25 May 2007

Digby: A Good Thing

Gonzales, a friend and adviser to Bush since their days in Texas, calls their close relationship "a good thing."

"Being able to go and having a very candid conversation and telling the president: 'Mr. President, this cannot be done. You can't do this,' — I think you want that," Gonzales told reporters this week. "And I think having a personal relationship makes that, quite frankly, much easier always to deliver bad news."

Digby: Runnin' With The Devil

Bill Sher has an excellent Russert "gotcha" question for Newt Gingrich when he appears on Meet the Press this week-end:

You're one of the intellectual architects of the current foreign policy strategy in the Gulf, and President Bush is following your advice on Iraq by naming a "war czar."

Yet in May 1999 during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, you said that:

...the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton, and I accuse you in Kosovo, of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for the things that you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don't have the courage to look at the world you have created...

Not Your Father's Pay: Why Wages Today Are Weaker

GREG IP

American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers' generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.

The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family's income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.

24 May 2007

Minimum Wage Increase to Become Reality

JESSE J. HOLLAND | AP | May 24, 2007 07:47 PM EST

WASHINGTON — After a decade-long wait, America's lowest-paid workers saw Congress poised Thursday to increase the federal minimum wage by $2.10. For years, the idea of increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour has been stalled by partisan bickering between Republicans and Democrats.

That almost became the fate of this year's proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 over two years. Democratic leaders attached the provision to the $120 billion Iraq war spending bill, which was vetoed by the GOP-controlled White House on May 1 because Democrats insisted on a pullout date for American troops.

23 May 2007

A Great But Broken Promise

Bill Moyers

May 23, 2007

Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and an independent journalist with his own production company. This article is the commencement address Bill Moyers gave this year at Southern Methodist University.


Thank you for this honor
and for inviting me to participate in this occasion. It would be a privilege to receive your honorary degree anytime, but I am especially pleased to be on the same platform with Marsh Terry, a beacon from “High on the Hilltop” for all these years now, and Bill Solomon, whose business and civic contributions are laced with a deep social conscience. I am humbled to be standing between two originals—one in literature, the humanities and the classroom, and the other in corporate governance and community service.

I am, after all, just a journalist. I make my living explaining things I don’t understand—a beachcomber on the shores of other people’s experience and wisdom. Furthermore, I know just where journalists stand on the scale of approval in our country. Some years ago when I gave the commencement at another university, a young woman who had just graduated came up to me and said, “Mr. Moyers, you have been in both journalism and government. That makes everything you say twice as hard to believe.”

Glenn Greenwald: The Islamic enemy within

(updated below - updated again - Update III)

Pew released a new poll today regarding the political beliefs and attitudes of American Muslims and -- needless to say -- our right-wing warriors, within hours of its release, have exploded in shrieking alarm. These revelations about American Muslims are "hair raising!," and the warrior-pundits are working in unison to milk every ounce of anti-Muslim fear-mongering that can be squeezed from this new poll.

It is literally difficult to overstate the prominence that fear and hatred of Muslims assumes in the worldview of these right-wing war proponents. They frantically search every news story for any possible angle to seize in order to exploit anti-Muslim hysteria. It is the centerpiece, the animating "principle," of the vast bulk of their public commentary.

Seymour M. Hersh: The Redirection

Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?

by Seymour M. Hersh
March 5, 2007

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Congress seeks missing billions in Iraq

By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Published: May 22 2007 18:16 | Last updated: May 22 2007 18:16

Members of Congress dem­anded on Tuesday that the Bush administration explain how billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money had gone missing in Iraq in what they called a disastrous effort to rebuild the country.

Responding to the latest report by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, members of the House foreign relations committee also directed much of their criticism at the Iraqi coalition government, venting their frustration with corruption.

'Pro-Israel' Group, CUFI, To Address US Navy's Swastika Shaped Building Complex ?

Posted by Bruce Wilson on May 23, 2007 at 8:33 AM.

"I think there is a role for [Pastor John Hagee]. He has earned a certain recognition with the community because of his support for Israel."

--Anti-Defamation League national director Abe Foxman, 3/9/07

"It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day..."

--Pastor John Hagee, "Jerusalem Countdown," pp. 92-93 ( note: there are many different editions of this book, so the page cite for the quoted text will be different for different printings of Hagee's book )

Are Your Credit Card, Banking, Internet Usage and Home Ownership Records Already in the FBI's Database?

By Frances Madeson, TomPaine.com
Posted on May 23, 2007, Printed on May 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52220/

Thanks to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine's March 9 audit report detailing the FBI's handling of expanded surveillance powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, subsequent media reports and congressional hearings called to probe the findings, we now know that the FBI's been doing the same "heckuva job" with respect to information gathering and storage characteristic of other sectors of the Bush administration.

