Bill Moyers: Begging His Pardon

t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist

Friday 15 June 2007

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites - the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well-known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser - has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.

Complaint: Schlozman Aimed to Replace Lawyers with "Good Americans"

By Paul Kiel - June 15, 2007, 12:28 PM

During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Bradley Schlozman, the controversial former senior political appointee in the Civil Rights Division, was battered with questions about his efforts to politicize the division.

A number of those questions from senators centered on Schlozman's efforts to purge the appellate section of the Civil Rights Division -- the small, but important section that handles civil rights cases in the court of appeals. What were they getting at? An anonymous complaint against Schlozman sent to the Justice Department's inspector general in December of 2005 spelled out the allegations. The complaint, obtained by TPMmuckraker, was filed by a former Department lawyer. You can read it here.

Paul Krugman: America Comes Up Short

Traveling through Europe recently, I’ve been able to confirm through personal experience what statistical surveys tell us: the perceived stature of Americans is not what it was. Europeans used to look up to us; now, many of them look down on us instead.

No, I’m not talking metaphorically about our loss of moral authority in the wake of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I’m literally talking about feet and inches.

To the casual observer, Europeans — who often seemed short, even to me (I’m 5-foot-7), when I first began traveling a lot in the 1970s — now often seem tall by American standards. And that casual observation matches what careful researchers have found.

BUZZFLASH: Connecticut for Lieberman Party Chairman John Orman called Tuesday for Sen. Joe Lieberman to resign...

Party head lambastes Lieberman on Iran

PETER URBAN purban@ctpost.com

Article Last Updated: 06/12/2007 11:32:39 PM EDT

WASHINGTON — Connecticut for Lieberman Party Chairman John Orman called Tuesday for Sen. Joe Lieberman to resign, saying his advocacy of a military strike against Iran could explode into a global conflict.

"He has crossed the line," said Orman, a professor of politics at Fairfield University. "His unilateral warmongering could lead to a new World War III."

During an appearance on "Face the Nation" on CBS Sunday, Lieberman said the United States should consider a military strike against Iran because of Tehran's involvement in Iraq.

Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War

As Security Work Increases, So Do Casualties

By Steve Fainaru

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 16, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.

While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said. One in seven supply convoys protected by private forces has come under attack this year, according to previously unreleased statistics; one security company reported nearly 300 "hostile actions" in the first four months.

Twenty Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime

By Russell Mokhiber, AlterNet. Posted June 16, 2007.

Did you know that corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined? This and 19 more amazing facts about the state of corporations in America.

The following is text from a speech delivered by Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter to the Taming the Giant Corporation conference in Washington, D.C., June 9, 2007.

20. Corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.

Whether in bodies or injuries or dollars lost, corporate crime and violence wins by a landslide.

The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery -- street crimes -- costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.

'Honest Conservatives': Oxymoron?

Rick Perlstein

June 15, 2007

Brad DeLong, the remarkably erudite and morally penetrating blogger and economics professor, has been writing some very useful things about the question of "honest conservatism"—the understandable, if problematic, quest of liberals to find a conservative worthy of intellectual respect.

Here, he quotes the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek who speaks of "a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features."

Bush administration attacks 'shield' for bloggers

By Anne Broache http://news.com.com/Bush+administration+attacks+shield+for+bloggers/2100-1028_3-6191053.html

Story last modified Fri Jun 15 08:23:29 PDT 2007

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration on Thursday blasted a congressional proposal that would shield a broad swath of news gatherers, including some bloggers, from revealing their confidential sources.

The latest draft of the Free Flow of Information Act would pose a grave threat to national security and federal criminal investigations by protecting far too large a segment of the population, a U.S. Department of Justice official told Congress.

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

"The definition is just so broad that it really includes anyone who wants to post something to the Web," Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing here. She also argued it would protect "a terrorist operative who videotaped a message from a terrorist leader threatening attacks on Americans."

Controversy over military vehicles for Iraq heats up

By Renee Schoof
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - In February 2005, Marines in Iraq made a "priority 1 urgent" request for 1,169 military vehicles with V-shaped undersides that save lives by deflecting blasts from roadside bombs.

