Digby: Getting It Right

John Edwards was clear and concise today about Iran on Meet The Press, saying explicitly that a military strike would strengthen Ahmadinejad and would be a mistake. When Russert pressed him about whether we could ultimately "let" Iran get a nuclear weapons, he said it would be a bad thing, but that there were many, many steps to take before we get to that --- and that he just didn't know at this point.

Digby: Real America

In contrast to the hysterical, rock star reaction Bush received at the NY Stock Exchange:

On Tuesday, President Bush popped in for a surprise visit to the Sterling Family Restaurant, a homey diner in Peoria, Ill. It’s a scene that has been played out many times before by this White House and others: a president mingling among regular Americans, who, no matter what they might think of his policies, are usually humbled and shocked to see the leader of the free world standing 10 feet in front of them.

More Deception from the Bush White House

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The state of the union is disastrous. By its naked aggression, bullying, illegal spying on Americans, and illegal torture and detentions, the Bush administration has demonstrated American contempt for the Geneva Convention, for human life and dignity, and for the civil liberties of its own citizens. Increasingly, the US is isolated in the world, having to resort to bribery and threats to impose its diktats. No country any longer looks to America for moral leadership. The US has become a rogue nation.

Digby: Impressive And Gratifying

I don't know how many of you saw the giddy reception that President Bush received on the floor of the NY stock exchange last week, but it was one for the books. It was captured best by CNN, which carried it live.

Digby: Bad Consequences

Further to my post below, you should read this new interview with John Edwards by Ezra Klein at TAPPED on the topic of Iran. He tries to clarify his remarks on Iran and they are satisfying in some respects but not so in others.

Here's the part I find interesting:

So, I just want to get it very clear, you think that attacking Iran would be a bad idea?

I think would have very bad consequences.

So when you said that all options are on the table?

It would be foolish for any American president to ever take any option off the table.

Digby: Stop It Now

James Fallows:

Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard — on the merits, and in the politics. It’s hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from “surge” to “get out now” and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It’s just a question of by whom and for how long. On a balance-of-misery basis, my own view changed last year from “we can’t afford to leave” to “we can’t afford to stay.” And the whole issue is hard in its politics because even Democrats too young to remember Vietnam know that future Karl Roves will dog them for decades with accusations of “cut-and-run” and “betraying” troops unless they can get Republicans to stand with them on limiting funding and forcing the policy to change.

Digby: Bad Move

I am starting to get agitated about our Democratic leaders' approach to Iran. John Edwards' recent comments while in Israel were disturbing enough. Now Hillary Clinton has used the same language.

Government by Control Fraud

In recent years, America has seen the implosion of several major corporations in a seeming explosion of corruption and fraud. Worldcom, Global Crossing, Tyco, and, of course, Enron have become watchwords for corporate corruption, and capitalism as a white collar crime. Few people understand how these frauds were perpetrated and, more importantly, why. The leaders of these companies had already reached the pinnacles of their professions, and would have made sums unimaginable to most people if they had run their businesses honestly and competently. Why did they throw it all away when the surety of eventually being caught and called to account seems, in hindsight, so obvious?

I can't really speak to the psychology of control fraud; I don't know that the psychology at its core is well understood, other than to posit elements of sociopathic behavior by the perpetrators. However, the methodology of white collar crime on the scale of these recent scandals is well documented and is known as control fraud. Control fraud occurs when conspirators are able to take control of an institution in order to exploit the trust and authority of the institution to convert its assets to personal use.

Pentagon Inspector General to release investigation into secretive pre-war Iraq intelligence group

Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: Wednesday February 7, 2007

Former Undersecretary Feith says he hasn’t seen report

A long awaited Pentagon Inspector General's report into the Office of Special Plans and its activities surrounding pre-war intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war has been completed, RAW STORY has learned.

According to sources close to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the classified version of the Pentagon IG's report will be released to committee members Friday. Two to three declassified pages may also be concurrently released to the public.

