Digby: Pathological

Like rugs:

The Baghdad Security Plan is going so well that Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence are flocking back to their homes in Baghdad, so a number of officials are telling us. The only problem with that: it's probably not true. General David Petraeus, in an interview with the BBC on March 18, said hundreds and even up to a thousand Iraqis had already returned, although he warned the plan is still in its early stages--a hopeful sign. On March 20, a Pentagon official, Major General Michael Barbero, gave a briefing in Washington during which that statistic morphed into hundreds of Iraqi families, which at a conservative multiplier of six to a family, bumps that number well above a thousand people. Meanwhile, Brig. General Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, confidently asserted that 2,000 families had returned.

Digby: Nehring Completion

In doing some research on the US Attorney scandal this morning I came across this interesting diary from DKos that sparked my interest. It's about a guy named Ron Nehring, the new head of the California Republican Party:

The architect of the plan to fire Carol Lam is Ron Nehring.

"Ron Nehring ...is an important piece on Norquist's chessboard," states a report titled Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government. Prepared for the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, the report reveals how the National GOP has targeted San Diego as a "battleground" and model for an alleged agenda of radically cutting government funding, permanently weakening organized labor, and aggressively moving to privatize public services.

Daily Kos: The Subprime Disaster in One E-Z Anecdote

by TheWurx

Fri Mar 30, 2007 at 11:49:23 AM PDT

For years, economic-oriented blogs have been telling us about the disaster that is going to befall the subprime mortgage industry the moment interest rates rise and adjustable rate morgages begin to adjust upward. As it happens, the subprime mortgage industry has imploded right on schedule... but please note that INTEREST RATES HAVE NOT RISEN BY ANY SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS. Rates are at most a point higher than they were in the last year or two. Only the loans opened with teaser rates are getting much of a spike. The rest have been repriced without too much pain.

Then why are all the subprimes tanking? I have an anecdote that will illustrate it perfectly.

Daily Kos: Interior Dept. hollows out the Endangered Species Act

by smintheus

Fri Mar 30, 2007 at 01:54:23 PM PDT

The Bush administration Interior Department has long been waging a war against the Endangered Species Act. The high cost of implementing the ESA by designating critical habitats, they claim, gets in the way protecting newly endangered species. It turns out that it gets in the way of business, too, which has been of critical concern to Bush's appointees in Interior.

Unable to dismantle the ESA, and forced by persistent lawsuits to implement it, Interior Dept. officials have been busy trying to hollow out the enforcement mechanisms by which it can be obliged to designate new species and new habitats for protection.

Bush's long history of tilting Justice

The administration began skewing federal law enforcement before the current U.S. attorney scandal, says a former Department of Justice lawyer.

By Joseph D. Rich, JOSEPH D. RICH was chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil right division from 1999 to 2005. He now works for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
March 29, 2007

THE SCANDAL unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest.

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Ex-Partner Of Giuliani May Face Charges

Kerik Counts Said To Include Deception During Cabinet Bid

By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 31, 2007; Page A01

Federal prosecutors have told Bernard B. Kerik, whose nomination as homeland security secretary in 2004 ended in scandal, that he is likely to be charged with several felonies, including tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wiretapping.

Kerik's indictment could set the stage for a courtroom battle that would draw attention to Kerik's extensive business and political dealings with former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who personally recommended him to President Bush for the Cabinet. Giuliani, the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination according to most polls, later called the recommendation a mistake.

'We Were Torturing People For No Reason' -- A Soldier's Tale

By Tara McKelvey, The American Prospect. Posted March 31, 2007.

Interrogator Tony Lagouranis says he discovered and indulged in his own evil at Abu Ghraib prison, and now fears that it will be his constant companion for the rest of his life.

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

The Torturer's Toll

Tony Lagouranis is a 37-year-old bouncer at a bar in Chicago's Humboldt Park. He is also a former torturer. That was how he was described in an email promoting a panel discussion, "24: Torture Televised," hosted by the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security in New York on March 21. And he doesn't shy away from the description.

