Digby: Dirty Talk For Troubled Times

I can't tell you how surprised I am that this guy only came up with 285 uses of some of George Carlin's dirty words on my angry, unhinged, potty-mouthed blog. I honestly can't believe it. Even factoring in the fact that my comments are on haloscan so my filthy leftist commenters weren't counted (as they were on some other blogs), out of 5500 posts or so I know that I have used teh dirty words more than 285 times. There's definitely something wrong with the methodology.

Digby: Family Value$

We have heard a great deal over the past few decades about how the elites are ruining the country with their libertine ways. In fact, the social conservative movement is based almost exclusively upon the idea that our society is going to hell in handbasket because the liberals are promoting immorality. And one of the main pieces of evidence is the decline of traditional marriage.

But what if the decline of marriage has little to do with a lack of traditional family values at all? And what if the salt of the earth regular working Americans who social conservatives claim as the backbone of their movement are the ones who are rejecting marriage in the greatest numbers?

Digby: Michelle Makes Her Move

...to displace Coulter as Queen Bee. (You can find the link if you want it.)

I remains to be seen if the rest of the Noise Machine is ready to anoint her:

MM: Ann Coulter was here yesterday. She gave a very, mostly funny, speech, and at the end of it, dropped a stinker where she used the term "faggot." And I'm glad, I have to honestly say, I'm glad I didn't bring my children here because that's not the kind of language I would use. What was your reaction to that? Because, predictably, the left is in high dudgeon about it. Howard Dean wants every presidential candidate in the Republican Party to renounce it. Do you think that was a really bad move on her part and should be condemned?

Digby: Normalizing Crazy

Glenn Greenwald does a nice job today dealing with yet another example of journalistic double standards, dealing with the predictable excretory spew of Ann Coulter at this year's CPAC vs Howie Kurtz's recent spell on the fainting couch over few anonymous comments that were removed from the Huffington Post. But he highights this comment from Andrew Sullivan which just floored me

When you see her in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young. The standing ovation for Romney was nothing like the eruption of enthusiasm that greeted her. . . .

Freedom of Information Act turns 40

By William Douglas

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - It's been used to reveal how many times disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff visited the White House, to search for previously undisclosed details on President John F. Kennedy's assassination and to aid UFO buffs in their never-ending effort to find out what's really happening in Roswell, N.M.

The Freedom of Information Act, which gives citizens access to federal government files, turns 40 this year. Born during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, FOIA came of age after the Watergate scandal and is a vital tool for individuals, journalists, corporations and academics who seek information that the government may be reluctant to release.

Crisis Looms in Mortgages

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: March 11, 2007

On March 1, a Wall Street analyst at Bear Stearns wrote an upbeat report on a company that specializes in making mortgages to cash-poor homebuyers. The company, New Century Financial, had already disclosed that a growing number of borrowers were defaulting, and its stock, at around $15, had lost half its value in three weeks.

What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21.

The Theocratic Agenda Is Heading for a Statehouse Near You

By Rob Boston, Church and State. Posted March 10, 2007.

Well-coordinated "faith-based" initiatives and anti-evolution lobbying in state capitols from New Jersey to Colorado signal a stealth national strategy by Religious Right organizations.

Utah seems like a strange state to experiment with voucher subsidies for religious and other private schools.

Politically and culturally, the Beehive State is dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Seventy percent of the state's residents belong to the church. Most Mormons are content to send their children to public schools, where they are often released during the school day for religious instruction offsite. There aren't even many private schools in Utah.

ACLU Refutes FBI’s Claims of “Unintentional” Patriot Act Abuses, Citing Lies About Authority to Demand Phone Company Records

FBI Should Notify Customers and Name the Phone Companies Involved, ACLU Says

ACLU Analysis of DOJ Report Online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/nationalsecurityletters/28969lgl20070309.html

WASHINGTON – Claims that the FBI’s reported Patriot Act abuses were the “unintentional” result of outmoded computer systems and human error are not credible, the American Civil Liberties Union said today, citing evidence that agents contracted with phone companies to obtain customer records and later sought to cover up the illegal requests.