Huffington Post: Jane Hamsher--Scooter Agonistes

While tomorrow's release of the Scooter Libby grand jury tapes will no doubt be fodder for endless blog posts, they will be of no less interest to shrinks and dramatists. Over five and a half hours of the tapes played in court today, and although Libby's endless network of obfuscations at times became impenetrable, it was fascinating to watch his gradually dawning realization under Patrick Fitzgerald's relentless and dogged questioning that he was in fact screwed.

Paul Krugman: The Green-Zoning of America

The New York Times

Monday 05 February 2007

One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." The book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad's Green Zone were assigned on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions were outsourced to private contractors.

Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that the Bush administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America.

USDA Faulted On Oversight Of Test Crops

Associated Press
Wednesday, February 7, 2007; Page A07

A federal judge in Washington has ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct more detailed reviews of applications to plant experimental plots of genetically engineered crops.

In a ruling made public yesterday, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. said the department should have more thoroughly reviewed an application by the Scotts Co. to plant more than 400 acres of grass in Oregon. The grass was genetically engineered to withstand a popular weedkiller.

Wal-Mart bias case to go to trial

Wal-Mart will face a lawsuit claiming pay discrimination against more than a million female US employees after a court approved the action.

A federal appeals court upheld a 2004 ruling giving the lawsuit class action status, sanctioning claims from up to 1.5 million current and former staff.

Rove associate got help with job

Dan Eggen, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department removed a prosecutor in Arkansas without cause to make room for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, a senior Justice official conceded in testimony Tuesday.

But Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told senators that the new interim prosecutor in Little Rock, J. Timothy Griffin, has more experience as a prosecutor than the U.S. attorney he replaced.

Scooter Libby and the media debacle

by Eric Boehlert

The New York Times made headlines last week when it tapped a new D.C. bureau chief. But if the paper of record really wanted to jump-start its Beltway news operation, maybe it should have tried to lure Patrick Fitzgerald away from the Department of Justice.

Let's face it, as special counsel in charge of investigating the Valerie Plame CIA leak, and now the lead prosecutor in D.C. federal court methodically laying out the damning evidence of perjury, obstruction, and lying against Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Fitzgerald has consistently shown more interest -- and determination -- in uncovering the facts of the Plame scandal than most Beltway journalists, including the often somnambulant D.C. newsroom of The New York Times.

PM Carpenter: Coming soon to an arrogant government very near you: Fiscal Armageddon

The president's nearly $3 trillion, 2008 budget proposal reads like a happy "how-to" manual for what Chalmers Johnson, the East Asian historian and thoughtful author of the eye-opening "Blowback" series, unhappily surveys:

We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.

TPM Cafe: About that Bush Family Ranch in Paraguay...

By truthista

A government office forbidden by law from disseminating information domestically was the mouthpiece of choice for the administration to deny rumors that the Bush family purchased thousands of acres in a remote portion of northern Paraguay.

According to CNN, the State Department's USINFO Counter - Disinformation / Misinformation Team, led by Todd Leventhal, "helps U.S. embassies identify and rebut other nations' disinformation, most often fabrications about the United States planted in foreign newspapers or television shows and, these days, on the Internet."

Court Hears Libby Describe Cheney as 'Upset' at Critic

Grand Jury Tapes Bolster Case Against Former Aide

By Amy Goldstein and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 7, 2007; Page A03

Vice President Cheney and other senior White House officials regarded a former ambassador's accusations that President Bush misled the nation in going to war in Iraq as an unparalleled political assault and, early in the summer of 2003, held daily discussions about how to debunk them, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a federal grand jury.

In grand jury audiotapes played yesterday during Libby's perjury trial, the vice president's then-chief of staff said Cheney had been "upset" and "disturbed" by criticisms from former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that Bush had twisted intelligence to justify the war. And Libby said that Karl Rove had been "animated" by a conversation with Robert D. Novak, in which the conservative columnist told Rove he "had a bad taste in his mouth" about Wilson and was writing a column about him.

Living the American Dream ... in a One-Bedroom Apartment

By Andrew Lam, New America Media. Posted February 7, 2007.

The middle class is clinging to its precious status by contending with far smaller living spaces than those of previous generations.