As a specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Lagouranis interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield, and other places in Iraq from January through December 2004. Coercive techniques, including the use of military dogs, waterboarding, and prolonged stress positions, were employed on the detainees, he says. Prisoners held at Al Asad Airfield, which is located approximately 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, were shackled and hung from an upright bed frame "welded to the wall" in a room in an airplane hanger, he told me in a phone interview after the NYU event. When he was having problems getting information from a detainee, he recalls, the other interrogators said, "Chain him up on the bed frame and then he'll talk to you." (Lagouranis says he didn't participate directly in hangings from the frames.)

Digby: All Scandals Are Not Created Equal

Kinsley thinks we liberals are being dishonest and that if the shoe were on the other foot we would be defending a Democrat in Bush's position. Uhm, no. I wouldn't, anyway.

Among other things, I have a real problem with any government lying the nation into a war and then escalating it against the will of the people for inscrutable reasons. We went down that road not all that long ago and it was mostly Democrats in the congress (and virtually all Democrats in the streets) who led the way against their own leadership --- leadership, I might add, who had done truly heroic work on issues dear to their hearts. I suspect that the cynics of that time were railing against the liberals being so disloyal. And liberals still pay the price today for doing it. Perhaps that's foolish. I call it citizenship.

Digby: Easy To Be Hard

In case anyone was wondering who was in charge, I think this pretty much answers the question:

In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.

Driftglass: The Demolished Man

More and more the degenerates who currently run this country are hanging on the future like a drunk hangs on a parking meter. Playing out the final innings of their long and blood-dimmed game of Kick the Accountability Can down the road 30-50 years and then asserting that History will prove them to have been right.

Ah the Future Perfect tense; that patron saint of bad ideologies. With it, exoneration – like the cavalry in every B-Western – is always just over the horizon, riding hell for leather towards the final reel.

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'

How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Sunday, March 25, 2007; Page B01

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

Glenn Greenwald: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum

David Brooks' column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks' central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to -- the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today's so-called "conservatives" exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don't believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.

The American Prison Nightmare

By Jason DeParle

For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

George Soros: On Israel, America and AIPAC

The Bush administration is once again in the process of committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East, one that is liable to have disastrous consequences and is not receiving the attention it should. This time it concerns the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the US State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.

The Myth Of Voter Fraud

By Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt

Thursday, March 29, 2007; Page A19

As Congress probes the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, attention is centering on who knew what, and when. It's just as important to focus on "why," such as the reason given for the firing of at least one of the U.S. attorneys, John McKay of Washington state: failure to prosecute the phantom of individual voter fraud.

Allegations of voter fraud -- someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote -- have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.

Marriage Of Hypocrisy And Corruption

David Sirota

March 29, 2007

David Sirota is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government —And How We Take It Back. This article appeared in The Denver Post.

We all know that special interests talk out of both sides of their mouths whenever they are trying to buy public policy. But in recent weeks, we have seen glaring examples of sheer hypocrisy that are eye-popping, even by Washington standards. On issues from pharmaceutical prices to democracy to trade, lobbyists are stepping all over their own rhetoric in attempts to keep Congress from embracing a populist, middle-class agenda.

The first example came when corporations recently pulled out all the stops against the Employee Free Choice Act, the legislation that strengthens workers' democratic rights to form unions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a press release claiming it opposed the bill because it supposedly "undermines the fundamental concept of our workplace democracy." Yet, just days later, the president of the Business Roundtable attacked legislation strengthening company shareholders' ability to vote down exorbitant executive pay packages, saying that "corporations were never designed to be democracies." Yes, Corporate America wants Congress to believe that it is worried about workers' democratic rights at the very same time it is telling shareholders (the owners of the companies) that they should have no democratic rights at all.

George Bush's Favorite Historian

The strange views of Andrew Roberts.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007, at 3:40 PM ET

President Bush is sometimes a boastful anti-intellectual, but in the past year he has been touting his reading lists and engaging in who-can-read-more contests with his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. (Bush claimed to have read 60 books in just the first seven and a half months of last year, the pace of a full-time reviewer.) There even seems to be a White House book club.