The report also shows that the FBI is issuing hundreds of thousands more National Security Letters than ever imagined, and that tracking of the NSLs is sloppy, resulting in thousands of innocent Americans being entered into databases that are shared with numerous U.S. agencies and foreign governments.

New climate report: More bad news

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Sat Mar 10, 2:23 PM ET

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by The Associated Press.

Gonzales Yields On Hiring Interim U.S. Attorneys

Top GOP Sen: "There Will Be A New Attorney General Maybe Sooner Rather Than Later"

By Paul Kane and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 9, 2007; Page A01

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales agreed yesterday to change the way U.S. attorneys can be replaced, a reversal in administration policy that came after he was browbeaten by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee still angry over the controversial firings of eight federal prosecutors.

Gonzales told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and other senior members of the committee that the administration will no longer oppose legislation limiting the attorney general's power to appoint interim prosecutors. Gonzales also agreed to allow the committee to interview five top-level Justice Department officials as part of an ongoing Democratic-led probe into the firings, senators said after a tense, hour-long meeting in Leahy's office suite.

Noam Chomsky: A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded

Friday March 9, 2007
The Guardian

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

Memos Tell Officials How to Discuss Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: March 8, 2007

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

In December, the Bush administration, facing a deadline under a suit by environmental groups, proposed listing polar bears throughout their range as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the warming climate is causing a summertime retreat of sea ice that the bears use for seal hunting.

Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge

By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: March 9, 2007

Violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the last two years, reversing the declines of the mid-to-late 1990s, according to a new report by a prominent national law enforcement association.

While overall crime has been declining nationwide, police officials have been warning of a rise in murder, robbery and gun assaults since late 2005, particularly in midsize cities and the Midwest. Now, they say, two years of data indicates that the spike is more than an aberration.

Paul Krugman: Department of Injustice

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Report Says FBI Violated Patriot Act Guidelines

March 08, 2007 8:26 PM

Brian Ross and Vic Walter Report:

The FBI repeatedly failed to follow the strict guidelines of the Patriot Act when its agents took advantage of a new provision allowing the FBI to obtain phone and financial records without a court order, according to a report to be made public Friday by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

The report, in classified and unclassified versions, remains closely held, but Washington officials who have seen it tell ABC News it documents "numerous lapses" and describe it as "scathing" and "not a pretty picture for the FBI."

Rolling Back the Regs

By Kari Lydersen, In These Times. Posted March 9, 2007.

The Bush administration is muscling its way past environmental protections by dictating how federal agencies interpret and enforce policies.

Emissions limits on coal-fired power plants, endangered species protections that inhibit logging, and restrictions on chemicals in drinking water have all been thorns in the side of the Bush administration.

But an executive order released on Jan. 18 with little fanfare could give the White House-controlled Office of Management and Budget (OMB) much greater control over such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Paul Krugman: A History of America's Disappearing Middle Class

The following is excerpted from the keynote speech delivered by Paul Krugman at the Economic Policy Institute's recent conference on The Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

...One thing I've been noticing on multiple debates in public policies -- climate change is another one -- is there seems to be an almost seamless transition from denial to fatalism. That for 15 or 20 years the people would say, "No, what you're saying is not happening." And then almost immediately they'll turn around and say, "Well, yeah, sure it's happening, but there's nothing that can be done about it."

And that's kind of the way a lot of the discussion now goes on inequality. That there is really nothing you can do to arrest this. That it's all the invisible hand driving this growth in inequality, and there's nothing you can do to really change it -- well, maybe better education. But while education is very much a good thing, it's the all-American way of dodging problems. Since everybody approves of it, you say we should have better education but wave away the pretty strong evidence that while it's a good thing, it won't make very much difference. So there's this general sense that you can't do anything.

Easing Downward Mobility

Ross Eisenbrey and Maurice Emsellem

March 08, 2007

Ross Eisenbrey is the vice president and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Maurice Emsellem is the director of public policy for the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

Congress will soon debate whether to renew President Bush’s fast track authority to negotiate trade deals, and lawmakers—and even corporate America—will talk about the fate of U.S. workers hurt by increased imports or offshoring exacerbated by past deals.