But instead of those Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, the Marines back home sent armored Humvees, vehicles that offer far less protection. It wasn't until May 2006 that the Marines ordered the MRAPs, and then only 185 of them.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates now is asking the Marines to investigate and explain what happened. Today MRAPs are a priority with Gates. Congress is spending $8.4 billion to meet the military's request for 7,774 MRAPs. And the Army is checking to see whether it needs thousands more to replace Humvees.

Travels through Europe with President Bush

Updated: 7:42 a.m. ET June 13, 2007

Andrew Ward, the FT's White House correspondent, follows President George W. Bush during his European tour, which included stops in Prague, the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Rome, the Vatican, Tirana and Sofia.

Tuesday June 12, Washington

President George W. Bush arrived home late on Monday from his eight-day tour of Europe. The trip had touched on weighty issues ranging from missile defence and the future of Kosovo to climate change and Africa. But at the White House press briefing on Tuesday morning, the most pressing question was about something different: did the president have his watch stolen in Albania?

Libby judge harassed after sentencing

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jun 14, 12:54 PM ET

A federal judge showed no sign that he would delay I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison term in the CIA leak case Thursday — even as he reported getting threatening letters and phone calls after sentencing the former White House aide.

"I received a number of angry, harassing, mean-spirited phone calls and letters," U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said. "Some of those were wishing bad things on me and my family."

Walton made the remarks as he opened a hearing into whether to delay Libby's 2 1/2-year sentence while the former White House aide appeals. Walton heard arguments on the request and was scheduled to continue them Thursday afternoon.

Populations of 20 common birds declining

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Fri Jun 15, 2:31 AM ET

The populations of 20 common American birds — from the fence-sitting meadowlark to the whippoorwill with its haunting call — are half what they were 40 years ago, according to an analysis released Thursday.

Suburban sprawl, climate change and other invasive species are largely to blame, said the study's author Greg Butcher of the National Audubon Society.

"Most of these we don't expect will go extinct," he said. "We think they reflect other things that are happening in the environment that we should be worried about."

What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq's Oil for US Companies

By Ann Wright
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Saturday 26 May 2007

On Thursday, May 24, the US Congress voted to continue the war in Iraq. The members called it "supporting the troops." I call it stealing Iraq's oil - the second largest reserves in the world. The "benchmark," or goal, the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the US invaded Iraq is privatization of Iraq's oil. Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds.

This threat could not be clearer. If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there. The privatization law, written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration, would leave control with the Iraq National Oil Company for only 17 of the 80 known oil fields. The remainder (two-thirds) of known oil fields, and all yet undiscovered ones, would be up for grabs by the private oil companies of the world (but guess how many would go to United States firms - given to them by the compliant Iraqi government.)

Lou Dobbs Persists in Promoting Lies about Immigrant Leprosy Cases

By Mark Potok, Intelligence Report. Posted June 15, 2007.

For more than four years, CNN's Dobbs has spreaded one one-sided -- and in some cases outright false -- information to attack undocumented migrants.

By Mark Potok, Intelligence Report
Posted on June 15, 2007, Printed on June 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/54185/

Poisonous and untrue propaganda continues to leak into the national dialogue on undocumented migration to the United States.

Secret Mexican conspiracies to take over the American Southwest or merge with Canada and the United States. Murders and drunken-driving deaths caused by "illegal aliens" reaching astounding levels. Emergency rooms in California, overwhelmed by the migrants, going out of business. Jobs stolen and wages lost to the tune of billions. Epidemics of frightening diseases like leprosy.

Brain gets a thrill from charity: study

We'd probably be extinct by now if this wasn't true.--Dictynna

By Julie Steenhuysen
Thu Jun 14, 5:10 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Knowing your money is going to a good cause can activate some of the same pleasure centers in your brain as food and sex, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

People who participated in a study got a charge knowing that their money went to a charity -- even when the contribution was mandatory, like a tax. They felt even better when they voluntarily made a donation, researchers found.

Political Animal: All About Oil

I am, I think, more inclined to give Ronald Reagan a share of the credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union than many of my fellow liberals. But while rock-jawed rhetoric and missile defense may have played a role in the demise of communism, they were hardly the overwhelming factors that conservatives play them up to be. I'm reminded of this by Yegor Gaidar, who, despite an obvious agenda of his own for saying so, tells a big part of the story here:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.

Nuclear Weapons Programs Are About Regime Survival

By Dilip Hiro
TomDispatch.com

Sunday 10 June 2007

The Iranian bomb in a MAD world.