The most recent selection was A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 by conservative British writer Andrew Roberts. Bush invited Roberts for a discussion over lunch at the White House earlier this month. The author was joined by Dick Cheney (who was recently photographed carrying the book), Rove, and a group of neoconservative intellectuals including Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb, along with various other officials and conservative journalists. Though the event was supposed to be off the record, several participants wrote it up afterward. (You can read their breathy accounts here and here and here.) Bush's embrace of Roberts' book is hardly surprising, given how it glorifies his presidency. But it does suggest that all the heavy reading he's been doing lately may not be opening his mind.

End-game of a tormented presidency has begun

Posted on Thu, Mar. 29, 2007

COMMENTARY

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

Not since the latter days of Richard M. Nixon have we had so clear a spectacle of arrogant politicians bumbling into fatal mistakes and poorly planned and executed cover-ups as George W. Bush administration is now providing, day by day.

How strange that an administration that took such pride in putting up a seamless wall around the White House and marching in lock-step, all reading from the same script and spinning in one direction, has come to this.

What should have been a simple matter of replacing a handful of U.S. attorneys - seven of 93 political appointees - now threatens to devour a presidential buddy of long standing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Big powers jockey for oil in Central Asia

The US, Russia, China, and others have a military or business presence.

By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

Here at Dushanbe airport, French Air Force planes sit on the tarmac, their blue, white, and red roundels looking a bit incongruous against the backdrop of the soaring, snowy Pamir Mountains.

A dozen miles away, Indian engineers are quietly reconstructing a former Soviet airfield. In central Tajikistan, Russia maintains a motorized infantry division of 10,000 men at a sprawling outpost, while the US is reportedly training Tajik forces in counterterrorism techniques.

They're all piling into a modern replay of the 19th-century "Great Game," in which the contending Russian and British Empires vied for land and influence amid these same Central Asian desert wastes and towering mountain peaks.

In God Our Press Trusts

Susan Jacoby

“On Faith” panelist Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: History of American Secularism, (2004) which was named a notable nonfiction book by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and cited as an outstanding international book by the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. more »

The question about whether the media treat religion fairly really ought to have two parts, and the second half ought to read: "Do the media treat skepticism about religion fairly?" The answer to both questions is no.

The media do not treat religion fairly because they routinely give preferential treatment to religion, exempting it from the critical scrutiny that all other institutions receive (or are supposed to receive) from a free press in our society. Religious skepticism, by contrast, is either treated negatively or, more commonly, omitted altogether from stories about religious issues.

Uncle Sam's $100M Mistake

Poorly Written Justice Dept. Documents Cost Feds A Bundle In Income Tax Case

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2007

(AP) Poorly written Justice Department documents have cost the federal government more than $100 million in what was supposed to have been the crowning moment of the biggest tax prosecution ever.

Walter Anderson, the telecommunications entrepreneur who admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and District of Columbia tax collectors, was sentenced Tuesday to nine years in prison and ordered to repay about $23 million to the city.

But U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he couldn't order Anderson to repay the federal government $100 million to $175 million because the Justice Department's binding plea agreement with Anderson listed the wrong statute.

Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.

US 'no longer technology king'

The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The US is now ranked seventh in the body's league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.

A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.

US News Media's "War on Gore"

By Robert Parry
Consortium News

Thursday 22 March 2007

When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass..

How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore - ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?

In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet" been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote "let them eat cake" was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?

Scott Ritter: Calling Out Idiot America

Ouch!--Dictynna

Posted on Mar 23, 2007

The ongoing hand-wringing in Congress by the newly empowered Democrats over what to do about the war in Iraq speaks volumes about the level of concern (or lack thereof) these “representatives of the people” have toward the men and women who honor us all by serving in the armed forces of the United States of America. The inability to reach consensus concerning the level of funding required or how to exercise effective oversight of the war, both constitutionally mandated responsibilities, is more a reflection of congressional cowardice and impotence than a byproduct of any heartfelt introspection over troop welfare and national security.

The issues that prompt the congressional collective to behave in such an egregious manner have more to do with a reflexive tendency to avoid any controversy that might disrupt the status quo ante regarding representative-constituent relations (i.e., re-election) than with any intellectual debate about doing the right thing. This sickening trend is bipartisan in nature, but of particular shame to the Democrats, who obtained their majority from an electorate that expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of the war in Iraq through their votes, demanding that something be done.

The Kids Are Alright

What the latest day-care study really found.

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007, at 5:21 PM ET

The headlines blared this week. "Does Day Care Make Kids Behave Badly? Study Says Yes" (ABC). "Child Care Leads to More Behavior Problems" (Fox). "Day-care Kids Have Problems Later in Life" (NBC). "Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care" (New York Times). And, ironically, "Bad Mommies" (Slate).

It's useless to rail at the press for leading with the bad news and for ignoring the researchers' caveats that no cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn from their data. Still, coverage like this feels designed to twit working parents. And it turns out that in the case of day care, the headlines and the stories really were alarmist—even wrong.

US rate cut looms as Fed chief fails to calm market jitters

· Property correction may be harsher than expected
· Retail spending seems solid and investment is up

Larry Elliott, economics editor
Thursday March 29, 2007
The Guardian

The prospect of an early cut in US interest rates loomed larger last night after the head of America's central bank failed to convince a jittery Wall Street that the world's largest economy could withstand rising oil prices and a weak housing market.

Shares and the dollar came under pressure after Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, admitted that the correction in the US real estate sector "could turn out to be more severe than we expect".

Harold Meyerson: The Republican Mystery

Wednesday, March 28, 2007; A15

The truly astonishing thing about the latest scandals besetting the Bush administration is that they stem from actions the administration took after the November elections, when Democratic control of Congress was a fait accompli.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' hour-long meeting on sacking federal prosecutors took place after the election. The subsequent sacking took place after the election. The videoconference between leaders of the General Services Administration and Karl Rove's deputy about how to help Republican candidates in 2008, according to people who attended the meeting, took place Jan. 26 this year.

New memo details allegations against GSA administrator

By DANIEL FRIEDMAN

March 27, 2007

Even as the head of the General Services Administration prepares to address allegations of improper conduct at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, new information about her actions continues to emerge.

A March 27 memorandum from committee Democrats states that GSA Administrator Lurita Doan overrode longtime contracting officers to intervene on behalf of Sun Microsystems in a pricing dispute with the agency “after direct intervention by Sun representatives with Doan herself.”

Matt Taibbi: A Timetable for Politics as Usual

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 28, 2007.

After the Iraq timetable vote has passed the Senate, it seems like the Democrats, Republicans, and White House are all suspiciously happy.

In medicine they call it "drug-seeking behavior." A guy shows up at three different regional hospital emergency rooms in the space of a month, each time complaining of severe but non-specific lower back pain. Suspiciously, he is well-versed in the various milligram dosages of commercial hydrocodone. Ask him to wait an extra hour in the exam room, he starts bouncing his knees, and his forehead starts to pour sweat ...

Does this man's back really hurt? Maybe it does. You have to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least the first time. But the moment that orgasmic smile flashes across his face as soon as you hand him his Oxy scrip, you have to wonder. Just like I'm wondering right now, after watching what looked very suspiciously like a carefully-orchestrated congressional vote-seeking charade, i.e. the recent "controversial" scheduled-withdrawal/Iraq-timetable vote in the Senate.

Is There Hope for Health Care?

By Jacob S. Hacker, TomPaine.com. Posted March 28, 2007.

Leading Democratic presidential candidates made clear on Saturday that "stay the course" is no longer a viable strategy on the health policy battlefield.

What a difference a year makes. Just 12 short months ago, health care was nowhere on the political agenda, and pundits were confidently stating that, after the failure of the Clinton health plan a dozen years prior, Americans continued to be wary of serious action. Affordable, quality health care for all Americans was a pipe dream.

