Questions and answers about the new immigration bill

By Dave Montgomery

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Democratic-controlled Senate next week will plunge into its first confrontation over immigration when it debates a comprehensive bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators and endorsed by President Bush.

Here's a guide for the upcoming debate:

QUESTION: Millions of illegal immigrants would be quickly legalized under this bill. Isn't that amnesty?

ANSWER: Depends on the perspective. The Bush administration and the bill's supporters say no, because illegal immigrants would pay fines and fees and would have to meet other conditions if they eventually want to get on a path to citizenship.

Paul Krugman: Don’t Blame Bush

I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Food Stamps: The $21 Question

Isaiah J. Poole

May 18, 2007

Isaiah J. Poole is executive editor of TomPaine.com.

Do you know how you could eat on just $21 a week?

This week, you may have heard about the four members of Congress who have decided to try living on the amount of food they could buy with $21, the average weekly Food Stamp program allotment. One of the members, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and his wife, Lisa, have maintained a blog about their experience. It’s a sobering read—not just the experiences of the normally well-fed politicians who are doing this for a week, but the comments of ordinary people who have had to do this, and worse, for weeks or months at a time. It makes you wonder how on earth a nation’s leaders can be so casual when spending public money on instruments of war, power and political advantage, and yet be so stingy when it comes to that most basic form of human compassion, making sure your neighbor has enough to eat.

Southern ocean carbon sink weakened

An international research team has found that the Southern Ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide has been reduced by around 35 percent since 1981.

New biofuel from trees developed at UGA

A team of University of Georgia researchers has developed a new biofuel derived from wood chips. Unlike previous fuels derived from wood, the new and still unnamed fuel can be blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel to power conventional engines.

Iraq is on the verge of collapse: report

Thu May 17, 2007 3:05PM EDT

By Ibon Villelabeitia

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's government has lost control of vast areas to powerful local factions and the country is on the verge of collapse and fragmentation, a leading British think-tank said on Thursday.

Chatham House also said there was not one civil war in Iraq, but "several civil wars" between rival communities, and accused Iraq's main neighbors -- Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- of having reasons "for seeing the instability there continue."

White House: Planned pay gains too costly

By Tom Philpott, Special to Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, May 19, 2007

As the House of Representatives prepared to pass its fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, the White House urged lawmakers to reconsider a host of costly personnel initiatives added by the Armed Services Committee.

Initiatives opposed by the White House included:

Bigger pay raises

The House was set to vote for a 3.5 percent basic pay increase for January 2008. That’s 0.5 percent higher than proposed by the Bush administration. The House would continue a string of annual raises set 0.5 percent higher than private sector wage growth through at least 2012.

Hang in there, America: Competent leadership is just 600-plus days away

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

McClatchy Newspapers

There are 614 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.

So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.

The American people

The end of the end of ideology?

Despite the polarized nature of politics today, it appears that we all have the same underlying goals and behaviors: The pursuit of happiness, the American dream etc. This is, at the very least, the way psychologists had viewed political ideology for quite some time. However, new research may have identified the characteristics that lead us to lean ideologically to the left or right.

Jerry Falwell's Immorality

He was, of course, a monster.

What kind of man, let alone what kind of minister of the Gospel, would underwrite a video full of made-up stories about a president of the United States, whose policies he happened to oppose, being a cocaine trafficker and assassin? What kind of man would then recruit the film's producer to pose as an investigative journalist appearing in sillouette, as Falwell himself interviewed him about why he feared for his own life? ("Be assured, we will be praying for your safety.")

What kind of man and minister of the Gospel would report that another president whose policies he happened to oppose said things to him that he never, ever said? ("Falwell responded that his account 'was not intended to be a verbatim report,' but rather an 'honest portrayal' of [President] Carter's position.")

Glenn Greenwald: Gonzales' yearlong effort to block Comey's testimony

Back in February, 2006 -- a couple months after the New York Times first revealed that the Bush administration was spying on Americans in violation of FISA -- the Senate Judiciary Committee informed the Justice Department that it wanted to question John Ashcroft and his former Deputy, James Comey, regarding the NSA program. In particular, the Committee wanted to question the two DOJ officials about a Newsweek article reporting that both of them, in 2004, refused to certify that the NSA eavesdropping program was legal.