For countries - small, middling, or great - acquiring nuclear weapons is all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or nation. Joining the "nuclear club" has proved an effective strategy for survival. The possession of city-busting, potentially planet-ending weaponry threatens to bring about a MAD - the Cold War acronym for "Mutually Assured Destruction" - world. While the "madness" of this strategy is apparent, a rarely mentioned aspect of today's geopolitics is that acquiring nuclear arms has proven a logical step for a regime to take when its survival is at stake.

The United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, stacked up nuclear weapons by the thousands as "deterrents," well aware that the use of even a tiny fraction of them would annihilate the planet many times over. The doctrine worked, maintaining a precarious peace until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Dems Who Lost Their Minds

Frank O'Donnell
June 14, 2007

Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act.

An ingenious Democratic political strategist might have concocted the following scenario:

Recent polls show not only heightened public concern over global warming, but much more confidence that congressional Democrats would do a better job on this than President Bush.

So global warming could be used as a wedge issue going into the next elections. Democrats should take action that would capture the moral high ground and accentuate the differences. Try to pass something tough, and force the President to threaten a veto or get polluter-friendly Republicans such as Jim Inhofe to filibuster.

Bush Shafts Enron Victims

Robert L. Borosage

June 14, 2007

Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future. This article first appeared in The Huffington Post.

Wall Street’s investment banks just got another one step closer to making defrauding investors an accepted line of business. And Enron’s employees who lost their pensions and the small investors who got fleeced in the Enron frauds just got shafted again—this time at the urging of President George W. Bush.

Wall Street’s most powerful investment banks and their friends in high places lobbied the U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to reject the recommendation of the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Justice Department support defrauded investors in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

America's Fragile Democracy

By Robert Parry
June 13, 2007

By a two-to-one margin, a federal appeals court has repudiated George W. Bush’s right to snatch a civilian off the streets of America and hold the person indefinitely without trial. But the makeup of the three-judge panel was a fluke, with two Clinton appointees comprising the majority.

The proportion of Republican appointees to Democrats on the full U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, is the opposite, eight-to-four Republican. So, the Bush administration retains high hopes that the full court will agree to review the case of Ali al-Marri and grant the President the authority he wants.

The case, which tests the limits of Bush’s claims to “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief, eventually is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court where Bush has four of nine justices solidly in his corner – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

War and Censorship at Wilton High

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate. Posted June 13, 2007.

High school students in Connecticut weren't allowed to discuss the war, so they wrote a play about it. "Voices in Conflict," was quickly banned by the school, but made it to New York where it brought the audience to tears.

Last Sunday night, as millions of Americans tuned in to the two Tonys -- the final episode of “The Sopranos,” to see whether Tony Soprano lived or died, and the Tony Awards, celebrating the best in American theater -- actor Stanley Tucci (who played “Nigel” in “The Devil Wears Prada") was in an off-Broadway theater, the Culture Project, watching high school students perform a play about war.

The production, “Voices in Conflict,” moved the audience to tears, ending with a standing ovation for the teenage actors, still reeling from a controversy that had propelled them onto the New York stage. Their high school principal had banned the play.

Jane Hamsher: Pardoning Libby: Never a Good Idea

This post, written by Jane Hamsher, originally appeared on The Huffington Post

In a rather shocking move, Barack Obama's General Counsel Robert F. Bauer adds his voice to the chorus calling for Scooter Libby to be pardoned, but he believes he is coming at it from a different angle than the Libby apologists:

To Bush's antagonists on left, a pardon would be only another act in the conspiracy -- a further cover-up, a way of getting away with it. But this is the entirely wrong way of seeing things. A pardon is just what Bush's opponents should want.

America's Exploding Mortgage Crisis Reveals That Home Ownership Isn't Paradise for Everyone

By Howard Karger, Dollars and Sense
Posted on June 14, 2007, Printed on June 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/53826/

Anyone who has given the headlines even a passing glance recently knows the subprime mortgage industry is in deep trouble. Since 2006 more than 20 subprime lenders have quit the business or gone bankrupt. Many more are in serious trouble, including the nation's number two subprime lender, New Century Financial. The subprime crisis is also hitting Wall Street brokerages that invested in these loans, with reverberations from Tokyo to London. And the worst may be yet to come. At least $300 billion in subprime adjustable-rate mortgages will reset this year to higher interest rates. CNN reports that one in five subprime mortgages issued in 2005-2006 will end up in foreclosure. If these dire predictions come true, it will be the equivalent of a nuclear meltdown in the mortgage and housing industries.

