Juan Cole: How to Get Out of Iraq

comment | posted April 5, 2007 (April 23, 2007 issue)

Both houses of Congress have now backed a timeline for withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq in 2008, which George W. Bush has vowed to veto. He gives two major rationales for rejecting withdrawal. At times he has warned that Iraq could become an Al Qaeda stronghold, at others that "a contagion of violence could spill out across the country--and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict." These are bogeymen with which Bush has attempted to frighten the public. Regarding the first, Turkey, Jordan and Iran are not going to put up with an Al Qaeda stronghold on their borders; nor would Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis. Most Sunni Iraqis are relatively secular, and there are only an estimated 1,000 foreign jihadis in Iraq, who would be forced to return home if the Americans left.

Crooks and Liars: Rachel Maddow’s Open Letter To Orrin Hatch

By: Nicole Belle on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 9:09 AM - PDT
The Rachel Maddow Show:

Dear Senator Hatch -

You don't call, you don't write…

I've just about exhausted myself trying to get someone in your office to call me back this week. Please apologize to your adorable receptionist on my behalf - the poor man now gets audibly exasperated as soon as I say "hello".

What I'd like to talk with you about is very simple: on NBC's Meet the Press this past Sunday, you said this about Carol Lam, the US Attorney for San Diego who was fired by the Justice Department in December:

Chomsky: Preventing War with Iran

By Noam Chomsky, Tomdispatch.com. Posted April 6, 2007.

Stopping a war with Iran requires a strong organized popular opposition.

Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush's announcement of a "surge" in Iraq came despite the firm opposition to any such move of Americans and the even stronger opposition of the (thoroughly irrelevant) Iraqis. It was accompanied by ominous official leaks and statements -- from Washington and Baghdad -- about how Iranian intervention in Iraq was aimed at disrupting our mission to gain victory, an aim which is (by definition) noble.

What then followed was a solemn debate about whether serial numbers on advanced roadside bombs (IEDs) were really traceable to Iran; and, if so, to that country's Revolutionary Guards or to some even higher authority.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Wal-Mart and Target Spy on Their Employees

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted April 6, 2007.

With Target and Wal-Mart acting as though they are entitled to spy on, stalk and imprison their own employees, we are on the road to a full-scale workplace dictatorship.

It reads like a cold war thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry. Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them. They're guilty!

But this isn't a John Le Carré novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn't the USSR or the CIA. It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren't carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb. Their crime was "fraternization." One of them, James W. Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors. At least the company spy reported hearing "moans and sighs" within the woman's room.

Huffington Post: Karl Rove Discusses Work For Nixon In 1972

backfile | Posted April 6, 2007 09:09 AM

READ MORE: Karl Rove, Nixon

1972 video of Karl Rove discussing his strategy to motivate youth in the campaign to reelect Nixon. Karl Rove was serving then as the College Director of the Republican National Committee.

UN panel issues stark climate change warning

By Jeff Mason
1 hour, 33 minutes ago

Climate experts issued their starkest warning yet about the impact of global warming, ranging from hunger in Africa to a fast thaw in the Himalayas, in a report on Friday that increased pressure on governments to act.

More than 100 nations in the U.N. climate panel agreed a final text after all-night talks during which some scientists accused governments of watering down conclusions that climate change was already under way and damaging nature.

American mercenaries

Jeff Lee, The Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, April 05, 2007

VANCOUVER — Of all the events I witnessed while covering the first months of the war in Iraq in 2003 as an unembedded reporter, there are two I now recognize, with the clarity of hindsight, that illuminate how badly the U.S. government miscalculated its plan to “democratize” the country.

How to Live a Low-Energy Lifestyle

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org. Posted April 5, 2007.

Americans can cut consumption and keep their affluence -- but it will take a change in priorities.

Al Gore is really doing it, bringing climate awareness to the doorsteps of opinion makers and forcing them to consider all of its implications. Of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished in this country.

Aside from all the sniping about his annual home power bill (which turns out to be so high partly because he spends an extra five grand or so to buy wind power and might also have something to do with a vice president's security needs), lots of the usual "free market uber alles" types are accusing him and all green-minded folks of forcing them to wear the dreaded "hair shirt" of mandatory reductions in their energy use.

The Evidence Is There: It’s Time for Congress to Investigate the Ties Between the Bush Family and Osama bin Laden

By Lucy Komisar, IPS News. Posted April 5, 2007.

How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).

Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.

Attack of the Mortgage Vultures

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive. Posted April 5, 2007.