Fast forward to Saturday morning, when leading presidential hopefuls gathered in Nevada for the "New Leadership on Health Care" forum, jointly sponsored by Center for American Progress and the Service Employees International Union. The event didn't create the kind of political fireworks that journalists crave. No Republican candidates showed up, unfortunately, and the Democrats who came -- in the order they spoke, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel -- were all civil and, to varying degrees, substantive. But the event did showcase something far more important than inter-campaign squabbles: Health care is the number one domestic policy issue going into the 2008 presidential race.

Preventing Economic Collapse

Thomas I. Palley

March 27, 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.

The U.S. economy is showing signs of a potentially rapid deceleration. In particular, there is accumulating evidence that the housing sector slowdown may be becoming a meltdown. In many areas house prices are falling. House sales are down nationally, and mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures are rising—especially in the sub-prime market. This has caused tremors in broader financial markets. The only good news is employment and wages continue growing, but labor markets conditions are also widely viewed as a lagging indicator.

Reliability of corruption indicators

Global corruption indicators and, on a broader front, global governance indicators, based principally on experts’ perception, are currently widely used for determining the allocation of public aid for development. IRD economists showed that the latter reveal an inaccurate appreciation of the true level of corruption. They advocate a more reasoned use of these global indicators and the setting-up of complementary surveys taking into account the points of view and experiences of the people and actors involved.

Kissinger's extradition to Uruguay sought over Operation Condor

Sun Mar 25, 3:00 AM ET

An attorney for a victim of Uruguay's 1973-1985 dictatorship has asked his government to request the extradition of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger over his alleged role in the notorious Operation Condor.

Condor was a secret plan hatched by South American dictators in the 1970s to eliminate leftist political opponents in the region. Details of the plan have emerged over the past years in documents and court testimony.

Lawyer: David Stockman charged with securities fraud

By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press

NEW YORK — David Stockman, a former top budget official in the Reagan White House, and three others were charged today in an alleged securities fraud conspiracy that embroiled one of North America's largest auto parts companies before the supplier collapsed into bankruptcy.

Stockman was the former chairman and CEO of Michigan-based Collins & Aikman Corp. He had previously served as budget director under President Reagan in the 1980s and had been a former Republican congressman.

Who's Scripting Gonzales?

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 26, 2007; 1:36 PM

Why did Attorney General Alberto Gonzales go before the television cameras two weeks ago and deny that he knew anything about last year's firings of U.S. attorneys, when -- as we just learned from yet another Friday-night document dump -- he approved them during an hour-long meeting in November?

Did that meeting not make an impression? Did he choose to lie about it? Was he secretly drawing a distinction between giving his approval and knowing anything about what he had given his approval for?

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers

By CHARLES DUHIGG

Published: March 26, 2007

CONRAD, Mont. — Mary Rose Derks was a 65-year-old widow in 1990, when she began preparing for the day she could no longer care for herself. Every month, out of her grocery fund, she scrimped together about $100 for an insurance policy that promised to pay eventually for a room in an assisted living home.

On a May afternoon in 2002, after bouts of hypertension and diabetes had hospitalized her dozens of times, Mrs. Derks reluctantly agreed that it was time. She shed a few tears, watched her family pack her favorite blankets and rode to Beehive Homes, five blocks from her daughter’s farm equipment dealership.

U.S. Navy shows force in Persian Gulf

By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
Tue Mar 27, 5:58 AM ET

The U.S. Navy on Tuesday began its largest demonstration of force in the Persian Gulf since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by a pair of aircraft carriers and backed by warplanes flying simulated attack maneuvers off the coast of Iran.

The maneuvers bring together two strike groups of U.S. warships and more than 100 U.S. warplanes to conduct simulated air warfare in the crowded Gulf shipping lanes.

The link between Private Armies & Private Schools?

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 6:40 AM on March 27, 2007.