CENTCOM Commander’s Veto Sank Bush’s Threatening Gulf Buildup

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Admiral William Fallon, then President George W. Bush’s nominee to head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition in February to an administration plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM, according to sources with access to his thinking.Fallon’s resistance to the proposed deployment of a third aircraft carrier was followed by a shift in the Bush administration’s Iran policy in February and March away from increased military threats and toward diplomatic engagement with Iran. That shift, for which no credible explanation has been offered by administration officials, suggests that Fallon’s resistance to a crucial deployment was a major factor in the intra-administration struggle over policy toward Iran.

The plan to add a third carrier strike group in the Gulf had been a key element in a broader strategy discussed at high levels to intimidate Iran by a series of military moves suggesting preparations for a military strike.

WP Editorial: Mr. Comey's Tale

A standoff at a hospital bedside speaks volumes about Attorney General Gonzales.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007; Page A14

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 17, 2007.

Brilliant historian and essayist Chalmers Johnson argues that unless we face up to the tremendous strain our empire is having on America, we will lose our democracy, and then it will not matter much what else we lose.

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

Mr. Fish: Are You Wagging at Me?

(cartoon)

Permanent ice fields are resisting global warming

The small ice caps of Mont Blanc and the Dôme du Goûter are not melting, or at least, not yet. This is what CNRS researchers1 have announced in the Journal of Geophysical Research. At very high altitudes -- above 4200 meters -- the accumulation of snow and ice has varied very little since the beginning of the 20th century. But if summer temperatures increase by a few degrees during the 21st century, the melt could become more marked, and could affect the "permanent" ice fields.

Sirotablog: BREAKING: Emanuel Blocks Dem Debate on Trade Deal As White House Signals Real Agenda

Breaking news out of Washington today, five days after a handful of senior Democrats and the Bush administration announced a secret deal to push a package of free trade pacts just months after Democrats successfully used opposition to lobbyist-written trade deals to win the 2006 election. According to sources on Capitol Hill today, after the Los Angeles Times confirmed that Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) earlier this week agreed to demands by rank-and-file congressional Democrats to debate the secret trade deal at this Tuesday's Democratic Caucus meeting, Emanuel abruptly took trade off the agenda prior to the meeting, preventing the discussion from taking place. Additionally, Emanuel, one of the chief architects of NAFTA as a top Clinton administration staffer, refused to agree to set a date to discuss the secret trade deal. Meanwhile, White House and GOP participants in the deal are now signaling that the deal's much-touted labor and environmental provisions are designed to be kept out of the core text of trade agreements and thus potentially rendered utterly unenforceable. To date, the specific legislative language of the secret deal has been kept concealed from the public.

The Cost of a GOP Myth

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, May 16, 2007; Page A15

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales clings to his job much longer, he may end up as the only remaining employee of the Justice Department. By resigning on Monday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty joined Gonzales's chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson; the department's White House liaison, Monica Goodling; and Justice official Michael Battle, who oversaw the dismissal of federal prosecutors, on the list of Gonzalesites who've left the building. At this point, the number of U.S. attorneys dismissed for political reasons still exceeds the number of Justice officials who've left because of their involvement in dismissing those attorneys or dissembling about it, but the ratio is tightening.

Worm attacked voter database in notorious Florida district

Brad Friedman

May 16, 2007

(Computerworld) Sarasota County, Florida's computer database infrastructure was attacked by a notorious Internet worm on the first day of early voting during the 2006 election featuring the now-contested U.S. House race in Florida's 13th Congressional district between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R).

In the early afternoon hours on Monday, October 23, 2006, an Internet worm slammed into the county's database system, breaching its firewall and overwriting the system's administrative password. The havoc brought the county's network, and the electronic voting system which relies on it, to its knees as Internet access was all but lost at voting locations for two hours that afternoon. Voters in one of the nation's most hotly contested Congressional elections were unable to cast ballots during the outage as officials were unable to verify registration data.