Permanent Bases the World Over: Behold the American Empire

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on June 14, 2007, Printed on June 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/54047/

Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending.

Only four years after the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be coming into sight in this country -- not the carnage or the mayhem; not the suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck bombs; not the massive flight of middle-class professionals, the assassination campaign against academics, or the collapse of the best health-care service in the region; not the spiking American and Iraqi casualties, the lack of electricity, the growth of Shia militias, the crumbling of the "coalition of the willing," or the uprooting of 15 percent or more of Iraq's population; not even the sharp increase in fundamentalism and extremism, the rise of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the swelling of sectarian killings, or the inability of the Iraqi government to get oil out of the ground or an oil law, designed in Washington and meant to turn the clock back decades in the Middle East, passed inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone -- No, none of that.

Digby: Bubblicious

Can someone tell me what hold Scooter Libby has on everyone in Washington that he can even get Barack Obama's general counsel to go to bat for him? Pictures? Videos? What?

Bush's opposition has braced for a pardon and its rage at the prospect is building. To Bush's antagonists on left, a pardon would be only another act in the conspiracy -- a further cover-up, a way of getting away with it. But this is the entirely wrong way of seeing things. A pardon is just what Bush's opponents should want.

Orcinus: The haters and Obama

Tuesday, June 12, 2007
-- by Dave

The outpouring of right-wing bile regarding Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy has probably already played a role in the Secret Service security detail he's already been given.

Unsurprisingly, the even more poisonous versions of that bile are inspiring white supremacists as well.

Major increase in fuel standards in the works

Zachary Coile, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

(06-13) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The Senate is weighing the first major increase in federal fuel economy standards since Congress first responded to the oil crisis of the 1970s, part of a new energy bill that Democratic leaders hope to pass in the next few weeks.

The measure would raise fleetwide fuel economy standards by 35 miles per gallon by 2020, up from the 25 miles per gallon average now for cars and trucks. The standards would rise an additional 4 percent every year until 2030.

Big Business wants bigger voice in energy policy debate

By Jim Snyder
June 13, 2007

Two broad-based business groups are angling to play a larger role in shaping the outcome of the debate over energy policy currently consuming Congress.

One is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business behemoth that spent more than $45 million on lobbying last year. It announced yesterday it was creating a side group that would spend millions of dollars more on energy policy in particular, revising a model the Chamber used in a successful campaign to change tort laws.

America's Progressive Majority

Eric Lotke
June 13, 2007

Eric Lotke is research director for the Campaign for America’s Future.

The façade of conservative political dominance is crumbling. The disintegration runs deeper than public disaffection with the Bush administration’s catastrophic failures and is more fundamental than the political realignment of the 2006 election. The notion of America as a “conservative nation” was always more fiction than fact, but the nation’s rejection of President Bush’s brand of “you’re-on-your-own” conservatism and wedge-issue divisiveness is so broad that today the façade is simply unsustainable.

An exhaustive review released today of decades of public opinion research by the Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters for America, using the most reputable, nonpartisan sources, leads to a simple conclusion: America is more progressive than people think—or, more precisely, than the conventional wisdom would lead them to believe. From the economy to social issues, terrorism to trade, Americans want politicians who recognize that we’re all in it together.

U.S. Mortgage Foreclosure Filings Rise 90% in May

By Kathleen M. Howley

June 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings surged 90 percent in May from a year earlier as more homeowners fell behind on their monthly mortgage payments, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

There were 176,137 notices of default, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions last month, led by California, Florida and Ohio, the Irvine, California-based seller of foreclosure data said in a report today. The median price for a U.S. home slid 1.8 percent the first three months of 2007 as the housing slump entered its second year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The filings rose 19 percent from April.

Why did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?

In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco

James Risen
Thursday January 5, 2006

Guardian

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Give Ethanol a Chance: The Case for Corn-Based Fuel

By David Morris, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2007.

In the last few years, the environmental community has begun attacking corn-derived ethanol. Although imperfect, there are reasons to give ethanol a fair trial.

Working Assets is my long-distance phone company. I love it dearly for its combination of business efficiency, social responsibility and progressive politics.