Over the last decade, we have been witnessing some of the most brazen acts of mortgage entrapment ever to hit the American housing market.

George Bush likes to boast about the high rates of homeownership. But today in America, millions of homeowners are at risk of seeing their prized possession taken right out from under them.

Over the last decade, we have been witnessing some of the most brazen acts of mortgage entrapment ever to hit the American housing market.

Research Explains How Lead Exposure Produces Learning Deficits

A study of young adult rats by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health provides evidence that explains exactly how exposure to lead during brain development produces learning deficits. The study shows that exposure to levels of lead that are similar to those measured in lead-intoxicated children reduces the birth and survival of new neurons (neurogenesis) in the brain. Lead also alters the normal development of newly born neurons in a part of the brain (hippocampus) known to be important for learning and memory. The study is published in the March 30, 2007, issue of Neuroscience.

Army of God

The Legal Muscle Leading the Fight to End the Separation of Church and State

By Sarah Posner | April 1, 2007 (page 1/3)

n a dismal, rainy afternoon, over tea and Pepsi and a plate of fries at the Bob Evans restaurant in Cannonsburg, Kentucky, Bill Scaggs, a retired government and public-relations executive of ARMCO Steel, told me why he thinks that homosexuality is the greatest threat to America. "AIDS kills," was his circa 1984 answer, "and the most common way to pass that on of course is from homosexual contact." His voice cracking with indignation, Scaggs added that he refuses to use the word gay. "It's homosexual, or worse," he says. "Gay is in our Kentucky song! They took it away and trampled on it. We want it back."

Scaggs is a board member of Defenders Voice, a local organization formed two years ago by a group of ministers and their followers who fought the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at Boyd County High School, just up the road from where we sat. Located on a stretch of state highway dotted with churches, dollar stores, payday lenders, and a drive-through cigarette store, the high school had become a place where anti-gay harassment had become an everyday occurrence.

Talk to Action: Wade Leaps

By cyncooper
Tue Apr 03, 2007 at 01:02:26 PM EST

Wade Horn resigned as Assistant Secretary of Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services yesterday, and effective this weekend. I wrote about Horn in "Hand That Feeds" onTalk2Action a few weeks ago. Horn is a go-to guy for the Religious Right but he always seemed to get a free pass from the media. I focused a recent grant his department gave for $1 million to an organization that he founded, the National Fatherhood Initiative.

There were other questionable grants by Horn -- giving money to reporters to write articles, funding a group on whose board he had been seated. He oversaw the failed abstinence program, and set up "Responsible Fatherhood," which sounded identical to the right-wing pet project he previously ran. On the rare occasions when explanations were sought, they sounded absurd but never attracted much attention.

We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars

By James Howard Kunstler, AlterNet. Posted April 4, 2007.

Kunstler argues that the coming age of energy scarcity will change everything about how we live in this country -- most of all our dependency on automobiles.

The following is James Howard Kunstler' recent speech to the Commonwealth Club of California. An audio stream of the speech is available.

Two years ago in my book The Long Emergency I wrote that our nation was sleepwalking into an era of unprecedented hardship and disorder -- largely due to the end of reliably cheap and abundant oil. We're still blindly following that path into a dangerous future, lost in dark raptures of infotainment, diverted by inane preoccupations with sex and celebrity, made frantic by incessant motoring.

The coming age of energy scarcity will change everything about how we live in this country. It will ignite more desperate contests between nations for the remaining oil and natural gas around the world. It will alter the fundamental terms of industrial economies. It will ramify and amplify many of the problems presented by climate change. It will require us to behave differently. But we are not paying attention.

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

Interesting review of D'Sousa's book, from Andrew Sullivan of all people.--Dictynna

The Mullah
A Review by Andrew Sullivan

I.

American conservatism is in crisis. That much is almost universally clear. But the next period in American politics will be determined not least by how clearly we understand the crisis of the right. For it may be that the remarkably successful Republican coalition of the last three decades is not at all doomed at the polls. A Giuliani or Romney candidacy, especially up against a Clinton candidacy, could well eke out a victory in 2008. Nor is it quite the case that the familiar fault lines within the movement -- libertarians versus social conservatives, neoconservatives versus realists, economic internationalists versus populists -- have somehow come to a head all at once. The strains are there, all right, and they have been made much more acute in the Bush years under the weight of massive spending increases, evangelical overreach, abuse of executive power, conventional corruption, and (most disastrously) a mismanaged war. But the reflexive sense of cohesion on the right still manages to keep the rickety coalition together -- if only because of the palpable weakness of the alternatives, at least so far.