In my apartment building people of various income levels are stacked on top of each other. The architect and the teacher occupy one-bedroom apartments on the floor above me. They are considered middle-class and, for that matter, so am I. An affluent, well-traveled couple lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor. A poor Chinese immigrant family of five is crammed into the converted storage room where half a dozen bicycles were once kept, their children often turning the foyer into a makeshift playground strewn with plastic toys.

This is typical of the way we live in urban areas around the world: People of various classes live right next to, if not on top of, one another. We share the same address, practically, but occupy a very different sense of space. And just like those in the middle of my building, the middle class everywhere is feeling the pinch.

How parents react to material hardship found to be key to how income affects children

Research drawing from the "Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999" challenges the accepted finding that family income is directly associated with parental stress. The study found that parents who make more money can better provide more cognitively stimulating materials, and that material hardship can lead to parental depression and conflict. These effects in turn may cause parents to show less affection towards children, who then may become depressed or misbehave.

Bush's Religious Right Swat Team Takes Aim at Methodists

By Frederick Clarkson
topic: Battle For Mainstream Faith
section:Front Page

It seems that whenever the Bush administration has a religion problem, a special political swat team turns up to handle it.

When the National Association of Evangelicals were preparing a statement expressing concern about global warming the Institute on Religion and Democracy helped lead a campaign of religious right leaders to derail the statement. When gay families, organized by Soulforce, planned to participate in the White House Easter Egg Roll, an IRD staffer published a shrill "expose" in the neoconservative Weekly Standard. And when Methodist ministers and Bishops organized a campaign to stop the placement of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and related Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, (including a petition signed by 10,000 Methodists so far including 14 bishops and 600 clergy) -- IRD once again stepped in on behalf of Team Bush, issuing a press release denouncing the effort, and organizing a letter-writing campaign in support of the complex.

Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouse

Fueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director

As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Military waste under fire

$1 trillion missing -- Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting
- Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003

The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.

The Pentagon's unenviable reputation for waste will top the congressional agenda this week, when the House and Senate are expected to begin floor debate on a Bush administration proposal to make sweeping changes in how the Pentagon spends money, manages contracts and treats civilian employees.

The Quiet Plan to Kill Medicare

Posted by Elana Levin at 11:34 AM on February 6, 2007.

The press has failed to notice that the President's proposed 2008 budget includes a plan to do away with Medicare.

(My esteemed colleague Amy Traub wrote this post for us so I can't take credit). President Bush's new health care proposals have so many destructive features it took DMI nine pages to outline them all in our State of the Union rapid response last month. And we were really trying to brief. But it appears that the President didn't even mention all of the harmful plans he has in store for the nation's health care system. Like getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

You read that correctly. The President's proposed 2008 budget includes a plan to do away with Medicare.

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Digby: Her Legacy

Molly Ivins: Stand up against the surge

January 11, 2007

(CREATORS) -- The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

Digby: Real Men Go To Tehran

Accidental? Really?

Andrea Mitchell just said:

As the civil war grows deadlier by the day, the Bush administration is increasingly blaming Iran.

I feel, once again, as if I'm watching this take place under water. It's all there, I can see it, but it's all a bit distorted and everything is moving in slow motion. I'm screaming, but it comes out muffled and imprecise. The Bush administration is provoking a war with Iran, in real time, on television and we are just watching it happen.

Digby: Clean And Bright

The other day I wrote about Marty Peretz's not so unconscious racism toward African Americans. And lo and behold along comes Joe Biden and he sticks his big white foot in the same stupid mouth. Apparently, a lot of privileged white people really believe they aren't racist when they separate "the blacks" between the "articulate, bright, clean" kind and "the others." (Peretz calls the others four-flushers and race hustlers. A member of my family used to call them "The Ubangis." You get the drift.)

Digby: Hearing From Our Betters

Money in politics better than some people in it

From Darren McKinney

The Jan. 24 letter to the editor from Nick Nyhart and Chellie Pingree (“Full public funding of elections proven to work in states, cities,”), respective presidents of Public Campaign and Common Cause, lament the lack of public financing for all American political campaigns: “A democracy should be about all of us and not just about those who can write huge checks.”

Digby: Snake Bit

We always figured that "media strategist" and WHIG member Mary Matalin was one of the authors of the Plame smear. She's one of Cheney's intimates, she was hired to do damage control and is a mean and nasty person. Exposing "the wife" has her style all over it.