Though the toothpaste is out of the tube, I wonder if people generally grasp the enormity of the damage done. There is in existence an electronic database with over a half-billion records containing information collected via extrajudicial requests made in National Security Letters, the majority of which pertain to U.S. citizens. Your banking and credit activities, telephone and internet usage records, insurance policies, post office box rental, and car, boat and home ownership records could already be in the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse. If so, no one need inform you. If the information is incorrect, there's no way to fix it. It is shared among 10,000 government employees at multiple agencies and is stored for 20 years even if you have no connection whatsoever to a crime. In fact, only 65 convictions correlated to information obtained by the FBI from over 143,000 NSL demands made from 2003 to 2005.

22 May 2007

Official Identity Theft

Frances Madeson

May 22, 2007

Frances Madeson is the author of a new comic novel, Cooperative Village, which chronicles the travails of a woman who becomes subject to the USA PATRIOT Act when her library card goes astray. More information is at the publisher’s website, www.carolmrp.com.

Thanks to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine’s March 9 audit report detailing the FBI’s handling of expanded surveillance powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, subsequent media reports, and congressional hearings called to probe the findings, we now know that the FBI’s been doing the same “heckuva job” with respect to information gathering and storage characteristic of other sectors of the Bush administration.

Though the toothpaste is out of the tube, I wonder if people generally grasp the enormity of the damage done. There is in existence an electronic database with over a half-billion records, containing information collected via extrajudicial requests made in National Security Letters, the majority of which pertain to U.S. citizens. Your banking and credit activities, telephone and internet usage records, insurance policies, post office box rental, car, boat and home ownership records could already be in the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse. If so, no one need inform you. If the information is incorrect, there’s no way to fix it. It is shared among 10,000 government employees at multiple agencies, and is stored for 20 years even if you have no connection whatsoever to a crime. In fact, only 65 convictions correlated to information obtained by the FBI from over 143,000 NSL demands made during 2003-2005.

Baroodys: Corleones Of The Right?

Rick Perlstein

May 22, 2007

Michael Baroody, who made his living lobbying against the commission of consumer product safety, has been nominated by President Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The coverage has been excellent, if a bit repetitious: fox guarding henhouse, fox guarding henhouse, fox guarding henhouse - the image repeated ad nauseum, and reasonably so.

(Click on any of the highlighted words above and you'll find a different anti-Baroody recommendation: keeping cigarettes from the horrors of fire-safeness, fighting for all-terrain veicles' right to flip over and kill people, protecting parents from the dangerous knowledge that the cribs and strollers they just bought had been recalled, making the world safe for asbestos, heroically keeping the National Highway and Transportation Safety Board in the dark about accident data on defective tires, keeping government out of the climate-change-prevention biz, and keeping the feds from "silencing commercial speech without authority"—the commercial speech in question being tobacco billboards near schools.)

That's our Michael, as anyone reading a newspaper these days knows.

Scientists concerned about effects of global warming on infectious diseases

As the Earth’s temperatures continue to rise, we can expect a signficant change in infectious disease patterns around the globe. Just exactly what those changes will be remains unclear, but scientists agree they will not be for the good.

Frankenstein Immigration Deal Angers Left, Right and Center

By , AlterNet
Posted on May 22, 2007, Printed on May 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52186/

Get set for round two of the Great American Immigration Debate as Congress attempts to reform an immigration system that almost everyone agrees is dysfunctional, regardless of one's ideology or position on the issue.

Building off of last year's Senate proposal -- one that came very close to becoming the law of the land -- Congressional leaders negotiated a new immigration bill. Unfortunately, in trying to craft a proposal that would be acceptable to everyone, they seem to have created an abomination -- an approach in which the most liberal supporter of immigrants' rights and the most dedicated anti-immigration hard-liner will find something to loathe.

The New York Times editorial board weighed in this weekend, condemning the "deal" as a wasted effort and a missed opportunity. The original is here

The Immigration Deal

The immigration deal announced in the Senate last week poses an excruciating choice. It is a good plan wedded to a repugnant one. Its architects seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul a broken system and emerged with a deeply flawed compromise. They tried to bridge the chasm between brittle hard-liners who want the country to stop absorbing so many outsiders, and those who want to give immigrants -- illegal ones, too -- a fair and realistic shot at the American dream.

21 May 2007

Scientists report rise in levels of carbon dioxide

By Robert S. Boyd
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Instead of slowing down, worldwide carbon-dioxide levels have taken a sudden and alarming jump since the year 2000, an international team of scientists reported Monday.

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels - mostly coal, oil and gas - are increasing at three times the rate experienced in the 1990s, they said.

Gingrich's War on 'Secularism'

All 43 American presidents – even those who doubted religion – associated themselves with the Christian faith. Today, it is still far easier for a politician from a fringe religious sect, such as Mormonism, to be a serious national candidate than it would be for an atheist or an agnostic.

Yet, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is basing his political comeback, in part, on an assertion that the real bias in America is against those who believe in religion and that “radical secularism” is oppressing them.

“This anti-religious bias must end,” Gingrich told an enthusiastic audience of graduates from the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

ExxonMobil Lied, Continues to Lavishly Fund Prominent Global Warming Deniers

In January, oil giant ExxonMobil tried to “soften” its stance on climate change, asserting that it was “misunderstood” and now acknowledges the contribution of humans to global warming. Subsequently, the company promised that it would “not be providing any further funding” to groups that distort global warming science, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Independent/UK: Exclusive: Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr

By Patrick Cockburn In Baghdad
Published: 21 May 2007

The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official.

The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. "I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild," the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai'e told The Independent in an interview. It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with little thought for the consequences include the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the Baath party.

Preview of Murray Waas Book on Plame/CIA Leak Case

By E&P Staff

Published: May 21, 2007 1:10 PM ET
NEW YORK Investigative reporter Murray Waas broke several key stories on the Plame/CIA leak affair for the National Journal, and now his book on the case will appear June 5 -- the day Lewis “Scooter” Libby is sentenced to prison.

The book, “The United States v. I. Lewis Libby,” is published by Union Square Press/Sterling Publishing. Waas edited it and provided new reporting. E&P received an advance copy of the 584-page volume today.

Pentagon Making Preparations To Keep Tens Of Thousands Of Troops In Iraq For ‘Decades’

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee this month, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace uttered a “carefully worded” statement revealing that the Pentagon had no plans to fully withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq if legislation passes Congress mandating troop redeployment:

PACE: Sir, we have published no orders directing the planning for the overall withdrawal of forces. We do have ongoing replacements of forces, and we do change the size of the force over time so that that system is available to either plus-up or draw down, but we have published no orders saying come up with a complete plan for total drawdown.

Michael Moore's 'SiCKO' Receives Healthy Response at Premiere

By Anthony Kaufman / Wall Street Journal

CANNES, France -- Filmmaker Michael Moore received a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday morning, where his latest movie "SiCKO," a critical look at the U.S. health-care system, premiered to the world's press. No stranger to the festival, Mr. Moore won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, for "Fahrenheit 9/11" three years ago here.

During the packed 8:30 a.m. morning press screening at the Grand Lumiere Theatre, several scenes in the documentary brought spontaneous applause, including a prologue segment that shows one man, without health care, stitching a large open wound on his leg with his own hand.

U.S. Pays Pakistan to Fight Terror, but Patrols Ebb

WASHINGTON, May 19 — The United States is continuing to make large payments of roughly $1 billion a year to Pakistan for what it calls reimbursements to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan, even though Pakistan’s president decided eight months ago to slash patrols through the area where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are most active.

The monthly payments, called coalition support funds, are not widely advertised. Buried in public budget numbers, the payments are intended to reimburse Pakistan’s military for the cost of the operations. So far, Pakistan has received more than $5.6 billion under the program over five years, more than half of the total aid the United States has sent to the country since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, not counting covert funds.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Fear of Eating

Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Frank Rich: The Reverend Falwell’s Heavenly Timing

Hard as it is to believe now, Jerry Falwell came in second only to Ronald Reagan in a 1983 Good Housekeeping poll anointing “the most admired man in America.” By September 2001, even the Bush administration was looking for a way to ditch the preacher who had joined Pat Robertson on TV to pin the 9/11 attacks on feminists, abortionists, gays and, implicitly, Teletubbies. As David Kuo, a former Bush official for faith-based initiatives, tells the story in his book “Tempting Faith,” the Reverend Falwell was given a ticket to the Washington National Cathedral memorial service that week only on the strict condition that he stay away from reporters and cameras. Mr. Falwell obeyed, though once inside he cracked jokes (“Whoa, does she look frumpy,” he said of Barbara Bush) and chortled nonstop.

This is the great spiritual leader whom John McCain and Mitt Romney raced to praise when he died on Tuesday, just as the G.O.P. presidential contenders were converging for a debate in South Carolina. The McCain camp’s elegiac press release beat out his rival’s by a hair. But everyone including Senator McCain knows he got it right back in 2000, when he labeled Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Mr. Falwell was always on the wrong, intolerant side of history. He fought against the civil rights movement and ridiculed Desmond Tutu’s battle against apartheid years before calling AIDS the “wrath of a just God against homosexuals” and, in 1999, fingering the Antichrist as an unidentified contemporary Jew.

NYT Editorial: Why This Scandal Matters

As Monica Goodling, a key player in the United States attorney scandal, prepares to testify before Congress on Wednesday, the administration’s strategy is clear. It has offered up implausible excuses, hidden the most damaging evidence and feigned memory lapses, while hoping that the public’s attention moves on. But this scandal is too important for the public or Congress to move on. This story should not end until Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is gone, and the serious damage that has been done to the Justice Department is repaired.

The Justice Department is no ordinary agency. Its 93 United States attorney offices, scattered across the country, prosecute federal crimes ranging from public corruption to terrorism. These prosecutors have enormous power: they can wiretap people’s homes, seize property and put people in jail for life. They can destroy businesses, and affect the outcomes of elections. It has always been understood that although they are appointed by a president, usually from his own party, once in office they must operate in a nonpartisan way, and be insulated from outside pressures.