Several Democrats are proposing the idea of “wage insurance,” giving laid-off workers up to $10,000 a year for two years—but only if they lost their job due to offshoring and only if they take a job with a big pay cut, unlike traditional unemployment benefits that are given to all workers that lose their jobs. What’s wrong with helping out workers who are having a hard time finding a good job? Even with the new Congress, this push for wage insurance could do more harm than good to laid off workers and the programs that they and their families rely on to get back on their feet.

House Democrats introduce bill to restore habeas corpus

03/08/2007 @ 12:02 pm

Filed by Mike Sheehan

Powerful House Democrats have introduced legislation intended to restore the right to habeas corpus.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommitee on Intelligence, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, announced today the presentation of bills that would reverse "problematic parts of the Military Commissions Act," according to a statement released by Harman's office.

Subliminal advertising leaves its mark on the brain

UCL (University College London) researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.

Some Explaining to Do

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; 1:14 PM

It's time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to come clean about their roles in the White House's outing of a CIA agent and the ensuing cover-up.

It's actually long past time. But with former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby's conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction yesterday, the stench of corruption has taken formal residence at the White House.

The Four Unspeakable Truths

What politicians won't admit about Iraq.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 3:33 PM ET

When it comes to Iraq, there are two kinds of presidential candidates. The disciplined ones, like Hillary Clinton, carefully avoid acknowledging reality. The more candid, like John McCain and Barack Obama, sometimes blurt out the truth, but quickly apologize.

For many presidential aspirants, the first unspeakable truth is simply that the war was a mistake. This issue came to a head recently with Hillary Clinton's obstinate refusal to acknowledge that voting to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq was the wrong thing to do. Though fellow Democrats John Edwards and Christopher Dodd have managed to say they erred in voting for the 2002 war resolution, Clinton is joined by Joe Biden and a full roster of Republicans in her inability to disgorge the M-word. Perhaps most absurdly, Chuck Hagel has called Bush's 21,500-troop "surge" the biggest blunder since Vietnam without ever saying that the war itself was the big blunder and that he favored it.

Matt Taibbi: NYT's Tom Friedman and the Pundits Will Blame Us for Iraq

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 7, 2007.

As the political class and the media establishment wake up to the nightmare in Iraq they are going to start looking for someone to scapegoat -- and it looks like they are going to blame the American people.

"Secretary of State Rice said it was like Germany after World War II. I would say it was like Germany, but Germany of 1648, before it was a modern state, rather than Germany in 1948... We were able to rebuild Germany and Japan after WWII, but there are real differences with Iraq. We defeated them with large numbers of troops and we imposed an effective occupation. We never defeated the Sunnis of Iraq and we never imposed an effective occupation controlling the country. Moreover, Germany and Japan had a tradition of democracy and free markets that we could build on. Iraq had very little." -- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman has been subdued lately. I get the feeling that he's taken some of the criticism of his nutty metaphors (I'm only one of a great many people who've been on him about this) to heart and decided to chill out, which in a way is kind of a shame. He's still an arrogant, wrong-headed prick, but he's no longer a walking literary time bomb like he used to be. I often feel now, like I did on the day Red Auerbach died, that the world has lost one of its leading lights.

Placing Libby Above The Law

March 07, 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.

Over three years ago, on the morning of July 14, 2003, I picked up The Washington Post and did something I don't always do: I read Robert Novak's column.

It was about the controversy concerning George W. Bush's prewar claim that Iraq had been uranium-shopping in Africa and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's charge that the White House had twisted this intelligence to hype the case for war. A few sentences in the middle of the column caught my eye: Novak was reporting that Wilson's wife—Valerie Plame—was a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction.” I knew Joseph Wilson. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, we had become Green Room acquaintances, seeing each other at the Fox News Washington bureau. As two of the few commentators questioning the wisdom of launching a war against Iraq, we had bonded. I had even persuaded Wilson—who joked he was an establishment type of guy—to write an article slamming the neoconservatives for my home base, The Nation .