Digby: Believe Your Eyes

I think the thing I hate the most about Republicans is how they insult your intelligence and then dare you to challenge them on it. They installed that silly, little boy in the white house and forced us all to pretend that he was a competent leader for years or risk being called a traitor or worse even as we watched him drive the country into the ditch. They lied right in our faces about the "gathering threat" of Iraq and now they are trying to shove this bucket of swill down out throats:

Digby: Fighting Words

Free Republic posted a YouTube video of their counter-protest on Saturday. Judge for yourself. It runs about 9 minutes, but it's worth looking at. Clearly there was some point when people were able to walk closely by the counter-protesters on the sidewalk and it's possible that somebody spit on Sparling during that period. It's not captured on this film. Police are casually walking through and people are lolling about with baby strollers, so it doesn't appear to be a very dangerous scene. (You can see a woman dressed in black who appears to be interviewing Sparling at one point. Perhaps she is the NY Times reporter who observed that he was spit on?)

Digby: Kewl Kid High

John Kerry is a decent man and he doesn't deserve this kind of treatment by the low-life little creeps who make up the DC press corps. This snotty derision from a bunch of overpaid, useless, psychologically stunted twits is a new low.

Digby: Yes, Yes, Yes

Obama makes the bold move and it's very smart. Not only is it the right thing to do (yes, that should enter the equation) I think it's the savvy political move.

When the AUMF was being debated and all the presidential club members voted for it, I wrote that it would do them no good. If the war went well, they didn't have a chance. If it didn't their vote would hang around their neck.

Digby: Why Don't We Just Crown Him King

...and get it over with:

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

Digby: "They Tried To Kill Me"

So apparently the NY Times journalist who reported the spitting incident apparently personally saw Cpl. Joshua Sparling getting spit upon.

Hughes for America has the story:

The latest in a long line of controversies surrounding veteran Joshua Sparling, who lost part of a leg in Iraq, started with this New York Times article penned by Ian Urbina, with help from Sarah Abruzzese and Suevon Lee. "There were a few tense moments, however," the story read, "including an encounter involving Joshua Sparling, 25, who was on crutches and who said he was a corporal with the 82nd Airborne Division and lost his right leg below the knee in Ramadi, Iraq. Mr. Sparling spoke at a smaller rally held earlier in the day at the United States Navy Memorial, and voiced his support for the administration's policies in Iraq. Later, as antiwar protesters passed where he and his group were standing, words were exchanged and one of the antiwar protestors spit at the ground near Mr. Sparling; he spit back."

Digby: America In The Balance

The right has a new obsession with "balance" just like the news media. This even translates into teaching schoolchildren crackpot science so that their cretinous parents aren't offended by the truth:

Frosty Hardison is neither impressed nor surprised that An Inconvenient Truth, the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination last week for best documentary.

"Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.

Frank Rich: Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up

In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.

The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq.

Disaster: Bush Says He’ll Continue Meddling in Middle East After His Presidency

Posted by Jon Ponder | Feb. 4, 2007, 2:33 pm

Geogre Bush has informed his inner circle that after he leaves office he plans to invite leaders from Middle East to his think tank, which will be part of his $500 million library, where he will give them guidance on the finer points of democratic governance:

Indeed, senior officials close to Bush [say] that Bush’s plan after he leaves the White House is to continue to promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East by inviting world leaders to his own policy institute, to be built alongside his presidential library.

Federal Prosecutors Widen Pursuit Of Death Penalty as States Ease Off

By CHRISTOPHER CONKEY and GARY FIELDS

February 3, 2007; Page A1

At a time when many states are backing away from capital punishment, the federal government is aggressively pursuing -- and winning -- more death sentences, including in jurisdictions that traditionally oppose them.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York persuaded a jury to give a death sentence to Ronell Wilson, a 24-year-old man convicted of killing two undercover detectives by shooting each in the back of the head. The decision -- the first time in more than 50 years that a federal jury in New York agreed to sentence someone to death -- marked something of a milestone for the Justice Department in its continuing effort to apply the death penalty more evenly across the country.

A Failed Cover-Up

What the Libby Trial Is Revealing

By David Ignatius

Friday, February 2, 2007; Page A15

Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.

The Most Important Church-State Decision You Never Heard of

By Rob Boston, Church and State. Posted February 3, 2007.

Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that kicked off the culture wars, marks its 60th anniversary.

Television preacher Pat Robertson can barely contain his anger when he talks about a 1947 Supreme Court decision calledEverson v. Board of Education.

Robertson attacked the ruling on his "700 Club" several times last year. Everson came out of anti-Catholicism, he sputtered in January of 2006. Four months later, he blasted the decision because in it the justices "relied on a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists talking about a wall of separation that isn't in the Constitution."

Bush: Medicare, Social Sec. must change

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

President Bush, poised to submit his new budget to Congress next week, warned Saturday that unless programs like Medicare and Social Security are changed, future generations will face tax hikes, government red ink or huge cuts in benefits.

Controlling spending requires the government to address the unsustainable growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Bush said in his weekly radio address. He said spending for the programs is growing faster than inflation, faster than the U.S. economy and faster than taxpayers' ability to pay for them.

Paul Krugman: Missing Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours crossed. She was, as she wrote, “a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader’s record.”

I can’t claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes, she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.

Iraq at Risk of Further Strife, Intelligence Report Warns

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 2, 2007; Page A01

A long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, presented to President Bush by the intelligence community yesterday, outlines an increasingly perilous situation in which the United States has little control and there is a strong possibility of further deterioration, according to sources familiar with the document.

In a discussion of whether Iraq has reached a state of civil war, the 90-page classified NIE comes to no conclusion and holds out prospects of improvement. But it couches glimmers of optimism in deep uncertainty about whether the Iraqi leaders will be able to transcend sectarian interests and fight against extremists, establish effective national institutions and end rampant corruption.

Brzezinski's showstopper

February 1, 2007, 3:05 pm

Posted by Grant Gallicho

Here is the must-read statement delivered by Zbigniew Brzezinski in today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. It's long, I realize, but stick with it. Take it all in.

Your hearings come at a critical juncture in the U.S. war of choice in Iraq, and I commend you and Senator Lugar for scheduling them.

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

Matt Taibbi: The Low Post: The Scum Also Rises

Fox kicks off the witch-hunting season

"Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?"

-- From Hannity.com, Monday night, long after the "madrassa" story had been debunked

Nearly two years before the next presidential election, we've already set the tone: Even the most outrageous media fictions about candidates are apparently going to go unpunished.

At least that was my thought, after watching last week's unfolding of the Obama-madrassa scandal -- the unofficial starting gun for the Great Slime Race, as the 2008 presidential campaign will someday be known. I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.

Americablog: Religious right misleads its followers in massive email blitz about weekend peace march

by John in DC - 2/01/2007 09:29:00 AM

What a surprise. Two of the largest and angriest groups of the religious right, the American Family Association (known for its failed boycotts of American companies that support civil rights) and the Family Research Council (known for its obsessive homophobia), were caught misleading their followers this week in an effort to denigrate the United States Capitol Police, the folks risking their lives to protect our members of Congress.

In separate emails, the AFA and FRC defamed the United States Capitol police by claiming that they knowingly permitted a small handful of individuals to deface the US Capitol during this weekend's anti-Iraq-war protest. AFA and FRC even urged their followers to contact Speaker Pelosi's office to complain about the apparently deficient police officers defending our nation's capitol. (One group even suggested that perhaps Pelosi herself had ordered the police to allow the graffiti!)

2006 Personal Savings Drop to 74-Yr. Low

Feb 1, 8:56 AM (ET)

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER

WASHINGTON (AP) - People once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression more than seven decades ago.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.

Wal-Mart pays itself rent, gets large tax breaks

02/01/2007 @ 9:17 am

Filed by Michael Roston

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer and the world's biggest retailer, is regularly paying itself rent and using the transaction to decrease the taxes it pays to state governments, according to a report in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

The article by Jesse Drucker shows that Wal-Mart has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes in 25 states, and may not be the only company using the practice. Drucker shows that state governments are finally getting wise and working to close a complicated tax loophole that the federal government discontinued years ago.

Judiciary Chairman Conyers to probe signing statements

02/01/2007 @ 10:57 am

Filed by RAW STORY

"Asserting that President Bush’s frequent use of 'signing statements' to interpret federal laws have allowed the executive branch to effectively thwart Congressional intent, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said Wednesday that his panel will launch a formal investigation into the practice," the paid-restricted Roll Call reports Wednesday.

Webbcast

By Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker

Monday 29 January 2007

For more than forty years, it has been the custom for the President's State of the Union address to be followed by a formal televised response. In 1966, the leaders of the Republican minority in Congress, the florid Senator Everett Dirksen and the stolid Representative Gerald Ford, appointed themselves to deliver the first of these, after one of Lyndon Johnson's lordly extravaganzas. The Ev and Jerry Show, though charming in a ramshackle way, was less than a monster hit, and nearly all the subsequent post-SOTU presentations have likewise been little noted nor long remembered. Senator Bob Dole, with characteristic bleak wit, evaluated his response to President Clinton's 1996 address thusly: "I gave a fireside chat the other night, and the fire went out." It was different this time. This time the fire was on, and it was the rebuttal that had something truthful to say about the state of the union.

James Webb is a writer, the highly acclaimed author of six densely textured novels of men in battle. As of last Tuesday evening he had been a United States senator for all of twenty days. He was an unusual choice to deliver the Democrats' reply to President Bush's address, and, as it turned out, a canny one. Normally, the replier speeds through a miniature of the traditional SOTU laundry list, administering quick shoulder massages to as many interest groups as possible. Webb, pugnacious of temperament, chose instead to use his nine minutes to speak of "two areas where our respective parties have largely stood in contradiction." The first was the ballooning of economic inequality at home. The second was Iraq, where, he said, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

The Sunni-Shiite Folly

The Bush administration's cockeyed strategy to promote sectarian conflict in the Middle East.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007, at 6:59 PM ET

The Iranians are expanding their presence in Iraq, the Saudis are cutting a separate deal with them to contain the strife in Lebanon, and who can blame either party?

Yes, as the AP reported Tuesday, this surge of Saudi-Iranian cooperation "could complicate Washington's efforts to isolate Tehran." But it is Bush's abandonment of diplomacy that has left the vacuum that the Saudis and Iranians are now trying to fill. And given the alternative of mayhem and anarchy, their new rapprochement might not be a bad thing.

Journalist Sy Hersh has harsh words for Bush

Kat Schmidt

Posted: 1/30/07

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh closed out last week's symposium "The 'War on Terrorism': Where Do We Stand" with a scathing critique of President George W. Bush and his foreign policy in the Middle East.

"The fact of the matter is we have a government that will do what it wants to do for the next two years," he said. "The worst is yet to come. It's sort of like we're essentially powerless [and] just play it out."

One of the premier names in American investigative reporting, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1968 My Lai massacre and helped break the story about U.S. prison abuses at Abu Ghraib in 2004. He previously spoke about Iraq at Tufts in 2004 and about the Iran-Contra Affair in 1988.

The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Stop Global Warming

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2007.

Evironmentalist Bill McKibben explains that forcing Congress to take action on climate change is the top priority. Fortunately, he has a plan.

It has been a winter for the record books in the Northeast and Midwest. People are golfing in Michigan instead of ice fishing, sap is running in Vermont, and cherry blossoms are blooming in Washington, D.C.

People are waking up to spring in January and the stark reality of climate change.

"Hurricane Katrina blew the door open and Al Gore walked through it with his movie," environmental writer Bill McKibben said. "Now we have to take that education and turn it into action."

Note to Progressives: Challenge Market Fundamentalism

By Ruth Rosen, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2007.

If progressive causes are to get anywhere in the next Congress, we need to challenge the ingrained belief that the market can solve our problems.

Women have gained the potential of enormous power in DC with Nancy Pelosi elected as Speaker of the House. The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues will grow to be perhaps the largest in Congress, but the question remains: how will these newly empowered women use their power?

Among the issues on the wish list of newly elected women, according to Women's eNews, are women's health, educational equity and sex trafficking, women in prison, and international domestic violence.