Digby: Still Wondering

Back in the day I wondered on this blog if Pat Tillman might have been fragged. (I was disabused of that when a reader reminded me that fragging was something that was done only to officers, so I stood corrected on the terminology.) But, I always wondered if he might have been killed on purpose because of this:

Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.

How bogus letter became a case for war

Intelligence failures surrounded inquiry on Iraq-Niger uranium claim

By Peter Eisner

washingtonpost.com

Updated: 7:43 a.m. ET April 3, 2007

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Bush losing key adviser on Iraq

By Warren P. Strobel

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - President Bush is losing his top day-to-day adviser on Iraq, the White House confirmed Monday.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan, who has played a key behind-the-scenes role in implementing Bush's controversial Iraq policies over the past four years, will leave later this spring.

Her departure, which follows that of her deputy, could leave the White House with a vacuum of long-term experience on Iraq policy, and it comes as Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress prepare for a showdown over withdrawing U.S. troops.

Booman Tribune: The President's Polls are Collapsing

by BooMan
Thu Mar 29th, 2007 at 01:43:33 PM EST

Last November the people of New Hampshire threw out both of their Republican congresspeople. It's the only thing they could do to voice their displeasure with the President and his war. In return, the President decided to escalate the war. Let's take a look at how that is playing in the Granite State.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

Approve/Disapprove/Undecided
Total sample 17% 62% 21%
Voters 17% 66% 17%
Republicans 42% 38% 20%
Democrats 1% 85% 14%
Undeclared 11% 74% 15%

New book says Kissinger kept Nixon in the dark

April 2, 2007

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Newly released documents show that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delayed telling President Richard Nixon about the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to keep him from interfering, according to new book excerpted in Vanity Fair on Monday.

"Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power," is by presidential historian Robert Dallek, who spent four years reviewing the Nixon administration's recently opened archives, including 20,000 pages of Kissinger's telephone transcripts and hundreds of hours of Nixon tapes.

Democracy vs. 'democracy'

E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

04.02.07 - WASHINGTON -- "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States."

That is not some reactionary piece of propaganda denying your right to choose the next president. It is one of the more memorable sentences from the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the hard-to-forget 2000 case that put the current occupant in the White House for his first term.

Will Latinos Continue Moving Democratic?

By Roberto Lovato, Public Eye. Posted April 3, 2007.

Will Latinos keep turning away from the Right, furthering the momentum witnessed in last year's massive marches and during the off-year elections?

After last year's elections, Lionel Sosa watched the returns and saw more than 30 years of his life's work endangered. Sosa, the advertising executive who, along with close ally, Karl Rove ("we've been good friends a long, long time"), engineered the GOP's historic advance among Latinos in the 2004 elections, had warned party leaders of the consequences of the anti-immigrant policies of certain of its members.

Latino support for Republicans rose from 21 percent in 1996, to 31 percent in 2000, to between 40 to 44 percent in 2004 (the number is still being debated). In 2006, after the final results were tallied, less than 29 percent of Latinos voted Republican, and Sosa publicly "I told you so'd" the GOP with comments like, "We as a party got the spanking we needed." The much-vaunted rise of the Latino Right had reached, at the very least, a pause.

Trillions in Debt, Can the Middle Class Hang On?

By James Scurlock, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2007.

How do we stop the credit industry's predatory business model and get Americans out of debt when incomes aren't rising as fast as the costs of healthcare and housing?

Last week, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board were forced to remind the nation's bankers to verify their customers' incomes -- adding that it might be a good idea to determine whether or not said customers could afford their mortgage payments. The new guidelines are expected to have a chilling effect on what the industry calls "home ownership." Many esteemed economists have expressed hope that the resulting declines in home values, which have been inflated by the lack of such guidelines, will not stop too many Americans from cashing out the equity in their homes to keep consumer spending up. In other words, the "new economy" is based on people slowly losing home ownership, not gaining it.

McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say

By KIRK SEMPLE

Published: April 3, 2007

BAGHDAD, April 2 — A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

TPM Muckraker: Meet Monica "Buzz Saw" Goodling

By Paul Kiel - April 1, 2007, 12:04 PM

There has been an assumption that Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, is pleading the Fifth simply because of her role in preparing false testimony to Congress. That is, at least, the impression given by her lawyer's letter to the investigating committees.

But this profile in Legal Times shows that Goodling is far from just a mid-level aide who played a peripheral role in the purge. On the contrary, she's very well-connected and apparently one of the main drivers behind the process of selecting U.S. attorneys.

Distract and Disenfranchise

I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now, finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising income inequality.

Let me explain.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were being taxed to provide social programs for other people.

George Bush’s Land Mine

If the Iraqi People Get Revenue Sharing, They Lose Their Oil to Exxon

by Richard Behan

George Bush has a land mine planted in the supplemental appropriation legislation working its way through Congress.

The Iraq Accountability Act passed by the House and the companion bill passed in the Senate contain deadlines for withdrawing our troops from Iraq, in open defiance of the President’s repeated objections.

He threatens a veto, but he might well be bluffing. Buried deep in the legislation and intentionally obscured is a near-guarantee of success for the Bush Administration’s true objective of the war-capturing Iraq’s oil-and George Bush will not casually forego that.

Magnolias face 'perilous future'

"...the significance of the plants' decline lies not only in the threat to the genetic diversity of the family, but also because magnolias are a highly sensitive indicator of the well-being of the forests in which they are found."

The spectacular bloom of a magnolia may be a very common sight in gardens but in the wild, it is a different story.

A new report has found that over half the world's magnolia species are facing extinction in their forest habitats.

America Gone Wrong: A Slashed Safety Net Turns Libraries into Homeless Shelters

By Chip Ward, Tomdispatch.com. Posted April 2, 2007.

A dirty little secret about America is that public libraries have become de facto daytime shelters for the nation's street people while librarians are increasingly our unofficial social workers for the homeless and mentally disturbed.

Ophelia sits by the fireplace and mumbles softly, smiling and gesturing at no one in particular. She gazes out the large window through the two pairs of glasses she wears, one windshield-sized pair over a smaller set perched precariously on her small nose. Perhaps four lenses help her see the invisible other she is addressing. When her "nobody there" conversation disturbs the reader seated beside her, Ophelia turns, chuckles at the woman's discomfort, and explains, "Don't mind me, I'm dead. It's okay. I've been dead for some time now." She pauses, then adds reassuringly, "It's not so bad. You get used to it." Not at all reassured, the woman gathers her belongings and moves quickly away. Ophelia shrugs. Verbal communication is tricky. She prefers telepathy, but that's hard to do since the rest of us, she informs me, "don't know the rules."

Digby: The Best And The Brightest

It seems that former white house justice department liason Monica Goodling may be stretching her right not to incriminate herself to mean a right not to talk to people who may be mean to her. Josh has the lowdown here.

Ms Goodling is a lawyer so people might think it's unusual that she wouldn't know the law. But I'm frankly not surprised Ms Goodling would have some rather unconventional, out of the mainstream, legal views. She's a graduate of Regent University law school (class of 1999) --- Pat Robertson's very own college.

Digby: Tabloid Auto De Fe

Many people are wondering what in the hell was up with Katie Couric when she hammered John and Elizabeth Edwards last night on 60 Minutes. (Taylor Marsh wrote the definitive post on her egregious conduct, here.)

K-Drum thinks she was just trying to prove her "serious journalist" bonafides, which it seems to me should have been a pre-requisite for her current job, but there you go.

Digby: Who Are They Kidding?

Gonzales appeared with softball pitcher Pete Williams today and babbled the usual about how he didn't know nothin' bout birthin' no babies. But this struck me:

Gonzales: The president — the White House has already confirmed that there was a conversation with the president, mentioned it to me in a meeting at the Oval Office — in terms of concerns about — about the commitment — to pursue voter fraud cases in — in three jurisdictions around the country. I don't remember that conversation, but what I'm saying is during the process there may have been other conversations about specifically about the performance of US attorneys. But I wasn't involved in the deliberations as to whether or not a particular United States attorney should or should not be asked to resign.

Digby: Setting The Example

Iran said Monday it was interrogating 15 detained British sailors and marines to determine whether they intentionally entered Iranian waters — an indication the country might be seeking a way out of the confrontation with Britain.

Britain denies its personnel had left Iraqi territory when they were captured and detained by Iran — a contention backed by Iraq's foreign minister, who called on Iran to release the group.

Digby: Wanton Removal

Via Avedon Carol, I was reminded of this speech by James Madison on the subject of impeachment. (I say "reminded" not because I am a constitutional scholar but because impeachment was discussed at great length recently, as I'm sure you'll recall, and the founders "intent" was debated ad nauseum.)

...let us consider the restraints he will feel after he [the president]is placed in that elevated station. It is to be remarked that the power in this case will not consist so much in continuing a bad man in office, as in the danger of displacing a good one. Perhaps the great danger, as has been observed, of abuse in the executive power, lies in the improper continuance of bad men in office. But the power we contend for will not enable him to do this; for if an unworthy man be continued in office by an unworthy president, the house of representatives can at any time impeach him, and the senate can remove him, whether the president chuses or not. The danger then consists merely in this: the president can displace from office a man whose merits require that he should be continued in it. What will be the motives which the president can feel for such abuse of his power, and the restraints that operate to prevent it? In the first place, he will be im-peachable by this house, before the senate, for such an act of mal-administration; for I contend that the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal from his own high trust.

Digby: Going To The Big Woodshed

And another one bites the dust:

David Stockman, a former top budget official in the Reagan White House, and three other people were charged Monday in an alleged securities fraud case that embroiled one of North America's largest auto parts companies before it collapsed into bankruptcy.

Frank Rich: Elizabeth Edwards for President

The New York Times
Sunday 01 April 2007

Elizabeth Edwards's choice to stay in the political arena despite a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious - as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life, death and, yes, political ambition, drives "some people" (to use Katie Couric's locution) nuts.

If you caught Elizabeth and John Edwards in the Couric interview on "60 Minutes" or at their joint news conference in Chapel Hill, you saw a couple speaking as couples chasing the presidency rarely do. When Ms. Couric gratuitously reminded Mrs. Edwards that she was "staring at possible death," Mrs. Edwards countered: "Aren't we all, though?" It's been a steady refrain of her public comments that "we're all going to die" and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her husband's candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There's no apologizing by either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans. There's no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards sounds like an adult speaking to adults.

Glenn Greenwald: Your modern-day Republican Party

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Mitt Romeny can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind

The Great Con

Naming the present era of Republican corruption

Since the end of the Civil War, abuses of power by highly placed Republicans have deeply gouged the face of American history. Our democratic republic has survived these encounters by the skin of its teeth. National Democrats are hardly free of sin, but they usually stray as lone-wolf miscreants. Republicans are customarily organizational and familial about their excesses, which is why the scale and wreckage of their collective transgressions are far more damaging to the Union. So egregious are these escapades that they come widely to be known by shorthand labels -- the Whiskey Ring, part of the rampant corruption and fiscal misfeasance of the Grant administration -- Teapot Dome,McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran-Contra. The list also includes such blatant offenses to the Constitution and the law as the attempted overthrow of President Clinton by members of the Federalist Society and other participating members of the far right in the cooked-up scandals of what Hillary Clinton labeled "the vast right-wing conspiracy."

Report Faults Interior Appointee

Landowner Issues Trumped Animal Protections, IG Says

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

NYT Editorial: The Rovian Era

Published: April 1, 2007

Turn over a scandal in Washington these days and the chances are you’ll find Karl Rove. His tracks are everywhere: whether it’s helping to purge United States attorneys, coaching bureaucrats on how to spend taxpayers’ money to promote Republican candidates, hijacking the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for partisan politics, or helping to organize a hit on the character of one of the first people to publicly reveal the twisting of intelligence reports on Iraq.

Whatever the immediate objective, Mr. Rove seems focused on one overarching goal: creating a permanent Republican majority, even if that means politicizing every aspect of the White House and subverting the governmental functions of the executive branch. This is not the Clinton administration’s permanent campaign. The Clinton people had difficulty distinguishing between the spin cycle of a campaign and the tone of governing. That seems quaint compared with the Bush administration’s far more menacing failure to distinguish the Republican Party from the government, or the state itself.

Comeback attempt for the labor movement

By Robert Kuttner | March 31, 2007

THE NEW York Times recently reported that the earnings gap is now the widest since 1928, with the richest 1 percent of Americans having captured most of the economy's 2005 growth, and the bottom 90 percent getting nothing. Between 1979 and 2005, according to MIT professor Thomas Kochan, productivity of American manufacturing rose by about 70 percent, but the real wages of production workers remained flat.

This economic pummeling of ordinary Americans has many causes, including deregulation of industries that once paid decent wages, the weakening of tacit social compacts in which bosses were ashamed to pay themselves hundreds of times the earnings of workers, the erosion of the minimum wage, and increased off shoring. But one of the big reasons is industry's relentless assault on unions, an attack abetted or tolerated by most US administrations for three decades. Unions not only raise wages for members; they work for a fairer wage structure generally, both in their spillover influence on wider patterns of pay and in their political work for a fairer brand of capitalism.