Study finds antibiotic resistance in poultry even when antibiotics were not used

A surprising finding by a team of University of Georgia scientists suggests that curbing the use of antibiotics on poultry farms will do little -- if anything -- to reduce rates of antibiotic resistant bacteria that have the potential to threaten human health.

Not Saving? Strategies To Help You Start

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Christian Science Monitor. Posted March 7, 2007.

Americans have been spending more than they save for nearly two years, and 2006 was the worst year for saving since 1933. To turn it around, experts say, know your weaknesses.

When millions of Americans struggle to save any money from month to month, as research suggests they consistently do, the first step to a solution is not for them to make a realistic budget.

That's according to Daniel Wishnasky, a financial planner in Phoenix who says many frustrated, would-be savers have overlooked a more basic step. They first need to lay a solid foundation by examining entrenched spending patterns and the powerful, deep-rooted emotions behind them.

A suggestion for probing our shameful treatment of fallen troops

By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers

Let's get this straight once and for all: With great power comes great responsibility.

The president and the Congress have the power to send America's fighting men and women to war. They also bear the responsibility for caring for those troops and their families.

It's their duty to make certain that the families of those who fall in battle don't fall through the cracks. They also have a sacred obligation to see that those who are wounded or injured in service receive the finest medical care that a rich nation can provide.

And while we're restating what should be clear and obvious, the politicians also have a responsibility to make certain that the Veterans Administration takes good care of the veterans of the wars gone by - World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War.

Guilty

Posted March 6, 2007 10:30 AM

Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been found guilty of lying to a probe into the leak of classified information.

Vice President Cheney's former Chief of Staff was found guilty on two counts of perjury, one count of making a false statement, and one count of obstruction of justice.

Former Prosecutor Says Departure Was Pressured

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: March 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 5 — The former federal prosecutor in Maryland said Monday that he was forced out in early 2005 because of political pressure stemming from public corruption investigations involving associates of the state’s governor, a Republican.

“There was direct pressure not to pursue these investigations,” said the former prosecutor, Thomas M. DiBiagio. “The practical impact was to intimidate my office and shut down the investigations.”

Daily Kos: Two FBI Whistleblowers Confirm Illegal Wiretapping of Govt Officials, Support Sibel Edmonds Claims

by lukery

Mon Mar 05, 2007 at 11:22:33 AM PST

Sibel Edmonds has got her hands on an explosive official report from an FBI agent which demonstrates that the US Government was illegally spying on "high-profile U.S. public officials"

They were illegally using the rubber-stamping FISA court to do it (you know, FISA, the court they had to ignore in the illegal NSA wire-tapping case). FISA is supposed to be for "Foreign" persons only - not for domestic surveillance.

But here's the thing: Sibel worked for this particular agent when she was at the FBI - so this illegal spying uncovered all of the criminal activity that Sibel knows about "large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder" - and to top it off, no action has been taken, no arrests, no idictments, and they buried the enitre case by gagging Sibel, and congress - by claiming 'national security.'

Specter Detector

U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming Patriot Act revisions?

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 6:58 PM ET

Listen to the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.

The U.S. attorneys purge scandal is heating up. The House and Senate have convened hearings for Tuesday, promising an orgy of named names and pointed fingers. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., now admits what he once denied: that he may have had a hand in the removal of New Mexico's U.S. attorney. And the senior Justice Department official who personally canned the U.S. attorneys has just announced the date of his resignation.

But as the political scandal spreads, the question at its heart gets less and less public attention: Who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody looking?

Washington Is Losing Its Grip on Latin America

By Mark Weisbrot, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Posted March 6, 2007.

As President Bush heads south for a seven-day trip to counter the populist political tide in Latin America, he'll discover that Washington's influence has collapsed and is not likely to recover.

"State of Denial" is the title of Bob Woodward's famous book on the Bush team's road to disaster in Iraq, but it would have served just as well for a description of their Latin America policy. This week President Bush heads South for a seven-day, five country, trip to Latin America to see if he can counter the populist political tide that has brought left governments to about half the population of the region.