Each month, my phone bill carries alerts that urge me to take action on a specific issue or two. Recent Citizen Actions suggest the gravity of the issues chosen: "Save Our Constitution," "Impeach Dick Cheney," "Close Guantanamo."

The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer

By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation. Posted June 13, 2007.

A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass. A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor.

Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.

But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.

Joe Lieberman Is At It Again

After wrongly supporting George W. Bush's strategic blunder of attacking Iraq, and continuing to support Bush's failed policies after the invasion, Senator Joe Lieberman made irresponsible comments this weekend regarding military action against Iran.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Lieberman said, "If [the Iranians] don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing."

Nuremberg prosecutor says Guantanamo trials unfair

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI, June 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Some in U.S. Intelligence See Musharraf on His Way Out

By Spencer Ackerman - June 11, 2007, 7:15 PM

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S.'s Pakistan policy can be summed up in two words: Pervez Musharraf. But within the U.S. intelligence community, and in Pakistan, there's a growing belief that the U.S.-friendly military dictator's days are drawing to a close -- and possibly within the next few months. It may be time for the U.S. to face what it's long feared in the nuclear state: the prospect of chaos, rising Islamism or anti-Americanism that follows Musharraf.

But the hope -- among Pakistani military officers and politicians, to say nothing of U.S. diplomats -- is that the increasingly inept and unpopular Musharraf can be eased out of power while the U.S. slowly distances itself from him, allowing for as smooth a transition as is possible in the turbulent South Asian country. Some see the Pakistani Army remaining powerful enough to prevent a chaotic transition or an Islamist takeover. "This is going to be a Pinochet-like transition, instead of a Marcos-like one," one former Pakistani official tells TPMmuckraker. In other words, according to the ex-official, the U.S. may not stand foursquare behind its ally Musharraf until he's ultimately forced from power, as President Ronald Reagan chose with doomed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Matt Taibbi: Neocon II: Lie Hard With A Vengeance

Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career. Think Robert Goulet, Bill Shatner, even John Travolta. America loves a brave second act, particularly one that doesn’t mind doing a take or two with egg still on his face.

What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics. In the first six years of the Bush presidency the administration’s ideological nucleus – a tribe of humorless conservative revolutionaries led by Dick Cheney and including the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Elliott Abrams – racked up a startling record in matters of official policy. From their juking of the case for the Iraq War to their Jacobin-esque purges within the government’s intelligence apparatus to their paranoid and sometimes criminal fragging of political enemies great and minor, the neoconservatives working for George Bush botched virtually every important move they made in the last six years.

Out to Get ACORN

John Atlas

June 11, 2007

John Atlas is co-author of Saving Affordable Housing, and is currently writing a book on politics, democracy and poverty through the lens of ACORN. He was formerly executive director of the nationally-recognized Passaic County Legal Aid Society.

If you think it's safe to do your civic duty in George Bush's America, ask Matt Henderson. Henderson, the head organizer for ACORN in New Mexico, believed his grassroots group's effort to register poor, minority voters was a time-honored way of bringing disenfranchised people into the American democratic process. It almost got him indicted in October 2004, when it put him squarely in the crosshairs of a protracted fight between the Republican Party and ACORN over voting rights. It's a struggle that is likely to continue into the 2008 election.

ACORN, a little known, but very successful national grass-roots anti-poverty organization, came under White House fire after registering more than 1.6 million voters in the past two national elections: mostly poor and minority people who tend to vote Democratic, and mostly in swing states. Republican operatives went after ACORN hard, with a media smear campaign, trumped-up lawsuits in Florida, New Mexico and Ohio and pressure on state law-enforcement officials to file criminal charges against the group. Days before the 2006 election, a U.S. attorney in Kansas City brought a voter-fraud indictment against four people registering voters for ACORN, spurring a congressional investigation led by Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley.

Working Longer: Boomers Staying On

Tuesday June 12, 9:29 am ET
By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer Baby Boomers Expect to Work Longer, Studies Say -- Good Thing Since Many Can't Afford to Quit

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the baby boomers begin to ease into their 60s, most expect to delay retirement longer than their parents or grandparents.

That's good, because many can't afford to stop working anytime soon.