Republican Candidates Pander to Religious Right, Praise Falwell Legacy

By John Nichols, The Nation
Posted on May 15, 2007, Printed on May 16, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51940/

The various and sundry Republican presidential contenders will be stumbling over one another tonight -- as they debate in South Carolina -- and in the days ahead to curry favor with the religious right by expressing their sorrow at the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

It's not that most of the Republican candidates really cared much for Falwell. Aside from Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, the most seriously evangelical of the bunch, none of the GOP runners really qualifies as a Falwell follower in the classic sense.

Ted Rall: Frontrunners By Default

An Utterly Reckless Preview of the 2008 Election

NEW YORK--If I knew who was going win the presidency next year, I wouldn't tell you. I'd place a bet. Political handicapping is a mug's game, as I demonstrated in 2004 when I declared Howard Dean a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Even so, I've received so many requests for my dimestore Nostradamus act that I'm taking this week off from my usual policy of prognostication avoidance to call the 2008 race.

Start with a fact: If the last party primary were held today, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani would be the nominees. In the general election, I buy the latest WNBC/Marist College poll, which finds Clinton trouncing Giuliani by five points (48 to 43).

How Democrats Should Talk

By Michael Tomasky

Washington liberals and Democrats have made many arguments about what they need to do as they try to recover from the low point of their support among the public during the Bush years in 2002 and 2003 and climb toward renewed dominance. Most of these arguments have centered on the big questions of ideology and vision— whether the times demand a calibrated centrism or a bolder liberalism of big plans and ideas. But other arguments, put forward in many a blog post, have ignored ideology and focused more on the question of tactics.

One can dismiss this as superficial if one wishes, but it's demonstrably the case that the gulf between the two parties is frequently greatest in tactical matters. Considerably fewer than 50 percent of Americans are as conservative as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney; yet somehow they got 52 percent of the voters to support the administration in 2004. That victory had many sources, but surely high on the list were the Bush campaign's effective verbal assaults on John Kerry's character—and not all of them, incidentally, calumnious; "flip-flopper," alas, wasn't really a false charge. Even so, the election was close enough that a smarter Kerry campaign would have won, whatever the Democrats' long-running internal ideological divisions. So tactics matter.

Scientists Urge Half of Canada Forest Be Protected

May 15, 2007 — By Randall Palmer, Reuters

OTTAWA -- Canada's vast forests should be protected much more than they are now to preserve wildlife and water and to fight global warming, a group of 1,500 scientists from around the world said Monday.

The scientists say Canada's Boreal Forest, stretching from the Alaskan border and running north of the plains all the way to Newfoundland on the Atlantic, is one of largest intact forest-and-wetland ecosystems remaining on earth.

Powered by sound -- revolutionary stove could help reduce poverty

PA87/07 — May 10 2007

It's a cooker, a fridge and a generator in one — and it could have a huge impact on the lives of people in the world's poorest communities.

The £2m SCORE (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) project brings together experts from across the world to develop a wood-powered generator capable of both cooking and cooling food. By developing an affordable, versatile domestic appliance SCORE aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.

Why Karl Rove Cared

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 14, 2007; 1:02 PM

Why would Karl Rove want to fire a bunch of U.S. attorneys?

If you think it seems out of character, you don't know Rove -- or more precisely, you don't know the two sides of Rove. President Bush's powerful adviser is one part spreadsheet-carrying, vote-counting political wonk, and one part no-holds-barred, brass-knuckled political operative.

Vet Prosecuted for Opposing Recruitment in Library

By Matthew Rothschild

May 14, 2007

Tim Coil served in the first Gulf War and now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

On March 12, he and his wife, Yvette, went to the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Ohio. At 37, she is a student at Kent State and needed to study for a biology test. Tim, 40, was reading some books.

Then they noticed two military recruiters trying to enlist someone in a nearby room, with a large glass window.

Habeas Corpus Evaporating

Aziz Huq

May 14, 2007

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

Six months after Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2006 with its eyes firmly on the polls, there have been many promises and proposals from legislators about how to remedy the damage done to civil liberties by that law—but little action. Despite the powerful advocacy of former military officials, religious figures, and law enforcement officials, Congress has as of yet failed to fix a single one of the MCA’s many flaws.

As efforts to rectify the MCA’s most egregious incursions of America’s separation of powers hang in the balance, it is worth recalling how much is at stake today—and how badly things could go wrong if enacted legislation doesn’t achieve real reform.