Carrying vague promises of a joint effort on ethanol production -- but no offer to lower tariffs protecting the U.S. market -- President Bush hopes to entice Brazil into taking his side against his nemesis, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. This is a fantasy.

Is Big Oil Going to Control Iraq’s Reserves?

By Christian Parenti, The Nation
Posted on March 6, 2007, Printed on March 6, 2007

War and corruption have crippled Iraq's ability to export oil. But that's not stopping Big Oil's efforts to control and profit from what's left.

Iraq's postwar oil bonanza remains a mirage. The country has the second- or third-largest reserves in the world, making petroleum the heart and vast bulk of its economy. Thus in March 2003 did Paul Wolfowitz assure Congress that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." American planners predicted that Iraq's oil production would triple to a feverish 6 million barrels per day by 2010.

Instead war, corruption, sectarian slaughter and a massive crime wave have reduced the country's once mighty petroleum sector to an industrial zombie: still ambulatory, functional but essentially dead.

Green Roofs: Building for the Future

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet. Posted March 6, 2007.

Green roofs have been around for millennia. But as the planet heats up and green space dwindles, they are gaining in popularity in the U.S. and abroad.

From the U.S. Food and Drug Administration building in Washington DC to Heinz Corporate head quarters in Pittsburg, an increasing number of buildings are swapping shingles for sedums. The movement is called green roofing, but far from an industrial paint job, it evolves around technology that's ecologically-sound -- and proving so useful that cities like Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and the entire state of Maryland are eagerly exploiting the potential of this once forgotten façade.

"This technology offers us an opportunity to significantly improve not only the way our buildings operate, but to utilize wasted spaces -- there are millions of square miles," says Steven Peck, founder and president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, an organization established to increase awareness of green roof benefits. GRHC also hopes to advance the market in North America. "The roofing industry is just at the beginning of a process of transformation. Nothing can match the range of social, economic and environmental benefits green roofs provide."

Digby: Wasted Outrage

From Atrios, I see that John McCain has really stuck his foot in it now:

Discussing the war with Letterman, McCain repeated his assertion that U.S. troops must remain in Iraq rather than withdrawing early even though the war has been mismanaged.

"Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," McCain said. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."

Digby: 11Th Commandment

Seeing The Forest has a great piece today on the Al Gore electricity smear:

There's a tragic but true old expression that a lie can make it half way around the world before the truth can even get its pants on. Sadly, this has been proven true again this week with the $mear attack on Vice President Al Gore and his energy consumption.

Digby: Culture War Surrender

Lawrence Kudlow has apparently written some stupid rehash of every Clinton scandal that is, as they all were, completely full of shit. Media Matters has set the record straight here if you want the details.

But really. The country (with the exception of professional Clenis stalker, Chris Matthews) has left this stuff far behind. They know that the taxpayers spent more than $70 million and came up with exactly zilch on every single one of those charges. They know that the press went inexplicably mad for a period and they have moved on, even if the Republicans are hitching their pathetic wagons to limp hopes of a reprise of interest in Clinton's personal life. After the Starr Report, we found out far more than anyone ever wanted to know about that, and yet Bill Clinton had a 60% approval rating when he left office and remains incredibly popular today.

Digby: Evergreen Slime

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the media's narrative about the Democratic Party -- a narrative I would have thought would have gone out of fashion by now, but which appears to have reached classic, evergreen status:

I know this is all boring, arcane history now, but it's important to note that we are seeing similar stuff happening already with respect to various "deals" that are being reported in the press about Harry Reid and John Edwards. So far they are thin, nonsensical "exposes" written by one man, John Solomon, formerly of the AP and now of the Washington Post. Solomon is known to be a lazy reporter who happily takes "tips" from the wingnut noise machine and faithfully regurgitates them. He holds a very important position at the paper that was second only to the Times in its eagerness to swallow Ken Starr's spin whole.