Bruce Wilson: War On Public Ed. Linked To Blackwater USA

Last March 31, 2006, I covered the Christian right's war on public education and a Department of Education commissioned study that revealed public schools, if anything, outperform their private school counterparts. But, does Amway fortune heir Dick Devos care, or does he view institutions of public education, that Jefferson saw as integral to American Democracy, as obstacles in the way of a long range scheme to undermine democracy ? In a 2002 Heritage Institute address Devos, a leader in the war on public education who wants Intelligent Design in schools, is associated with Christian Reconstructionist views, and has been a significant funder of the "Council On National Policy" and served as the CNP's president in the late 1980's, outlined a "stealth strategy" for eliminating public schools. If DeVos succeeds in his jihad against public schools and American Democracy, maybe his brother-in-law Erik Prince, who owns Blackwater USA, the subject of a new expose by Jeremy Scahill and possibly the most powerful private mercenary army in the world, could help out with the ensuing anarchy... for a price, of course. (Nation article on Blackwater)

Frank Rich: When Will Fredo Get Whacked?

President Bush wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he’s as transparent as a teenager on MySpace.

On Monday morning he observed the Iraq war’s fourth anniversary with a sullen stay-the-course peroration so perfunctory he seemed to sleepwalk through its smorgasbord of recycled half-truths (Iraqi leaders are “beginning to meet the benchmarks”) and boilerplate (“There will be good days, and there will be bad days”). But at a press conference the next day to defend his attorney general, the president was back in the saddle, guns blazing, Mr. Bring ’Em On reborn. He vowed to vanquish his Democratic antagonists much as he once, so very long ago, pledged to make short work of insurgents in Iraq.

Jonathan Chait: Why the right goes nuclear over global warming

Most of the heat is generated by a small number of hard-core ideologues.

March 25, 2007

LAST YEAR, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: "Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?" Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no. In the year since that poll, of course, global warming has seized a massive amount of public attention. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study, with input from 2,000 scientists worldwide, finding that the certainty on man-made global warming had risen to 90%.

So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved. As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. Al Gore's recent congressional testimony on the subject, and the chilly reception he received from GOP members, suggest the discouraging conclusion that skepticism on global warming is hardening into party dogma. Like the notion that tax cuts are always good or that President Bush is a brave war leader, it's something you almost have to believe if you're an elected Republican.

Paul Krugman: Emerging Republican Minority

Remember how the 2004 election was supposed to have demonstrated, once and for all, that conservatism was the future of American politics? I do: early in 2005, some colleagues in the news media urged me, in effect, to give up. “The election settled some things,” I was told.

But at this point 2004 looks like an aberration, an election won with fear-and-smear tactics that have passed their sell-by date. Republicans no longer have a perceived edge over Democrats on national security — and without that edge, they stand revealed as ideologues out of step with an increasingly liberal American public.

GSA Chief Is Accused of Playing Politics

Doan Denies 'Improper' Use of Agency for GOP

By Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 26, 2007; Page A01

Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove's political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.

With GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan and up to 40 regional administrators on hand, J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, gave a PowerPoint presentation on Jan. 26 of polling data about the 2006 elections.

Who's Gorging and Who's Getting Roasted in the Economic Barbecue?

By James M. Cypher, Dollars and Sense. Posted March 26, 2007.

Not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has America witnessed such a rapid shift in the distribution of economic wealth as it has in the past 30 years.

Economic inequality has been on the rise in the United States for 30-odd years. Not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century -- during what Mark Twain referred to as "the Great Barbeque" -- has the country witnessed such a rapid shift in the distribution of economic resources.

Still, most mainstream economists do not pay too much attention to the distribution of income and wealth -- that is, how the value of current production (income) and past accumulated assets (wealth) is divided up among U.S. households. Some economists focus their attention on theory for theory's sake and do not work much with empirical data of any kind. Others who are interested in these on-the-ground data simply assume that each individual or group gets what it deserves from a capitalist economy. In their view, if the share of income going to wage earners goes up, that must mean that wage earners are more productive and thus deserve a larger slice of the nation's total income -- and vice versa if that share goes down.