'Build parks to climate proof our cities'

Scientists looking at the effect global warming will have on our major cities say a modest increase in the number of urban parks and street trees could offset decades of predicted temperature rises.

100 percent of pregnant women have at least one kind of pesticide in their placenta

A doctoral thesis written at the Department of Radiology and Physical Medicine of the University of Granada reveals an average presence of eight organochlorine contaminants in the organisms of pregnant women, which are usually ingested by means of food, water and air. These chemical substances may cause some malformations in the genito-urinary system of the foetus, such as cryptorchidism and hypospadias.

Sun Myung Moon front group gets $80,000 in federal money to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day

Moonies claim credit for MLK's revered status

If there was an organization that received taxpayer money and appeared to be doing reasonably good things in the community, would you care whether that organization was a front group for a powerful political/religious enterprise? Would it matter to you that the head of that enterprise had a much broader -- some call it an anti-democratic -- agenda, than merely helping out in the community? Would you warn your neighbors about the group?

Those were some of the questions facing Connecticut State Senator Bill Finch when he recognized that the Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Service for Peace was affiliated with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Paul Krugman: Divided Over Trade

Nothing divides Democrats like international trade policy. That became clear last week, when the announcement of a deal on trade between Democratic leaders and the Bush administration caused many party activists to accuse the leadership of selling out.

The furor subsided a bit as details about the deal emerged: the Democrats got significant concessions from the Bushies, while effectively giving a go-ahead to only two minor free trade agreements (Peru and Panama). But the Democrats remain sharply divided between those who believe that globalization is driving down the wages of many U.S. workers, and those who believe that making and honoring international trade agreements is an essential part of governing responsibly.

Bill backs workers, unions and supports democracy Employers now can intimidate workers who try to unionize, and labor has little recourse

May 12, 2007

BY JAMES WOLFINGER

In the recent debate over the Employee Free Choice Act, Vice President Dick Cheney and other opponents of the bill have shown a fine ability with political language. These commentators wield words and phrases such as "democracy," "free choice" and "fairness." They warn the American people that the legislation will dangerously tip the balance of power to that bogey of the right, "big labor," while robbing workers of their cherished democratic right to a secret ballot by forcing them to accept a card check system.

Bob Herbert: The Millions Left Out

“Organizing is so important. We have 50 million service economy jobs and we’ll probably have 10 or 15 million more over the next decade. If those jobs are union jobs, they’ll be middle-class families. If not, they’re more likely to live in poverty. It’s that strong.”
--Sen. John Edwards to Bob Herbert

The United States may be the richest country in the world, but there are many millions — tens of millions — who are not sharing in that prosperity.

According to the most recent government figures, 37 million Americans are living below the official poverty threshold, which is $19,971 a year for a family of four. That’s one out of every eight Americans, and many of them are children.

The Battle to Ban Toxic Toys

By Brita Belli, E Magazine
Posted on May 14, 2007, Printed on May 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51763/

"Phthalates" (pronounced THA-lates) are found in everything from cosmetics to IV bags to children's toys. Environmentalists and environmentally minded legislators are beginning to worry about long-term exposure to the chemical compounds.

Specifically, they worry about diisononyl phthalate or DINP, a plasticizer commonly used in soft vinyl products made for babies, such as bath books, rubber ducks and teething rings as well as bisphenol A (BPA), a building block for polycarbonate plastic used in shatter-resistant baby bottles.

Ted Rall: The Case For Defeatism

Why Harry Reid Was Right

NEW YORK--"I believe...that this war is lost," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Obviously he's right (and overdue). Amend that: he was right. Within 24 hours Democrats were backpedaling, stampeded by the usual onslaught of scorn and pseudo-patriotic outrage from Fox-fed GOP dead-enders.

"What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost...The war is not lost," Democratic Senator Charles Schumer clarified, less than brilliantly.

Frank Rich: Earth to G.O.P.: The Gipper Is Dead

OF course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the “Let’s Make a Deal” debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They don’t seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country — not Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny’s nowadays — that would try to sell a mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don’t have a product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The debate’s most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his “optimism,” his “morning in America,” his “shining city on the hill” and even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.