Digby; "A Bunch Of Old Tires Is Worth More Than Billy Ray"

I'm always so interested when I hear that racism is dead in this country. When you look around, you certainly don't see the kind of institutional racism you saw when I was a kid. And young people today certainly do seem to be less racist than my generation --- popular culture is an amazing multicultural amalgam.

But, I also know that there is a certain kind of racist bully in American culture who is always present. And there are a lot of them out there. And when they do express their hate, a whole bunch of other people either turn away or come crawling out of the woodwork to defend them --- and that's when society's enduring bigotry comes right to the surface.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil, and Trouble

Uh-oh. The housing bust is just beginning.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, March 2, 2007, at 5:23 PM ET

As the housing boom comes to an increasingly ugly end, the parallels between the real-estate industry today and the technology industry in 2000 and 2001 are astonishing. Blogger Barry Ritholtz last month posted eerily similar charts of the NASDAQ composite index in the tech-bubble years and the index of housing-related stocks in the real-estate-bubble years. Both show rapid rises, a swift correction, and a subsequent rally when analysts and insiders proclaimed (prematurely) that the worst was over.

Echoes from 2000 can also be heard in the continual false calls of a market bottom. The Web site Minyanville has documented the repeated bottom-calling attempts by National Association of Realtors economist David Lereah. Lereah believed the housing market had stabilized in March 2006 and again in April, June, October, and November.

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Published: February 27, 2007

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

Official report says US CO2 to rise by 20%

· Publication delayed for more than a year
· Authors argue president's efforts 'are working'

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

A draft report prepared by the Bush administration admits that emissions of greenhouse gases by the United States will rise by 2020 to 20% above 2000 levels, flying in the face of warnings from scientists that drastic action to cut emissions is needed if environmental catastrophe is to be averted.

The internal administration report, which has been obtained by the Associated Press, should have been handed to the United Nations more than a year ago as part of the world body's monitoring of climate change, but its publication has been delayed. The draft estimates that US emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, largely from the burning of oil, coil and natural gas, will rise from 7.7bn tons in 2000 to 9.2bn tons in 2020 - an increase of 19.5%.

Paul Krugman: Valor and Squalor

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Frank Rich: Bring Back the Politics of Personal Destruction

If you had to put a date on when the Iraq war did in the Bush administration, it would be late summer 2005. That’s when the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina re-enacted the White House bungling of the war, this time with Americans as the principal victims. The stuff happening on Brownie’s watch in New Orleans was recognizably the same stuff that had happened on Donald Rumsfeld’s watch in Baghdad. Television viewers connected the dots and the president’s poll numbers fell into the 30s. There they have largely remained — at least until Friday, when the latest New York Times-CBS News Poll put him at 29.

Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: "I Think About It Everyday"

We spend the hour with General Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general. He was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. In 2004 he unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clark talks about his opposition to a U.S. attack on Iran; the impeachment of President Bush; the use of cluster bombs; the bombing of Radio Television Serbia in the Kosovo War under his command; US service members refusing deployments to Iraq; his own presidential ambitions and much more. [includes rush transcript]

Glenn Greenwald: Confrontational investigations, subpoenas, and hearings are the priority

To their real credit, The New York Times Editorial Page (though definitely not the Times itself) was one of the earliest national media venues to recognize our country's true constitutional crisis brought about by the Bush administration's radical theories of presidential omnipotence. And they have, as relentlessly as any other media outlet, condemned those abuses and repeatedly called for actions to limit, if not altogether end, the sheer lawlessness of the Bush presidency.

Today the Times has an Editorial -- entitled "The Must-Do List" -- which identifies numerous pending Bush scandals regarding lawbreaking and abuses of presidential power, and for each one, the Editorial provides a proposed Congressional solution in the form of legislation. It is worth emphasizing, as always, that this list entails only the abuses that we have learned about (not from Congressional oversight, but from the disclosures of whistleblowers to journalists). It is beyond doubt -- as Ron Suskind recently pointed out in an interview with Spiegel-- that there are a whole array of similar, if not worse, abuses which the unprecedentedly secretive Bush administration has still managed to conceal: