economic advantages in an already highly consolidated industry.

Fixing a Non-Problem

Small businesses don't need new tax cuts to offset a minimum wage hike.

By Robert B. Reich
Web Exclusive: 01.10.07

One of the first items of business for the new Congress is increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25. The president says he'll sign the bill, but only if it contains new tax breaks for small businesses that will offset the increased cost resulting from a minimum-wage hike.

Congress should pass the minimum wage increase without any small-business tax break. Small businesses don't need new tax breaks -- because the minimum wage increase won't actually impose new burdens on them.

Anatomy of a Ban

A line-by-line look at Georgia's proposed abortion-ban bill reveals the future of radical anti-choice legislation.

By Alina Hoffman and Ann Friedman
Web Exclusive: 01.22.07

After South Dakota voters rejected that state’s abortion ban -- which included language claiming abortion was bad for women and no rape or incest exceptions -- pro-choice advocates warned that any state could pass a similar law. A handful of states have indeed passed trigger laws, meaning they will only take effect if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. But in Georgia, Republican state representative Bobby Franklin has introduced H.B.1, a bill that would take anti-abortion policy a step further, not only criminalizing abortion but redefining personhood and legitimizing many questionable claims about abortion’s effects.

Ted Rall: The Government's $8 Billion a Month Con Job

NEW YORK--Much abuse has been hurled at Halliburton and other well-connected contractors for overcharging and stealing from the people of Iraq and American taxpayers alike--and rightly so. But focusing on the contractors is a dangerous distraction. War profiteers are mere bit players in one of the biggest con jobs ever: the war itself.

In 2003, when Saddam statues were falling over and the wise white men of Washington (and one fake black woman) still thought they had a prayer of finding WMDs, the Bush Administration was burning through $4.4 billion a month on Iraq. Now even the most rabid neocons have abandoned their dreams of finding the weapons, planting the seeds of democracy or even restoring electricity, let alone preserving Iraq's territorial integrity. And yet the deficit spending has doubled, to $8.4 billion in Iraq and $1.3 billion in Afghanistan.

Bush's Focus on Iraq Gives China `Golden Moment' to Flex Power

By Ken Fireman

Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- For President George W. Bush, the past year has been a time of deepening anxiety about Iraq. For China's busy diplomats, it has been a period of growing confidence.

China was such a dominant force at last week's East Asian summit that Philippines President Gloria Arroyo called it ``a big brother in the region.'' The Chinese government is also active in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, seeking access to energy supplies.

The Logic Of US Deployments Points To Iran

By Martin Sieff, UPI Senior News Analyst
Washington (SPX) Jan 24, 2007

The logic of the new force deployments President George W. Bush has approved for the Middle East appeared geared towards launching an air strike against Iran or deterring Iranian retaliation rather than preparing for a major change in U.S. strategy to win the war in Iraq.

As we have noted in previous coverage, the much hyped "surge" strategy the president has approved to strengthen U.S. forces in Iraq, especially in Baghdad, will be almost negligible in its boost to U.S. troop numbers in and around the Iraq capital in the short term.

State Of Delusion

Robert L. Borosage

January 24, 2007

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

Last night’s State of the Union address revealed that the state of this president is still delusional. He can’t level with the American people because he can’t or won’t recognize the reality that we face.

The best part of the speech wasn’t anything the president said. It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sitting over his shoulder, signaling the change that Americans voted for. The president also got a lift from the “ordinary heroes” that he recognized at the end of the speech. But when it came to substance, the president seemed bored with his own words as he trotted out his pledge for more of the same.

Bradblog: Diebold Voting Machine Key Copied From Photo At Company's Own Online Store

Princeton University Computer Scientists Confirm 'Secret' Key For Every Diebold Voting Machine 'Revealed' on Company Website!

Good lord in heaven. How dumb are these guys at Diebold?! Can you believe the United States has actually entrusted them to build a security system for the original U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?!

After everything else. Now comes this.

He Still Doesn't Understand the War

Bush whiffs on Iraq again during the State of the Union.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007, at 12:31 AM ET

What a dispiriting State of the Union address! So many disasters, so little time left to repair them, so few insights into what caused them or what to do about them now.

President Bush may not have felt obligated to discuss Iraq in detail, having laid out his new plan in prime time less than two weeks ago. But to the extent he talked about the war, his words were at best puzzling, and at worst, maddening.

The Plame-gate Plot Thickens

By Robert Parry
January 24, 2007

In the opening statements at the trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, new evidence emerged pointing toward a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House.

Libby’s defense attorney Theodore Wells described a conversation from 2003 between Vice President Dick Cheney and Libby, his chief of staff, at which a worried Libby complained that “they’re trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb.”

According to Wells, Libby then told his boss, “I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected,” referring to Bush’s top political strategist who now holds the post of deputy White House chief of staff.

Why Democrats can stop the war

Pundits say if the party gets too tough with Bush, it will be blamed for "losing" Iraq. But the real political risk is going too easy on Bush, and losing the trust of war-weary voters.

By Rick Perlstein

Jan. 24, 2007 | Earlier this month, the folks at MoveOn.org came to me with a challenge: Study the history of Congress' efforts to halt, or at least halt the escalation of, the Vietnam War, and mine it for lessons about what Congress should do about Iraq now. They found themselves saddled with a historian deeply suspicious of using history to glibly draw battle plans for the present -- but one who emerged, nonetheless, believing that this time the lessons are clear. Last Thursday, Salon ran Walter Shapiro's article "Why the Democrats Can't Stop the Surge." I've come to a different conclusion about what Congress can or can't do. The questions are not just: Can Congress stop the surge? Can Congress stop a war-mongering president in his tracks? The better question is what are the things Congress can accomplish just by trying to stop the escalation, boldly, and without apology?

Scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link

U.S. warnings of advanced weaponry crossing the border are overstated, critics say.

By Alexandra Zavis and Greg Miller
Times Staff Writers

January 23, 2007

BAQUBAH, IRAQ — If there is anywhere Iran could easily stir up trouble in Iraq, it would be in Diyala, a rugged province along the border between the two nations.

The combination of Sunni Arab militants believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda and Shiite Muslim militiamen with ties to Iran has fueled waves of sectarian and political violence here. The province is bisected by long-traveled routes leading from Iran to Baghdad and Shiite holy cities farther south in Iraq.

But even here, evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq's troubles is limited. U.S. troops have found mortars and antitank mines with Iranian markings dated 2006, said U.S. Army Col. David W. Sutherland, who oversees the province. But there has been little sign of more advanced weaponry crossing the border, and no Iranian agents have been found.

Who exactly ARE those 33% of Americans still supporting Bush?

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 7:19 AM on January 23, 2007.

Howie Klein: What's just down the freeway...

This guest post was written by Howie Klein.

I live in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood of single family homes with nice lawns and gardens. It's called Los Feliz and it's right off the 5 Freeway. Ethnically, the neighborhood is pretty diverse, one of the things that makes it so attractive. I don't think Republicans bother running in the area. I know one didn't challenge our congresswoman, Diane Watson (although that isn't because they approve of her impeccably progressive voting record); it probably has something to do with the fact Bush only managed to garner 16% of the voters against Kerry (an increase of 2% over what he managed against Gore). Not far down the 5 Freeway there are two very different districts that have long perplexed me-- the 42nd CD and the 44th CD, represented, respectively by Gary Miller, the single most extreme right wing congressman from California and by Ken Calvert, whose voting record isn't much different from Miller's.

Finding Hope in a Post-Oil Society

By James Howard Kunstler, Orion Magazine. Posted January 23, 2007.

America invested most of its late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future: Suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It's time for us to make other arrangements.

As the American public continues sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We'll run them on ethanol! We'll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil...!

The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal liquids...

A Spying Policy Still Without Warrant

Aziz Huq

January 22, 2007

Aziz Huq directs the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007), and recipient of a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellowship.

At first it was hailed as a victory for civil liberties. But last week’s announcement that warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency has come to an end means less than it first appears.

Until now, the NSA has been engaged in electronic spying on Americans’ communications without warrants. On Wednesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez announced that all such warrantless surveillance “will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” or FISA court.

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq

By Steve Silberman
02:00 AM Jan, 22, 2007

A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another - a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.

Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense's network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine's bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden's cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Minimum Wage Rises, Sky Does Not Fall

When I flew to Seattle last week, airport security gave me trouble over the four pound ham I was carrying. Several TSA officials gathered to consider the question of whether ham is a "gel," to which I retorted: If ham is a gel, so am I. I suggested that they biopsy it for hidden box-cutters.

I offered to divide it into 21 three-ounce chunks, each appropriately stowed in a Ziploc baggie. But no deal.

Global warming: the final verdict

A study by the world's leading experts says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

Paul Krugman: Gold-Plated Indifference

President Bush’s Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Mr. Bush’s proposal won’t go anywhere. But it’s still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should “treat health insurance more like home ownership.” He went on to say that “the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance.”

Digby: Self Stinger

Howard Fineman says that presidential elections are just like high school (in 1954, apparently.) Without irony:

Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course, and that is especially true when, as now, much of the early nomination race is based in the U.S. Capitol...

Of course.

Digby: Mechanical General

Glenn Greenwald watched the Gonzales hearing today so we don't have to. I'm glad I didn't because it sounds like the kind of testimony that invariably makes me want to put a boot through the televison set. It's a technique that the most closely aligned Bush sycophants have mastered, aping their fearless leader's stonewalling gibberish, eating up time, boring everyone with mindless platitudes until they finally just give up in suicidal despair of ever getting a straight answer. I call it the McClellan Curse, named for the robot puppy they called Scotty.

Why Hawks Win

By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon
January/February 2007

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should.

National leaders get all sorts of advice in times of tension and conflict. But often the competing counsel can be broken down into two basic categories. On one side are the hawks: They tend to favor coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions. When they look at adversaries overseas, they often see unremittingly hostile regimes who only understand the language of force. On the other side are the doves, skeptical about the usefulness of force and more inclined to contemplate political solutions. Where hawks see little in their adversaries but hostility, doves often point to subtle openings for dialogue.

As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don’t count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.

Digby: Back To The Future

Reader Colin reminded me of this little nugget from a year ago, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Digby: Preventive Quagmire

Kevin explains further his position on the rightness and wrongness of liberal hawks and doves and makes a lot of sense. But on one point, I have to disagree completely:

I also made a specific comment about preventive war: namely that the failure in Iraq doesn't especially vindicate the argument that preventive war is almost always wrong. It is almost always wrong, and the fact that Iraq was a preventive war was a good reason to oppose it. But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive.

Digby: Were We Wrong?

Kevin Drum asks:

If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don't get more respect? Here's the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It's because they don't deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of.

Digby: More Moron

I just don't think I can take much more of this kind of puerile, ignorant bullshit:

MR. LEHRER: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you've just said - and you've said it many times - as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it's that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military - the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They're the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.

Frank Rich: Lying Like It's 2003

Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could imagine we’d already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?

Scooter Libby, the mastermind behind the White House’s bogus scenarios for ginning up the war in Iraq, is back at Washington’s center stage, proudly defending the indefensible in a perjury trial. Ahmad Chalabi, the peddler of flawed prewar intelligence hyped by Mr. Libby, is back in clover in Baghdad, where he purports to lead the government’s Shiite-Baathist reconciliation efforts in between visits to his pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.