Researchers examine carbon capture and storage to combat global warming

While solar power and hybrid cars have become popular symbols of green technology, Stanford researchers are exploring another path for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas that causes global warming. Carbon capture and storage, also called carbon sequestration, traps carbon dioxide after it is produced and injects it underground. The gas never enters the atmosphere. The practice could transform heavy carbon spewers, such as coal power plants, into relatively clean machines with regard to global warming.

Paul Krugman: Lies, Sighs and Politics

The New York Times
Friday 08 June 2007

In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan's birthday. Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven't changed a bit.

Time to loosen US ties to Pakistan's Musharraf: New York Times

The New York Times called Monday for the US government to begin to sever its ties to Pakistan's leader General Pervez Musharraf as he faces the biggest protests of his eight years in power.

"Pakistan seems to be rapidly approaching a critical turning point, with a choice between intensified repression and instability or an orderly transition back to democratic rule," the influential daily wrote in an editorial.

UGA study finds that weaker nations prevail in 39 percent of military conflicts

Writer: Sam Fahmy, 706/542-5361, sfahmy@uga.edu
Contact: Patricia L. Sullivan, 706/542-2693, tsulli@uga.edu
Jun 11, 2007, 08:19

Athens, Ga. � Despite overwhelming military superiority, the world�s most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II, according to a new University of Georgia study.

The study, by assistant professor Patricia L. Sullivan in the UGA School of Public and International Affairs, explains the circumstances under which more powerful nations are likely to fail and creates a model that allows policymakers to calculate the probability of success in current and future conflicts.

Blackwater-backed Torture Flights Caught in the UK

By Adam Howard
Posted on June 10, 2007, Printed on June 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//53723/

Blackwater USA, the nefarious sounding and behaving contracting company, whose reputation for treachery rivals Halburton's, has been linked to a plane being used to shuttle "terror suspects" to secret prisons in Poland and Romania. These "torture flights" have been roundly condemned by human rights groups.

The Blackwater connection has come to light because of a plane spotted landing in the UK this past weekend. Inside the supposedly civilian plane were four armed US security policemen.

Colony Collapse: Do Massive Bee Die-Offs Mean an End to Our Food System as We Know it?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on June 11, 2007, Printed on June 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/53491/

The joke may have fallen flat, but this time no one could blame Bill Maher. Sure, it happened on the May 4, 2007 installment of his show Real Time With Bill Maher, but CNN personality and senior medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta was the one delivering the punch line, and it seems he was the only one in the room who believed the issue of Earth's mysteriously vanishing honeybees was a joke. And while some may argue that he stayed on message, promoting his May 19 documentary called Danger: Poison Food, he nevertheless fumbled for answers when Maher asked him about what could be killing a major component of the nation's food supply.

Warp and Woof

An Upper East Side dog lover who funded one of the city's oldest hate groups is dead

by Maria Luisa Tucker

May 30th, 2007 11:30 AM

In most ways, Michelle Ilse Weyher fit the cliché of an Upper East Sider. The blonde housewife was married to a big-deal lawyer. She had a pet Chihuahua named Mr. Peeper, whom she carried around in a Sherpa bag. She occasionally wrote letters to the editor of The New York Times with advice to fellow dog owners. But Weyher stood out in one very big way. Her charity work was not for the Junior League or the Met, but for New York's oldest hate group: the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that has supported all manner of racist pseudoscience since 1937.

America's Secret Obsession

By Ted Gup
Sunday, June 10, 2007; B01

"If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you'll probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds."

-- Former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy

* * *

In April 1971, CIA officer John Seabury Thomson paddled his aluminum canoe across the Potomac on his daily commute from his home in Maryland to CIA headquarters in Langley. When he reached the Virginia shore, he noticed a milky substance clouding the waters around Pulp Run. A fierce environmentalist, Thomson traced the pollution to its source: his employer. The murky white discharge was a chemical mash, the residue of thousands of liquefied secrets that the agency had been quietly disposing of in his beloved river. He single-handedly brought the practice to a halt.

Nearly four decades later, though, that trickle of secrets would be a tsunami that would capsize Thomson's small craft. Today the nation's obsession with secrecy is redefining public and private institutions and taking a toll on the lives of ordinary citizens. Excessive secrecy is at the root of multiple scandals -- the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of Enron, the tragedies traced to Firestone tires and the arthritis drug Vioxx, and more. In this self-proclaimed "Information Age," our country is on the brink of becoming a secretocracy, a place where the right to know is being replaced by the need to know.